Black German Poetic Ecologies: Joy and Diasporic Homecoming in Megaloh's “Oyoyo” and Leila Akinyi's “Oyoyo // Nyumbani”

Abstract

This article focuses on the connection between ecology and poetics as seen in two tracks by Black German hip hop artists—‐Megaloh's “Oyoyo” (2016) and Leila Akinyi's “Oyoyo // Nyumbani” (2016). I discuss how cultural production opens possibilities to construct poetic and sonic environments that attend to Alltagsrassismus and negative stereotypes while also establishing new possibilities for joy and homecoming in diaspora. Derived from the Greek “oikos” meaning “house, dwelling place, habitation,” ecology points to the embodiment of lived experience and knowledge‐making in the “Oyoyo” tracks. Drawing on Audre Lorde's “Poetry is not a luxury” and the concept of Black joy, I demonstrate how these tracks promote varying understandings of diasporic homecoming and construct sonic ecologies in which Megaloh's and Akinyi's Germanness and Blackness are rendered compatible.