KITOFA: A poetic journey through ancestry, exile and return 

By Damiete Braide

Chris Okunnuwa’s KITOFA: Poems of Lineage and Water establishes the author within contemporary diaspora literature, delivering a poetic journey through ancestry, exile, and return. Spanning six parts and a coda, this collection draws sensory patterns from the rituals, water, and oral traditions of the Ilaje, a Yoruba coastal tribe, carrying them into the modern global landscape.

Okunnuwa builds KITOFA from physical images rather than explanations. The collection follows a family’s trajectory from the Ilaje creeks to the UK diaspora, functioning as sustained imagist poetry in which ritual, cloth, fire, land, and water carry the weight of meaning.

KITOFA is a name with a journey inside it. It is the Ilaje rendering of “Christopher”, a name the collection notes was alien to the soil, brought by the missionary tide, and bent by the poet’s people into something of their own. It belonged first to the poet’s grandfather, and his grandson carries it forward as Chris:

I  carry, though his time was never mine to know.

Instead of merely analysing inheritance, the collection forces the reader to bear witness to the weight of time, bridging the sensory heritage of a coastal community with a contemporary diasporic experience where identity is woven from memory and fractured histories.

The imagery throughout is exact. In “The Drowned Ledger,” a colonial tax collector’s record is left scattered: black ink dissolving in brown water

This image shows imperial administration and authority being undone by the creek. In “The Man Who Didn’t Take Off His Agbada,” water runs from the sleeves of a garment of dignity, turning the physical body into a direct channel for the river.

The collection employs a tactile use of personification and metaphor; an outboard engine holds  a lone, screaming note, boat blades , slice” the black water and the sun bakes the concrete.. The structural forms shift with the subject matter. “The Scar” and “The Drowned Ledger” function as documentary narratives, utilizing plain, declarative lines and grounding the text in specific, named places like Idumagbo and Abokisi. In contrast, “Before the Coffin Closed” turns toward the solemnity of an elegy, while “Adesewa” shifts into tenderness.

However, the range of the collection is uneven, and not every poem sustains this imagist discipline. Several narrative pieces lapse into expository lines, explicitly explaining the emotional or historical context rather than allowing a further image to convey the meaning. This tendency to over-explain dilutes the spare, minimalist quality that defines the book’s strongest sections, occasionally reducing poetic ambiguity to plain reportage.

Furthermore, personification, which serves as the book’s primary literary device, is used with excessive frequency across the middle chapters. When mechanical objects, elements, and landscapes are continuously assigned human agency within consecutive poems, the technique loses its sharpness and becomes a predictable stylistic default. These recurring structural choices create a repetitive rhythm that occasionally distracts from the collection’s otherwise sound methodology.

The poet handles ritual imagery with control. Cultural elements like beads drumming, and libation anchor social and spiritual meanings rather than being used for exotic effect. To preserve this linguistic authenticity, Yoruba and Ilaje words sit unexplained directly within the lines, supported by a glossary at the back for readers who wish to look deeper.

The collection’s central irony sits in the generational contrast between name-bearers. The original Kitofa meets the Crown’s collectors with fierce refusal:

I am paying no shishi to any colonial master

His grandson carries his name, yet has complied with the tax obligations his grandfather rejected and has worked within the British state, which is the very authority his ancestor resisted and fled.

Okunnuwa does not explicitly argue this contradiction; he lets an image hold it. In “Holding the Line,” the speaker is a prince of the creek stewarding a King’s coronation:

Rain slid off the velvet, struck my vest instead

The velvet is shielded while the servant gets wet. Rank, inheritance, and service at Westminster Abbey meet in a single downpour.

In the final movement, “The Same Current,” the book’s motifs gather into a final lament: An ocean lies between the cradle and the bone.

The tide washing my shoes here is cold the water of the creek is ever warm

Here, water holds the collection together as an emblem of memory, passage, loss, and return. When Kitofa finally turns his canoe home, the empire is gone, and the poem ends plainly and permanently: The river remained.