Joladé Olusanya
Joladé Olusanya is a Nigerian-British poet, filmmaker and photographer whose work explores memory, masculinity, faith and emotional inheritance. A multi-award-winning writer, his poetry has been commissioned by the BBC, the Barbican and others, and published in Poetry London and several anthologies. His visual work has been commissioned by Warner Bros., Random Acts and Canon, and featured by The Guardian and VSCO. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and BAFTA Connect member, he centres underrepresented voices through community-rooted storytelling. He is currently developing his debut poetry collection, photography book and a range of films across the UK, US and Africa.
Jabez Incarnate is the debut poetry pamphlet from Nigerian-British artist Joladé Olusanya. Written in the wake of spiritual reckoning and personal transition, the collection explores the burdens of inheritance, masculinity, faith, memory, and belonging.
Olusanya’s poems travel between London, Lagos, and New York, where familial duty and the weight of culture clash and harmonise. Rooted in the language of the everyday and the epic, Jabez Incarnate is a sustained meditation on lineage, distance, and what it means to carry names, promises and absences.
Through striking lyricism and cinematic frames, Olusanya captures moments of soft resistance – men at barbershops, prayer in public, grief on public transport – evoking a sense of a person trying to navigate who he is, and who he must become.
‘Glory to the grace and thunder of Joladé Olusanya’s Jabez Incarnate. I keep thinking about the dynamism of these beginning lines: “And God said let there be light then light said let everything I touch have shadow shape and function then function said let man...see other man in the dance”—and how he moves us through desire, name-taking and the intimate ways “we hope / we’ll be enough for tomorrow.” Like many of his most striking films, portraits and photographs, Olusanya energizes body and breath with his writing here, creating poems that blur, flex, survive and divine. ‘
—R. A. Villanueva, author of Reliquaria and A Holy Dread
'Joladé Olusanya’s voice shines through, Jabez Incarnate. An anticipated debut pamphlet from a writer and orator of our time. Whether on the bus in London, or in a diner in Manhattan, Olusanya’s lens on spirituality, his existence within the diaspora and its complexities mark Jabez Incarnate, as one of many stops in his journey of stories needing to be told.'
—Yomi Ṣode, author of Manorism