It is almost impossible to read the words Kill the Poet, Save the World!—the title of the debut poetry collection by Nigerian author Abdulkareem Baba-Aminu—without recalling “Save the cheerleader, save the world,” the catchphrase from Heroes, the cult classic NBC television series (2006-2010). In Heroes, the cheerleader in question was Claire Bennett (Hayden Panettiere), a teenager with regenerative abilities whose survival was crucial to preventing a chain reaction of events that would result in future catastrophe. The only way to ensure that survival? Time travel, that good old sci-fi trope.
While time travel can be overused in this genre to the point of eye-roll-inducing cliché, the reason it endures is our cultural obsession with fate. Whether it’s the time heist engineered by Tony Stark/Iron Man to wrest the Infinity Stones from Thanos in Avengers: Endgame (2019) or Outlander’s Claire Fraser journeying back two hundred years through standing stones to find her soul mate (2014-2026), the concept of transtemporal travel allows us to consider if, given the chance to change the past, we can somehow change the future—and what the consequences of such an action would be.
The temporal paradox is an idea in which Baba-Aminu is very much interested. In the poem “The Past is Not a Place,” he imagines a charged encounter with an infant Abubakar Shekau, not yet the fearsome leader of the Boko Haram terrorist group responsible for a litany of atrocities across northern Nigeria, including the 2014 Chibok schoolgirls abduction, but “a softness, a potential.” (p. 25) “If I end this heartbeat now,” Baba-Aminu muses,
will Chibok still sing?
Will the girls return home
in a different timeline,
braiding their hair
without ghosts in their fingers? (p. 25)
Genetic engineering—the manipulation of DNA and other genetic material—may be the closest we come to course-correcting the past. Even as he seemingly celebrates the innovation in “The Genegineer,” however, Baba-Aminu questions the wisdom of this kind of scientific intervention, cautioning that in our attempt to fix nature’s flaws, we end up losing something vital in the process.
As a book title, then, Kill the Poet, Save the World! is a rather provocative choice. In each of its three namesake poems (the second and third differentiated by “II” and “Finale” in parentheses) the author rails against the propensity for navel-gazing in contemporary poetry and how the craft has been reduced to an endogamous activity. Likening poetics to coding, he would like to see his fellow practitioners not just restored to prophet status, but taking a more forward-facing and active stance in fashioning society.
His own positionality as an “engineer of consciousness” is very much in keeping with the Africanfuturist school of thought pioneered by the Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor. Leading by example, he espouses ecocritical concerns in “The Last Butterfly I Ever Saw,” exorcises the ghosts of Nigeria’s Civil War in “An Elegy in Split Frequencies,” and calls out societal dysfunction in “Masquerade (or A Rational Anthem).”
And yet, for all his hardboiled criticism, Baba-Aminu is not above engaging in some typical poetic indulgences himself, chiefly reminiscing on romantic love and heartache. In “/pulse.exe” and its companion. “/pulse.exe (II) or Hex Education,” he likens an old flame, his version of Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” to computer malware. This equivalence of love with a viral infection, coupled with a portrait of its debilitating effects is also repeated in “Virulent” and “You Left Me With the Chamber.” Such a paradigm might suggest disillusionment and a distrust of affection, but in “Equilibrium of Two”, he attests that “the greatest love is simply a choice made across time,” suggesting that hope can be found in the ashes of heartbreak and our bard’s heart remains elastic.
Dedicated to his mother’s memory, for example, “For Yaya, For Everything” drips with filial devotion, and meanwhile the poetry takes an elegiac turn in “River Kaduna” and “A Code of Zaria,” two poems in which he revisits his hometown of Kaduna and Zaria, the site of his alma mater, the Ahmadu Bello University. Both cities are located in Nigeria’s Kaduna State. Formerly nicknamed “The Liberal State,” its once-celebrated cosmopolitanism has been undermined by frequent sectarian violence. Baba-Aminu captures the contradiction and laments the resulting wounds.
The most intimate poems in this thirty-five-piece suite are the ones in which he lays bare his own personal trauma. In 2024, Baba-Aminu was involved in a car crash, and the less than stellar medical attention he received in the aftermath led to more health complications. It is a topic he has broached in his newspaper column for the Daily Trust, but it is verse, over and above journalistic prose, that proves the better conduit for vulnerability.
“The Body Forgets,” “Clinical Findings After Two Harmattans,” and “Propane Profane” chronicle his hospitalization and the crippling effects of chronic pain, while “Farewell” is a meditation on mortality in rhyming couplets:
Call: Who are you when the circuits go cold?
Response: I am learning a hymn so bold.
Call: What is a body when spared or betrayed?
Response: A rumour of light that the dark has mislaid. (p. 71)
As to be expected in a work under the speculative umbrella, Baba-Aminu’s language is rife with mythical as well as scientific and technological imagery. On a more literal level, he weaves in Hausa, the de facto lingua franca of Northern Nigeria, and militaristic terms—residuals of Nigeria’s thirty-year military rule. Beneath the chrome and circuitry lies an astute spiritual sensibility. “Quantum Eid” is the most overt, but there are religious motifs and similes all through, which makes comparisons to Rumi tempting.
There is plenty to suggest that our interlocutor is also a disciple of Rainer Maria Rilke. In the seventh of his “Letters to a Young Poet,” Rilke urges his charge to approach love as a duty, writing:
To love is also good, for love is hard. Love between one person and another:
that is perhaps the hardest thing it is laid on us to do, the utmost, the ultimate
trial and test, the work for which all other work is just preparation.
Like a faithful adherent, Baba-Aminu appears to have taken Rilke’s injunction to his protégé to heart, applying the lesson to his engagement with the world, and not just select interpersonal relationships. It is this love for humanity that gives Abdulkareem Baba-Aminu’s writing, rooted in the Nigerian experience, transnational appeal, and whether you fall in with the geeks, the mystics, the revolutionaries, or the romantics, Kill the Poet, Save the World! has a ready-made poem for you in it.