| Summary: | This essay explores the spiritual, poetic, and political dimensions of water in Romeo Oriogun's The Gathering of Bastards, situating his work within the lineage of post-independence African poets such as Gabriel Okara and Christopher Okigbo. Central to Oriogun's poetics is a ritualistic "river-call" to bodies of water, which function both as mythical deities and as sites of existential migration. Drawing on indigenous Edo cosmology and transoceanic migration narratives, Oriogun reconfigures the Atlantic and Mediterranean seas as zones of necropolitics and spiritual invocation. His poetry fuses lyrical spirituality with the violent realities of queer displacement and border-crossing, using water as a metaphor for memory, mourning, and mobility. This essay argues that Oriogun's hydrography constitutes a performative engagement with the ontological and political crises of exile, articulating a post-Anthropocene poetic consciousness.
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