Memento: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigerian Poetry is Stunning
Memento: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigerian Poetry, out now from the Vermont-based Animal Heart Press, is that rare gem: a 115-page anthology where every poem, regardless of theme, brings about an ultimate change of vision. It is sublime.
Adedayo Agarau, the editor, should be commended for selecting a wide range of talented poets, both seasoned and new. And all of them, himself included (his work is also featured in the anthology), plunge into reality and don’t look away. As he tells us in his introductory note, the anthology “dusts us with a sprinkle of everything: family to loss, to love, to country, to mental health.”
This is evident from early on in Memento. JK Anowe’s “Flight of the Scarecrow,” a kind of lamentation, is an example of the stunning power of the work included in this anthology. We imagine the speaker, a scarecrow or perhaps someone who has been reduced to a kind of scarecrow, longing for contact, experiencing “an utmost bracing to feel.” This is someone who wants to wake up, to get moving, someone who wants to be “capable of dreams, of wings.” But this speaker is filled with pain: there are “hooves of rain/stampede of water reigning rapid on my frontage.” This striking image here suggests a deluge of pain surging — no, galloping — forward, and it fits the poem perfectly.
Another is “houses” by Hauwa Shafii Nuhu. This poem links the violence of war and conflict to the violence men can commit in relationships. The speaker, who hears a story of a “street back in time, ravaged by insurgence.” The doors to the houses there were kept “perpetually locked/to open them was to open an inventory/of bodies fallen from crossfire.” The speaker makes the connection to men who try to “open the closed door/south of my heart,” realizing that, even if the man means well, “something gives, when you have died too many times/in known hands.”
Each poet here does something fascinating and fresh with language. Wale Ayinla’s “Landscaping” describes a woman whose body is bent “like a half moon on a heavy July evening/grains of stars around her like music.” The poem then offers us a flurry of memorable lines like: “…On my/face were a cloud, rain, and a rainbow” and “the world spin over my head in its envelope/made of wishes.”
There’s also I.S. Jones’s “Invocation,” a sort of prayer and an ode to nature and beauty, filled with diamond-sharp lines like: “…each plant plant emerges from the language of soil/to revise light as nourishment” and “to pull their juicy bodies back into the startling world.”
The poets in this anthology often give us crisp, pristine images that take us exactly where they want us to go. Consider “The Final Plague” by Adedayo Agarau, a terrifying vision of an Old Testament plague, where “seraphs are leaning into the morning with swords” and “Pharaoh’s disobedience blooming in God’s wrath,” the language of the poem itself calling to us from ages ago.
Since these are contemporary poets, it’s clear that, as Adedayo Agarau observes in his introductory note, that the Nigerian poetry landscape “is a fecund one.” I agree, which is why I’d be remiss if I didn’t note my joy in seeing this book widely available. I can’t speak for other countries, but in the United States, at least, there is a deficit when it comes to knowledge of writers and poets from the African continent. Because of the way curricula are structured, most people’s knowledge of Nigerian literature begins and ends with Chinua Achebe. That should change. Adedayo Agarau, in his introductory note, says that this anthology can be used as a school text. I hope it’s used in classrooms everywhere. And I hope curious readers pick it up and take the opportunity to expand their tastes.
Memento: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigerian Poetry is an anthology of the first order. Each poem sings. You usually have one or two misfires, but that isn’t the case here. The lines are tight; the writing soars. But enough from me. I’ll quote from Precious Okpechi’s “new kind of lonely:” this is an anthology where “everything is a certain kind of extraordinary.”
