In My-Grate – Lagos to London, the poet crafts a transcontinental hymn — at once fractured and fluid — that excavates the migrant experience with both unflinching honesty and lyrical ingenuity. This is not merely a poem; it is a cartography of survival, a portrait of diasporic longing painted in sweat, syntax, and second-hand accents.
From the outset, the title offers a brilliant linguistic sleight of hand. The hyphenated pun — My-Grate — collapses migration into a declaration of personal greatness. It signals a work that will be as concerned with the interiority of the speaker as with the politics of passage. And it delivers.
The opening lines — “I am made in Nigeria / But assembled in the UK” — evoke the cold, mechanical logic of global displacement. Bodies are no longer born, they are produced. The poet immediately situates himself as both product and process, caught between geographies that refuse to fully claim him. One foot in Shomolu, the other in Southmere — he is a split figure, a modern Janus peering into twin cities that mirror each other in their chaos and their quiet.
There is a jazz-like cadence to the work: stops and starts, improvisational flares, rhythmic syncopations that mimic the pulse of trains, of traffic, of thought. We move through border control (“What’s your business here?” / “Survival, sir. Just survival.”) and into the invisible customs of cultural translation. The speaker carries “Contraband Stories and Regrets” — a brilliant metaphor that transforms memory into illicit cargo. His pain, his past, are unsanctioned goods. He is a smuggler of metaphor.
Midway, the poem finds its political teeth. With lines like “Minimum wage – for Maximum Rage” and “a diversity quota / a perfectly packaged African story,” the poet critiques the commodification of Black identity in the West. He is not an individual, but a checkbox — an aesthetic curated for corporate inclusion brochures. Yet he resists this flattening by reclaiming his name: “I call myself Joy.” This declaration acts as both shield and seed — protecting the self while planting it anew.
But the most luminous turn comes quietly — on a train, of course — where, between underground stations, the speaker glimpses his father’s smile in his reflection. It is a subtle, cinematic moment: a mirror not just of self but of ancestry, of cultural inheritance. Suddenly, survival is not shameful — it is sacred. “Survival is its own kind of victory.” Here, the poem finds its moral architecture.
The final movement is elegiac but buoyant. The refrain — “This is how a Black boy regains his smile” — is a liturgical utterance, a line that should be stitched into fabric, chanted in classrooms, graffitied on immigration offices. It reframes joy not as naive optimism but as a radical, transgenerational inheritance. The ancestors, we’re reminded, also crossed oceans. They too carried laughter like contraband.
Formally, the poem defies neat classification. It is part memoir, part manifesto, part oral history. It could easily live as a spoken word piece, but it also holds the quiet gravity of the page. Its language is lush but not indulgent, its metaphors daring but never decorative. The poem does not pander to sentiment, nor does it drown in grievance. Instead, it walks a tightrope — between elegy and resistance, between fragmentation and blooming.
In an age of curated performativity, My-Grate – Lagos to London reminds us that the most profound art often emerges from the tension of displacement. It is not simply a story of migration, but a symphony of split selves learning to harmonize. The result is a poem that glows — not despite its grey surroundings, but because it dares to bloom in them.
– Reviewed by Taiwo Michael Oloyede
Poet. Art Critic. Cultural Historian
