Welcome to Archipel
Welcome to Archipel — an ongoing dialogue between me, Cara Waterfall, and poets and creatives of all kinds. This space celebrates the ways we connect through mentorship, community and transition. If you’re interested in participating, simply reply to this newsletter or click here.
Archipel is also rooted in my first poetry mentor: my father. Every paid subscription directly sustains the Donald E. Waterfall Scholarship Fund, supporting poets like our inaugural DEW Scholar, Isaiah Adepoju. Join us in building Year Two!
About 🌊 Currents: Voices in Motion
Beginning this month, the Abidjan Poetry Hub — first founded on Facebook — evolves into 🌊 Currents: Voices in Motion, a recurring column within Archipel. The name is new, but the spirit remains the same: community, practice and craft carried across the many languages we write, speak and dream in.
Thank you for reading, for sharing — and for being a part of this growing community.
Gbakas: Auto Body as Canvas
I’ve long been obsessed with the gbakas of Cote d’Ivoire — the shared minibuses that zigzag across the cities along syncopated lines. They don’t just carry passengers; they carry tempo — slowing for the promise of a passenger or accelerating to find a new one.
Gbakas are the most affordable mode of transportation, but not the most comfortable. It is said that the word gbaka comes from Malinké, meaning box or cage — and it fits: a gbaka is a crowded cage of noise and sweat that still gets you to your destination.
Across their dented metal and glass, their hand-painted phrases turn auto body into autobiography. They aren’t only vehicles; they’re street psalms — sermons on wheels, boasting philosophies in chipped enamel and dust. Every gbaka carries its own sermon. Every slogan is a worldview condensed into ten chipped letters. Each phrase is a pocket-sized gospel, equal parts bravado and benediction.
Respect Obligé — Respect is mandatory. A moral code for survival in a city where horns are punctuation marks.
Y’a Dieu Dedans — God’s inside. A declaration of faith and a song title by Paulo Chakal (ft.) Didi B that’s become a street anthem.
Turbo — a single word that hums with velocity and swagger, often paired with decals of Lewis Hamilton or Neymar Jr.
Caméléon — the survivalist’s slogan; adapt or vanish.
And then, the pantheon of icons riding shotgun — plastered on rear panels, windshields, and doors throughout the capital. Like footballers Didier Drogba or Simon Adingra; the undisputed King of coupé-décalé, DJ Arafat or Congolese musician Fally Ipupa; race car driver Lewis Hamilton: saints of hustle, discipline and divine swagger. Che Guevara is also a big favourite here, his face stenciled on back doors — a symbol of rebellion perfectly matched to the gbaka’s unruly grace.
I’ve taken hundreds of photographs of them. Most are cracked and sun-faded, held together by little more than a few coats of paint and persistence. But together they form a rolling anthology of Abidjan’s imagination.
Faith, speed, and style — the holy trinity of the road.
The City Writes Itself
The gbaka doesn’t just carry passengers — it carries language. Every dent, scratch and sticker is part of its syntax. In a city that speaks in motion, the auto body becomes a body politic: a mirror of the belief in hustle, irony and resistance.
I like to think of these vehicles as mobile poems: compressed, communal and improvised. The slogans speak in French, English, Nouchi, some of the other local dialects and prayer.
When the World Speaks Back
Once you start noticing signs, you see them everywhere: graffiti that feels like prophecy, billboards that lean into urban slang (Babi: mets moi au dos: literally, put me on your back i.e. “carry me” or “back me up” or “put my name on it”), handwritten pleas taped to lampposts, warnings that read like koans.
These public words — earnest, improvised, sometimes misspelled — are an overlooked literature. They tell us what a community believes, fears, worships or jokes about.
They’re poems hiding in plain sight.
This Week’s Poetry Prompt
Find one sign or gather a handful — from anywhere: a bus, a billboard, a hand-lettered notice, a church marquee, a protest placard. Let the signs guide you somewhere unexpected. *Maybe “STOP” turns into a love lyric; maybe “AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY” becomes a poem about borders and belonging.)
Then, either:
Begin from a single line.
Use the sign as your title or opening, translate it into your voice, or let it spark a memory/question/story.
or
Make a found poem from many signs.
Arrange the phrases you’ve collected into a collage/cento and edit as you see fit. You can sort by mood (prayer, warning, joke), by place (market, taxi rank, highway), or by grammar (imperatives, benedictions).
The idea is to notice the public language we live inside and transform it into a poem that reveals what our cities are already saying.
Optional craft moves:
Translate across languages or tones (French ↔︎ English ↔︎ Nouchi↔︎Language of Your Choice).
Add footnotes if a phrase needs context.
Keep spacing and line breaks that mirror how the words appear on their various surfaces.
Your Turn, Your Sign
Keep your line short enough for a bumper, but big enough to hold your world.
Then expand it into a poem, a manifesto, a confession on wheels. If you’re feeling bold, write your sign in two languages — or invent one.
Share: Post your line(s) or your found poem in the comments. Tell us where each sign came from (city/neighborhood), and which language (if applicable).
On Gathering the World’s Words
Poetry begins with noticing. Every sign we pass — painted, printed, hand-scrawled — is an attempt to be seen, to be heard. When we gather these fragments, we start to hear the world’s collective voice: its humour, its weariness, its hope.
Sometimes the city says exactly what we need to hear; sometimes it misfires gloriously. Either way, the poem is already out there, waiting for you to write it down.
As always, thank you for reading!
With love and intention,
Cara
Magnificent loved this post did not know the meaning of the name, and the story behind them. Well described.