Emmanuel Iduma: Do you remember when we met? I have a vague memory of Dami Ajayi showing you a short story I’d just written (God Sees Backward) and you said something about my poetry.

Adebiyi Olusolape:  That feels like far away and long, long ago, but is it even eight years yet? If you had not given it, I would not have remembered the title of the story. However, I recall the thrill I got from reading that story even though I do not recall many of its particulars. The central character was a Christian preacher, right? And, the story was set against the backdrop of an ethno-religious conflict in Jos, or have I gotten it wrong?

The thing about your poetry is the realisation that your writing relied on a metonymic choice of words. You would be describing an everyday feeling, action or event but your word choice relied on substituting unexpected words for the ones I would naturally expect in those contexts. The journey of reading you meant arriving at familiar places but through oblique routes.

Your writing kept compelling my thoughts to move laterally. From time to time, this lateral movement would run into the concreteness of a solid metaphor. I think it all worked because much of your action played out in the mind of a character or the narrator. The physics and geography of inner worlds allows for that kind of thing. And, your characters were notable for their odd notions, so the technique and the ideas it was used to portray reinforced each other.