An Interpreter of Diasporic Nigerian Consciousness

In his fourth full-length poetry collection, Autobiomythography of, Ayokunle Falomo intertwines his personal and diaspora history with Nigeria’s colonial past, anatomizing the psychological and cultural impacts of colonialism on the Nigerian identity.  

In 2020, when I first encountered the late American critic, Harold Bloom’s pronouncement of Walt Whitman as the poet of the American consciousness, I wondered what a poet could possibly have done to deserve such venerable estimation. I discovered that the poet had to have written poems such as ‘Song of Myself’, ‘When Lilac Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’, ‘The Sleepers’, ‘As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life’, ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, and ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’. The first of these, in particular, teems with the sort of strangeness that defines literary originality, as it does fazing folderols. The defining characteristic of this literary equivocation is the centrality of the American consciousness to the poems. In his latest poetry collection, Autobiomythography of, Nigerian-American poet, Ayokunle Falomo, aspires to a similar feat of cultural representation, drawing inspiration—albeit with some anxiety—from Whitman’s stylistic approach to explore his own cultural and historical inclinations.  

Although the title of the book, Autobiomythography of, is a mouthful, much of the 45 poems that follow cast an immersive light to its ambitious scope. The ambition is promiscuous in nature, encompassing the poet’s autobiography, the biographies of others, and the grand subject of his mythmaking: Frederick Lugard, the British colonial administrator in Nigeria. It is also ambitious in its attempt to hold all these diverse threads into a single, cohesive collection. At over 125 pages, however, the book is brimming with poems of varied motivations...

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