Adam

Gboyega Odubanjo

A personal review and tribute by our poetry reviews editor Sean Wai Keung.

I first met Gboyega Odubanjo around 2012, in his home city of London. I was an undergraduate there and was just dipping my toes into the poetry scene, going to readings and taking part in as many open mics and slams as possible. I spent more time at these events than I did at the university I was studying in, and it’s where I learned to love poetry. As with many of the friends I made during those times, I don't really remember where I first encountered Gboyega – he was there, as was I, and that just felt like a natural and normal state of things.

Adam is a collection very much concerned with the idea of the origins of things. Its title comes from the name given by police officers to the remains of a young Black boy discovered in the Thames in 2001. By using this name – also, of course, the Biblical name of the first man – Gboyega connects the story of this young boy not only to those who have come before him, but also to us, his readers. As the opening of the collection reads, ‘We enter with, and as, Adam’.

Throughout the collection, the who, what, where and why of ‘Adam’, both as a real unidentified person and as a name and concept, is explored. And while this might risk turning a real life tragedy into something academic, or worse, merely entertaining, Gboyega avoids this by centring images and sounds of the personal and the everyday; the poems never drift too far from the subject matter, but also never use tragedy simply for the sake of it. The ‘Genesis’ sequence stands out because of this, flowing seamlessly between existential musings and small moments including buying an album and drinking too much. The use of occasional slang and dialect aids this, especially when it comes to the word ‘man’ (‘now man said rah swear down’ and ‘my man with the yellow eyes’ for instance), which takes on a whole new meaning in the context of the collection.

Over the last few years my contact with Gboyega slowed. The last time I saw him was in 2023, at a poetry event in London I was hosting. We hugged and told each other it had been too long. He reminded me of a time ten years previously when we had co-featured at a poetry event in Shoreditch, and we laughed about how, afterwards, we had stood outside the venue sharing poems, cypher-style. We congratulated each other on how far we’d both come since then, and as always I told him that I was desperate to bring him up to Scotland at some point. I never quite managed it.

There’s one poem in Adam that particularly hits me: ‘Against Resting in Peace’ is both angry and darkly hilarious, from the first line – ‘there you go telling me what to do’ – all the way to the final phrase, ‘peace you say’. Gboyega’s untimely death still doesn’t feel real to me, and I can only imagine how much stronger that feeling must be for his closer friends and family. Yet if Adam teaches us anything, it’s that we still remain connected to others, even through death. And above the pain of his passing, I will cherish my memories of him, and be grateful that this collection of his work exists.

Gboyega Odubanjo died in August 2023. Adam was published by Faber in July 2024.