2000 Blacks

Masterfully crafted.

The Cave Canem Prize celebrates the richness of Black culture and the depth of our shared experience. Ajibola Tolase exemplifies the essence of creativity and resilience, using his poetry to shed light on the beauty and complexity of the Black experience.

‘Imagine / the land without the conflicts,’ writes Ajibola Tolase in his blazing debut, 2000 Blacks. From Nigeria to America, Tolase explores the surrealness that arises from living in repressive spaces. Yet despite the violence embedded in systems of power, ‘the native word for burn is the same as dance.’ This is a necessary poetry that leaves no quarter unsinged, a revelation in its willingness to dwell in the unimaginable.

Yes, there is a villanelle and sonnets flanked by abcedarians, but it’s the percussive vernacular that guides me through Ajibola Tolase’s 2000 Blacks. It’s the revelrous, ‘If everyone celebrated / what didn’t kill them, we can pretend / to be immortals’ and the irreverent ‘I would have hugged him / until he felt shame’ that sings to me. Be it the tongue’s many failings, absence, migration, Tolase has created a world I'll trumpet for years to come.

Sharing both history and spirit across the Black diaspora, how our cultures connect has never been more clearly rendered than in Ajibola Tolase’s 2000 Blacks, which sings of life and death throughout the expanse of the world. If there’s an incantation, some language binding us together in the experience of how we manage to survive over time, Tolase offers it here. Whether his poems report the loss of friends and family or celebrate the music of a tragic hero like Fela Kuti, whose music lives on, Tolase ultimately harmonizes all the culture humming within our humanity. In these poems, he rewrites ‘the books of our masters’ while ‘working on a dance.’ 2000 Blacks is a celebration not only of survival but of a creation of life built on generations of living. So, just open the book, drop the needle, and let it spin; every track is a poem I want to dance to.