A debut poetry collection that traces intergenerational memory from the Nigerian-Biafran War through family life, landscape, and migration, with the Black body positioned as a site where history and private loss are held.
The collection is rooted in family stories—especially the poet’s father and grandfather—and tracks how wartime loss and unmet obligations (a pension that never arrived) persist across generations.
Ayandele treats the Black body as an archival site, using physical form to store and carry cultural memory, grief, and the experience of displacement.
The manuscript won the 2024 Moon City Poetry Award, was published by Moon City Press in January 2026, and the author won the 2026 Pink Poetry Prize.
# What this book is about My Father Paints His Dreams on My Body is Ifeoluwa Ayandele's debut poetry collection. The poems collect family history, personal memory, and national history—the Nigerian-Biafran War and its long afterlives—against landscapes of rivers, forests, and the everyday places that made the poet. Central to the book are Ayandele's relationships with his father and grandfather and the ways those relationships transmit grief and unfulfilled hopes.
# The body as archive
# Family and specific stories One anchor image is Ayandele's grandfather, a soldier who returned home after the Nigerian Civil War and later travelled to Lagos to collect a pension that never came. That absence—of a promised payment, of material restitution—threads through the poems. The father figure links the speaker to the deep past and to ancestry while also existing within the present's daily practices: prayer, animal life, and local landscapes.
# Place and displacement
# Themes and motifs The collection moves through several repeating concerns: the Nigerian-Biafran War, family and grief, animals, prayer, rivers, forests, and the experience of migration. Animals and natural scenes often appear as modes of instruction or consolation. Prayer is described as a current or river that carries voice and feeling through the poems.
# Reception and honors
# What the collection asks the reader to consider Across its pages, My Father Paints His Dreams on My Body asks how we carry the dreams and losses of earlier generations, and what it means to translate inherited longings into our own lives. The poems keep memory mobile: it does not sit quietly in the past but persists in bodies, in landscapes, and in the routines that bind family and place.
# Who might read this book Readers interested in contemporary Nigerian poetry, intergenerational memoir in verse, and treatments of the body as a site of historical memory will find the collection direct in its concerns and precise in its images. Those attentive to place—Tede, Ago Are, Lagos—and how migration reshapes allegiance and remembrance will also find the work pertinent.
I. After my father’s demise, I travelled from Ibadan, back home to visit my mother after a year apart. I had gotten home late in the morning, but the sun was still scorching, spurting hotness into the streets. The warm air surrounded me, carrying the smell of nearby canteens and restaurants. Groaning generators rising
My father has come back from the war of life. He has lived. He is living. And today, I cannot think of a better way to celebrate him than to write about this man I know, whose strength, resilience and faith have formed me. The post To My Father: Akindeinde Sanya appeared first on BellaNaija - Showcasing Africa to the w
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