Will you be able to tell love apart from crime or crime apart from love? Not a cheeky paradox, clearly an essential question in Pemi Aguda’s “Smother.”

We are smothering each other. How might we respond?

In the diaspora, Arthur Anyaduba argues in “Alimony,” the foreign African, finding a mismatch between cultural stereotypes and Western justice, takes to self-help. But he’s in a dream. Except that it’s not exactly a dream: Moses Kilolo’s “immortal precariat,” wanders into the belly of the night after a fight with his lover. He is shot. He is swallowed by infinity, ill-fated.

Can we escape the “faceless puppeteers that control our fate?” Nne Nwankwo’s “Vultures,” indicts those who put “neo” in front of an abomination. The rhetoric of crime becomes historical and transactional—neocolonialism, neofascism, neoslavery, neodeath. Aren’t there those, as in Sihle Ntuli’s “Watch,” and Ayomide Owoyemi’s “Justice,” whose silence match their stares as a macabre drama unfolds?

Yet the macabre drama is too hard to recall. Obiaderi Agholor’s poems pierce intractable misery. “Her body was found / trashed in a can, too small / to stem the flow of blood. / Ten years worth of I / love you, mummy,” he writes in “Buchi.”

This misery could be institutionalized. Say, in a prison. Towards the end of preparing for this issue, we received the best gift possible: a short memoir by an inmate in a Nigerian prison, prefaced by a young writer who volunteers his time to run a literacy program there. Katung Kwasu introduces us to Sagir Lawal. Neither the former who is free, nor the latter who is confined, can escape the pressing questions of punishment or forgiveness.

“I’d like to write of this more tenderly…” is a line from Stephen Partington’s “Anti-Pastoral,” and we’d like to give you that tenderness. Tenderness as poignant as Eloghosa Osunde’s photographs and writing, which punctuate this issue, rendering grey visible. Our monochromatic visions are of lives outside the covering of the law, desolate yet remaining resilient. “Because the city is this: a stubborn string of concrete walls, tall walls, thick walls, breaking walls, lonely walls, desperate walls.”

Always, we are indebted to our contributors and tireless editors, who give their time and talent freely.

Could this be our best issue to date? You tell us why not.

CONTRIBUTOR: EMILY ACHIENG

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