Trailing A Seaweed Cord: A Polyphonic Voyage Between the Niger and the Liffey

Trailing A Seaweed Cord: A Polyphonic Voyage Between the Niger and the Liffey

By Jerry Adesewo

Some anthologies merely assemble poems, and there are those rare collections that create an enduring literary conversation across continents, histories, and generations. “Trailing A Seaweed Cord,” an Embassy of Ireland in Nigeria poetry project under the leadership of Ambassador Oeter Ryan, belongs firmly to the latter category. This is not simply a commemorative anthology in honour of Wole Soyinka; it is a richly layered cartography of memory, exile, artistic inheritance, and human becoming. The collection functions as both tribute and dialogue, gathering voices from different literary traditions into a shared meditation on language, mortality, displacement, and cultural continuity.

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From the opening poem, “Transience” by Toyin Adewale-Gabriel, the reader enters a world shaped by movement and impermanence. The poem’s imagery is sensuous and philosophical at once: sparrows on air currents, thunderstorms threading through cassava leaves, moon baths, future fruit, harmattan water, and the “sepia of our earth.” Adewale-Gabriel establishes one of the anthology’s defining concerns—the fragile, shifting nature of existence itself. Time in these poems is never fixed; it dissolves, reforms, and haunts.

Yet what gives Trailing A Seaweed Cord its remarkable intellectual depth is its sustained intertextual conversation with both James Joyce and Soyinka’s own poem, “Notes from Here to My James Joyce.” The anthology, edited by Aduke Gomez, repeatedly returns to the literary and philosophical bridge between Ireland and Nigeria, between modernist experimentation and postcolonial consciousness, between the River Liffey and the River Niger.

This relationship becomes particularly striking in “Nightward: Calling James Joyce for Wole Soyinka” by Ismail Bala. Bala’s poem reads like an invocation from the corridors of literary memory, summoning both Joyce and Soyinka into a shadowed meditation on darkness, fragmentation, and spiritual unease. Its compressed language and spectral imagery echo the density of modernist poetics while remaining unmistakably contemporary and African in temperament.

The anthology does not merely reference Joyce as an influence; rather, it revisits Soyinka’s own long artistic engagement with Irish modernism. Several poems carry traces of Joycean wandering consciousness, fractured syntax, dream imagery, and layered allusion, yet these are filtered through Yoruba cosmologies, African oral traditions, and contemporary global anxieties. In this sense, Trailing A Seaweed Cord becomes a triangular dialogue between Joyce, Soyinka, and a younger generation of poets navigating the fractures of the present age.

This convergence of traditions finds powerful expression in “From the Niger to the Liffey” by Stephen James Smith, one of the anthology’s emotional and conceptual high points. Smith brilliantly aligns the Yoruba griot tradition with the Irish seanchaí, positioning storytelling as both cultural inheritance and moral archive. The poem moves with spoken-word urgency while carrying the weight of history, migration, and artistic kinship. Here, the Niger and the Liffey become symbolic rivers of memory flowing toward one another.

Another major strength of the collection lies in its tonal and stylistic diversity. Each poet engages Soyinka’s legacy differently. Some embrace philosophical abstraction; others lean into intimacy, political critique, or mythic resonance. Yet the anthology never feels fragmented because recurring motifs—seas, storms, wandering, labyrinths, thresholds, tides, rain, and mirrors—create a powerful thematic continuity.

Katie Donovan’s “Pearl” offers one of the collection’s most tender moments. Beneath its deceptively gentle surface lies a profound meditation on motherhood, vulnerability, and memory. The sea becomes both sanctuary and threat, carrying emotional undertones that resonate with the anthology’s wider concerns about protection, loss, and return.

Likewise, “Fugitive” by Obasiola Martha Ibe explores loneliness and estrangement with philosophical precision. The poem’s meditative voice examines the instability of identity in modern existence, suggesting that exile is not always geographical; sometimes it is spiritual and psychological.

Tade Ipadeola’s “Genera” stands out for its elegance and restraint. Ipadeola writes with intellectual clarity about language, companionship, and the silent burdens of consciousness. His poem reminds the reader that language itself can become a homeland for the displaced.

The political pulse of the anthology emerges forcefully in “Eyes All Over Your Flesh for Wole Soyinka” by Molly Twomey. Twomey juxtaposes private anxiety with public violence, invoking surveillance, genocide, fear, and inherited trauma while echoing Soyinka’s lifelong confrontation with tyranny and moral silence. The poem feels urgently contemporary, yet rooted in the broader historical struggles that define Soyinka’s oeuvre.

What is most admirable about Trailing A Seaweed Cord is its refusal to simplify either Soyinka or poetry itself. These poems demand attentive reading. Their density, allusiveness, and layered symbolism may challenge casual readers, but that challenge is integral to the anthology’s artistic integrity. Like Soyinka’s own work, the collection insists that literature should interrogate rather than merely comfort.

The anthology’s title itself becomes an interpretive key. A seaweed cord suggests fragility, drift, entanglement, and connection. It evokes histories crossing oceans, cultures tethered through memory, and artists speaking across distance. The image captures the anthology’s central achievement: binding disparate voices into a shared exploration of what it means to survive history without surrendering imagination.

By the time one reaches “When This Night Comes” by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe, the collection achieves a quiet emotional culmination. The poem’s final invocation—touch, touch me—resonates beyond intimacy. It becomes the anthology’s collective plea for human connection in an increasingly fragmented world.

Ultimately, Trailing A Seaweed Cord succeeds because it understands homage not as imitation but as continuation. Just as Soyinka once wrote toward Joyce across geographical and cultural distances in “Notes from Here to My James Joyce,” the poets gathered here now write toward Soyinka—and through him, toward larger traditions of resistance, memory, and artistic reinvention.

This is a collection of crossings: between nations and languages, myth and history, exile and belonging, darkness and illumination. It is intellectually ambitious, emotionally resonant, and aesthetically fearless.

More than a tribute anthology, Trailing A Seaweed Cord is a living conversation—one that reminds us that poetry still possesses the power to preserve memory, challenge silence, and carry human voices across oceans of time.