From Anger To Hope: How James Eze Uses Poetry To Confront Nigeria’s Wounds

A Poetry Collection Born From National Unease

JAMES Ngwu Eze’s Unbind Me Now emerges from a Nigeria marked by violence, displacement, social dislocation and uncertainty. Rather than retreating into private reflection, the poet turns outward, using the collection to engage the experiences of people living through difficult national realities.

That approach has now placed the book among the three finalists for the 2026 Nigeria Prize for Literature, alongside Ogaga Ifowodo’s Why Does God Need a Gun? and Tares Oburumu’s Flora’s Love Colony. The three collections emerged from an initial field of 223 submissions in a prize cycle devoted to poetry.

For Eze, however, the significance of the collection extends beyond literary competition. He presents poetry as a form of public testimony and as a means of giving language to experiences that are often difficult to articulate.

From Okigbo’s Invocation to a Contemporary Cry

The title Unbind Me Now carries a deliberate literary echo.

Eze traces it to Christopher Okigbo’s Labyrinth, particularly the poet’s invocation, “O mother Earth, unbind me”. The reference connects the contemporary collection to an earlier Nigerian poetic tradition in which personal anguish, history, spirituality and national experience often intersect.

Yet Eze does not simply reproduce Okigbo’s concerns. Instead, he transforms the earlier invocation into a contemporary demand for release.

In his account, the title became part of the emotional architecture of the collection. He approached the work consciously, seeing the poet’s responsibility as extending beyond personal expression to a wider social and human purpose.

That decision gives the book a distinctly public character.

Poetry as a Record of Anger

At the centre of Unbind Me Now is anger.

Eze describes the collection as containing poems shaped by outrage, violence and the disturbing realities confronting Nigerians. In that sense, the book does not attempt to make suffering aesthetically comfortable.

Instead, it confronts smoke, fire, death and fear.

The strategy reflects a broader tradition of socially engaged Nigerian poetry, in which writers have used verse to interrogate political violence, inequality, injustice and the human consequences of failed institutions.

The important distinction, however, is that Eze does not present anger as the final destination. He deliberately structures his poems so that intense openings and confrontational passages can move towards restorative endings.

Consequently, the collection attempts to hold two emotions together: outrage at what is wrong and hope that something different remains possible.

Giving the Streets a Voice

One of the collection’s notable concerns is the ordinary Nigerian.

Through poems such as “Voice of the Streets”, Eze attempts to create a representative poetic space for workers, religious figures and other members of society whose experiences may rarely enter formal political discourse.

This approach turns the poet into an observer and participant.

Rather than presenting national suffering solely through statistics or institutional language, poetry can bring the emotional dimension of crisis into sharper focus. Death becomes grief. Displacement becomes absence. Violence becomes memory. Migration becomes separation.

In this respect, Unbind Me Now seeks to document not only what happens to Nigerians but also how those events are experienced.

Naming Violence Without Euphemism

Violence occupies another major space in the collection.

Eze addresses terrorism, attacks and the killing of civilians and public servants. His concern extends beyond the events themselves to the language used to describe them.

That distinction matters because political and institutional vocabulary can sometimes make violence appear abstract. A euphemism can turn a human tragedy into a technical description.

Poetry works differently.

By returning attention to suffering, loss and individual experience, Eze attempts to restore the human weight behind the headlines.

The result is a collection that treats poetry not simply as decoration but as documentation.

The Other Side of “Japa”

Although violence and insecurity provide much of the collection’s urgency, Eze moves beyond them.

Migration, identity and belonging also occupy important territory.

The Nigerian phenomenon popularly described as “japa” becomes a subject of emotional and social inquiry. The poems consider not only the Nigerians who leave but also those who remain behind.

That perspective broadens the migration debate.

Leaving the country may create opportunities for those who travel, yet departure can also produce emotional costs for families, friendships and communities. At the same time, Eze raises another question: what might Nigerians who leave eventually bring back?

Knowledge, skills, values, influence and financial remittances all form part of that conversation.

Therefore, migration in Unbind Me Now becomes more than a story of departure. It becomes a question about belonging, responsibility and the relationship between those who leave and the society they leave behind.

A New Vocabulary for Outrage

Eze also identifies a stylistic challenge at the heart of the collection.

Having previously written extensively about love, he says Unbind Me Now required a different poetic vocabulary. The tenderness associated with romantic poetry, he argues, cannot adequately express extreme social anger.

That change in vocabulary also affected the architecture of the poems.

Eze deliberately constructed forceful openings, allowing the poems to establish emotional intensity quickly. However, he then sought endings that could restore some sense of possibility.

This structure prevents the collection from becoming a simple catalogue of suffering.

The poems may begin in darkness, but they are not necessarily intended to end there.

From Litany to Performance

The collection also experiments with form.

Eze draws partly from Catholic litany and responsorial traditions, incorporating call-and-response structures into some poems. The technique creates the possibility of participation between poet and audience.

That is particularly significant in a collection concerned with collective experience.

Instead of positioning the reader as a distant observer, the structure can invite participation. Poetry becomes something that can be read, spoken, performed and shared.

The approach also connects with Eze’s wider cultural work. His profile with The Nigeria Prizes identifies him as a poet, cultural organiser and communications strategist who has worked on initiatives designed to expand the audience for poetry.

From Complaint to Agency

Ultimately, Unbind Me Now asks what happens after anger.

For Eze, outrage should not remain an emotional endpoint. The collection turns towards agency by asking when Nigerians will move from expressing grievances to demanding accountability and accepting responsibility for shaping their circumstances.

That argument gives the book a civic dimension.

The poet is not merely documenting what is wrong. He is also asking what citizens can do with the knowledge of what is wrong.

Remembering a Longer Nigerian History

Eze further complicates the narrative of national decline by invoking Nigeria’s pre-colonial civilisations.

Benin, Oyo, Ife, Kanem-Bornu and Nok appear as reminders that the country’s history did not begin with colonialism or the contemporary political order.

Such references provide a historical counterweight to the despair running through the collection.

They suggest that a society experiencing crisis can still draw from a deeper inheritance of creativity, organisation and cultural achievement.

The historical memory therefore becomes part of the argument for hope.

Literature as an Act of Possibility

Eze’s optimism does not deny Nigeria’s problems.

Instead, he places contemporary frustration within a wider history of social transformation, pointing to struggles against slavery, segregation and apartheid as examples of systems that eventually changed.

For him, freedom is consequently not something citizens should simply await.

It requires participation.

That belief also shapes his plans for the future of literary culture. Should he receive the $100,000 Nigeria Prize for Literature, Eze says he would commit part of the prize to reviving literary festivals in Southeast Nigeria, including efforts to restore the Coal City Literary Festival in Enugu.

The proposal extends the philosophy of Unbind Me Now beyond the page.

If poetry is supposed to serve society, then literary culture itself must also find ways to reach society.

A Collection Between Anguish & Hope

Unbind Me Now is therefore more than a collection built around national anger.

It is an attempt to transform anger into language, language into memory and memory into a demand for agency.

Its engagement with violence, migration, identity and historical memory places the individual Nigerian experience within a wider national conversation. At the same time, its use of performance, call-and-response and restorative endings suggests that Eze does not want despair to have the final word.

That tension may be the collection’s central literary proposition.

Nigeria’s wounds are real, the poet argues, but poetry can still insist on the possibility of healing.