A Poet’s Lament of a World on the Precipice

In her debut collection, Cadaver of Red Roses, Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi renders an evocative and poetic journey through past tragedies, protesting against war and poor leadership.

The writer’s life is often marked by existential suffering. In his essay, ‘Suffering is Literature’s Big Game’, Chimezie Chika writes that, ‘Perhaps literature revels in pain because the writer suffers so he can create—and something of the writer’s ordeal while writing is absorbed by the pages produced.’ Much of this keen observation is evident in Zainab Iliyasu Bobi’s debut collection, Cadaver of Red Roses, which won the 2024 Derricotte/Eady Chapbook Prize. As the second Nigerian writer to win the prize, following Wale Ayinla’s To Cast a Dream in 2021, Bobi’s powerful collection confronts the mind with haunting memories of recent global and national crimes. It also addresses the enduring stereotypes faced by Black people and those of Islamic faith. 

Cadaver of Red Roses isolates us into terrifying scenes where we are compelled to witness various disasters. It captures personal losses that evoke emotional turmoil, allowing us to sympathize with the poet-persona’s tragedies. Bobi fulfils James Baldwin’s notion of the artist as ‘a sort of emotional and spiritual historian,’ shouldering the responsibility to enlighten readers about both the upheavals and the subtle graces of our existence...