Poetry Reading and Author Talk with Tokunboh (Toki) Talabi
Hartford Public Library
Hartford
June 4, 2025
It’s always great to see one of Hartford’s own finding success as a writer. For Tokunboh Talabi, who goes by Toki, her journey has taken her from Hartford to Nigeria and back. She’s written about her experiences in her new book, The Evolution of the Unwritten Girl, from which she shared some excerpts in the atrium at the main branch of the Hartford Public Library.
Talabi drew from her experiences as a bicultural person for the series of monologues and poems that comprise the book. The self-published book is based on a play that she has written and performed in Hartford, New York and other places.
Her mother is an African American from the south, while her father is from Nigeria. She said that when people think about someone being bicultural, they assume that person has parents from two different races. But although both of Toki’s parents are Black, she still experienced the feelings of being torn between two cultures and not being fully accepted by either.
I instantly recognized at least part of where Talabi’s experiences came from when she shared an excerpt called “Penny Candies.” The poem is about the social and cultural importance of money, but she starts off by describing how she rode the bus to the Copaco shopping center in Bloomfield with her mother when she was a child.
I basically lived at Copaco as a kid, but it wasn’t that part of her experience that stood out to me. It was the little details that I’d all but forgotten about from my childhood. She described riding the T bus, because many moons ago the bus system in Hartford was labeled with letters, not numbers. I would take the T4 or T5 to get to Copaco, while the T8 and T10 went further down Blue Hills Avenue so that I could go see my grandfather.
She talked about visiting the petting zoo there. For those who live near Copaco but may be younger, it might be hard to believe that there was a full-blown petting zoo near the center of the plaza. It was one of the highlights of the week for my brothers and me to go play with “those dried up ass goats,” as my mother would call them.
Before she began reading, Talabi discussed how specificity in storytelling creates universal experiences. It sounds counterintuitive, but the specific sights, sounds and memories that we share connect us in a more concrete way than generalities and vagaries aimed at securing a larger crowd. She talked about how one of her poems, “Smart Hair,” led to a connection she never expected: While she was speaking from the perspective of a Black woman, a Swedish woman thanked her after her performance, because her daughters are often targeted with the “dumb blonde” stereotype.
She used the same skill of deploying specific details in another excerpt she read, “I Saw You in Africa.” She attended school in Nigeria for two years before returning to the United States. She didn’t go back to Nigeria until she was 28; she wrote about how she sees us, the children of the African diaspora, back in the place that we come from.
Hartford is home to one of the most prestigious literary histories in the nation. Thanks to writers like Talabi, that tradition is being carried forward in the 21st century.
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