Art germinates from the soil of experience, hence, it is bound to time. Thus, it is only inevitable that poetry as an art either retrospects the past, introspects now or foreshadows the future. However, and this is my concern, although experience is often conceived as ‘personal,’ writing a collection of purely personal poems can be dicey: the language is belaboured so much that it bears a burden heavier than simply ‘enacting’ the poet’s private experience. It is tasked by the same muse to re-enact. And in re-enacting, each poem must not only stay true to the creative course (shedding itself of obsolescence), but also make the collective discernible even in the personal, so that each poem becomes a mirror through which the reader looks at their own world. It brings to mind James Baldwin’s statement, which, I think, applies to writers as well, that the task is in “mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.” And—I essay from Baldwin’s postulation—it is here that language is belaboured—in letting the mirror (language) of each poem be able to magnify others’ light. We should be reminded that, while this task may not be primal to most poets, in the end, it is what bonds the reader to the re-enacted experience, as can be seen in Origami. In laying forth the origami of himself, Babatunde has written a reality which we all take part in.
The poems in this chapbook are reminders of what we once passed through; they are, as James Joyce’s title says, ‘portraits of a young man” looking back in time (as seen in poems such as: “Origami,” “The beautiful ones were never born,” “The genealogy of misery”), mulling over the present (“Where is home”), and, sometimes, interrogating the future (“An ode for those who will never return”). Babatunde writes, as the title of one of the poems depicts, ‘poems in which he comes clean;’ poems in which he attempts to be as honest, pure, as odacious even, to his memories, to the ubiquity of human condition and to the creative course.
The poems here embody the truism that there’s always something of our childhood with us as we grow through life; hence, as Niyi Osundare once says, ‘looking forward is looking backwards’ and vice versa. The origami of our lives is forged from, not without, a beginning. In the eponymous poem, it is shown that it begins with the set of moral folds into which we are sewn as children. The poet writes: “Boy, come here/Give ear to me/Son, do not spend your strength on women/Father tells boy.” Even if the last statement (“father tells boy”) is not mentioned, one can easily discern that underlying the admonition is the voice of a father, an adult guardian, instructing (“folding”) a child into the man he’s to be.
While the poem reads like a personal narrative, it depicts a peculiar experience: an adult offering a moral compass to guide a child through life. In the poem “Bundle of question,” we’re reminded that every child, at some point, develops the gene of curiosity, of questioning—the world of the family, of nature (the love or fear of it), actions and reactions of adults—“Do cloths fall from heaven?/Why does daddy get two meats while I get only one?” (“Bundle of questions”) And it is through such inquisitiveness that the origami begins to fold, or unfold. One can’t help but admire the poet’s terse recollection of not just his childhood, but ours as well.
In some of the poems, especially those about memories, the persona brings to mind Sherwood Anderson’s character (George Willard) portrayed in the short story “Sophistication” (1919). Sherwood’s story is a bildungsroman, written against the backdrop of childhood introspection and retrospection, just like some of the poems in Babatunde’s chapbook. It is a simple story of a poor lad caught up in the web of nascent modern American adulthood. In the story, George Willard, young, innocent, appears perturbed by the anxiety of success and the imminence of failure, the seeming unsophisticatedness of rural life and the overwhelming demand of urban ways. Yet, in this maze of aloneness, he desires to be seen, even if briefly, by someone; for him, it should be a woman “because he believes women are gentle and will (easily) understand, for, most of all, he wants understanding;” and such understanding should come from a girl (Helen White), the daughter of a Winesburg banker, whom he was once fond of in his childhood days. He then sets about mulling over his childhood with her.
Although Babatunde’s persona is not a boy soured by love, he, too, is caught up in a similar awakening, as he takes a backward tour through phases in his becoming. Reading poems like “Bundle of questions,” “Of failure,” “The beautiful ones were never born” (which parodies Ayi Kwei Armah’s title), “Boys are stones,” “The prison called freedom;” one hears echoes of Sherwood’s summation of Willard’s life, captured in the statement: “There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes a backward view of life.” In the poem “Boys are stone,” in which Babatunde writes: “Blame me not when I wear the flint for a face/For I must sharpen the stone that I am,” one not only fathoms adult awakening, but, as Sherwood writes of George Willard, an affirmation of “a moment when he [the boy, finally] crosses the line into manhood” (“Sophistication”).
Babatunde writes with tender recollections of phases in life, just like Sherwood’s George Willard does of his love for Helen White. It’s paradoxical how such fondness layers through time into adulthood, that we somehow wish they could replay, albeit, in our now-mature perception of the world. Here, again, is another verisimilitude which Willard and Babatunde’s persona, exemplified in the poem “The prison called freedom,” written for a lover, Ajike, shares. The poem, with its many innocent confessions, reminds the reader of those moments during childhood when inexpressible fondness for the opposite sex creeps into our innocent play,s and we begin to think life could gift us certain dreams. It is this ilk of love, now realised in adulthood, that the poet lyricises when he declares: “Recently I have found myself staring into the night skies/and muttering your name/Nobody told me love would be like this.”
But the thread which knits the thoughts and moods in Origami is not only about love; rather, about loss, regrets, sorrow and emptiness left by death. The poem “The beautiful ones were never born” embodies the poet’s moment of sadness occasioned by the demise of his grandmother, as “mama’s eyes, twin doves, look on lifelessly as the drama starts,” then her face “pales out as the doctor relays the news.” In the poem, “My grandmother never runs out of songs,” the poet reminisces about fond times with his grandma, who always sings “songs of wisdom/of soul that knows that this world is not her own;” songs that the poet sings some days, “hoping she would ascend by the tone of his voice.” Remembering these songs is a way of “celebrating our grandmother,” a way of looking back through loss and cherished moments, too.
The strength of the poem is in its narrative and dramatic lucidity. The reader not only picks the tone of sadness, but also sees the bodies falling on the floor in a grieving spree, as “mother throws herself on the floor,” as “father’s eyes fill up with tears,” as “the doctor swipes his hands over grandma’s face.”
Babatunde shows great perceptiveness to detail. However, although the poem “The beautiful ones were never born” is undoubtedly one of the best poems therein, the shortcoming of the chapbook is the recycling of words and expressions like “origami topples,” “fold,” etc. There’s the brazen wave of clichés and the lack of attempt to alter them: “This body of water is war and turbulence.” “War” is “turbulence” and vice versa, hence redundant. There are many redundant sentences in the chapbook that a careful edit could have helped to trim. In “Echoke/Poetry, a body of water,” the reader could be literally choked, nay, drowned beyond imagining in the depth of clichéd language flowing through almost every line. Here’s the opening line: “Wade across this stream of words, swim through this body of water, for poetry is a body of water.” If the poet is as intentional about language as he is about his subject matter, more could be gained where something seems to be missing. Between language and subject matter, the use of one without the other makes a chapbook a little too smug to read, much like chewing pepper and taking water. Nonetheless, one evocative statement from the poem, “Of failures”, is worth quoting, and I would end with it: “Sometimes, even the fire that burns the phoenix will see nothing stirred except its ashes.”
Nket Awaji, who formerly published under the pseudonym Nket Godwin, is a poet, essayist and book reviewer writing from the city of Port Harcourt, Rivers State. His work has appeared in Afrocritik, Euinoia, Afreecan Read, Lion and Lilac, Yarnz, Eboquill, Africa Writer. He has been long listed for Unserious Collective, 2024. When not writing, he teaches English language and Literature. He tweets @nket-awaji