Dear writers, as we at Agbowó prepare for our milestone 10th Issue, we invite you to submit works scuffling with the potent tensions emerging from these reflections—the dialogue between past and hereafter, the pull between hope and dread, the contrast of joy in small lives against inflated national terror, and the vital work of reclaiming decolonial narratives. We are interested in seeing how your narrative, prayer, limerick, litany, or lyric essays bring these convoluted conversations to the fore. Think of these ideas less as a strict theme and more as a resonant frequency; we welcome submissions that engage these complex currents, perhaps exploring how tomorrow’s inevitability shapes today’s dread or hope, but we are also eager for work that surprises us with its power and originality in confronting the contours of existence. Our core desire is to celebrate language, to read something that spurs us, makes us wait, and compels us to consider the depth and beauty of the sentence on a craft level.
Consider the precarious edge upon which existence often balances. In Tomorrow Never Dies, the 1997 blockbuster, Mr. Stamper’s icy promise, ‘I owe you an unpleasant death, Mr. Bond,’ speaks volumes about the intimate threats and struggles for survival that punctuate our realities, both on screen and off. Isn’t this our mirrored lives? Look around: the insidious, creeping outbreaks of political violence, the potential for forceful ejection from physical and surreal landscapes we thought stable, the soul-wearying burden of consciousness itself—all represent the sublime and sometimes terrifying possibilities of reality. The sheer persistence required to navigate this finds echoes everywhere. Perhaps the Red Woman’s rhetorical question to Arya in Game of Thrones, ‘What do we say to the God of Death?’, finds less an answer and more a defiant counterpoint in Bond’s rigorous drive to simply endure within Tomorrow Never Dies. Yet, an unsettling feeling often remains, a pervasive question about the nature of it all—captured, maybe, in the way The Eurythmics’ pulsing bass beat unsettles the viewer from the start of Kinds of Kindness. That film’s general sense of feral, universal violence seems to probe directly: faced with such intensity, what is this world, and what possibly makes sense within it?
So, how do we grapple with what makes sense in such a world, teeming with both sublime possibility and terrifying intensity? Perhaps answers, or at least ways to frame our urgent questions, lie hidden in how we perceive time and narrative itself. Wole Soyinka, in Myth, Literature and the African World, offers one powerful lens, revealing time not merely as linear progression but as a cyclical dance—a perpetual dialogue interconnecting past, present, and future. This perspective illuminates how history’s echoes shape the now; see how the imminent and elusive genesis of national terror remains starkly palpable in the backdrop of Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Similarly, Mainframe’s 1993 classic, Ti Oluwa Ni Ile, dives deep into the raw struggle to stay alive amidst forces that feel both surreal and seemingly preordained—a buried body demanding justice, divine intervention, desire, potent human corruption—grounding these existential battles within specific contexts of African spiritualism and greed. These narratives powerfully suggest that while everything connects somewhere—here—there’s no single, simple map for navigating this existence. They compel us towards vital post-existential inquiries: How much agency do we truly possess? How does the very idea of ‘radical freedom’ or a ‘unified self’ contend with the tangible weight of history, potent cultural narratives, or even deeply embedded concepts like predestination? And yet, crucially, these stories also affirm that individuals do strive, make decisions, and actively shape their lives against and within these complex drapery.
We welcome submissions across all genres—fiction, poetry, essays, drama, and visual art. Find more information about our submission guidelines here.
Submission Window: April 6th – May 31st
Decisions: July 2025
Editing and Production: August- September 2025
Publication: October 2025