Nnadi Samuel’s Eclectic Gaze

In his poetry chapbook, Nature Knows A Little About Slave Trade, Nnadi Samuel flexes an impressive thematic range, perpending such timeless and timely conditions as social policing, childhood, slave trade, religion as well as sign language.

As I read Nnadi Samuel’s ‘Praise for the Inner Lining of my Morphing Apparel’—the poem that opens his new chapbook, Nature Knows a Little About Slave Trade—I was reminded of ‘Song of Myself’ by Walt Whitman. In the 24th section of the 1892 version of the poem, Whitman writes: ‘Through me forbidden voices, / Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil’d and I remove the veil, / Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur’d.’ Whitman’s lines, where he uncovers, liberates, and unapologetically accepts desires that are culturally censored as taboo, are ‘transfigured’ in Samuel’s poem into stranger figurations and subtler associations. The self-glorification of Samuel’s speaker is rendered with an ironic tone, so eloquently confident that it seems immune not only to judgment but also to the physical risks of social nonconformity: ‘I: asphalt glory. / Color riot, in ways that put coffins out of fashion, / snithe the threading to come clean as shorelines.’ 

Considering the epigraph of the poem comes from Francisca Coker’s short listicle on social policing, particularly on dressing culture across many communities across the world, the poem that follows reads like a fiery vocalization of an imagination that desires the Whitmanian freedom. A kind of freedom that is both shamelessly and decisively individual, a freedom so utter in its boundlessness as to satisfy even the most ‘harmful’ sartorial tastes: ‘My sternum aches for harmful collars, for tough cravats. / Each knit: a riffraff defying strangling.’ However, the speaker’s political, religious, and cultural state is capable of neither tolerating nor accepting this sort of self-expression...