Songs from a Garden of Ghosts: On Wale Ayinla’s To Cast a Dream

Ayinla is searching for a syntax flexible and form-ly enough to carry his own terrific “interior space”, and the dreams that abound there, in all their colours.

The Mediterranean, to paraphrase Plath, has been eating men like air. In the first half of  2021, at least 1146 migrants died trying to cross the blue body into Europe, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), twice-plus the number of deaths in the same six-month period of the previous year (that year’s was estimated at 1400). The deaths had peaked in 2016—at 5143—from over 4000 in 2015. These deaths and the bodies emptied are taken from the charts—both become a business of dream in the Nigerian poet Wale Ayinla’s debut chapbook, To Cast a Dream, which was selected by Mahogany L. Browne as winner of the 2020 Toi Derricotte Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. The poet pulls the dead out of sleep, as a boy might pull out a flute from under a bushel, and asks them to sing, because: 

There’s no remedy for the sea awakened to fight,

its teeth ravenous, wrapped around the cabin

searching for scapegoats. Its blue sharpened from distrust,

severed with bulbs smashed into the throat. — ‘Ocean Dwellers Welcome Their Guests with Grudges.’

Silence may be why the death toll rises year after year: “Sometimes, a closed mouth is a grave making room/ for another,” Ayinla writes. The philosopher who only interpreted the world, as Marx said, must now change it; the poet takes up this responsibility. He intends for the poems in this book to not only represent and—by extension—interpret the abundant bones playing beneath the sea’s glassy surface, he sings a social force: to make another death an impossible dream by making a multitude of ghosts palpable to the living. Ben Okri’s ‘An African Elegy’ is echoed at length.

Hope is the force, Ayinla knows and believes this, fervently, and quite intricately he weaves the thing with feathers into his elegies. The poet recognizes the salient beauty that abides our lives wherever we may be—in the countries of West Africa from which people flee because of the almost impossibility of fully entering your living here, where poverty is a mass identity, and violence lords comfortably over vast territories of a land—and in that beauty lies what truly matters. 

One powerful poem in the book that dramatizes this well is ‘Aubade to the Frame of a Face Masked as Dandelion in the Pocket of a Damask Trouser’, set in Dakar, Senegal. Following a torrent of images—sea spitting salt; a future arrayed in the geography of the earth—a migrant man holds a picture of his son in a garden. Then, “He looks up and his eyes are rainclouds, and the boat coughs out bones.”

In language that moves, Ayinla shows that while making this death-journey, in a quest for a better life for them and for their families (the man wearing the damask trouser perhaps took the sea’s way because of his little boy in the garden), the men realize—usually too late—that what they truly want lies behind them, perhaps now unreachable. They realize what freedom means: Hunger is the same as freedom/ if no one is dying.

But it is not as simplistic. Some of those who take to the sea do so because hope is absent on the earth, their part of the earth, as the poet writes on ‘Migration Haibun.’ The sea is survival for them. (For instance, refugees and asylum-seekers.) This haibun is written after Ocean Vuong’s ‘Immigration Haibun’; though the poet does not reference this poem, thematically and form-wise Ayinla imitates Vuong’s. He does not make better what he borrows here. There is a leaning, a heavy leaning, into certain tropes—especially that of the sun burning skin and inducing thirst. A good deal of the poems in To Cast a Dream bear this mark, spontaneity tied, and it becomes tedious to read. 

One other reason why the haibun does not hit is—and this is one of the feeble parts of the book—the migrants are plain comics; their lives don’t touch us, even in the poet’s lush language they are far from us because we don’t really know what is going on inside them; they become a symbol in a kind of moral fable. They speak and sing as one, as the dead: a garden of ghosts. When we catch sight of a man whose rib of longing slightly sticks out—as in ‘Aubade to the Frame’—it is only briefly. In this vein, the transparent dream is not so transparent.

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The collection’s title fuses Christ’s words to Peter and the other disciples—“‘Children, you have no fish, have you?’ They answered him, ‘No.’ He said to them, ‘Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.’” (John 21)—with Tranströmer: “The dream of the man stretched out sleeping/ becomes at that instant transparent.” The excerpt from Tranströmer opens the book.

Rumi’s assertion that “No man knows our name until our last breath goes out” sits close to Tranströmer: before a man dies, his dream resides only in his head, contained within himself; death reveals that dream, the name he pursued. Ayinla thus intends to cast for us the transparent dream. Like Christ did, he also intends to tell us where to cast our dream: “plant the remains of your dream/ where death’s hand would not reach,” from the titular poem. But where would that be; where would death’s hand not reach? Anywhere not the sea, perhaps; but even dry ground is unsafe:

The sand at the feet of the vultures might be

graves crawling up on them, the ground

writhing, wanting a surmounting. — ‘Elegy to the Moon Children…’

The glowing diamond at the center of this chapbook’s black body (paraphrasing Juan Ramón Jimenéz)—death—touches even Ayinla himself, and the poems in this book that quicken a string inside us, and the finest, are those in which he engages his own grief: the death of his father, although he does not like to enter this room, as if shy of it. Usually, he borrows a boy who is not particularly himself, but a magical character who is all part fine image, and each image touches you, caresses you into pain, and then into wonder.

These poems’ blooming begin at the rear of the book when he begins to “call grief by its maiden name”, though littering them throughout wouldn’t have been a bad idea. ‘Prelude to Omissions’, afore quoted; ‘Resurrection’; ‘In the Absence of Words’; ‘Little Fires’, which doubles as a love poem; and ‘In Praise of a Night of Perdition’, which was shortlisted for the Brittle Paper Award for Poetry in 2019, are some of the poems of personal rather than collective grief. But the most accomplished of them, and also in the entire book, is ‘Awaiting an SMS from My Late Father.’

It appeared first in Poet Lore. An Afro-surreal experience that is surely reminiscent of Tranströmer, in which sorrow is carried by magic and wonder; there are angels and rags and ashes-trousers, stars are drunk in water’s stead, night is doused over skin, and:

I pretend

that heaven’s Wi-Fi is locked and death

is the password...

I throw seashells at the river, & there 

is a voice. My father speaks from a river

& this is technology. My ears would rather

not marvel, for what person speaks 

with a mouth tied at the edge?

In this poem language, like a seal drunk on love, follows language without losing implication. You have to witness it.

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The alchemy of Ayinla’s weaving fascinates; it is interesting how he puts in the right place spontaneous and totally unexpected but welcome verbs that reorient the line, causing each of some of the brightest of his bones to start over and over again in the course of its unfolding, shocking and waking us. His poetry is born and nurtured deliberately—if writing is a guided dream, to borrow language from Borges, then this poet is a guided dreamer. He is almost obsessed with perfecting the line. Reading him, therefore, requires plenty of care and patience, else one will not take as much from the book. His care, too, is why, I believe, he refrains from engaging here copiously with his own grief; you need only read some new Nigerian poetry to find several dead mothers and fathers, recurring like a bad dream.

A reason for the difficulty in the book is that, like the young Tranströmer whose biggest challenge was finding a syntax for his imagination, as John Freeman has noted, Ayinla is still searching for a syntax flexible and form-ly enough to carry his own terrific “interior space”, and the dreams that abound there, in all their colours. 

Beside Vuong, who is a major influence and whose first name is in many of the titles, and Tranströmer, other poets whose influence mark the book include Ladan Osman, whose Kitchen Dwellers’ Testimony Ayinla samples on titles like ‘Ocean Dwellers’ Testimonial’, and Kaveh Akbar, especially his Calling a Wolf a Wolf. The Bible also feeds his poems:

& what do we say to the boy 

digging the earth to find his love?

the earth is for grief and its fullness thereof.

But what stands Ayinla apart is the cadence of Yoruba that marks his poetry. ‘Sea Boys’, a poem that feels unfit for this book, though perfect as a standalone poem (first published on Palette Poetry), inspired by a small stream in Abeokuta, southwestern Nigeria, from where the poet comes, opens in the language: ‘Egbo naa.’ On other poems you hear the Yoruba in the English, clearly, if you hear: ‘The small sun is troubling upon the sea’s face.’ It is the poetry of one whose consciousness flourishes in a different language. There is a streak of Soyinka in him. 

I am most grateful for this book because Ayinla imports into Nigerian poetry, for the first time perhaps, some words that you won’t usually find (there are some fresh ones in Gbenga Adeoba’s Sillerman Prize-winning Exodus; it appears that sea poetry unfolds the left side of the brain). The moon is abundant in our poems, and Ayinla makes judicious use of that image, but he draws from it a different energy at different points in the book’s time. But how beautiful to see a blue sail fling itself to a boat! To witness a requiem at the throat of a cathedral. How eloquent the taste of Christ’s bruised body thrutched to our lips. He writes unlike any other Nigerian poet writing today, and at the same time makes language that pulses with the burning blood of his time. ◇

To Cast a Dream (48 pages) was published in 2021 by Jai-Alai Books; it was selected by Mahogany L. Browne as the winner of the 2020 Toi Derricotte Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize.