The Struggle Between Faith and Finality

Feranmi Ariyo’s I Watch You Disappear articulates illness, grief, hope and faith, blending prosaic narrative with poetic depth to capture the emotional tension of a family grappling with cancer and loss.

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...