The Interior and Emotional Connections of African Poetry

In the box set, Kumi, the subject of Dare Tunmise’s chapbook, A Failed Attempt at Undoing Memories, offers the ineluctability of memory. More than this, the poems in this chapbook concern themselves with the particularly sticky properties of memory, of how, as an African, it cannot be erased. Such is the inheritance of trauma and the vast reaches of the experience of being African. The memories are deep, and its cultural responsibilities are even deeper: ‘my father touched my eyelids and said,/Son, you were not named after the sea to sight/rain and cave your body/under a hill.’ This bestowal is in the very nature of cultural education, a circumstance inherited by all the adult characteristics one grows into later on; it is the peculiar circumstance from which one rises to face life. The ability to keep that educational inheritance—or memory, if you will—is what makes the individual. In an instance one makes a prayer to be part of a positive memory, which will equip one adequately to confront the world and the African existence better. In the pungent images of ‘A Failed Attempt at Undoing Memory’, the poet’s mnemonic projects reach their apogee as he ranges across the human experience to show how certain kinds of memory remains indelible, from intimate ruminations on sensual bliss (‘The stained white tissue on the bed/that mocks holiness’) to untimely death and menacing presence of trauma.