Illustration by Shalom Shoyemi / THE REPUBLIC.
the ministry of arts / books dept.
The Struggle Between Faith and Finality
Illustration by Shalom Shoyemi / THE REPUBLIC.
the ministry of arts / books dept.
The Struggle Between Faith and Finality
No, the Nigerian poet Feranmi Ariyo’s debut chapbook, I Watch You Disappear, does not feature any prose poems. Yet, the diction, movement and narrative structure of the poetry share characteristics (such as scene-setting, dialogue and narrative causality) that are central to personal nonfiction, as well as to the most impersonal fiction, which often take stylistic distinction of style as its breathing force. It is immediately noticeable that Ariyo’s habitude to the prosaic is somewhat disabling: his expository poetics invests too heavily in the lambent quality of his poetry. No sooner does he dazzle us with his velvet diction than we were touched by the nagging sense that we should be reading through compressions and implications, two requisites of rewarding poetry. Simply put, Ariyo leaves nothing to the reader’s imagination. And yes, the poems are as dour as an oncologist’s silence, for they are a child’s account of his experience witnessing the harrowing process of his father’s cruel battle with cancer and his eventual succumb to death.
These poems can be divided into dual categories on their qualities, preoccupations and emotional range. Since it is all doom and gloom—with the only intervening moments of softness supplied by the speaker and his brother, Malik—the poems are divided between recollecting the moments before and the moments after their father’s death. The setting of the former is the hospital, with its wards of sickness and suffering. The latter takes place in the speaker’s imagination and his will to understand the workings of reality and the world. Thus, to say that the poem that opens the book, ‘My Father Undoes Darkness’, sets the tone for the whole book would be a convenient observation: it does not. About ‘[t]he first time my father speaks of his cancer’ the poem recounts, in six sections, the family’s attempt to make sense of his cancer diagnosis.
In Ariyo’s involuntary world of medicine and the terror of sickness, people with medical problems of every kind are everywhere, and their woeful fates are communicated with enough terrifying explicitness to inundate or even break the arid heart of the insensitive. Visceral, the second section of ‘Cancer Wards’ recounts the fate of a woman the young speaker met in the hospital ward just days earlier:
She comes, she goes.
She comes, and goes.
But weeks earlier than prophesied, when she disappears,
all the nurses deny her whereabouts;
your father opines that she has moved away to some
faraway clinic because denial is the only
way he knows can soften
the idea that she no longer exists.
As concise as this section is, the following two are as clumsy as the first is baggy. Perhaps the only rewarding aspect to this sweeping style is that it keeps you just as hooked to the story, despite the gory and dispiriting specifics of cancer treatments and hospital visits. Even if parts of your mind wander into the interminable weirdness of the ever-expanding galaxies, Ariyo needs only a few of your situated glances at his lines to pull you back to earth, listening as he recounts how two wet-behind-the-ears kids, playful as innocence made flesh, respond to the damning fate of their terminally ill father:
The first time my father speaks of his cancer. . .
Malik and I shuttle between peeking between the dusty louvers
and wrestling thin velvet curtains as they
flutter like homeless
spirits in incoming harmattan wind.
While the opening poems do not particularly succeed in plumbing below the surface of fine descriptions and storytelling, there are moments that go beyond mere syntactic bravura and narrative propulsion, moments that reach the very heart of the human experience. There is a moment in the sixth section of ‘My Father Undoes Darkness’ that is everything from show-stopping to sublime, where the kids reveal their early youthfulness and innocent imagination: ‘Cancer cells look like contiguous stars, to me. Malik yells, stars; / my mother chuckles at this, then segues back into crying.’ Nothing short of an efficient emollient, it tells us something about the human emotional complexity, especially in the image of their mother, who, in that unthinkable moment of total dejection, manages to show a modicum of love and resilience through her soft reaction to her playful kids. Though the movement of the moment is suspiciously smooth, it remains as baffling and edifying as it is memorable. Just as the boys, in a feat of symbolic transposition, substituting the plethoric gore of their father’s cancer cells into a constellation of stars.
THE CRITIQUE OF FAITH AND THE FINALITY OF DEATH
The poem that marks the centre of the book is titled, quite suggestively, ‘My Father Dies’. However, Ariyo’s descriptive and anatomizing powers are at their peak in poems postdating the death of his father. Having turned impervious, through the uncaring bite of experience, to the deep irrationality at the core of religious faith, Ariyo continues to make his rational case against the silent grain of the divine. Vital, ironically caustic, and piping polemic in every line, ‘For the People Who Console Us with Psalms and Homilies’ is an impressive poem summarizing the frustration of the bereaved with their Nigerian sympathizers’ innocent glorification of God in their time of grief. Throughout the four sections, Ariyo strikes the right note, conveying the sharpness of his ironies through italicization:
Everyone wants speak [sic] about god.
And I, too, like to imagine that god who keeps an inventory of hair loss on stone tablets,
keeps a record of the feathers of doves, the migration routes
of greater flamingos or how they feed. But no one wants
to acknowledge their god as the strange artist that sparks little incendiaries
in the dark ether of their mother’s body—who has never
smoked a day. His other acts of creation. The things that happen
on the days after He rested: plagues, fires, and then floods.
But one in ten people survive pancreatic cancer and suddenly, God is love again.
The irony of the last line lands so well because it is not a question. However, the poem becomes even more suggestive of deep-seated human hypocrisy when, in an earlier poem, ‘Healing’, the speaker, still hopeful that his father might overcome cancer, prays as any believer would, without a trace of irony:
For thine is the kingdom.
For thine is the body.
For thine is Life
For thine is Life
For thine is Life
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A poem of searing criticism of faith, streamlined to the dual flawlessness of technique and logical reasoning, ‘For the People Who Console Us with Psalms and Homilies’ makes the eternal point of the fickleness of human reasoning as something worthy of a ceaseless pondering. It is, however, important to point out that the overriding sense we get from these post-death poems is not one of easy, convenient and completely sentimental frustration, but of serious curiosity unleashed by the cold sudden hands of death laid on the family. The poem is particularly engrossing, even instructive, because it reinforces the human, though interminably irrational, assumption that death is what happens to other people.
Hence, the poet’s journey from the early poems of the book to the closing ones is interesting. It is not only safe but obligatory to note that it is the finality of death, not the ‘[u]ncertainty [that] aches worse than the cancer’, that gives the poet his distinctive, animating voice. This is particularly because the majority of the poems before the central death are not only long-winded but also suffer from many of the qualities found in the poems that follow, which recount the destabilizing force of death. This observation is further enunciated in the poem titled ‘Half-life’, which depicts the speaker’s mother suffering from loneliness. Going in one ear and out the other, this penultimate poem reads as tired as the poet:
My mother, at forty-five, sits in the
doctor’s office,
inventing evidence to prove pieces of her are getting
hauled away by vandals.
She holds her disfigured skin as she invents new names
to heighten the sting of every symptom of her erasure:
“Back pains”
“Spaghetti veins”
“Callused skin”
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OF EPIGRAPHS AND THE FRAGILITY OF HOPE
One of the often-understated strengths in Ariyo’s poetry is his ability to preface his poems with apposite epigraphs that set the tone for the following poems, that match and sometimes even surpass, the challenge posed by the epigraphs. A fascinating example of this in I Watch You Disappear is his consideration of hope in the face of impending personal loss in ‘If One Must Hope’. For this examination, he drafts Hanif Abdurraqib’s cynical, though befitting, outlook on hope in ‘It’s Not Like Nikola Tesla Knew All of Those People Were Going to Die’ from his book A Fortune for Your Disaster. The epigraph reads: ‘Enough with the foolishness of hope . . . If one must pray, I imagine it is most worthwhile to pray towards endings.’ The poem that follows marries the substance of the above statement to the tilt of its core—that is, what becomes of us when the subject of our hopefulness has been struck out of existential commission—while at the same time allowing for the reasonableness of the necessity of hope in our lives. The last section of the poem, signifying his variation on that epigraph, reads:
On the next morning, after spasming, my father would
not wake, my mother wails so loud, loud enough to
be mistaken for madness,
then she speaks nothing for days.
The loss of words,
the loss of silence;
side effects of hope—
how, when it’s gone, it bruises;
how grief becomes, like faith, the substance
of things longed for but not seen.
But hope is necessary, I’ve decided,
in the way that for awhile
it keeps the rest of the world sane.
However, the crux of this commendable execution is that Ariyo’s first quatrain feels echolalic: it relies heavily on his precursor to bring his own interpretive aspiration home. ‘The only difference between sunsets and funerals,’ writes Abdurraqib immediately after Ariyo’s drafted epigraph, ‘is whether or not a town mistakes the howls / of a crying woman for madness.’ While the emotional depth of Ariyo’s lines is commendable, it is significantly shaped by the precursor’s imagination, rather than using it as a springboard for his own resonance.
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Although much can be said against the prosaic inclination of Ariyo’s poetics, nothing can be said against the begirding liveliness of I Watch You Disappear, particularly in its exploration of cancer, hospital visits, and the role of faith in relation to grief—both destabilizing and healing. In this regard, the collection anchors itself alongside recent Nigerian poetry books, such as Samuel A. Adeyemi’s Heaven is a Metaphor, Okwudili Nebeolisa’s Terminal Maladies and Nome Emeka Patrick’s Voyaging, all of which explores the complex interplay between death, grief and faith⎈