Abstract
In this paper, I explore the ways in which Segun Adekoya in his poetry collection, Here and There, charts a migratory persona's experiences in Nigeria and America. I leverage the flâneurial adventure possible with poetry in the conceptual frame of orbiting, which I borrow from molecular ideas in chemistry and physics, to highlight how Adekoya structures experiences into schemes of movement across spaces beginning from home in Nigeria to America, and in between both as a cyclic reflection. With the term, orbiting, developed here as a conceptual prism catering to the collection's internal structure of poetic movements across places, I connect with Mathias Iroro Orhero's critical terminology, transpatiality. Thus, orbiting recurs as the scheme of a persona's movement, assuming a different concept yet a related deployment away from the regular Afrodiasporic reimagination of multiple spaces and times, with attendant social crises of/in homeland. This orbiting as a poetics fits Adekoya's literary mapping, as it does not in this sense track diasporic subjects familiar with multispatialities. However, Adekoya appropriates a hybrid form of poetic-scape and critical eyes, by the constitutive colonial and postcolonial details of lives in Nigeria and America. In adapting the adverbials of migration as a structural scheme for close reading of Adekoya's Here and There, I highlight the textually generative orbital structures undersigned by adverbs: “Here,” which essentially evokes the poeticisation of Nigerian life; “There” that refracts the life outside Nigeria in America, as might also reverberate in other foreign climes; “Here and There,” the third and final orbital scheme, burrows mainly into similarities and differences in both worlds.
Keywords
Introduction
The sense of poetry as migration suggests how critical awareness belies movement, which allows real or vicarious experiences as well as both aspects of reading engagements with places. Poetry about space, in this migration sense, often presents a moving persona that conducts the reader through literary mapping in places and times. This gesturing towards the poetics of spatiotemporalities, which forms a structural fulcrum for poetry writing, is the motivation for this paper. The essay, therefore, tracks how the intrinsic, structural compass of poetry, which details shifting scapes of movement, can assume a method of reading for migration. Following the flanerial persona along the internal markers of places and the reading process that poetry enables, I propose “orbiting” as a conceptual framework. I deploy orbiting as an analytical strategy for close reading of Segun Adekoya’s poetry, tracking signs and structures of movement along with themes the movement brings. In this article, I posit that Adekoya’s poetry enacts the migritude consciousness that maps spatial scales as an organising trope. Thus, in reading the flâneurial adventure that Adekoya undertakes in Here and There, I invoke orbiting as a term derived from Orbital Molecular Theory in Chemistry and Physics, and reconfigure this concept for a discursive engagement of poems in this paper.
Content
Orbiting, as formulated in this essay, is the conceptual scaffolding for the scheme of movement in poetry of time and space. It is indexed in a transpatial imagination and critical unpacking of this poetic structure. Orbiting is taken to mean the praxis or structure, which finds its roots in the phenomenon and behaviour of molecules, and it develops from the understanding of pieces of chemical substances as atoms, ions, and matter. Molecules relate in chemistry as a broad subject consisting of elements and compounds. These compounds define the world, and hence embed a range of earth matters such as atoms, chemical bonding, nuclei rings, and movement (Kota Iwata et al, 2015, 1-3; Theodore Brown et al 2003, 38). Molecules commonly concern the exploration of chemical substances that form or disperse (Ebbin Darrell 1990, 41-42). Taken into the migration context of poetry, therefore, orbiting hints at some migrant ideas that might be useful in the description of the poetics of movement in poetry, tied to adverbial signs such as here, there, and here and there. The orbiting is in the cyclic movements through places in the textual planes that ramify migration through time and places in the world.
Thus, I suggest that there is a diametrical relation between orbital elements in the sciences and the structure of poetic process and writing. Generally, in the natural sciences, the concept of molecules is typified in molecular chemistry or molecular physics. The bifurcation here depends on the specific discursive domain, whether it centres on the subject of physics or chemistry. Molecular chemistry aptly concerns itself with the laws governing the interaction between molecules that make for the production and disintegration of chemical bonds, as molecular physics relates the laws governing their
structure and properties. As molecular chemistry reifies schemes in chemical elements and bonds, the latter notion of molecular physics frames the conceptual notion of orbiting, which, taking into its literary sense here, as an organising trope for theme and structure that fosters the migratory schemes of poetry and praxis.
Orbiting, in my specific context, relates to the scenic mediation and poetic accounts the poet renders, and it forms comprehensive, minute and significant experiences across the historical, colonial, postcolonial and planetary descriptions and comparisons of times and places that are evident in the poetic text indexed in migration. Orbiting, thus, suggests a poetic deployment of movement between the poet and the space he traverses, mediating through scenic metaphors that ground the persona’s articulation of shifting locales of experiences and themes. This entanglement between the poetic persona and the spaces reifies orbiting, as both a quantum idea of movement and navigational process in literary map-making.
By literary map-making, I suggest the significance of the inherent poetic-scapes – Here, There, and Here and There – for the reader to make sense of its relationality with orbiting as a frame of cyclic movement and poetic path-marking iterations. I note that Adekoya uses the formal spatial adverbs: “Here” and “There” as orbital schemes to negotiate the colonial and postcolonial matters he details in his poetry. Orbiting, by its connection with literary transmigration, finds its import particularly with how the poet mediates textually his structure of movements through poetry, which touches on what Mathias Iroro Orhero has described as “transpatiality.” Orbiting relates to “transpatiality,” a term Orhero (2025, p.3) uses to critique the long poetic form of Amatoritsero Ede, the Nigerian Canadian poet, scholar, essayist, and publisher. As Orhero puts it, “‘transpatiality’ describes how Ede’s poetry “negotiates and represents the complex and multiple time-spaces new African diasporic writers like himself inhabit” (Orhero 2025, p. 3). Unlike the focus of Orhero’s transpatiality on Ede’s work as a diasporic poet, orbiting, as a conceptual category does not refigure Adekoya as an African diasporic writer. However, poetry spatiality: here and there, recalls the sort of atomic and molecular descriptions of possible diasporic experiences.
Thus, I suggest that there is a diametrical relation between orbital elements in the sciences and the structure of poetic process and writing. Generally, in the natural sciences, the concept of molecules is typified in molecular chemistry or molecular physics. The bifurcation here depends on the specific discursive domain, whether it centres on the subject of physics or chemistry. Molecular chemistry aptly concerns itself with the laws governing the interaction between molecules that make for the production and disintegration of chemical bonds, as molecular physics relates the laws governing their
structure and properties. As molecular chemistry reifies schemes in chemical elements and bonds, the latter notion of molecular physics frames the conceptual notion of orbiting, which, taking into its literary sense here, as an organising trope for theme and structure that fosters the migratory schemes of poetry and praxis.
Orbiting, in my specific context, relates to the scenic mediation and poetic accounts the poet renders, and it forms comprehensive, minute and significant experiences across the historical, colonial, postcolonial and planetary descriptions and comparisons of times and places that are evident in the poetic text indexed in migration. Orbiting, thus, suggests a poetic deployment of movement between the poet and the space he traverses, mediating through scenic metaphors that ground the persona’s articulation of shifting locales of experiences and themes. This entanglement between the poetic persona and the spaces reifies orbiting, as both a quantum idea of movement and navigational process in literary map-making.
By literary map-making, I suggest the significance of the inherent poetic-scapes – Here, There, and Here and There – for the reader to make sense of its relationality with orbiting as a frame of cyclic movement and poetic path-marking iterations. I note that Adekoya uses the formal spatial adverbs: “Here” and “There” as orbital schemes to negotiate the colonial and postcolonial matters he details in his poetry. Orbiting, by its connection with literary transmigration, finds its import particularly with how the poet mediates textually his structure of movements through poetry, which touches on what Mathias Iroro Orhero has described as “transpatiality.” Orbiting relates to “transpatiality,” a term Orhero (2025, p.3) uses to critique the long poetic form of Amatoritsero Ede, the Nigerian Canadian poet, scholar, essayist, and publisher. As Orhero puts it, “‘transpatiality’ describes how Ede’s poetry “negotiates and represents the complex and multiple time-spaces new African diasporic writers like himself inhabit” (Orhero 2025, p. 3). Unlike the focus of Orhero’s transpatiality on Ede’s work as a diasporic poet, orbiting, as a conceptual category does not refigure Adekoya as an African diasporic writer. However, poetry spatiality: here and there, recalls the sort of atomic and molecular descriptions of possible diasporic experiences.
Conclusion
From the analysis so far, it is pertinent to assert that poetry can recur as migration. This is corroborated by the orbiting frame that marks Adekoya’s mediation of Nigeria and America, which enlarges his poetry’s scenic structure of movement and map-making. This notion of map-making tied to the poetics of migration is as recalled in the discursive movement structure in this essay. It tracks the persona’s poetic orbiting through all social matters that he structures by adverbials of “here”, there, and “here” and “there.” Form and theme, in the poems, gesture through the orbiting frames in the way scenic mappings tie with their corresponding tropes of movement, both internally contrived and externally refractive of movements across places and times.
On a critical note in this orbital discourse, Segun Adekoya’s Here and There is reminiscent of Old English poetic form that is heavily alliterative, and it is illustrative of his epistemic digestion of foreign styles in his foray into Euromodernist readings. Being a poet that has picked on the poetic-scape of his African unconscious, the musicality in most of the poems marks Adekoya out as a song-conscious writer. To this end, his orbital schematic rendering of Here and There has forged a poetic work that combines both Yoruba cosmological energies (although with marginal reflection in the current work) and the English poetic influences drawn from English writers, which inscribe his conscious, quixotic accounts of Nigerian society and beyond.
A keen attention to poetics of movement in the collection reveals African migratory and traumatic memory that can be construed from many poems, which pick on life elsewhere. Further studies on Nigerian poetry can examine Adekoya’s Here and There, or other Nigerian poetry collections, which might be indexed by the orbiting praxis, schematics and explorative types. Critical studies on orbiting can include such works as: tosin gbogi’s locomotifs, Tade Ipadeola’s The Sahara Testament, Olajide Salawu’s Preface for Leaving Homeland, and Romeo Oriogun’s Nomad. These poetry collections prove that Nigerian poetry increasingly finds conceptual relations with depictions of journeys and transpatiality. Thus, it might be the case that recent Nigerian poetry can be read as orbiting in diasporic consciousness and African traumatic memories in the colonial and postcolonial era. Adekoya, in Here and There has, on the whole in its migrant universe, provided the scheme of movement in which the reading of his poems charts a discursive literary mapping deeply implicated in its text-to-theory approach in contemporary Nigerian poetry.
On a critical note in this orbital discourse, Segun Adekoya’s Here and There is reminiscent of Old English poetic form that is heavily alliterative, and it is illustrative of his epistemic digestion of foreign styles in his foray into Euromodernist readings. Being a poet that has picked on the poetic-scape of his African unconscious, the musicality in most of the poems marks Adekoya out as a song-conscious writer. To this end, his orbital schematic rendering of Here and There has forged a poetic work that combines both Yoruba cosmological energies (although with marginal reflection in the current work) and the English poetic influences drawn from English writers, which inscribe his conscious, quixotic accounts of Nigerian society and beyond.
A keen attention to poetics of movement in the collection reveals African migratory and traumatic memory that can be construed from many poems, which pick on life elsewhere. Further studies on Nigerian poetry can examine Adekoya’s Here and There, or other Nigerian poetry collections, which might be indexed by the orbiting praxis, schematics and explorative types. Critical studies on orbiting can include such works as: tosin gbogi’s locomotifs, Tade Ipadeola’s The Sahara Testament, Olajide Salawu’s Preface for Leaving Homeland, and Romeo Oriogun’s Nomad. These poetry collections prove that Nigerian poetry increasingly finds conceptual relations with depictions of journeys and transpatiality. Thus, it might be the case that recent Nigerian poetry can be read as orbiting in diasporic consciousness and African traumatic memories in the colonial and postcolonial era. Adekoya, in Here and There has, on the whole in its migrant universe, provided the scheme of movement in which the reading of his poems charts a discursive literary mapping deeply implicated in its text-to-theory approach in contemporary Nigerian poetry.
References
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Aiyejina, F. (1988). “Recent Nigerian Poetry in English: An Alter-native Tradition.” Yemi Ogunbiyi (ed.). Perspectives on Nigerian Literature 1700 to the Present. Lagos: Guardian Books (Nig.) Ltd, 112-28.
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Ayomiitan, E. & Ayeomoni, M. (2024). “A Critical Stylistic Study of Segun Adekoya's Under the Bridge.” Ethiope Journal of English, Literary and Cultural Studies. 2 (1), 20-53.
Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. Routledge.
Brown, T.L.; Kenneth C. Kemp; Theodore L. Brown; Harold Eugene LeMay; Bruce Edward Bursten (2003). Chemistry – the Central Science (9th ed.). New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Chambers, I. (1994). Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London and New York: Routledge.
Chinweizu, I., O. Jemie, and I. Madubuike. (1980). Towards the Decolonization of African Literature.
Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers.
Daintith, J. (2008). Oxford Dictionary of Chemistry. New York: Oxford University Press. Ebbin, D. (1990). General Chemistry (3rd ed.). Boston: Houghton Miffin Co.
Editors of Britannica (2016). “Chemical association: Chemical Bonding”. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/chemical-association
Egudu, R. (1978). Modern African Poetry and the African Predicament. London: Macmillan Press Limited.
Foucault, M. (1986). “Of Other Spaces” (‘Des Espace autres’) [1967], trans. Jay Miskowiec,
Diacritics 16, (22-7).
Garuba, H. (2005). “The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Re-figuring Trends in Recent Nigerian Poetry.” English in Africa. 32 (1), 51-72.
Iwata, K., S. Yamazaki, P. Mutombo, P. Hapala, M. Ondráček, P. Jelínek, Y. Sugimoto. (2015). “Chemical Structure Imaging of a Single Molecule by Atomic Force Microscopy at Room Temperature”. Nature Communications. 6: 7766, 1-7. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms8766 www.nature.com/naturecommunications
Jeyifo, B. (2006). “The Unfortunate Children of Fortunate Parents: Reflections on African Literature in the Wake of 1986 and the Age of Neoliberal in Globalisation”. G. Adeoti & M. Evwierhoma (Eds.). Reflections on African Literature, Governance and Development. Ibadan: Kraft Books Ltd.
Mbembe, A. (2001) On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nnolim, C. (2005). “Contemporary Nigerian Fiction”. Keynote Address Presented at 2005 Annual Convention of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), Imo State Branch, 6–7 July.
Okunoye, O. (2011). “Writing Resistance: Dissidence and Visions of Healing in Nigerian Poetry of the Military Era.” Tydskrif Vir Letterkunde. 48 (1), 64-84.
Olusunle, T. (2022). “The Print Media and the Evolution of Third-Generation Nigerian Poetry.”
International Journal of Current Research in the Humanities (IJCRH). 26 (1) 401-417.
Onwumere, O. (2010). “The Evolution of Nigerian Poetry.” Retrieved July 2O22 http://www.mantle thought.org/arts-and-culture/evolution -nigerian-poetry.
Orhero, I. (2025). “Negotiating Home in the Long Poem: Amatoritsero Ede's Transpatiality”. Nordic Journal of African Studies. 34 (1), 1-17.
Adekoya, Segun. (2012). Here and There. Ibadan: Anol Publications.
Adesanmi, P., and Dunton, C. (2025). “Nigeria’s Third Generation Writing: Historiography and Preliminary Theoretical Considerations.” English in Africa. 32 (1), 7–19. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40239026. Accessed 4 July 2025.
Aiyejina, F. (1988). “Recent Nigerian Poetry in English: An Alter-native Tradition.” Yemi Ogunbiyi (ed.). Perspectives on Nigerian Literature 1700 to the Present. Lagos: Guardian Books (Nig.) Ltd, 112-28.
Anyalenkeya, O. (2024). “Reimagining Narrative Syncretism in Nduka Otiono’s The Night Hides with a Knife.” Eds. Chris Dunton, Iroro Mathias Orhero, and Ndubuisi Martins Aniemeka. Critical Perspectives on Nduka Otiono. Austin: Pan African University Press, 67-81.
Anyokwu, C. (2016). “Tradition, Paradox and the Poetry of Segun Adekoya.” International Journal of Communication: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Communication Studies. 19, 79-92.
Ayomiitan, E. & Ayeomoni, M. (2024). “A Critical Stylistic Study of Segun Adekoya's Under the Bridge.” Ethiope Journal of English, Literary and Cultural Studies. 2 (1), 20-53.
Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. Routledge.
Brown, T.L.; Kenneth C. Kemp; Theodore L. Brown; Harold Eugene LeMay; Bruce Edward Bursten (2003). Chemistry – the Central Science (9th ed.). New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Chambers, I. (1994). Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London and New York: Routledge.
Chinweizu, I., O. Jemie, and I. Madubuike. (1980). Towards the Decolonization of African Literature.
Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers.
Daintith, J. (2008). Oxford Dictionary of Chemistry. New York: Oxford University Press. Ebbin, D. (1990). General Chemistry (3rd ed.). Boston: Houghton Miffin Co.
Editors of Britannica (2016). “Chemical association: Chemical Bonding”. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/chemical-association
Egudu, R. (1978). Modern African Poetry and the African Predicament. London: Macmillan Press Limited.
Foucault, M. (1986). “Of Other Spaces” (‘Des Espace autres’) [1967], trans. Jay Miskowiec,
Diacritics 16, (22-7).
Garuba, H. (2005). “The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Re-figuring Trends in Recent Nigerian Poetry.” English in Africa. 32 (1), 51-72.
Iwata, K., S. Yamazaki, P. Mutombo, P. Hapala, M. Ondráček, P. Jelínek, Y. Sugimoto. (2015). “Chemical Structure Imaging of a Single Molecule by Atomic Force Microscopy at Room Temperature”. Nature Communications. 6: 7766, 1-7. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms8766 www.nature.com/naturecommunications
Jeyifo, B. (2006). “The Unfortunate Children of Fortunate Parents: Reflections on African Literature in the Wake of 1986 and the Age of Neoliberal in Globalisation”. G. Adeoti & M. Evwierhoma (Eds.). Reflections on African Literature, Governance and Development. Ibadan: Kraft Books Ltd.
Mbembe, A. (2001) On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nnolim, C. (2005). “Contemporary Nigerian Fiction”. Keynote Address Presented at 2005 Annual Convention of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), Imo State Branch, 6–7 July.
Okunoye, O. (2011). “Writing Resistance: Dissidence and Visions of Healing in Nigerian Poetry of the Military Era.” Tydskrif Vir Letterkunde. 48 (1), 64-84.
Olusunle, T. (2022). “The Print Media and the Evolution of Third-Generation Nigerian Poetry.”
International Journal of Current Research in the Humanities (IJCRH). 26 (1) 401-417.
Onwumere, O. (2010). “The Evolution of Nigerian Poetry.” Retrieved July 2O22 http://www.mantle thought.org/arts-and-culture/evolution -nigerian-poetry.
Orhero, I. (2025). “Negotiating Home in the Long Poem: Amatoritsero Ede's Transpatiality”. Nordic Journal of African Studies. 34 (1), 1-17.