Another Name for Memory Is Tragedy

Michael Imossan’s poetry chapbook, For the Love of Country and Memory, takes us back to a myriad of memories; memories that are familiar, frustrating, and festering.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. 

                                                                      —James Joyce  

Memory, to re-echo Irish poet, Oscar Wilde, is ‘a diary we all carry about with us’, no matter how much we labour to sublimate these recollections—whether the ones where we are the main actors or perpetrators or where we are the victims affected by inimical outcomes—into trivial, jocose experiences. Deep down the confiines of our hearts, they live, thrive, and sometimes haunt our current endeavours.  

In Michael Imossan’s debut chapbook—For the Love of Country and Memory—which won the 2022 Nigeria News Direct Chapbook Award, memory opens to readers a long passage of grief. It invents a kind of heaviness, effected by the palpable, blistering reminiscence of a country’s loss as captured in the book. For readers, the poems therein are not only the poet persona’s hurt; they become a shared reality of agony.  

The chapbook, 37 pages of collective sorrow, takes us back to a myriad of memories; memories that are familiar, frustrating, and festering. As a matter of fact, all the poems—practically prefaced by media reports—hauntingly perform a harsh divorce with hope or respite. We are surrendered to the brutality of a recurring sorrow. No form of catharsis. The saying of the Greek philosopher, Plutarch, comes into mind as we leaf through the pages: ‘if we cease to grieve, we may cease to remember.’ We are constantly in the grieving process of remembrance as the writer grants us the privilege to own the narratives, brilliantly executed using the first-person narrator...