The first striking thought upon engaging Akinyemi’s beautiful offering is the words Teilhard de Chardin said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” The collection A god in a Human Body is something of a foray into this path; it attends to themes of identity, divinity, and the human experience. The poems, like forty-four paintings making a mosaic, give the vibe of a collage of emotions and reflections on the meaning of existence, marked by juxtaposition of the sacred and mundane. The collection is an outcome of inward gazing into personal struggles and societal observations, offering a multidimensional view of what it means to be both human and spirit. What we have is a bait and guide to contemplate our own identities and experiences in relation to larger existential questions that implicitly follow.
Breaking the kola with Dreamland, we go straight to business. The persona introduces himself with confidence: “I say, I’m a god in a human body/ a broken vessel,/ a wandering spirit.” This identity causes terror, as seen in the lines: “In dreamland, the demons are breaking sweats, scampering to safety. The tear gas of fury stings like a cobra’s venom”; you wouldn’t want to take such a being for granted. This identity finds reiteration in the description, “My spirit is a god, abami eda–/ strange being./ He wakes every morning,/ shouting, pacing the room, panting/ like a man under a spell.”
Being a god in a human body means the daringness to do and to be—to do the unthinkable, unimaginable, and improbable; it is to be undefeatable. In another poem, To Dare is to Live the point is continued; hence, “O, ye gods, to dare is to step out of a looming shadow and live.” It is given that the poet presupposes whoever picks this piece to read is Kin and Kindred, hence the summons, being a gentle yet poignant reminder, “Tell my kin and kindred to never settle for less,/ for they are from the lineage of warriors./ Tell them that, like me, they are gods borrowing a human body.” This identity is contagious. So when asked, who are you? The response is a full poem “You’re a god in a human body./ Rain fire like burning coal./ Breathe!”
Who’s this poet again? He’s an accidental feminist, as a titled piece states. Why? He responds to this identity with “I don’t need a masterclass in feminism./ My girl-child is the muse/ to rain bullets of fury on patriarchal voices.” Is this the poet’s way of reiterating the famous call: we should all be feminists? A sane feminist is the positive of all the opposites expressed in Deranged; rational feminists will say they are not anchored on hating men, and by implication, any man-hating woman is simply deranged. There’s no room for misandry or misogyny; hence, “Hold the deranged one tightly before they soil you in these gender wars.” A sane way of seeing a gender is contained in A Father to a Queen and Bloom. This picture is embellished in the piece Portrait of a Goddess, the stupefied persona confesses thus, “You’re a deity –/ I’m a saint worshipping at your temple.” This calls to mind the words of the teacher John Keating in Dead Poets Society to the effect: “every woman is a cathedral, boys, worship anywhere you see one.”
This collection goes hard on societal issues. The poem Hostage paints a familiar picture of the Nigerian people, the origin of the poet. The fragility of identity is touched upon; even more, the sacred is exposed: “They say these lands belong to their fathers./ The bandits with no ancestors/ have held us to ransom/ and our gods are looking on in sheer disbelief.” Identity is tied to skin colour. The African is reckoned as black and beautiful. In Brown Skin, a refined jab is aimed at those not proud of their skin colour—those given to bleaching maybe. The persona schools us to learn and say with him: “My brown skin is an/ armour. The earth painted me/ the colour of grit.”
The sheer interplay between sacred and mundane shows itself in the poem Sacrament, wherein a line reads, “The sacraments have been turned into fiery instruments.” Implying there’d be some burnings. Sacraments are sacred rites made from material elements. It is simply matter pointing to the divine and the divine responding through matter. Talking of divine and human, the piece Divinity brings out its marked distinction yet still inseparable from the mundane; it reads: “The divine cannot be crushed by mere mortals./ Evil chants are a sign of grave danger./ The gods are angry./ What gods? What anger?/ Who dares wrestle with the divine?” There are levels to these things, it seems to say.
There’s no denying the complexity of human experience. In this corner of the universe, uncertainties abound. It could be near-death experiences (I dodged many missiles of hate wrapped in fake love); it could be flood and fire; could it be the changing Shade of Love? It could be that “The ghosts of toxicity are haunting”; it could be searching (for a species, a god in the human body), amongst others. In the face of such a dilemma, there’s a solution Pray; it goes to say whatever it be: “Pray it/ Say it/ So tomorrow will be fine.” To pray is to unite the human with the spiritual; in this case, it is to enter fully into what should be our default mode. To pray is a Choice the poet proposes because “Today’s choices are deliberate and delicate –/ like fragile china about to break,” but what is more? We are free to choose but never free are we of the consequences of whatever choice we make.
Carnage paints the portrait of a writer. A writer is a critic, a gadfly, a moral compass. The irony is that he causes an orderly carnage. It does seem that “Invisible darts fly out of control,” but not literally out of control; the out of control is simply the bounden duty to never repress that which the spirit seeks to utter through him. Mouthpiece is a jab at those who fail to live up to the expectation placed on them by virtue of their status or office; those who have sold their conscience to the highest bidder. “Cold shoulder” is a metaphor for failure to stand up for what is right. The poet avers to be anything but a mouthpiece for such a lot. A strong reprieve is addressed to religion, especially the African (Nigerian) variant. Describing it, the poet taunts thus: “The black man’s religion is blood thirsty –/ holy wars, seventy-two virgins/ served as a meal for a gory conquest in a paradise of orgies./ The white man’s religion has left us on the precipice,/ broken and shattered.” Sexual promiscuity is not spared as contained in the piece Whore-ship which drives the message home that the temple—that a goddess’s body is—should not fall to disrepute. Harken to this: “Run from this woke generation before your spirit becomes a casualty.” And I tell you, if to presume the thoughts of the poet, the casualty will—as in the case of J.P. Clark’s—not be only the slain but the society as a whole.
This collection bears the hallmark of an intentional work, especially in terms of its message and style. Having dwelt much on the former, a highlight on the latter will do well to amplify the riches contained. The metaphors abound even without saying – take sacraments and angry birds as a sample; but there’s also parallelism as seen in “She was a goddess in a human body/ In the human body, she was a goddess”; the pun intended with “whore-ship and whore-sheep”; the metonymy in “more Christian than the pope”; the ritual chant that marked Indomitable Son; the poetic license in coining “shero” so as to express praise – Goosebumps of mother’s love (unsurprising for one who traces his lineage to wonder women – something of amazons); the hyperbole in “send me into the high heavens”, “Drown me in the ocean of thanks”; the repetitions in Thankful, a verse from whence reads: “Pause and reflect./ Pause and cry,/ cry and pause”; the simile in “refreshes my soul like a spring meadow”; the rhetorical device in “Who will interpret the words of the living to the dead?”; without exhausting the devices we need to add lastly that enjambment marks almost all the pieces, a signal example is Stories, which reads:
Beneath her eyes weretears – rock bottom. Her eyestell hidden stories.
This collection is fit to be a collection of short stories. But as the collection of poems that it is, fitting is the peroration of Jide Badmus, who insists that “a poem is an encounter, a transcendental expedition into a dark universe of knowing. Each line is a miracle. It is like sex with a lover—each time, the experience is different. Sacred. Takes you to the fringes of screams & tears. To say something is spiritual is to say that it is participatory. Like worship. Like bringing heaven down to earth!”