Nigerian poet and actress Titilope Sonuga has released her third collection of poetry This Is How We Disappear. The book explores the metaphoric disappearance of women as related to society and inspired by the Chibok Girls abduction in April 2014.

Also, Canada-based publisher Write Bloody North recently signed a distribution deal with the Lagos-based Roving Heights Bookstore which will see the collection available in Nigeria from 13 June 2019.

Here is a description of This Is How We Disappear:

On the night of 14 April 2014, 276 girls were kidnapped from their boarding school in Chibok, Nigeria by the terrorist organization Boko Haram. Before the global outrage and the viral Bring Back Our Girls movement pleading for their return, there was a deafening silence. This is How We Disappear is Titilope Sonuga’s reckoning with this quiet vanishing while living in Lagos, Nigeria at the time of the abductions. With powerful grace, she reaches into a larger truth about the many ways a woman can disappear; into her body, into her mind, into the earth, uncovering a culture of silence that spans generations. From Nigeria to Canada and back again, Sonuga charts her own migration patterns across the globe, negotiating loss, grief and the journey from girlhood into womanhood. With the distinctive music of Sonuga’s poetry and the rhythm of the oral traditions from which she emerges, This is How We Disappear is a celebration of the legacy of womanhood, magic making and shapeshifting as daring acts of survival.

Titilope Sonuga

In an earlier interview in 2017 with Africa in Dialogue, titled “The Disappearances of Women,” she implores the concerns that inform This Is How We Disappear, elaborating the female experience in a world that forces invisibility on them.