“A trembling”: Notes on Death in Recent Nigerian Canadian Poetry

In February 2023, Lagos-based critic Oris Aigbokhaevbolo launched a new online literary magazine, Efiko, with a piece entitled “The Death of Nigerian Literature,” in which he indicted the hollowing out of Nigeria-based literary platforms and flight of writers to creative writing programs abroad.[1] The next month, a young poet-critic whose Substack moniker is Eliot of Lagos asked whether contemporary Nigerian poetry was really “Nigerian” rather than American. He claimed that alongside depression, “Grief is the other dominant strain in recent poetry by Nigerians,” and that social crises—“the environmental degradation of the Niger Delta, the EndSARS movement, terrorism”—had made Nigerian poets “eloquent,” although this adjective was not necessarily intended as a compliment.[2] Another young poet-critic, writing for The Republic, called out what he termed “The Miseducation of Nigerian Poets” by American literary magazines and charged that his contemporaries were “imitating each other in an American brand of grief.”[3] These diatribes by writers in Nigeria drew responses from Nigerian writers pursuing their craft in the US.[4] Further debate ensued not only about the conditions for producing Nigerian literature in the twenty-first century, but also about the subjects and aesthetics of poetry.

The complaint from the most polemical of the Nigeria-based critics was that contemporary poets had indulged in derivative grief in their attempts to pander to American gatekeepers. But grief in recent Nigerian poetry is not simply an ambient mood or a passport to greener pastures. As counterexamples, I offer poems written in the years just before this debate by three poets from Nigeria—Amatoritsero Ede (b. 1963), Jumoke Verissimo (b. 1979), and Tolu Oloruntoba (b. 1985)—who are based not in the US but in Canada and concerned less with the hypothetical “death” of a national literature than with the actual deaths of specific individuals. The immediate subjects of their elegies are, respectively, a slightly older friend-qua-literary mentor, a younger contemporary known via social media, and a historical figure who died before the poet was born. Their poems are elegies insofar as they memorialize the dead. Of the moves of canonical English elegy that Jahan Ramazani enumerates in a wide-ranging recent essay, these poems involve the first, “ritualistic repetition,” but reject the rest: “apostrophe to the dead, satire of the degraded present, lament of a superior past, and the search for solace in a personified nature.”[5] In reading these poems, I am drawn to what Ramazani elsewhere calls “the affective and aesthetic solidarities that poets often seek” with their peers and predecessors.[6] As each poet imaginatively dwells with the dead, the poems by Verissimo and Oloruntoba open, in turn, onto questions about how diasporic positionality both complicates and affords possibilities for solidarity with the living. In what ways can poets invite individual lives and deaths to stand in for more widely shared struggles against disease, state violence, and antiblack racism?

If there is one Nigerian city identified with modernism, it is Ibadan, home to the country’s oldest university. During the 1960s, Ibadan was also the site of the Mbari Artists’ and Writers’ Club, where the early works of Afro-modernist writers such as J. P. Clark (1935–2020), Christopher Okigbo (1930–67), and Wole Soyinka (b. 1934) were published and performed.[7] Ede, Verissimo, and Oloruntoba all lived and studied in Ibadan at some point, coming into contact with the legacy of Ibadan modernism and the currents of writing that succeeded it. These poets also join a lineage of diasporic African and Black Canadian experimentalism in poetry—from Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973) through M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008)—defined in part by its oblique relation to received lyric and elegiac traditions.

Teardrops on the Weser, Amatoritsero Ede’s 2021 poetry collection, announces weeping as one of its themes. Writer-in-residence at the University of Bremen, Germany, in spring 2016, Ede lived alongside the River Weser on the Teerhof peninsula, once a “tarring yard” for shipbuilding even as it sounds like a cognate for “teardrop.”[8] Anchored in the riverscape of Bremen, a long poem in twenty-six sections (a-z) occupies most of the collection. Ede largely works in loose, lower-case, variously indented tercets, using white space rather than punctuation to pace his poetry. In its final sections, the titular poem leaps from the Weser to the Niger River to confront death: the death by oil poisoning of Niger Delta ecologies since crude oil extraction began in 1957 and the politically motivated deaths by hanging of the Ogoni Nine, who had opposed the collusion of Nigeria’s military government with Royal Dutch Shell in Ogoniland, in 1995. This vision in “v” of

“the niger delta

     shell-shocked

into haunted silence”

leads in “w” to a vision of the Atlantic as what holds together the rivers of Nigeria and Germany and ultimately holds the dead of the Atlantic trade.[9]

Ede grew up in Nigeria’s Delta State, his childhood “fringed by the ever-glowing haze of gas flares,” and moved to Ibadan in the 1980s to work in publishing.[10] There he encountered the University of Ibadan’s Poetry Club, which gathered on Thursdays to workshop poems. As Ede discovered, “the patron-saint of the club” was Okigbo, poet-martyr of the Nigeria-Biafra war, and “the moving spirit of the loose collective” was a charismatic young lecturer and poet named Harry Garuba (1958–2020).[11] Garuba befriended Ede and selected one of his poems for a legendary Association of Nigerian Authors anthology, Voices from the Fringe.[12] Ede went on to study German and English at the university (1991–1994) and to complete graduate studies in Germany and Canada, where he is now a literature professor. Garuba relocated to South African academia and passed away from leukemia on February 28, 2020.

Ede’s poem “Harry Fell” appears within a section of Teardrops on the Weser called requiem. Circulating among multiple counterpublics, other versions of the poem appeared as “The Well (for Harry Garuba)” in the Maple Tree Literary Supplement, a Canadian-facing online literary magazine that Ede founded in 2007, and as “Lacerations” in a memorial volume for Garuba published in Ibadan, Chants, Dreams and Other Grammars of Love.[13] The title “Harry Fell” parallels that of the other poem in requiem, “He left (for Pius Adesanmi),” the Nigerian- Canadian columnist and scholar who was killed in an Ethiopian Airlines crash on March 10, 2019. Both titles have the deceased as the subject and an active, single-syllable, past tense verb. But the poem itself is in the present tense. Seamus Heaney once wrote of “a search for images and symbols adequate to our predicament” in the North of Ireland.[14] Here the poet searches for images and symbols—and a title—adequate to his grief. In the poem’s opening lines;

“there is a bitter weal

                well beyond tears

         lodged like blood clots

 

                                                in the heart” (Ede, Teardrops, 51)

This “weal” or mark extends to “the well // of eyes,” an image that leads the poet farther down the page to describe a son witnessing his father “fall / drop // like stone in a well” (51). Given that Garuba was only five years Ede’s senior, it is striking that the poet positions himself as a son who has lost a literary progenitor.

Over three stanzas, the poem depicts the father as a dying “old lion” (51) unresponsive to his offspring before returning melancholically to its opening note:

“there is a bitter weal

         well beyond tears

or a tremulous whimper

 

          silently

                pressed

against the pressed lips

 

                                      as dumbbells cry

         and father falls

                like stone

 

         to the bottom

         of the dry

                     dark well” (51)

Here, the poet has condensed the progression of images in the poem’s first twenty-two lines into twelve lines. While the verb “falls” is technically in active voice, it connotes passivity. What claimed Garuba’s life was not state violence or sudden accident but a fatal disease. Yet the poem will have none of the usual dead metaphors of battling or fighting cancer. Nor, despite Garuba’s well-known academic work on animist thought, does it treat Garuba as an ancestor who retains a relation to the living and unborn.[15] The poet denies us the consolation of apostrophe to the dead. The poem ends in the pit of grief.

Mere months after Garuba’s death, the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police catalyzed #BlackLivesMatter protests across the US and around the world. In October 2020, widespread feminist and youth-led protests against police brutality and corruption in Nigeria mobilized with the hashtag #EndSARS to demand the dissolution of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad, which routinely targeted, extorted, and murdered citizens. On the night of October 20, members of both the Nigerian Army and Nigerian Police Force fired on unarmed protesters at the Lekki toll gate in Lagos and attempted to cover up the massacre.[16] In solidarity with the protesters, Jumoke Verissimo and James Yékú, Nigerian writer-scholars who both work in North American universities, curated poems responding to the #EndSARS movement and the related hashtag #Sorosoke, meaning “speak up” in Yorùbá. Initially published on October 22, 2020, in the online literary magazine Brittle Paper as Soro Soke: When Poetry Speaks Up, this rapidly assembled digital anthology was revised and expanded into a print volume published in Ibadan, Sọ̀rọ̀sókè: An #EndSARS Anthology. Reflecting in the introduction on their positionality, the editors write, “Many of us in the diaspora, already hurting and feeling like we have betrayed our countrymen by our absence, curse into the air. At home and abroad, we are all clutching our wounds . . . . We mourn our dead; we hold on to our dreams that a better Nigeria is possible.”[17] To be in the diaspora is not to be immune from the work of protesting injustice or grieving its victims.

Verissimo studied in Lagos and Ibadan and became well known in Nigeria as a poet before pursuing her PhD and teaching creative writing in Canada. The first poem in the digital anthology—the third in the print anthology—is a poem of hers consisting only of a title, quatrain, and footnote:

“Nigeria Will Not End Me¹

How could we not have known that our land drinks only young blood
We ask for bread; it gives us stone; we ask to live; it takes our breath
We stand up tall; it cuts our legs; we sit wearily; it shoots us down
Don't we know it already, don't we? To age in this land is to arrive in a grave?

[blank page]

¹Final Words tweeted by Okechukwu Obi-Enadhuze before his death.”[18]

Having tweeted about #EndSARS over the previous days, Obi-Enadhuze, a twenty-one-year-old software designer, posted this tweet on October 21, the day after the Lekki massacre, and was himself killed that evening. It was initially reported that he was the accidental victim of a police bullet, but another young man who identified himself as the brother of the deceased insisted that Obi-Enadhuze was in fact stabbed by “thugs” attacking the police barracks where he and his family lived.[19] Regardless of who perpetrated his death, the cruel irony that he lived only hours after this declaration resonated with an entire generation of Nigerians.

Through the first-person plural “we,” Verissimo adopts a generational voice. As in Ede’s “Harry Fell,” Verissimo forgoes any apostrophe to the deceased in order implicitly to address a counterpublic of protesters and supporters. Her poem’s long lines have an almost ritualistic patterning. Instead of a more traditional quatrain’s envelope rhyme, middle lines with the pattern “We ___; it ___” are enveloped between rhetorical questions. Nigeria has been described as a “vampire state” that sucks oil while draining life from the environments and cultures of the Ogoni and other Niger Delta peoples.[20] “Nigeria Will Not End Me” both personifies “our land” as a vampire with a macabre taste for “young blood” and depersonalizes the state as “it.” The phrase “our land” implies a sense of belonging or ownership that had been denied to numerous Nigerians (Verissimo and Yékú, Sọ̀rọ̀sókè, 21). In the words of Nigerian historian Abosede George, “the #EndSARS protests sought to make Nigerian citizenship mean something tangible and worthwhile for young people.”[21] Rendering the Lekki massacre in the timeless lyric present, the third line proceeds through a series of downward movements, as does Ede’s “Harry Fell,” but here the cause of the descent to death—“we sit wearily; it shoots us down”—is simply Nigeria. By the final line, “it” is no longer “our land” but “this land.” (Verissimo and Yékú, Sọ̀rọ̀sókè, 21). Amidst intense grief, it seems to the poet that to come of age in her country of origin can only mean imminent death. This conclusion is reinforced not only by the assonance and eye rhyme of “age” with “grave,” as well as the internal pararhyme of “arrive” with “grave,” but also by the empty white space that separates the text of the poem from the footnote informing readers of Obi-Enadhuze’s death (21).

What survivors know or should have known is equally at stake in Tolu Oloruntoba’s “Waxbill / The Death of David Oluwale.” Oloruntoba’s first collection, The Junta of Happenstance, won both of Canada’s major poetry prizes, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry in English (2021) and Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize (2022). In its acknowledgements, Oloruntoba, who studied medicine in Ibadan in the early 2000s and works in healthcare project management in western Canada, thanks Verissimo among “the constellation [of writers] that showed me my way.”[22] “Waxbill” appears in his follow-up collection, Each One a Furnace. Oloruntoba was inspired by the phrase “the solitary deaths of finches” in Dionne Brand’s Griffin prize-winning narrative poem Ossuaries (2010) to write poems that inventively respond to more than fifty species of finches.[23] Dedicated “for those who can never be still,” the collection interweaves avian and human experiences of migration (Oloruntoba, Each One a Furnace).

In 1949, David Oluwale stowed away on a ship from Lagos, arrived in Hull, and made his home in Leeds despite being persecuted by the police there. In the mid-1950s when Soyinka was studying at the University of Leeds, Oluwale was an inmate of Menston Asylum, and he was again institutionalized in what was now called High Royds psychiatric hospital when Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was in Leeds as an MA student in the mid-1960s. “In the sixties, David was the only black man sleeping rough on the streets of Leeds,” writes Caryl Phillips, who grew up in Leeds.[24] In early May 1969, his body was discovered in the River Aire. Two Leeds police officers whom a whistleblower identified as having repeatedly abused Oluwale were later found guilty of assault after the trial judge instructed the jury not to consider the more serious charge of manslaughter. Oloruntoba’s poem draws its epigraph from a Wikipedia entry about Oluwale that documents the judge’s dehumanization of the victim.

Were it not for the second half of the title and italicized epigraph, the opening of “Waxbill / The Death of David Oluwale” could be mistaken for an ecopoetic portrait of a finch species that occurs in Nigeria among many other African countries. The poem proceeds as a list.

“What we know:

i. The Black-rumped Waxbill, found in African grasslands,

   sometimes landing further afield,

   is a bird of Least Concern:

   not a focus of species conservation.

   They do not qualify as threatened.

2. The collective for a group of them, is a trembling;

3. A trembling:

¨    David Oluwale in the hull of the SS Temple Bar;

[…]

¨    The revenant beyond electroshocks; nights in the shut doorways of Leeds;

[…]

4. A trembling:

¨    The last day, the chase by the riverbank;

¨    Billy clubs Ellerker and Kitching in pursuit;

¨    Oluwale, legs pumping by the River Aire;

¨    Touchdown, splashback

5. A lack of trembling: rinsers of vagrants, collection from the river.”[25]

Finches can apparently be referred to as “a charm,” but the poet selects “a trembling” as the term that draws an associative link between the “Black-rumped” bird and Black immigrant to England. While this particular species of finch may “not qualify as threatened,” the term underscores Oluwale’s bodily precarity.

In the fourth entry, the poet refers metonymically to police officers Geoffrey Ellerker and Kenneth Kitching as “Billy clubs.” The focus on Oluwale’s effort to escape these tormenters, “legs pumping by the River Aire,” recalls W. H. Auden’s ekphrastic meditation on the sixteenth-century painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, “the white legs disappearing into the green / Water;” if the tendency to overlook suffering is a feature of the human condition for Auden, it is also a feature of racialized policing for Oloruntoba, Phillips, and others who memorialize Oluwale.[26] At the same time as “A lack of trembling” or anxiety is enjoyed by Ellerker and Kitching—their lawyer described them as “night soil men” cleaning up the streets, “rinsers of vagrants” in Oloruntoba’s phrase—the poem mourns this “lack of trembling” as the absence of life.[27] On one level, Oluwale’s body is the referent of “collection from the river” (Oloruntoba, Each One A Furnace, 7). On another level, since “collection” so often refers to a book of poems, the poem seems to ask what poetry can save from death. Given that the poem catalogs the dangers of diaspora amidst colonial antiblackness and that Oloruntoba emigrated from Nigeria to a settler colonial state, albeit several decades later, this elegy for Oluwale implicates the poet as a diasporic subject among the collective of “a trembling” (7).

Oloruntoba’s elegy, like Ede’s and Verissimo’s, is shorn of consolation. If these Nigerian Canadian poets constitute “a trembling,” their poems belie the reading of grief in recent Nigerian poetry as abstract or contrived (7). Goaded by the deaths of specific people, these diasporic writers also mourn a country and their separation from it. All three poems nonetheless elicit solidarity with those “of Least Concern,” including the departed who may otherwise be forgotten, the politically outspoken young, and the vulnerable on the streets around us (7).