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[FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE]
March 22nd, 2026
(Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria)
Interview about the poem, "Market Price," with poet, Adenekan Olanrewaju (Oamlad). The poem is published in Wax Poetry and Art, a magazine from Canada.
"Market Price" is representing Nigeria in the Poetry World Cup 2026.
What are some interesting or important aspects of this work, how it came to be, or what it means, that you want people to know?
This poem came out of something very ordinary. One day, standing in a market and realizing that the same things bought the previous week had quietly become more expensive as it usually is in Nigeria. You start doing strange calculations in your head without even noticing. If this goes up, what do I drop? If I buy this, what waits? And I kept thinking about how people speak in markets. Nobody says inflation. Instead we talk in substitutions. "Leave the yam, buy potatoes." "Reduce the quantity." "Come back tomorrow." and so on.
The voice in the poem is that of a market woman or a mother because she feels closest to that pressure and she cannot postpone reality because she meets it daily. I did not want to make her symbolic. I wanted her to sound like someone you could stand next to. Someone like Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, who marched from Abeokuta against taxation. The poem's reference to "Mama's defiance in '78" nods to that legacy. Our mothers have always resisted and today's market women are her granddaughters.
The lines that look like equations came later as another part of my influence as a Math Teacher. They felt honest to me because life starts to look like a calculation when things keep shifting under you and you are always solving for how to continue.
How does your city / region and your natural surroundings influence this creative work, and your artistic practice as a whole?
I currently reside in Abeokuta, the Olumo Rock's city, a place of granite stubbornness, but I grew up in Lagos, and Lagos does not let you ignore anything. Prices change fast. Movement is tight. You see the effect of decisions almost immediately, especially in markets and public transportation. Places like Abule Egba, Oja Oba, Mile 12 are signals. You can tell how things are going by how people are buying, arguing, or walking away.
There is also a kind of forced awareness in these places. You listen more closely. You watch how people adapt. Someone laughs while negotiating, but you can hear the strain underneath. That mix of resilience and pressure shapes how I write. I try not to decorate things too much and stay with what I can see and hear.
But my surroundings also teach me grief. The environment pushes me toward detail. Food, transport, small exchanges. Those are the places where larger issues show themselves clearly and writing (deliberate observation), for me, becomes a way of keeping record of that, before it becomes normal and disappears into routine.
Read the poem, "Market Price": https://waxpoetryart.com/mag/08/adenekanolanrewajuoamlad.html
Keywords: Nigeria, poetry, economic hardship, market women, resilience.
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