HCAF STARS SERIES, JULY 2025: INTERVIEW — ADESIYAN OLUWAPELUMI
Question:
The Hilltop Creative Arts Foundation is known for her central role of nurturing creativity in youths across the country. How has being its member contributed to your growth as an artist, and what opportunities, or experiences have been most impactful for you?
Answer:
First of all, I want to express my sincerest appreciation for this recognition. I am truly humbled and honored.
I remember the first time I encountered HCAF was through Abdulrazaq Salihu when he won the HIAFEST STAR PRIZE in 2023. I was truly inspired by the foundation’s tremendous commitment towards fostering literary arts among youths, especially embracing the “Catch them Young” vision right from primary and secondary schools. Growing up as a newbie creative, community and mentorship was a luxury. But it is nameworthy that even before I joined HCAF recently in the beginning of the year 2025, I was a beneficiary to the community. The work HCAF was doing and continues to do in grooming new crop of young authors from Pacella Chukwuma, Sunday Saheed to Zakiyyah Dzukogi through the HIAFEST PRIZE for Nigerian Teen Authors and many more initiatives stirred the waters for young poets like me. As Adedayo Agarau remarkably said in his explosive article on the verdant Nigerian poetry landscape, “Nigerian poets ride on the back of small hubs, community culture and language already established by writers before them.” I am happy to have been an offspring of HCAF, both indirectly and now directly as a member under the Ogun state chapter.
For me, community holds great significance because it is much more than belonging to something but belonging to something that matters, sharing something in passion alongside a people—”your people”, united in common purpose. Think of it as the ocean that calls out to the land saying you too can be water. HCAF gave me a chance to dream and I am happy to be living the dream. Permit me to borrow from the Bible, “just as a body, though one, has many, but all these parts come together as one body…” HCAF brings us together in one faith, one baptism in the gospel of literature. What the foundation has offered me more since joining is camaraderie, a more refined, disciplined purpose and boundless opportunity. Undeniably, HCAF stands at the forefront of poetic renaissance in Nigeria. Here, art is thicker than blood.
Question:
What themes and experiences push the creativity behind your work, and what part of the creative process poses a challenge to you?
Answer:
I think my trajectory towards thematic explorations in my poetry overflows from an expressive, tameless river. I do not write to be caged. I write to be free. However, I find myself often drawn to writing about the spiritual practice of quietness, its symmetry with sound, a manifesto for the political body and pondering the high and lowbrow aesthetics of the mundane. This often starts as inquiry, a bid for catharsis or just a walk in the greenery garden of the world through the imaginative lens of language. I see more of the world when I imagine it. With poetry, I don’t have to be, I learn to be. Therefore, the creative process is in itself an experiment —a creation of deeper life, a deeper ousia of the life I live. Leonard Cohen calls it “the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” I think the Genesis story lays it more explicitly showing us that God himself is a poet who by the creation of language created the cosmos. I, an offspring imitate this divine nature. When I write, I hope to create something bursting at the seams with abundant, unrestrained life. So I write in experience both intrinsically and extrinsically: to express from within me and to impress from without.
To the second part of the question, I think the greatest challenge for me in my creative process is what I call the trauma of being a Nigerian poet where writing becomes a luxury of time, space and attention. Even Samuel Adeyemi iterates in his poem, Magnifying Glass, “Only the rich write poetry now. I am trying to afford my life.” Likewise, in the odyssey of trying to afford my life, it is almost impossible to untangle myself from the systemic clutches of the nation’s economy. Not impossible. But nearly. Writing is not my full-time work. I am not a full-time poet, in my friend Sodiq Oyekanmi’s lingo. I juggle between intensive medical schooling and the habitual, miscellaneous acts of funding a living.
Believe it or not, a starving poet is an aggrieved poet. When you write from anger or melancholy, it often turns into a solitary cell you build with your hands. The anger that drives my poem especially in my more politically inclined poems such as Mourning, is a part of a larger attempt to escape the human trauma. As poets, we need to be given the luxury of lightness and joy in this decade of dearth, as in my poem Sicklebloom, to write more than just protest poems or sad poems. In James Baldwin’s words; “One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary while in darkeness, to know, that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is light.”
Question:
As a renowned creative, what advice would you give to emerging artists who are looking to balance the pursuit of artistic excellence with the desire for recognition and validation?
Answer:
I have been writing since 2020 before I got my first acceptance in 2022. If I were writing for validation, in the first six months, I should have given up. I had faced bouts of uncertainty and self-doubt but that did not stifle my spirit. In fact the two year gap prepared me for the continuous perseverance needed as a creative, stimulating a intrinsic motivation. That is the balancing factor to the pursuit. Over the years, I have been taught the importance of staying true to craft process, choosing a dedication to mastery over flattery or the avarice of fame. With artistic excellence, the recognition will come. The common challenge here exists in chasing after the desire of validation. But I will say instead of validations, chase passion. It is easier to attract the validations than chase after them. Through the numerous ups and downs of the writing vocation, this mindset will keep you writing even when the accolades do not come, especially when the accolades do not come on time. But if you persist, eventually the accolades come. The goal is to persist with patience but not without progress. Proverbs 22.29 says “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men.” Standing before kings is the end of that story, is the reward. Building expertise and diligence is the beginning, is the requirement.
Question:
What purpose fuels your creativity ?
I write because I enjoy it—it revigorates me, it excites me, it listens for me. Poems do not do the work of healing/ political or social reform, therefore I won’t be duplicitous in saying I write for these reasons. Poetry, for me, is not therapy or at least I used to think it was. I have discovered, like music, it can be therapeutic, capable of stimulating a change but never the change. In the end, all poems are sentiments; a kind of maudlinness absent of judgment.
Changes are enforced by laws, policies, governments and ideologies. I write to influence these schools of thoughts, meditating on what it means to be human—to experience, to love, to suffer, and to heal. As an artist, I am burdened first with the responsibility to appeal aesthetically, to engage your attention with what I call a “beautiful ache”, an irresistible energy that perturbs you emotionally, visually and if I am lucky, tactilely. What I then do with that is incite a private conversation. With that conversation, I begin an apologia, a written statement of my truth and I ask you to share if you will. Over the years, I have grown to not choose one or superimpose one over the other. I express. I impress. Both are expressed in equal explicit measures.
Question:
Fifty years away from now, what do you want the literary world to perceive of your art?
Answer:
I hope my work becomes a prism where my readers perceive the world more intricately in its colors and shades, amplifying the beauties of humanity and nature in an antiquity of my truth, preserved immemorial in time.
Question:
Is representation a priority for you, and do you see a need for your writing to reflect your background, or ancestral links?
Answer:
A few years ago, I was privy to the discourse of what is considered Nigerian and non-Nigerian poetry. I remember asking a question on X if a Nigerian poet does not necessarily write about his country, is it necessary for a sense of Nigerianness or his tribal sentiments to permeate his work whether forced or not? This conundrum jogged my thoughts for a few days and further lead me to another query on the conceptualization of self, imagination and creativity and how these factors influence my creative process. I had to know how much of my writing was a conscious act? And unconscious?
I have come to realize the poet discovers the representation of his poetry by his way of poetry itself. Choices in style, form and structure are largely deliberate artistic choices made by the poem where the muse is the facilitator of the thinking. Thus, wherever it bends me, I lean. I do not find the reason to handicap my writing process with a need
a need to reflect your background, or ancestral links. It is innate, meaning it eventually reflects. Whether intentionally imbuing my Nigerianness into my works or not, it is more controlled—an invented freedom than a forced freedom. Representation, I believe, is consequential—of self-sufficient causality.
