You Still Dey Speak English?

Description

Poetry, in many instances, resists the desire to be confined to a single definition. Ask a magazine editor, a poet, and a critic what poetry is, and their responses will differ—despite their frequent intimacy with the form. One might argue that a poem is meant to be experienced, not defined. Yet often, the reader encountering a work of poetry seeks both experience and comprehension. They don’t just want to feel the poem; they want to understand it—to walk away satisfied with that experience because they “have a rational understanding of that experience,” as Yvor Winters put it.

In You Still Dey Speak English?, Seun Lari-Williams offers this dual gift through poems that resonate as they leap off the page and settle between the reader’s conscious thoughts and subconscious feelings. Written in Pidgin English—a language native to the Nigerian tongue like lush grasses to the forest—the collection opens with reimaginings of classics such as The Road Not Taken and To His Coy Mistress.

It is an arduous task, but Lari-Williams proves up to it, aligning with the narrative arcs for which these classics are known, while infusing the wit of the Pidgin language through lines like: “If to say time dey brekete / dis your shakara no go be wahala” and “No tink am o / my love strong kakaraka. / I know sey e be like sey / cold dey catch am”—a jocular rendering of Shakespeare’s “My love is strengthened / though more weak in seeming.”

But the poems in this collection are more than reinterpretations. Moving from translations of famed writings, Lari-Williams veers toward original pieces, exploring themes of love, luck, hard work, hunger, and relationships—addressing both the trivial and the urgent within the Nigerian experience. These are poems that are equal and true all at once: deeply rooted in the Nigerian landscape yet broad in their global intentions. Ultimately, Lari-Williams invites us to a buffet of riveting narration, plated on a table set with Nigeria’s most versatile language.