2000 Blacks (University of Pittsburgh Press 2024) by Ajibola Tolase is a powerful poetry collection that has garnered significant recognition, winning the Gold Medal for Poetry in the 2025 Florida Book Awards as well as the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Tolase’s poetry is deeply evocative, blending personal history with broader cultural and political themes. The collection is divided into two sections: the first primarily explores themes of migration from Africa, while the second examines the poet’s relationship with his absent father and reflects on violent episodes in Nigerian history.
The opening poem is an abecedarian piece, with each line beginning with a successive letter of the alphabet. It introduces recurring themes of Africa, prejudice, rage, wounds, and education. Following this is the prose poem “Refuge Sonnets,” in which the narrator describes how people in his new world avoid speaking to him, fearing he cannot communicate clearly. This results in painful misconceptions:
“I live in their imagination as the wild
man who has crossed the Sahara to take from their bequeathal.
This might be why they drown me, even if they don’t, I’ll still
avoid water.”
Drowning imagery recurs throughout the collection, reinforcing feelings of displacement and struggle. “Refuge Sonnets” also touches on themes of greed, blood diamonds, and the suffering of “Black Africans too broken to cry or speak.” Though the poet clarifies that he is an international student rather than an immigrant, he secretly plans to stay, as his mother has told him, “there’s nothing for [him] to return to.”
In “As You Already Know,” Tolase crafts stunning imagery to describe his journey by plane:
“I carry home
in my pocket or
in the accent
that rolls off
my tongue.”
Yet, the poem also conveys his unease about being questioned on his reasons for traveling, a tension many immigrants experience.
A blend of pain and bitter humor underlies “White Girls Guide to Dating Black Boys.” The poem offers ironic advice, suggesting that it is preferable if “he’s mixed” and cautioning against mentioning previous Black partners on a first date. If the White girl struggles pronouncing his name, she may call him “sugar” but never “honey,” lest it be interpreted as a comment on his skin tone.
The theme of names continues in “How-To”:
“She called me Bo, a syllable easy
enough for her son who knows me
only as his mother’s distraction.I was opposed to her children
calling me dad since we had only
been together for a month.I snuck in after they were presumed asleep.”
Throughout the collection, language and naming serve as barriers between people, emphasizing cultural dissonance.
One of the most powerful poems, “Victoria Island, Lagos,” explores the history of the now-financial district in Nigeria. The poet details men paying for sex and a taxi driver who advises ignoring the city’s past in order to love it. However, the poet cannot ignore the violence beneath the surface:
“It was a wet day, blood trickled
down the windows of the taxi.”
This poem also recounts a terrifying night when “fine boys” (a euphemism for thieves) invaded his home:
“my mother stared at their guns
as if she has never seen one before.
They forgot to conceal
the Nigerian Police Force imprint,
or they did not care.”
The second section of the collection contains “Justice,” a harrowing poem that describes a mob’s brutal punishment of thieves:
“. . .The touch of gasoline is cold
and comforting before the matchstick
is struck. The tires hanging from
their necks. I looked. Everything
I saw ruined my sleep a decade later
when turning in my bed
brought me back to my college dorm
in Nigeria. Me and my friends were
watching a cellphone video of four boys
burning extravagantly before sunrise.”
The collection also delves into the poet’s fraught relationship with his father. In “Break Out,” he recalls that his sister was the first to hate their father, “who lied to us / before he left.” Other poems confront this unresolved tension. “High Water” evokes sadness and futility as the father plants rice seeds with “the care of a naturalist feeding the earth,” only to have a flood wash away his efforts. Another poem depicts an unsatisfying reunion between father and son in a park, where they remain strangers despite the father’s declaration that “you will always be my boy.”
The collection’s second abecedarian poem, “Nomad,” revisits the father’s absence and return:
“All the effort toward knowledge of my father’s
life come to
Zero. A tear for time spent without resolution. A tear for my
father.”
Ajibola Tolase
Ajibola Tolase’s 2000 Blacks is an extraordinary collection that captures the complexities of migration, memory, and identity. With its haunting imagery and poignant reflections, it stands as a significant contribution to contemporary poetry.
Tolase’s work has appeared in LitHub, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, and other esteemed publications. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Tolase has also received a creative writing grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. He is currently the 2023–2024 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Poetry at Colgate University and holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
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