The hall in the Faculty of Arts (Prof Adetugbo Functions Room), University of Lagos, was almost unbearably quiet the moment Oluwatosin Akinrinde leaned forward to speak. Outside, the afternoon rain drummed on the roof like impatient fingers, but inside, inside, students, lecturers, and writers had surrendered their breath. He did not announce the first poem. He simply began, voice low, almost conversational, as if confessing to a friend who already knew the worst:
“In Nigeria’s schools, starvation binds/The young, with books as rare as diamond finds./Chalkless boards and roofless rooms remind/ Of intellects in darkness left behind…”
The line is from “Education’s Famine”, the opening poem in his debut collection Deathbed and Other Poems. But it did not arrive as text on a page. It arrived as testimony. Akinrinde let the silence after “sins” stretch until it became its own character in the room, then dropped into the next stanza with the sudden drop of a fist on a table. Someone in the third row gasped. That was the moment the symposium, which was themed “Gender, Class and the Burden of Survival”, stopped being academic and started bleeding.
Akinrinde moved between poetry and prose with the fluidity of someone switching effortlessly into other dialects while speaking. From the clenched fury of “Education’s Famine”, where a mother sells her wrapper to pay school fees that will still not be enough, he slipped into the short story “My Sister”, which was read from Out-of-School Children and Other Stories. Here his voice softened, almost childlike, as he became ten-year-old Musa watching his elder sister hawk pure-water on Third Mainland Bridge at dusk. He lingered on small, lethal details – the way the plastic sachets cut into her fingers; the way drivers hissed “Fine girl, enter” while their wives looked away. When he whispered the line “Survival is what happens to girls when childhood ends too early,” the front row of female students nodded as though someone had finally spoken their own diary aloud.
He understood silence the way sculptors understand marble. Between “Deathbed”, the long poem that gives the collection its title, and the short poem “Healthcare’s Collapse,” he paused for a full twelve seconds – long enough for the audience to hear the rain again, long enough for us to feel the absence of a mother dying on a hospital floor because the family could not pay for oxygen. Then he began the story with a voice cracking on the word “deposit”. One could realize that the pause had not been a dramatic effect; it had been mourning.
“Tribalism’s Divide” arrived like a slap. Akinrinde’s tone turned cold, almost prosecutorial, as he recited the poem’s catalogue of slurs traded across Nigeria’s fault lines. But midway, his voice fractured. He repeated the lines: “One blood, yet fractured into clans apart,/ In Nigeria’s heart, division’s dart/Pierces the whole, tearing the social chart.” Suddenly, he was no longer performing; he was grieving in public. A lecturer in the back wiped his eyes with the edge of his Ankara cap and did not care who saw.
The most devastating moment came with “Motunde Brings Elon Musk Home,” a story so sharply satirical it could draw blood. Akinrinde read it deadpan: Motunde, a Nigerian Gen-Z girl, tries to outwit tradition by inviting and introducing Elon Musk to her local Yoruba father ‘Daddy Wa’. The hall exploded – first in shocked laughter, then in roaring applause that refused to die down. For ninety seconds the symposium forgot its decorum. Students stamped their feet. A senior lecturer at the department of English, Dr Kayode Kofoworola, roared from the podium: “That’s it!” In that uproar lay the deepest truth of the afternoon: resistance can be joyful, even when the odds are lethal.
When the formal reading ended, the questions came fast and fierce. A final-year student, Tunde Alabi, asked how he avoided despair when every story seemed to end in loss. Akinrinde smiled, small and tired. “The despair is real,” he said. “But so is the refusal to shut up. That refusal is also the story.” Another asked why he wrote so often from women’s and children’s perspectives. His answer was quiet lightning: “Because the people carrying the heaviest loads are rarely allowed to speak in their own voices. Someone has to steal the microphone for them.”
By the time Akinrinde read the excerpt from “My Sister”:
Honey: So this child is a fraud. You bore me a fraud child. The DNA confirms it. Oh my God.
Darling: (Knees down.) I swear to the God who made him I didn’t give you a fraud child.
Honey: You’re plain evil. How many times did you do it? Tell me!
Darling: Only once, only once did he plant the seed in me.
Honey: Mrs Fertile. So you’re the fertile land upon which he could plant the seed.
Darling: It’s not like that, honey. It’s because I love you that’s why I did what I did.
Half of the audience was crying openly. The audience was reminded of, quite acutely somberingly, the trending issues of paternity fraud precipitously fissured into Nigerian relationships. The applause that followed was not polite. It was grateful. It was angry. It was communal recognition that someone had looked at Nigeria’s open wounds without turning away, and somehow made beauty out of the bleeding.
As we spilled out into the wet evening, copies of Deathbed and Other Poems and Out-of-School Children and Other Stories tucked under arms like contraband scripture, it was clear that something more than literature had happened. Oluwatosin Akinrinde had not merely read to us. He had gathered the scattered pieces of our daily survivals – hawking pure-water at traffic lights, choosing between medicine and school fees, smiling while the country eats its young – and hands them back to us, which transforms into shared memory.
Literature, he reminded us without ever saying it directly, is not decoration. It is the place where a nation goes to discover what it is refusing to look at. And on this rainy afternoon in Lagos, two hundred witnesses discovered that a young writer from Lagos State had become one of the bravest mirrors we have.
Somewhere outside, a danfo driver blasted his horn in that familiar impatient rhythm. Inside our heads, Akinrinde’s nipped creative impotence in the bud with the closing lines of his artistic performance echoing themed issues in “Deathbed” still:
“We die many times before the final death. The trick is to keep writing the obituaries ourselves.”
