Editor’s Note
By now, everyone who reads my work or has heard me talk about the writers I love and why I love them would already presume my obsession with space. Because what else is there to be obsessed about if there are no spaces for it? It’s been a wild year, you’ll agree, marked by grief, loss, and a sprinkle of joy here and there, so I wonder how you and I have persisted in all of this chaos. Where are you, and why are you alive right now? What kept you together, whole, indestructible by the mental crucifixion of the self? I think of space as the opportunity to exist or the ability to be free. Perhaps Sufi mysticism explains what I am thinking better—it explains the idea of the liminal as a journey toward a divine union. How the human self occupies the “barzakh,” a metaphysical state between the material and spiritual, encapsulating the soul’s longing for transcendence while trapped in the finite.
In Muhammed Akinyemi’s “In My Head is a Market,” we arrive together at the three-market juncture of his grieving. I remember reading the essay with Noah Kahan’s “Carlo’s Song” playing softly in my ear through my headset. Both pieces contemplate death. Akinyemi is carrying his dead through poems while Noah arrives in musical notes, riffs, and the tender bliss of his guitar. Akinyemi arrives at this essay agreeing with BoJack Horseman that “my mother is dead, and everything is worse now.” This may have aligned with Sufi mysticism’s belief that BoJack’s mother and Akinyemi have, by the shared love and understanding of their descendants, found themselves in a mystical union that transcends human understanding. Perhaps not. But what does your loved one’s death remind you of? A room, their room, the dark corridor of that house as they remove their body from it, the night as it was shrouded in tears, the moon half eaten by clouds? Another loved one? What responsibility must you now carry through yourself and for others? Memory. And memory is liminal.
More than not, the idea of liminality thinks through the idea of ending. The anxieties of transition. The confusion of change. What would your liminal space rather be? This issue confronts you with the charge that fills you with questions and pungent curiosity.
I am shuffling through some of the photos I had pinned on my Pinterest profile, which, of course, engages with the liminality of space and are primarily inundated by the silence that metaphorizes them or rather the idea of silence, an uncomfortable silence that punches me in the gut when I stare at them. The photos have helped me think through what it could mean when spaces are left unclaimed, especially as I sunset “The Years of Blood,” my forthcoming collection where I am chronicling narratives where children went missing in Ibadan—as the Yorubas say in peculiar situations where grief dribbles itself through the door, Ó sọ ilé ọlá dàwọ́rọ́wọ́ (it has turned a house of wealth into ruins). Liminal spaces are, in fact, the dàwọ́rọ́wọ́ that the Yorubas refer to in this saying. You will see this in how the spaces in Olubunmi Familoni’s work, Winner of the 2024 NLNG Prize, engage with liminality so profoundly. In “Requiem For The Iron Monkeys,” the living room performs its function as a physical and metaphorical liminal space that bridges the outside world hedged by protests and disturbed by preventable chaos with the interior world of familial vulnerability. The space is neither fully private nor entirely removed from the external turmoil.
Even in Ope Adedeji’s “The Devil is Not Your Friend or Women’s Wrongs,” we are drawn into a world we would rather not be a part of. We are confronted with the liminality of Ojo’s fractured identity and the way it embodies the tension between victimhood and agency. Ojo exists in an in-between space where she is neither fully subservient nor entirely free, caught in a cycle of domestic and societal oppression that denies her complete autonomy while simultaneously demanding her survival. This liminality is particularly potent in her relationship with her brother, Dibu, whose dominance over her mirrors a larger systemic marginalization codified by the Women’s Wrong Act. Ojo’s violent retaliation against Dibu becomes a transgressive act, but it does not resolve her position; instead, it deepens her suspension in that liminal space between guilt and defiance, familial loyalty, and rebellion. Aren’t we all Ojo? Even Ope’s refusal to let Ojo comfortably occupy any fixed moral or social role heightens the stakes of this liminality. She makes her a compelling insignia that resists against a world that forces women to live perpetually on the threshold of power and subjugation.
This Liminal Issue is helping me think of the many ways we fill spaces and or are removed from them. It reminds me that Martin Heidegger’s existential phenomenology emphasizes “Being-towards-death,” where human existence is always in a state of becoming, moving towards an inevitable end. This liminality is inherent in the awareness of mortality, which shapes our actions and gives life its weight. Take, for instance, Itiola Jones’s “Daddy’s Girl,” which explores the liminality of identity through the speaker’s navigation of gender, power, and cultural belonging as an American queer individual with Nigerian heritage. The poem’s speaker occupies a charged interstitial space, rejecting traditional femininity while simultaneously being bound to patriarchal ideals inherited from her father. This liminality manifests in her gender performance, as she adopts a masculinized persona (“the feminine urge to be my father’s best boi”) while resisting the inevitability of her body’s biological transformation. The father’s role as both idol and oppressor underscores the speaker’s precarious position within dual systems of dominance: a patriarchal household and, implicitly, a diasporic tension between Nigerian cultural expectations and American notions of selfhood. The speaker’s evident desire for power and approval, exemplified through her mimicry of her father’s cunning and arrogance, reflects the internalized struggle of navigating multiple identities while never fully belonging to any. The speaker’s ultimate betrayal by her father—a stand-in for larger societal structures—parallels the experience of queer diasporic subjects who must contend with cultural ideals that often marginalize their queerness. Through deft use of biblical allusion, animal imagery, and subversive gender performance, the poem captures the complex, liminal experience of carving out an identity that is simultaneously shaped by and resistant to the oppressive legacies of both familial and cultural inheritance.
I have unreserved reverence for the people I work with at Agbowo: my editors, Adams Adeosun, Uthman Adejumo, Hauwa Shaffi Nuhu, Maxwell Dewunmi, and Nome Emeka Patrick. We will only arrive and journey with you. Your delectable tastes take us to the destination. I am also grateful to Joba Ojelabi and Habeeb Kolade, the leader of this pack, whose vision we are adding blocks to.
To end, let this issue stay with you. Linger in the music, the poems, the narratives, and the gloss of images we set before you.
Yours,
Adedayo Agarau
Oakland, CA
12/8/2024
Cover Art by Toby tha Photographer – Gedanken (thought)
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SPECIAL UNBOX: INTERVIEW
