An Interpreter of Diasporic Nigerian Consciousness

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.