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When I started studying Sufism and reading Sufi poets like Rumi and Ibn Arabi, poetry’s intellectual importance started to become more apparent to me, and I started writing poetry again. In a lot of traditions, but especially in the Sufi tradition, there are some things that prose can’t capture, and so if you want to say it, you have to sing it or express it through poetry. It comes closer to conveying spiritual experience, the direct encounter with the divine, than prose does. So even the Sufi authors who write prose, will cite poetry every couple of paragraphs. 

I tell my students, if you’re describing a mango or durian fruit to somebody who has never had one, you have to resort to poetic language like similes and metaphors. The same thing is true within Sufism, where you use poetry to describe the deepest truths and realities and experiences.

Q. You spoke last month at the Library of Congress. How was that experience?

A. It was a great surprise and honor to speak at the library in January as part of their long-standing Conversations with African Poets and Writers series. I presented examples of African Sufi poets who inspired my work before reading some poems and answering questions.

A lot of the questions were about the poetic process. Someone asked about writing in different languages and what’s different about writing poetry in English versus Hausa or Arabic. There was a question about vulnerability in poetry. When I am writing and reciting, how vulnerable and honest do I allow myself to be? 

Ogunnaike follows a long tradition of spiritual poetry, including poets like 11th-century Egyptian Imam Al-Busiri.

The audience also seemed interested by the Sufi conception of love as a single reality: that our love for each other, for nature, etc. is not separate from our love for God or God’s love for us. So some poems that were written as ordinary romantic poems become Sufi poems, and Sufi poems can become romantic poems, depending on the context.

Q. Do you write in other languages?

A. Not well. Sometimes I write poems in Arabic and Yoruba, but I really only write well in English. It’s literally my mother tongue, as my mother spoke to me in English. But the other languages I speak are always playing with my English, so I write a lot of multilingual puns. For example, in Yoruba, the word spelled “sin” means worship, so I have a poem that goes, “all of my sin is worship, and all my worship sin.” 

Q. What other projects are you working on?

A. I’ve been working on a book of Yoruba mythology with my brother that should be coming out at the end of this year. We’re really excited about it. It’s probably the biggest collection of Yoruba mythology ever collected in English. I also just finished another more academic book manuscript on a genre of Arabic Sufi poetry in a particular Sufi order from the 13th century to the present day. For whatever reason, maybe because Rumi is such a huge figure, Arabic Sufi poetry has been overshadowed in translation by Persian. Persian, as a language, is also closer to English, so it’s certainly easier to translate. 

I’m currently teaching a course called “What is Love?: Reflections on Love in the Islamic Tradition,” which is probably my favorite class to teach. We read everything from philosophers, theologians, Sufis, and regular love poetry. I’m also teaching an introduction to Yoruba religions, which has been going really well.

If people are interested in learning more about Sufi poetry, I host a podcast called the “.” There are about 12 episodes up now and we’ve recorded another 10.