Chelsea Haith

In this short essay we take a closer look at how Ellams’s verse integrates contemporary cultural references and larger classical and traditional frameworks. As we will see, his poems often function as a way of ‘writing back’, criticising patriarchal or male-dominated structures that are not only harmful to women, but, just as crucially, define men and masculinity in traumatising and violent ways.

In ‘Fuck / Tupac,’ the first poem in the collection The Actual, Ellams identifies connections across race in working-class struggle and gang warfare.

Fuck / Tupac

for dying early / for the fields of lavender and hawthorn in which I sat / overlooking Dublin City / though / as dusk wrapped the sky / it could have been any creaking constellation of traffic and tower blocks / from Compton to Clondalkin / blinking staccato madness / into the unspooling night / Fuck you / for forcing the criminal animal gnashing its teeth in piss-streaked alleys / collarless priests cruising in rented hatchbacks / Protestants and Catholics / like Bloods and Crips / brothers split along colour lines / fuelled by racist police / who came to break our skin

In the first lines, the reader is called to notice Ellams’s experience of dislocation in his adolescence in Dublin, heightened by the distance he feels from the city he sat ‘overlooking’ as well as the place he first emigrated from, that is, Jos in Nigeria. Ellams also highlights the similarities between the gangs of the 1980s and 1990s Los Angeles rap scene (the Bloods and Crips) and the violence of the religious and political ‘Troubles’ that divided Ireland and Northern Ireland in the second half of the twentieth century (Protestants and Catholics). Tupac (also known as 2Pac and Makaveli) was a leading rapper, perhaps one of the most representative artists associated with early American West Coast hip hop (the name Makaveli references the linguistic genius of Italian Renaissance diplomat Machiavelli). Ellams laments the split that he identifies between ‘brothers’ in both contexts. ‘Brothers’ in this case are not defined by racial or fraternal connection, but by class and poverty: that is, young underprivileged men are made ‘brothers’ through their mutual wage-slavery or the bonds of unemployment, but are divided unnecessarily by race and violence.

The speaker in the poem laments Tupac’s tragic assassination at the age of twenty-five in gang warfare in LA. Tupac fell victim to the same attitudes of honour and pride in one’s masculinity and social power that fuelled the gang wars, and which he referenced and called out in his work. At the same time, Ellams points to his own struggle to come to terms with social divisions and the violence that proliferates from them, noting most significantly their universality, ‘from Compton to Clondalkin’. He reminds the reader that the ‘collarless priests’ of the Troubles have much in common with West Coast gangsters and share their desire for power and recognition. The term ‘brothers’ points both to the priests, as well as Christians more generally, and to black men who identify transnationally with one another’s experiences of racial violence. Yet at the same time they respond to these experiences in hypermasculine ways, often with tragic consequences – as in the death of Tupac.

It is significant that Ellams begins his provocatively entitled collection with this angry mourning for the loss to arts, culture and history that follows as a direct result of toxic masculinist violence. The work continues in this vein, highlighting his grief through the emotive ‘fuck’ that begins each poem. Ellams is uncompromising in expressing his views about the impact these social issues have had on his life and lives like his own. He mediates constantly between different cultures and places, drawing on multiple contexts to make himself heard.

Works cited

Armitstead, Claire, and Inua Ellams, “Interview: Inua Ellams: ‘In the UK, black men were thought of as animalistic’”, The Guardian online, published on 22 April 2019, accessed on 2 December 2020 from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/22/inua-ellams-poet-playwright-cultural-impresario

Jarrett-Macauley, Delia, “Inua Ellams – Critical Perspective,” British Council Literature, published in 2018, accessed on 2 December 2020 from https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/inua-ellams

Nwaozuzu, Uche-Chinemere, “Inua Ellams’ The 14th Tale and the Concept of the Outsider,” Nsukka Journal of the Humanities, vol. 24, no.2, 2016: pp. 81-87.

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “Close reading of Inua Ellams’s ‘Fuck / Tupac’ from The Actual.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 8 February 2026.

The post Close reading of Inua Ellams’s ‘Fuck / <em>Tupac</em>’ from <em>The Actual</em> appeared first on writers make worlds.

Biography

Writing

Inua Ellams, 2009. Photo: Kim-Leng (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Ellams’s lyricism and cultural references point to influences ranging from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to the intellectual playfulness of Terry Pratchett, with a strong undertow running throughout of Nigerian oral literature or orature. Critic and writer Delia Jarrett-Macauley highlights the success of Ellams’s ‘linguistic, but low-key virtuosity’, as strikingly demonstrated in the lines written for his stage characters. Inspired by his heroes, the Nigerian writers Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri, Ellams’s poems and plays tell stories of his own life and those of others’ that are infused with the myths, legends, market gossip and lively cultural intermingling of his birth country.

Writing about Ellams’s dramatic work, Nigerian critic Uche-Chinemere Nwaozuzu notes that the solo drama style of his play The 14^th Tale reflects characteristic dramatizations in Nigeria of the outsider figure who struggles to come to terms with their identity and with fate. For Nwaozuzu, the play’s protagonist is a ‘split personality who battles with inherited personal demons and the need to chart a social identity’ during his youth in Nigeria and later in the diaspora. At the same time, he embodies the classical image of the Greek hero at the mercy of fate. Another of Ellams’s influences, Wole Soyinka, writes about characters beset by internal conflict in comparable ways, such as in a play like The Road. Here we see Ellams bringing together and channelling influences from European and Nigerian dramatic traditions into the British dramatic scene.

Ellams’s first full poetry collection The Actual / Fuck began its life as an anti-Trump project tentatively called ‘Fuck 45’ that Ellams composed on buses, trains and in the in-between moments of his busy life (Armitstead, The Guardian, 2019). His target was clearly the populist right-wing nationalism of the 45^th president of the United States, and the way in which Donald Trump’s values revealed that country’s divided consciousness. Drawing also upon his own experiences of troubled national myth-making, Ellams’s collection comprises fifty-five poems that engage passionately with themes of empire, nationalism, and racism, while also calling out the corroding, toxic effects of some forms of masculinity.

Speaking about his writing process at the Oxford Playhouse Search Party online event in November 2020, Ellams observed that many of his ideas first start as poems and then move into dramatic and dialogue forms that are further fleshed out on stage. He feels therefore that he is first and foremost a poet. However, all of his work grows out of his two major thematic and experiential influences: his odyssey as a migrant to Britain, and his experience of finding ways to belong in his new country. His journey from Jos, Nigeria to London via Dublin at the age of twelve is an especially major influence on his stage work and is frequently alluded to if not directly referenced in his plays, especially in his early work. His poems deal prominently with questions of being-in-place, and of cultural differences experienced in the African diaspora.

Ellams’s work is produced  in the moment and he shares it generously, drawing on the world as he sees it and performing off the cuff at the audience’s whim. In performance, he is innovative and daring. For example, he often uses an app to search for and share poems using single words suggested by the audience. His virtuoso mix of deep cross-cultural allusion with technological innovation is reflected in his recognition as one of the Royal Society of Literature’s 40 under 40 writers.

—Chelsea Haith, 2021

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 8 February 2026.

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