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AJ. DAGGA TOLAR
The therapeutic and healing properties of poetry are not necessarily definite for the genre, but they exist and can for poets provide all of the relief for the mind if taken up as a mirror of the self.
For the man or woman who is heartbroken, poetry can become a journey into the self, a retrospective X-raying of fortunes and misfortunes, with the aim of understanding the course of one’s own existence as a being. To make meaning of life, of love and losses. Here, where life is a rope, a strangling rope. A noose. With all the properties to transmute into a broken rope all to the same consequence of death, leaving the living with nothing but a thin thread of a bridge to navigate this heavy knotted maze of a rope.
The Clinician Dami Ajayi with his collection, Affection & Other Accidents hands us poetry with a stethoscope on the human heart and emotions. He examines how love fates us on the rope called life, how steady love and his travails hit hard with pain than the expected pleasure. The accident of broken promises and betrayed expectations, the same love we fall into to hide and provide us with reasons to go on living inflicts pain and other accidents of death and dying on our frail frame and being.
The first take of the collection is the shattering of the myth that the man is always and has always been the player; the man is the one leaving the woman in the hang and walking away. Here we meet a poet personae of a man taking us through his odyssey in the hands of a woman.
The story like reading of the title poem AFFECTION & OTHER ACCIDENTS doesn’t betray the beginning of most love stories of always “A perfect beginning” (p.2). The sacredness of words imposes stinginess on their use. This does not now dismiss history and chronology from poetry. In INTERLOGUE I (p.8), the love runs its course and in “Three years &/four proposals later/we stand annulled, a premarital divorce.” From the time we go on to place/s in INTERLOGUE II (p.19), where the poem reads “… you did me dirty/ in five cities.”
The first of the city is Lagos, four others are to follow after… and this is where the collection, in reality, kicks off too. On “the Third Mainland Bridge at top speed.” With the poet personae set to deliver “a replacement”/’s “engagement ring”. We do not get to know how the original was lost. The heart in love is most incapable of reading meanings outside of consolidating and consummating love; this is all there is to a thesis. An antithesis in the opposite direction in the sense of an anti-love does not exist. Readers cannot help but wonder how a lady can be chatty to an audience about a “missing engagement ring”, and at the same time express an “unfaltering devotion” to the same man without a clue as to how an engagement ring went missing “barely three months I slid it into your finger.” (p.3)
Love is a blinding floodlight, without the need of eyes to behold the change of currents in the underbelly already undermining the love in pursuit. With love, the heart is all the mind that is needed, and the confession of words; the pronouncement of the four-letter-word; and the “aisle-bound affection” is all there is defining reality.
We motion from Lagos to Germany; inside of “A trained coach heading from Berlin to Cologne” (p.4) with the goal already for “A perfect Danish wedding with all your family & none of the mine”. The rude response to his mother over “questions about Denmark”. And to now suffer “our relationship” to ridicule to feed the other’s hunger and “appetite for public spectacle” and the terrible conclusion to end everything “to get off and never see you again”.
But love is notoriously known for its power of elasticity and so we hop to the fourth city of New Delhi in India. Is the poet coming to New Delhi to plead with Parvati; the dark skin goddess of love? This is a reversal of Hindu mythology; a reversal of role for Shiva is not now the one playing hard to get.
The poem reads itself out as a podcast from the Vedas: “Love endures. Love is relentless. Love trudges.” (p.5) to find out “if there was any love left, anything we could work with to bring our affection back to speed”. All of the bribe of favourite cuisine condiments of “locust beans, dried fish, dried ewedu leaves, fiery ground pepper” fully loaded on suitcases from Lagos was too poor for appeasement to make room for the purported lovebirds to engage each other in a question and answer session on the future.
The poet proved to be too Cain-like with his vegetable load of offerings. The Abrahamic God of Genesis was alive in India already eager to taste blood. Again another reversal of role. The poet personae are unable to play Cain to the end, and suffer love to a murder, as the thunder of don’t dos come raining down; “Do not leave the light bulbs on. Do not leave skid marks on the porcelain. Do not leave used plates in the kitchen sink. Do not play music too loud. Do not sit. Do not write at night. Do not ask questions.”
From India with no answers we head to the fifth city; London. Distance should no longer be a hindrance to love, not when it can be obliterated with the touch of a button and two hearts can to and fro be connected, enabling the flow of soothing words to help temper the crisis of navigating the capital of the former British empire and the demands of a new job. Day one: “a deluge drenched me”. Day two: “slid & fell on Sunderland Avenue”. Day three: “tripped on the underground station & fell. I sat on the floor with my overtly yellow luggage & wept.” And nothing but the damning verdict of “incapable of living in Europe”.
London becomes the city of finishing off. The “London days, / days edged like a bet … /days trembling from denouement, /… /days notched by uncertainties, (p.11). But not without flickers of the flame of hope for a love already “threadbare” (p.7) and thinning out to sparkle light back to life has the He receives the news of the She coming to London. Alas, however the bomb drops, delivered by a precise phrase from of her coming to London “to apologize, not to beg”. More like two Generals of opposite camps at the peace talk to end the hostility with “a handshake & keeps dignity intact.” There is no understanding of the reason for the bitterness even in “a small war over toilet rolls” (p.25).Everything is in reversal form. How love came to feel like war and peace-making leaves the other with a broken heart.
The pain is on exhibition in AUBADE TO MY GREYING (p.9) the unrealisation of the dream of fatherhood (at least for now). They look forward to in a congenial coupling of man and woman in coitus copulation, for a “daughter” calling on “Daddy ….” Now we know everything is gone burst. How consoling is poetry to a broken heart even when it gives birth to poems to “progenies” that “don’t breathe air;/ they sit on shelves/& I wear/proudly the badge “author.”
Ebu is the Yoruba word for curse, as the poet plays Jesus in full blast damning the fig tree for fruitlessness in the poem MARY’S IN INDIA (p.20). The woman in our story finally gets named; Mary. And the poet discards civility to pass a harsh sentence of condemning her to loneliness. “Mary, /the sun will rise &/set on you alone today” and “… tomorrow” and “… always”. This is the final walk away; there is no return anymore to this love.
UNRELAIBLE NARRATOR (p.23) is the title for this fallback to the memory of the good and beautiful times. Of “shades of the nights, /the sour edges of the forbidden. /She would rest her head on/my bony knee & wait for daybreak, soft music cooing.”. “The night hasn’t changed its /shade & texture much, but people change/ & their circumstances” This much is what has rocked the DECLARATION (p.24) of “unflinching affection”. The poet poaches on the entire meeting of the classic song: LIFE GOES DOWN LOW (p.25) by the Lijadu Sisters to next fete us with his transition from the hilltop of desires and feeling of forever bliss to the valley of “despair”.
And love is “the dyspnoeic flame of an oil lamp” that gets no spark to life as “strangers do not offer smiles” of light “from behind dark face masks”. And the flame is assailed by the constant “cold calls” without any protective shield of a warming heart. What more is left as the poet announces his disentanglement with the line “I acknowledge my exile” from love.
And the night becomes the refuge for the broken heart. The sense of loss is now acknowledged, the man can wander into the dark unknown and alone to behold “Lupita dancing alone” (TONIGHT p.27). This is where therapy can begin, yes in a “nightclub”, burning the pains out of the heart watching other men “licking” the dancing Lupita “with their eyes”, and as well as listening to “the DJ” playing song after song. Lupita is medicine, prescribed in music and dance. Lupita is medicine in is self-indulgence without temper for anything or anyone else “outside her body/she will mind her business & whine her waist/as though there is no haste,/as though she made time.” The Broken heart is one and at the same time a split personality sharing the same space as the eyes watching Lupita dancing on stage and other men watching her but also as Lupita in her disregard for life’s “complexion & its complexities” and “sublime her worries”.
BIG HANDS (p.28), transports us back to tricks the mind can play on a broken heart seeking healing, the temptation to dwell in the past and not put it aside. How interruptions and eruptions of erotic desires even as ghosts can further damage the heart to continue to ail. So in sharing a table once again, “the urinal” is a sanctuary to aid the mind to not forget the handy lesson of Lupita. The poet’s personae are healing, and temptations must be avoided. Please keep your handshake to yourself, “I had folded your memory into/shelves where cobwebs belong.” WE MOVE. The reader is all with the poet, no doubt in full empathy. This is nothing but WOKE. To walk out into the night and “navigate [existence] with a Samsung & song.”
Continued on BookArtVille, September 2, 2022.
(A Review of Dami Ajayi’s Affection & Other Accidents, published by Radi8 Ltd., Lagos, Nigeria, 2022).
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