If I Gather Here and Shout

A deft, musical debut poetry collection about the disabling effects of illness, rupture, and inheritance--informed both by Yoruba divinatory systems and violent Western medical understandings of the Black body.

If I Gather Here and Shout summons Yoruba divinatory rituals into a hospital room. Incantatory verses accumulate alongside personal and historical "figures" of illness and death to illuminate the tensions between legibility and meaning-making that emerge when an ill Black body is processed through a Western medical context. With intimate knowledge of how ancestral memory aches and sings in the body, Funto Omojola invokes a lamenting chorus in the ceremony of survival.