The Poetry of Sentiment: On “The Gathering of Bastards”

”He is not patient with reality; or perhaps he dreads it. And Oriogun’s strength as a poet depends, it seems to me, on the quality of reality—hard-won reality—he can make available to the reader.”

The Poetry of Sentiment: On “The Gathering of Bastards”

Romeo Oriogun’s second poetry collection already appeared, in a slightly different form, as Nomad in Nigeria in 2021; it won the 2022 Nigeria Prize for Literature. Appearing in the United States as The Gathering of Bastards (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), it concerns itself with the violence of history, and with the various places—Bamako, Cotonou, Abidjan—the poet passed through in his movement to the States. He came across Africans from the sub-Saharan region trying to migrate to Europe by going on boats over the Mediterranean, an arduous and often life-eating journey: close to 2400 people died last year, in their bid to cross. He writes about these people, he lifts an elegy for the dead.

There is no fanfare to welcome the dead,

those who drowned at sea. There is no trumpet

blowing over the conches, over the brittle pebbles,

stringed together and worn as a necklace

by the prophet running across the beach,

allowing the wind to play music

through the shells of dead things.

From “The Drowned” (“for Lydia/ for Amanda”). The absence of an elegy, which must be due to the fact that the world is not paying attention, is itself soberly, apophatically calibrated as an elegy. The wind’s music would not be heard but for the silence of human singing. This evocative, elegiac tone has come from Derek Walcott and runs through much of the collection. Oriogun desires, to quote Walcott, “To praise lovelong, the living and the brown dead.” He seeks to adapt their voices (the dead) and in their behalf to sing their songs. What he does, though, is to sing his song as theirs. The poems are short on actual knowledge—not only of the past about which he writes, but of the journeys, the faces that make them up.

His affection for the world is too much for his poems to bear; it beclouds the faces he is supposed to be narrating, to be crafting. We don’t see those faces at all, we are served his affection (aesthetically a duckling) instead. The book’s one song is the bleeding of the world, yet his love cannot tolerate bleeding it—when he does, it is superficial, like trying to slaughter a goat with a paper knife. Witnessing, for him, involves relating the horror of history, as he sees it, and tending to his ache (which “is” equal to the ache of the world).

I stayed silent in history; the ropes cut through

my hands. I stayed silent in the bargaining.

30 copper bars for the men, 25 for the women,

the boy looked at me, at the rope, before being sold.

In the small hands of time, you said, Son,

you are not guilty. Inside of me was a hole;

within it I saw the ships, White men opening

mouths of Africans, checking teeth for decay,

writing down stout for those accepted,

for those staring into water. – from “Wishbone”

This is one of the rare instances in the collection where Oriogun comes close to being particular with the history that he is dealing with. Poems such as “A Stranger in Aba,” which carries the note “after the women’s war of 1929,” that is, the Aba Women’s Riot, “Last Days of General Abacha,” the man Abiodun Onadipe described in 1997 as Nigeria’s “first real dictator,” “Remembrance (after the Asaba Massacre)”—despite the titles and clipped notes—could be about anything. The historical event is never isolated for study; there’s instead an imprecise emotional interpretation of the event. “Wishbone” is not unlike the other poems listed: in spite of the 25 or 30 copper bars, the women and men are still “women and men.” The poet in generalizing them “trades” them once again, he evades the core of their person: they are not, for the poet, more than a throng, a series of faces that do not differ in any way. Even the boy who looks at him, we are not granted the grace to reckon the speech of his eyes. The mouths opened are but the “mouths of Africans.”

His depictions of “Africans,” of what “African” might mean, quite surprisingly, allies the stereotypes that the late Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainana ridiculed in his hit essay, “How to Write About Africa.” “Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls,” Wainana warned. This music and rhythm in “the African soul” is Oriogun’s staple: “I am a woman weighed down / by the music of drums, a lonely woman / walking in the loneliness of an abandoned truth,” a “woman” says in “A Village Life.” But it is perhaps Wainana’s statement on brushstrokes that best captures it. “Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. . . African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life—but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.” This is what I mean when I say Oriogun’s “lives” are faceless.

The interest, then, is not history, but a particular doctrine of history. “Killing begins with the story of land,” Chris Abani writes in his poetry collection from 2010, Sanctificum. Oriogun has been influenced by Abani’s work, and not mildly, but even more by Abani’s philosophy—it is impossible to separate one from the other. Sacrament of Bodies, his first book, more saccharine than a James Arthur album, drew much from Abani’s book. In reading Sacrament, not a leaf of original thought can be found (but for “At Udi” and “The Guilt of Exile”); the book is helped by “language” and borrowed philosophy. In his new book, he has moved up a rung or half-a-rung from the first—however, it is still difficult to see the poet’s mind in any serious contemplation. The doctrine of history that he flirts with in Gathering very nearly resembles the doctrine of history that Chris Abani plays in Smoking the Bible. History is taken at face value, the “African” past is regarded regally, and the poet’s complicity is mentioned. The complicity is never worked out. It is only mentioned.

For example, in the excerpt from “Wishbone,” the poetic voice says to himself, “Son, you are not guilty.” From where has this guilt come? “I stood silent in the bargaining” is bankrupt. In Oriogun’s work, the “insights”—to paraphrase Frost—usually are “too sudden to be credible.” Their “suddenness” is not the quickness of perception and association that enlivens poetry (that, too), but the quick regurgitation of an insight that is readily available, highly predictable. The philosophy, despite its not being fully-formed, is believed to justify the art. Nothing is farther from the truth. The poem ends thus: “I am capable of terror”—echoing Abani, “I have never killed a man, but / I know how, I know I can, / I know that if the timing were right I would.” Yet the latter’s layering of thought is missing in Oriogun.

 

Oriogun writes about cities in nearly the same way he writes about people: as things shaped from “the shadow of life”—a phrase from “Late December in Abidjan.” None of the city he writes about is “its own thing.” The place-names dropped in “Late December” pose particularity, but that is all they do: pose. His cities are mock cities, not real cities. A close reading of this poem should make this point clear.

The city, awake and brooding, is its own thing.

I walk along Abobo; on the road everything leads

to God, even the air. I watch men spread prayer

mats, each of them full of colors like little islands.

The earth, holy in all its resurrections, moves forward,

carrying us in its silence. Away from the men. . .

One reads the first line and one is impressed by what Oriogun is able to do with language but rarely does. There is, in the line, a rich perceptiveness, a wonderful insight. Without blatantly introducing an image, but through a detached sense of things, the poet allows the nine words to do the work. Words don’t usually do the work in Oriogun, words describe or narrate the work—which is a serious flaw of his work. In this case, though, not only is the city “its own thing,” the line as well is its own thing. It seems detached from the rest of the poem, in fact. After it, the poet resumes narrating or describing the work; the-poem-the-city ceases to be a vital experience, a particular experience salvaged for the reader.

Why does the first line have its effect? What makes its vitality available for the reader? One can think of (1) the careful selection—and arrangement—of the words, (2) the personification of the city, and—I believe—(3) a Scriptural allusion that beats below deck.

If the city is “awake,” it must have slept, and if it sleeps and wakes then it goes through the motions, it moves, is alive. A single word: awake, that word wakes the cities inside us. But “brooding” is the most important word in the line; it has a quality of meaning. To “brood” is to “sit on eggs; to hover with outspread wings; (fig) to hang close over (as clouds); to meditate moodily. To sit upon eggs to hatch them; to cherish under the wings . . .; to cherish moodily.” (New English Dictionary.) When the poet says the city is brooding, he is saying, “Somewhere in this city are mothers protecting their children; that protection is love, a love that knows the worth of its object; and somewhere, there are hawks waiting to bring to ruin others; in this city, there are those who are expectant, for rain, for money, for love; in this city, others contemplate their lives with coldness; in coldness, others cherish their lives.”

Matthew 23.37: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” The broody image of the city calls to mind this lament by Christ, His description of Himself as a mother-hen. Reading the line alongside this passage, the violence and bloodshed at the root of this “thing” (Abidjan, and indeed every city) becomes apparent. This city, too, has killed its prophets once, it has stoned its preachers, and the poet reenacts the person of Christ.

But the irony: unlike Christ, Oriogun, in describing the city as its own thing, forsakes any attempt to “gather” its children. A wise and humble choice. To say that and to then try to summarize the city is a study in futility. Yet the summary is exactly what Oriogun then tries to do. Nothing else is active in the poem; visual, not active.

“I walk along Abobo” is not active, it is describing an action. After that comes the flight: God is introduced. Nigerian poets seem obsessed with God, but it is the word—sadly the weakest word one can use in a poem: it usually means nothing but what the poet wants it to mean—we are obsessed with. The line with God in the excerpt does not actually make any sense, that is one proof of its meaninglessness when Nigerian poets use it (it appears 39 times in Sacrament and 23 times in this book). Even at that, it is possible to bear God without much ado; the problem is that the mystic’s condiments populate five lines: God, holy, earth, prayer mats, silence, resurrections, colors, islands. The city disappears in Oriogun’s “mystic innerworld”—to paraphrase J. P. Clark-Bekederemo on Gabriel Okara.

He is not patient with reality; or perhaps he dreads it. And Oriogun’s strength as a poet depends, it seems to me, on the quality of reality—hard-won reality—he can make available to the reader. The rush to turn reality into an artefact of the imagination hurts his poems, in more ways than one. He repeats himself aplenty: accent, tone, word. Sacrament is unbearably difficult to read for this reason; one holds one’s breath in reading the poems in Gathering, not because they are bright with awe, because one fears that he will repeat himself again. A list of easy words he returns to regularly: wildness, sadness, silence, ship, exploitation, terror, war, roads (a word that first probably came alive to him through Ben Okri’s The Famished Road—a road now successfully made famished in Oriogun’s work).

“Cotonou” could have been a glorious contribution to Nigerian letters, but it is made less efficient by Oriogun’s “romantic egotism” (R. P. Blackmur). The people in the poem approach real, yet they don’t sound like it. Oriogun tells us what they say, which is what he makes them say. “I desire beauty,” Oriogun says a driver says; it has come from “At Udi.” Nevertheless, it is his finest achievement yet, and it says something about the future of this poet, if he would listen closely to the lives he encounters and not always swap his life for theirs, if he would understand that a poem is not a recreation, but an invention of experience, an invention that takes as its data reality, that becomes itself a new, vital reality. ◼