ArtisansQuill

22/11/2025

NEW ON ARTISANSQUILL 🍀
Today, we journey into the beating heart of Kano through the unforgettable voice of Malam Idi, a blind storyteller who sees more than the world allows.

In this vivid, soul-deep narrative, Halima Ahmad paints Kano not just as a city of commerce and dust, but as a living symphony of voices, prayers, histories, and forgotten heroes. Through Malam Idi’s eyes (and his blindness), we witness resilience, dignity, and the unextinguished power of stories to anchor a people.

“Yet, in the darkness, I found a different kind of light… Each clink of a coin in my cup wasn’t just charity; it was a quiet acknowledgment that even a man the world refused to see still had stories worth hearing.”

Read the full piece on https://artisansquill.com/2025/10/02/gatangatanaku/ and let Malam Idi remind you that sometimes the truest vision comes from those who no longer see.

-Halima Ahmad The Kano sun beat down on my weathered face, its harsh glare meaningless to my sightless eyes. The ceaseless hum of the marketplace was my symphony, the rhythmic clatter of carts…

20/11/2025

🍀 New on ArtisansQuills:
Daniel Singfuri Yohanna tells an unflinching story

Excerpt:
“He pressed his ear to her chest. Safiya wasn’t breathing. He screamed—because sometimes the world is crueler in polished houses than in the forests of Zamfara.”

🔗 Full story: https://artisansquill.com/2025/10/16/daughter-of-my-sister/

-Daniel Yohanna Image Credit: Marcus Ganahl The night came without warning, thick, breathless, and bitter. In Damboa, the winds had whispered warnings, but no one truly listened to the wind until i…

20/11/2025

Cyprian Ekwensi: The Storyteller Who Refused to Sit with the Scholars

I was not born in the golden age of Cyprian Ekwensi, but I have read enough of his works to know that the man had Lagos breathing inside his works. His words carried the heartbeat of the city. Of course, the ‘Lagos’ of those days was not the sanitized, polished Lagos of Instagram reels we see today but the one that smelled of suya smoke, petrol and unfulfilled promises.

When you open ‘People of the City’ or ‘Jagua Nana,’ you find yourself deeply immersed in the characters and setting of the novels. You hear the agbero calling passengers. You see the young girl with too much makeup and a dream too heavy for her handbag. You feel the pulse of survival that beats through every line.

And yet, the literary elites rarely mention his name in the same breath as Achebe or Soyinka. Perhaps because he did not sit among them in critics’ perception intellectualism. He wrote for the common people, not the elites.

They said his stories were too simple. That he lacked the depth, the gravitas, the intellectual weight that Achebe and Soyinka carried. But maybe that is because Ekwensi was not trying to impress anyone. He was trying to connect.

He wrote about the chaos, the beauty, and the contradictions of our everyday lives.

And perhaps that is why time, that unfair judge, has not been kind to him. His simplicity became his curse. Critics mistook accessibility for shallowness. But tell me, what’s deeper than a story that makes a bus conductor pause mid-change to nod in recognition?

Ekwensi’s gift was relatability. He was not Achebe, the philosopher. He was not Soyinka, the grandiose dramatist of impeccable eloquence. He was the chronicler of the streets. The griot of the city. The man who turned gossip into literature.

There is a writing lesson there — a big one. Your writing does not always have to sound ‘great.’ It is about being felt. It is about understanding that your words are not trophies for scholars but mirrors for your readers.

Ekwensi wrote like the man who had seen too much to care about applause. Maybe, just maybe, that is the real art; to write not for the critic, not for the professor but for the woman in the bus who reads your story and whispers, “Na me be this.”

He may not sit on the same pedestal as Achebe or Soyinka. But every time a writer chooses clarity over confusion, emotion over ego, and truth over polish — somewhere, Ekwensi smiles.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough.

©️Charles Obinna

19/11/2025

🌿✨ New on ArtisansQuill: Hill of Friendship — Funke Awodiya chants a lyrical ode to heritage, memory, and the landscapes that shape us, leading a journey through time, rivers, and ancestral wisdom as she reclaims and celebrates a land lost to greed and neglect:

“I will tell your story
Of farmlands and flourishing grassland
I will tell the world about your flowing streams,
Singing birds, on breadfruit trees —
A communal place for man and nature,
A hill of friendship you truly are.”

Read the full poem here:

-Awodiya Funke Image Credit: Nicholas Beel I will tell your story Of farmlands and flourishing grassland I will tell the world about your flowing streams, Singing birds, o…

08/11/2025

“It is the thinking that we have arrived

when we are nowhere

that made Ọlọ́wọ̀ look Ọ̀rúnmìlà in the eye.

The result was that yams

no longer shot in their beds,

small rivers wore garments of leaves

birds’ songs hung in their startled throats.”

Dayo Ayilara shows how to merge the dance of the spirits with the feet of mortals in “It is the Thinking We Have Arrived”. Read the full poem on

-Dayọ̀ Ayílárá Image credit: Ahmad odeh It is the thinking that we have arrived when we are nowhere that made Ọlọ́wọ̀ look Ọ̀rúnmìlà in the eye. The result was that yams no longer sh…

03/11/2025

‘Olobo: the borrowed one, the one who longs.’ In the latest issue of ArtisansQuill, Professor Nimi Wariboko explores Kalabari words for lover, revealing how desire, intimacy, and longing are intertwined in culture and language. More than a study of love, it’s a guide to contemporary, accessible philosophy.
Read the full article: https://artisansquill.com/2025/10/18/olobo-lover/

-Nimi Wariboko Image Credit: Filipe Almeida On April 19, 2025, a cousin in the United States asked me for the Kalabari word for romantic lover. She believed there was no equivalent in the language.…

02/11/2025

innocence a lake in her eyes; men drown.
stars plucked from her skin dye the night…

Read Alfred Olaiya’s “Kòfó” on ArtisansQuill Issue 2 — a luminous poem of myth, desire, and the untamed muse.

-Alfred Olaiya innocence a lake in her eyes; men drown. stars plucked from her skin dye the night, but she ate the ‘t,’ replaced the ‘y’ with ‘i’ till longings d…

01/11/2025

Something about the oral form is at the core of it, constantly unfurling—a highly mutable, yet rocky thing. This thing stirs the heart. You feel it like a melting in your inside, like your heart being broken in a way you like. It is in the crooning of birds, the near-imperceptible drop in the voice of a conjuror-singer felt as a thud in your insides.

It is in the way the voice tilts like it is about to spill all of the world’s secrets as The Righteous Brothers caress the split between hun– and –gered. It is the magic in The Beatles’ Let it Be. It is the heart of music, the magic of drum, the beauty of the strings of the violin, in the shut eyes of a listener enraptured by music. Great movies and ads get it sometimes in peak cinematic moments that have you bawling your eyes out, a mixture of feelings wrapping their hands around your insides where nothing else can touch. It is a spirit that often proves elusive when the oral is reduced to the written. It is the joy of orality.

Now, this is not to say the written does not have its own magic. The magic of the written is in a different type of boundlessness that makes diehard fans of a book swear that the movies mangled it. It is two different types of magic.

In this issue, Old Forms, New Worlds, the contributors have attempted the feat of capturing the magic of old forms through unabashed didactism, social commentary, lively cadences, and a folkloric manner of thinking. In sum, they have fashioned marriages of all sorts between the old way of seeing and the new things to see.
Thank you for staying

https://artisansquill.com/2025/10/16/https-artisansquill-com-2025-10-16-issue-2-old-forms-new-world/

27/08/2025

fly, be youthful, enjoy the grace of independence that has scratched itself into your skin, fly but don’t forget the measure of your wing’s strength, the ground is full of pebbles and stones. Boy, fly, measure well, the length of drought that will come draw water out of your river, don’t break a wall, don’t break the dam. Boy, fly....

fly, be youthful, enjoy the grace of independence that has scratched itself into your skin, fly but don’t forget the measure of your wing’s strength, the ground is full of pebbles and stones. Boy, …

27/08/2025

Submissions still ongoing.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS | ARTISANSQUILL.COM

Theme: Old Forms, New Words

Deadline: September 1, 2025
Submit to: [email protected]
Enquiries: [email protected]

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“Before the printed word, there was the performed one.”

Praise songs. Proverbs. Dirges. Incantations. Lullabies. Folktales.

These are the breath-prints of our ancestors—oral forms passed from tongue to tongue, across generations. But what happens when these ancient vessels meet contemporary voices, truths, and tensions?

For this special issue of Artisans Quill, we invite writers, poets, performers, and thinkers to reimagine African oral literary forms through a modern lens. We’re calling this issue:

Old Forms, New Words

We want work that revives, remixes, or responds to oral traditions. Let your poetry chant. Let your flash fiction echo the rhythm of a folktale. Let your essays sing like proverbs. Whether you’re working in English, a local language, or a fusion of both—we want to hear what happens when the old speaks through the new.

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What We’re Looking For

Genres (original or translated):
• Praise poetry / Oríkì
• Dirges and laments
• Riddles, proverbs, or aphorisms
• Folktales and fables (traditional or contemporary retellings)
• Call-and-response narratives
• Incantations, lullabies, chants
• Lyric essays and reflections on oral forms
• Audio, performance, or multimedia pieces (via link or file)

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Interpretation Is Open

• A praise poem for a modern woman
• A climate-change folktale
• A lullaby for a child born in war
• A fragmented call-and-response between memory and migration
• A personal essay reflecting on your grandmother’s proverbs

Bring us something grounded, inventive, and emotionally resonant.

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Submission Guidelines

• Up to 3 poems or 1–2 prose pieces (maximum 1,200 words each)
• Attach files as .doc, .docx, or .pdf
• Title your email: Submission – Old Forms – [Your Name]
• Include a short third-person bio (50–80 words) in the body of your email
• Simultaneous submissions welcome. Notify us if your work is accepted elsewhere.

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Submit by: September 1, 2025

Send submissions to: [email protected]
Enquiries: [email protected]

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About ArtisansQuill

ArtisansQuill is a home for literature that crafts the soul. We publish original, resonant writing with an emphasis on form, feeling, and cultural lineage. We are committed to celebrating literary craft and honoring the roots from which it grows.

Let the ancestors whisper. Let your words answer.
We’re listening.

Full details at artisansquill.com


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