1.
Growing up, I spent more time before the mirror than in prayer. All attention on my cheeks, hoping my tribal marks would fade away one morning, or that flesh would gather enough around them to blur their depth. I grew up angry at the thick, conspicuous lines on my face. But one event sharpened my self-esteem. A boy in our compound, slightly younger than I was, began asking his parents to give him my type of tribal marks. When they refused, he fell ill for days. When the illness worsened, his parents finally agreed. That morning, he sat smiling in our parlour while a local blade cut into his tender skin, giving way to fresh blood.
I thereafter became fond of how I looked. I would sing songs heavy with parables, proverbs and paeans by Dr. Sikiru Ayinde Barrister, Ayinla Omowura, and King Dr. Saheed Osupa. I memorised ewì —Yoruba oral poetry— for ceremonies and gatherings. Later, when I began writing poetry, readers often remarked on my use of Yorùbá history, proverbs, and cultural allusions. A poet, Rahma Jimoh, once said she admired my work for its culturally relativistic tendencies. And why not? What are we without our language?
Identity, however, runs deeper than speech alone. It is a diverse, persisting entity unique to various individuals or peoples. As distinct tribes, how we look and dress are parts of our identity. How we celebrate our various events is. The food we eat is. The language we speak is. To distort these things in the name of modernity is to participate in our own disappearance. Thus, we must learn to accept ourselves for others to act towards us in the spirit of such esteem. We should not subject our values to other people’s validation. In today’s world, many things are evolving and growing; in the process, some things are being disrupted, and some have gone into extinction, sadly to the inclusion of local languages.
2.
One night at the university, I opened my poetry folder, scrolled to my Yoruba poems folder, and began to read one of the poems for revision. As I basked in the rhythm of tongue twisters, I recalled how some friends squinted to read them as though I had brought into the world a language from the underworld. Some dragged their teeth around the words until their tongues seemed to catch fire. As hilarious as the moment was for us, it deposited a load of worries in my mind: that our language is gradually sinking into the sea of time.
Many of our everyday words have been replaced by colonial vocabulary. The elders who should prevent the infant’s head from bending now watch it sag down the mother’s back, smiling, looking away as if it is what’s in vogue. We no longer call “Ìyá àgbà“; we rather call them “Grandma.” We no longer call “Màámi àgbà“; we now say “Big Mummy.” From primary school, we were taught to call our languages “vernaculars,” so much so that it is now heavy on the tongues of the younger ones. They make a Lazarus of it anytime they attempt to speak it, while English flows easily from their mouths like a waterfall.
If someone speaks deeply in Yorùbá among peers—using proverbs, idioms, and layered expressions—they are quickly labelled a traditionalist or even a Babaláwo. But we need to understand the sanctity of parlance: it must be preserved and promoted in order to strengthen our heritage. And I think the death of the language is not only a death of our nation, but it’s also the death of our morality, shyness and the speech of eyes and body. My people used to say “tí a bá ń gbàdúrà kí a má tẹ, tí a bá tẹ́tán, àdúrà kí a má ku lókàn“, that is, “If we’ve prayed to not get ridiculed but eventually get ridiculed, the next prayer in the circumstance is to not die from it.” Now that our local language has become endangered, what do we do next? How do we revive its beauty? How do we preserve what remains of ourselves?
3.
I have tried, in my own way, to become an ambassador for the language. I write poems in English, embedding Yorùbá between lines, using our proverbs and idioms to establish depth and truth. I used to chat—typing in Yorùbá constantly—with friends who understood what I was trying to do. 80% of my WhatsApp conversations with Hikmah As-Sideeq and Zainab Mátẹẹsùn were in Yorùbá. Whenever I shared Yorùbá poems or publications on my WhatsApp status, I can bet that the first to engage with them was Abdulhafeez Ọ̀ttún, who’d even share stories behind some proverbs and parables. Even though we still speak in Yorùbá, we chat less often in it now, and this essay is also a reminder for me to return to that practice.
I think of Rasaq Malik Gbolahan (RMG), the co-founder of Àtẹ́lẹwọ́— a literary establishment for the promotion of Yorùbá language and lifestyles through publication of Yorùbá poetry and prose, even organising culture-based events. I have some of my Yorùbá poems published by them. I think of Aremo Balogun Gemini, the Yorùbá spoken word poet who has authored two novels in the Yorùbá language and whose dream is to shut down the 02 Arena someday with his Yorùbá oral poetry performance. I must not forget Luqman Lustrous, who helped me understand the Àmì Ohùn ‘tonal placement’ better and shared with me the Yorùbá keyboard I use.
I remember when a stranger on Facebook—who later became my haiku sensei, Barnabas Adélékè—asked me to help translate his haiku collection into Yorùbá. I remember Mahatma, a multilingual haiku collection with artwork by the Irish poet Gabriel Rosenstock and the Kashmiri artist Masood Hussain, published by The Culturium in honour of Mahatma Gandhi. The work was translated from English into twelve languages, including Yorùbá. I translated the Yorùbá version after being invited through the Ghanaian poet Adjei Agyei-Baah, who translated the work into Twí.
I remember watching Wole Soyinka speak fluent Yorùbá during an interview. I have always believed and maintained that the mastery of his mother tongue sharpened his literary imagination, just as Chinua Achebe’s closeness to Igbo shaped his writing voice. I also remember the interview of Kevin Barry—popularly called Káyódè Òyìnbó—the white man from Wisconsin, United States, who speaks Yorùbá fluently and perfectly, save the English accent that quickly gives him away as not being a Yorùbá. As if that is not enough, Kevin can also play several Yorùbá talking drums, including bàtá, gángan and kẹríkẹrì. God forbid that one day, the White men return to our land to teach our language and culture to our children’s children.
4.
As a child, my fear about my tribal marks was simple: I thought people would not like me. I thought I would not be attractive. But adulthood revealed the opposite. What I once considered a stain, others saw as calligraphy. What I thought were scars, others called tattoos. One day, a friend I secretly admired asked for permission to touch my tribal marks. Unlike me, many people never arrive at acceptance. Some still try to erase their marks with creams or conceal them beneath makeup.
But my greater fear today is no longer the marks themselves. This essay is a lament for a language slowly thinning beneath the pressure of modernity. Yet it is also a call toward preservation. Civilisation should not erase tradition; it should not be an entity to cleanse us of our Identity; it should help us archive, print, digitise, and carry it forward. And not only that, we must continue speaking the language. We must write in it, sing in it, joke in it, dream in it. Because if we fail or refuse to do so, we’ll only become strangers in our own land. In Yorùbá, ‘Nation’ is “Orílẹ̀ Èdè”, loosely translating to “The Landscape of Language.” Which is to say, it is language that makes a nation.
About the Author:
Taofeek Ayeyemi “Aswagaawy” is a Nigerian lawyer, writer and author of the chapbook Some Stars Do Not Fall (Nimble House, 2024), and full-length collection Aubade at Night or Serenade in the Morning (FlowerSong Press, 2021). A BotN and Pushcart Prize Nominee, his poems and CNF have appeared in Lucent Dreaming, Up-the-Staircase Quarterly, FERAL, Banyan Review, Conscio, Agbowó, and elsewhere. He won the 2021 Loft Books Flash Fiction Competition, and 2nd Places in 2025 Octofest poetry contest, 2021 Porter House Review Poetry Contest, and 2016 Christopher Okigbo poetry prize. He is @Aswagaawy on X.
Feature Image by David Iloba on Perxels