Ibadan is hardly a literary fallow ground, being one of those mythic Nigerian cities. In addition to a reputation among precolonial West African feudal city-states, it was also the ground zero of postcolonial Nigerian modernism, the city of firsts, home to the earliest iteration of several establishments in the country, including its first university. That university, the University of Ibadan, singularly produced the first generation of Nigerian writers, which includes J.P. Clark and Wole Soyinka. In 1965, Clark wrote what might be the most popular pentastich in the country’s poetic tradition:
Ibadan,
running splash of rust
and gold — flung and scattered
among seven hills like broken
china in the sun.
These days, Clark’s “rust” and “hills” are metonyms for that city. Nearly thirty years later, one year after the spectacular failure of the Third Nigerian Republic in 1993, Soyinka published Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years. Where Clark’s poem is tersely lyrical, Soyinka’s memoir is a 400-page sociopolitical brawl. In fact, he picks his fights right from the title: “Penkelemes” is a Yoruba word purloined from the English language—a portmanteau of the phrase “peculiar mess”—and made popular by a devious political figure in the old Western Region, of which Ibadan was capital. Soyinka sets Ibadan in a constellation of cities as a metaphysical center, writing: “… it would not be Lagos, where he had first earned a living … and it would not be Abeokuta where, after all, he had been born; nor Isara, his second home … but Ibadan itself, with its rusted arteries, its ancient warrens and passions and intrigues, that would confirm what he had begun to be apprehensive about, in himself… a preternatural affinity to a lightning rod.”
Like Clark and Soyinka, Adedayo Agarau, in his debut full-length collection, focusses his enthusiasm on Ibadan. The Years of Blood splits the difference between those two seminal writers, refashioning the city as an object of parasocial affection and as a fantastical landscape. In Agarau’s honed attention to his city and its ghosts, a colorfully haunted place emerges, something of a sprawling museum-cemetery, Dantean in temperament. Place names appear functionally as grave markers. The graves are bodiless, the bones dry, the blood in bowls. The dead continue to outnumber the anxious living. There is only one hell and we are walking in it with the poet.
“It could be me whose blood is crying,” The Years of Blood begins. That opening poem, “Wind,” runs through a frantic series of jump-cut imagery—and the collection is recognizably cinematic—until we land, after so much nervousness, on a sublime surrealist sequence in the middle.
It could be my ghost finding
the touch of its mother in a house where the doors are
shutting against the portals of grief. I could be coming
through the window as wind. I could be filling the
room with cold.
The poem is a list of potential fatalities to relatives and to the speaker himself who, employing the subjunctive mood, vacillates between disappearance and reappearance. The block form circumscribes him, safe house more than jailhouse, preventing, perhaps, an irrevocable dissolution of life, of family, and of sanity. So much could have happened, the mechanics of the poem tell us, but, thank goodness, nothing has happened. “Wind,” hence, introduces us to the collection’s framework: the paranoia and the vanishing act, yes, but also a destabilization of the real and factual by the imagined, and a free-associating dream logic.
The poet repeatedly visits the old haunts of a precarious childhood, trawling the waters, turning the soil over again, and finding, yet again, a totalizing trauma, an umbra of brutality. In “Ibadan,” “everywhere weed grows is a wild mouth eating children,” this echoed symmetrically like a gospel truth. In “Soka,” “A machete cutting deep through / the bones of a child / is someone else’s answered prayer.” In “Portent,” “What we learned regarding rituals is that blood is thicker than blood.” A mother/mortar/pestle/bone motif recurs relentlessly, each occurrence more grotesque and visceral than the last. By the fifth incarnation, the reverberation is so intense that it slips into an earsplitting onomatopoeia: “the mortar sings to the bones, gbomgbom gbomgbom / & the bones listen.”
The Years of Blood throbs with indiscriminate homicidal violence, the class of perpetrators and the class of victims separated not by tangible social markers, but by an aspiration to power in a country where political power might as well be the only real insulation against its volatile temper. “Michael, we don’t go to the field anymore,” Agarau writes in “Salt water”:
They say the hands that snatched you will snatch children till
democracy arrives. Till the soldiers on Oke-Ado return to their
barracks & the news informs us we have a president. In fact, after democracy
arrives, politicians will need to stay in power.
But where Agarau’s Ibadan is a god-city reveling in excess, always another body, another bone, some more blood, an extra modifier or metaphor to unsettle the settled line, his America is a rather prosaic place, legible and untouched by the occult. The personas, ghosts of friends initiated into mysticism by the condition of victimhood, cease their stirring. Distance straightens out the poetics of memory and equivocation gives way to directness. Take the two couplets in the second movement of “Fine boy writes a poem about anxiety,” for instance:
on a sidewalk on 7th street
a dead cat is someone’s pet
in Ibadan, a dead cat
is someone’s grandmother
Most of this poem’s eight-page run is negative space. There is room now for the eyes to rest, time now for a gentle exhale. The long shadow of violence remains, yes, but the blood recedes and we can sneak in “a stick of cigarette.” America, then, is where the poet sends us for respite, although there is the simple pleasure of linguistic dexterity elsewhere. The collection is attuned to the tonal calibrations of its multilingual subject-origin, being in a perpetual state of translation and retranslation between its English textual trappings and an audible Yoruba lyricism, as typified by one of the more upbeat poems, “Prelude, Christmas,” in which, for once, “Birds are crying like birds, and the children of men speak like the children of men.”
In a project of this nature, documentarian in its impulses, pegged to such things as “the news at 7,” one wonders about the duty of the poet to the violence he rhapsodizes, about what Edouard Glissant calls “poetic intention.” Critics are fond of the idea of the pursuit of art for its own sake. The ars poetica disagrees often, and the reality is different on the ground anyway. Poets have a knack for stitching statements of purpose into their work. Agarau’s declared intention in The Years of Blood is as grand as they come: “i want to lift the hope from this poem & give it to the dead person’s mother,” he writes in “On Joy,” “…teach death about itself, wreck the ship in everyone’s grief.”
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