Two Reviews: Chris Abani’s Smoking the Bible, Saddiq Dzukogi’s Your Crib, My Qibla
A double review.
1. The Shallows
In a 2006 conversation with Colm Toibin (facilitated by BOMB), Nigerian-American writer Chris Abani noted how Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart, set up a tough tradition with his first book: Achebe “performed the culture to other people [the West].” Abani was to resist this approach, he was to follow the path that the playful, exciting Amos Tutuola (author of The Palmwine Drinkard) and—later—the poet Christopher Okigbo took. In his new book of poems, Abani is more Achebe in sensibility than Okigbo, though it is Okigbo that he name-drops in his list of ancestors: “Marley, Hayden, Hughes, Awoonor, Okigbo—/ the sainted.”
Things Fall Apart tells a similar story as the one Abani tells in Smoking the Bible (Copper Canyon Press, 2022): a father who kills the thing he loves. Abani-the-dramatic-persona is Okonkwo, a man fleeing his father’s shadow, who cannot banish from himself that shadow, and who, succeeding at failure, cannot forgive himself the fear; and he is Okonkwo’s son, Nwoye, whom Okonkwo, through violence, seeks to bend into an image of himself. The dilemma is that he cannot cease becoming, either way. Yet where Achebe adequately explores the individuality of Okonkwo, his fear, strips of tenderness which he demonstrates in his own powerful, moving way, Abani does not venture into the life of his father, refuses to understand—perhaps in fear of what he would find: a man whom he carries within himself, an oath that would not be broken, as he says of the speech of his mother’s eyes, “She wonders how many/ women like her I will break.” That refusal to understand is a crucial reason for Smoking’s weakness as art. The sin for which Abani convicts his father, to the extent that it is revealed by word-objects in this book, does not warrant the weight of the emotion that he harvests from it.
Smoking the Bible is Abani’s sixth collection, coming over a decade after the terrific Sanctificum, a much better book by leaps and bounds. Smoking contains elegies (more accurately, the poems hint at the form), meditations, notes, drafts, commentaries, and more. A conversation with a dead brother, it captures the moments of his illness, of Abani’s care; it burrows into the past of memory, childhood; engages the violent history of their relationship with their father, the pain of watching their mother stay through the heat of it all, her power. No one in this book has more character than the mother, she is real, unpredictable, and felt. Sometimes the brother’s voice reaches us whole also, distinct:
Find a steady woman and in the grace
of quotidian domesticity, raise children
whose hearts are wild horses no one can trap.
Lorca can be forgiven for breaking into the last line, but the phrases “steady woman” and “grace/ of quotidian domesticity” have come to us from an original country, small artifacts from the culture of being that spoke them—they reveal the brother in a way that only voice, uncontaminated, can. Other than the brother’s voice, and the mother’s a few times, the bulk of the poems are in the lyric voice of the persona. Not surprisingly, the father speaks words we recognize but with his voice, person, mute.
In “Cameo: Creation,” after she puts a burden of personal history into fire, the mother “hesitated a moment, penitent, then pulled back./ She let it hurt for one second too long.” This poem functions by a single metaphor (of the diary put in fire), every other line works to maintain the quality of that act—the functional metaphor. Whatever details the poet offers after the act is thus substantiated by the act itself, and by the distance between the persona and the mother: we are witnesses with the poet, through the poet’s voice. As such, the hesitation before retrieval comes across sharp—it is being presented, as a case is presented, so that the reader can make their own judgments; behind the tingling “it” is a space sufficient for the contemplation of hurt. “Snake” is another successful poem in this mode. Unlike these poems, several poems in Smoking lack an adequate formula for the torrent of emotions they state. In the absence of a working emotional formula, the poet resorts to “simple wisdom”—“Sometimes grief is acceptance/ that love has always been inadequate.” “Love is a figure of speech, but also a thing real. . .” “How Giacometti’s tortured bodies carry a redemption,/ always alluding to the Christ on the cross, perhaps.” “In Africa we say, He who strikes a woman strikes stone.”
The book’s first poem, “Flay” begins by contemplating the act of writing a poem; and then advances by blind leaps that distort the poem’s character. The first three lines fall flat on the ear, offer no single precise imagery, semantically reveal a struggle but lack an equivalent reflection, outside what’s said, in the dramatics of strung words, of a wrestling between poet and “stone,”
The point of a pen opens a hole
into a soul’s dereliction. This search
for the right word bores through stone.
They recall better, more finely measured lines of a different but almost synonymous implication (on the surface, the following excerpt is about a mason carving a name into a gravestone; but, also, it is about the poet carving into the page this witnessed struggle) from the first page of Basil Bunting’s Briggflats. Below, it is clear that these words are not primarily ambassadors of the mason’s (or the poet’s) struggle, they are struggling objects themselves—
A mason times his mallet
to a lark’s twitter,
listening while the marble rests,
lays his rule
at a letter’s edge,
fingertips checking,
till the stone spells a name
naming none,
a man abolished.
The necessity of “Flay”’s fourth line is impossible to ascertain. The poet then says something about knifing a tomato, unfocuses the image by saying even this arrives us at loss, and the Word appears: “Migrant.” Yet, for Abani, it is not enough that every intimate moment be turned into a reflection of a bogus political idea, it must also be religious, by way of a cliché: “Gospels are made of less than this.” By the poem’s end, we wonder what we have read: “the ocean begins.” Why does the “ocean” begin, and in what way? In the context of the book, is it a metaphor for history? Or the Slave Trade? Or even of grief (saltwater)? The poem hardly responds, even by sensations. Additionally, if Abani leaves us an image lacking reverberation quality, he also regularly gives metaphors that could work without being interfered with, little abundant things choked by a persistent need on the poet’s part to offer a reading of them, usually in favor of the shallow cultural, the vague historical, or the sentimental. “Light Flame, Turn Rebel” is a good example; this poem’s last line soaks up all that precedes it, the penultimate line would have been a good place to leave it alone.
A poem, Randall Jarrell wrote—a good poem “is a sort of onions of contexts, and you can no more locate any of the important meanings exclusively in a part than you can locate a relation in one of its terms.” In Smoking, usually, meaning can only be successfully located in a poem’s line, in an aspect—so that there are several small meanings in a poem that do not accrete into a comprehensive whole; and that located meaning is didactic to the point of burning the possibility of any further context, any fresh revelation for the reader when, if, he returns. There is one, and only one, context—the context of revenge, not even of grief: “I have practiced this hate for so long it feels right,” he writes in “Father.” Bitter Revenge outdoes itself and leaves the reader unaffected.
Chris Abani has always been a moralist, across books, but the art that results from his moralist-approach would not always get in the way of that art. He is much more interesting and incisive as a frivolous critic of the world than he is as a Sage, embittered; from a posture of sweet, delicate detachment, and yet with a conviction and dedication to contributing to the idea of a better world, the art succeeds better. Sanctificum (2010) resulted from that posture, though that sensibility is also reflected prematurely in Kalakuta Republic (2001). Take the titles of the poems in this new book, which at first may appear to have some deep meaning but are really basic, sometimes even of doubtful utility, compare to the poem “Well Meant” from Daphne’s Lot:
Twenty-five hundred tins of tuna,
no can opener.
Powdered milk that loosened unfamiliar
stomachs speeding death.
Three thousand Bibles dropped into
Mujahudden children.
One thousand blankets and sweaters,
sent to tropical hot zone.
Crates of suturing thread and no needles.
Thousands of candles and no matches.
Tubes of toothpaste and no toothbrushes.
Boxes of high heeled shoes.
The poet presents a list, does not interpret, leaves us a clue in the title, and we may be complicit.
2. Miniaturizing Immensity
Loss confronts us, not only with memory, but with dream, the modification, the subversion, the perversion of memory. It appears to be the closest thing to redemption. Saddiq Dzukogi, pining for redemption, one whose spell is the return of his little child, gives himself to plain memory and dream. Where in Abani a child wrestles with the meager love his father gave, and the bucketful of violence, using the poem as a sociological tool for vengeance: Dzukogi is asking if he, as a father, loved enough.
The poems in Dzukogi’s debut Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) make a precarious living at the very edge of sentimentality. Thankfully, more often than not, they do not move beyond the edge. The urge towards the sentimental is cautioned by the distance created between the poet’s self, its grief, and the object (poem) that he makes of that grief. This is done in two ways: (I) through the use of the third person in the book’s first section (“Your Crib”); and (II) through the emplotment of the second section (“My Qibla”) as “A Dialogue” between the dead and the living. Because of that distance, we hear the sobbing, we drink the black milk of mourning, but the voice is often clear, the jug titled to our throats lucid. From “Palms”:
He can see her eyes, light jazzes inside
the lamp holders, in the spaces she leaves behind.
He says maybe his daughter is there in the night
as splintered moonlight. This is his own face
carved. Her mother shows him her own hands
says it reminds her of the girl
who suckled her breast. He touches the darkness
below her mother’s reflection.
It does not cling to his fingers
where memories sprout as fingernails.
Dzukogi wants to dissolve the space between what’s real and the shadow or reflection of the real. The book’s best parts result from a growth of the fantastic out of the real. Though the title (“Palms”) refers to “a ritual site of holding,” I am tempted to think of Wallace Stevens’ “palm at the end of the mind,” which “stands on the edge of space.” This is because Dzukogi’s work abides space-edge, and at that edge creates and grows its own abundant space. He possesses a fine ability to carve precise little phrases of an immense quality out of interstices in thought, through quick perception (he’s sensitive to fluctuations in language that refresh a poem: “a ghost,/ a gust of wind”); he takes the grand, fractures or punctures it, feeds into the almost insignificant his dream. To put it differently, he impregnates the little with immensity. Reading him, one’s reminded of the immensity of Pablo Neruda’s poems, and—moderately—of the chaotic genius of Paul Celan (what Celan did was to dramatize a mind trapped that chooses to make a home of its prison, to reconfigure the wounds there present, Dzukogi on the other hand ends up writing clumsy lines when he plays at Celan, because he is narrating his mind, in order to find an escape). However, it is Borges’s stories, particularly “The Aleph,” that these poems sharply recall. Dzukogi believes, “O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a King of infinite space. . .” (This excerpt from Hamlet opens “The Aleph.”)
[H]is daughter’s name morphs
into a world inside a hummingbird’s abdomen. — from “A Kind of Burden.”
Every single time he closes his eyes,
he pictures each drop of tears
swelling with Janna [paradise] inside. — from “Back to Life.” (Italics mine.)
Child, my mother says your body shortens
the distance between God and me—a bridge
sprawled from my doorstep into paradise. — from “Measuring the Length of Grief. . .”
Tap these words and they would ring, they’d ring precisely because Dzukogi’s dreams are ours, too. These surreal images are the very images of our inner world. Their truth, and strength, depends on their being accurate descriptions of shared dreams. For us, it could be deja vu, or it could be the experience of the Biblical king who dreamed, knew the essence of that dream, could not remember what the dream had been about, but recognized it immediately it was told to him. Beyond the magical, intimacy is created around a fetish of domestic objects: the gone girl’s clothes, shoes, crib.
Your Crib, My Qibla may be described as monotonous: images recur (buried milk, breast milk in a polythene bag; darkness, shadows, these are surplus; flowers keep shedding their colors); the same elegiac tone runs throughout the entire book, a sobbing voice that slips occasionally into that of the seriously depressed; and the content of the poems themselves are repetitive. But that would be missing the point. Dzukogi’s book is not so much a collection of different poems as it is one long poem with gentle shifts, vague variations within it; the book’s functional mode appears to be what Helen Vendler, writing on Whitman, has called “a reprise,” a poem previously written is taken and rewritten, cooked differently in the high-metaphor cauldron of the poet’s mind. But more importantly, the motivation of the poet’s exercise has necessitated its character.
In Roland Barthes’s The Mourning Diary, containing notes, written after his mother’s death, detailing and inspecting the “performance,” the ambivalence of his grieving, he writes, “What I find utterly terrifying is mourning’s discontinuous character.” Dzukogi must have felt the same way as he drafted these poems (the last poem is titled “One Year After,” it is safe to assume they were written in the twelve months following his daughter Baha’s death). He must’ve felt that if in his life he was compelled to mourn discontinuously, surprised in rare moments by joy or even by beauty, this “long poem” may be his way of negating that discontinuity, so that mourning becomes perpetual, a long affair with no side-glances. He tries to gift us the intensity of his suffering in just the same way he feels it off holidays, which must be most of the time. Your Crib, perhaps unlike Barthes’s diary, does not narrate grief; it is an exorcism of grief: the poet tries to banish from his body the legion and—because swine care nothing for pearls, do not grieve—command them into ours. The aesthetic problem has to do with the command, sometimes the poet’s authority falters. When Dzukogi cries us an ocean, we drown. And though we survive the water, we still have a faint wish we had never gone in.
Interspersing this book are poems that serve as a refrain part of the first section of what I’ve called “one long poem.” These poems are futuromaniacal, as Barthes writes: “As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.” In these “dream states” (each of which begins: “Today Baha is not dead”), Dzukogi “constructs” a future with his daughter in it: in one she is six; in another twelve; she is probably in her late teens; she tends to him as he dies.
Today Baha is not dead; she is listening to the flame
in the stove as it cooks her favorite meal,
the food teetering inside the pot.
She can do this language of understanding when it is cooked
by chewing the rice to feel if it’s gone soft.
She leans back against the wall in the silence that washes
the kitchen after her cell phone rang and she drops
the mackerel in the simmering oil. Her mother’s voice rings
a presence that touches their ears, and they listen. — “Windows”
“[D]o this language of understanding” is an awkward phrase, its meaning dances around it (we know that because of what surrounds it), yet never quite fits with the phrase employed. Nevertheless, this poem is remarkable for its simplicity, for what seems to be an effortless rendering of an afternoon in the domestic life of a young Nigerian woman. The pain is acute because we know that this scene so ordinarily rendered, this dream made flesh and bone, is one the central character will never appear in. If anyone is listening to the flame, it is the poet, and it is his heart that is burning. Baha is dead.
A copyeditor could have helped with a dozen concord issues in this book, sloppy shifts between tenses: “In her eyes he felt his being. . ./ when he kisses her cheek.” Poets have melted down time in a single poem, James Longenbach did so in Earthling; but the grammatical glitches here are glitches. Yet the specks of dust on these finely polished poems do not—in any way—diminish their beauty.