An Interpreter of Diasporic Nigerian Consciousness

Autobiomythography of

Illustration by Charles Owen / THE REPUBLIC.

the ministry of arts / books dept.

An Interpreter of Diasporic Nigerian Consciousness

In his fourth full-length poetry collection, Autobiomythography of, Ayokunle Falomo intertwines his personal and diaspora history with Nigeria’s colonial past, anatomizing the psychological and cultural impacts of colonialism on the Nigerian identity.
Autobiomythography of

Illustration by Charles Owen / THE REPUBLIC.

the ministry of arts / books dept.

An Interpreter of Diasporic Nigerian Consciousness

In his fourth full-length poetry collection, Autobiomythography of, Ayokunle Falomo intertwines his personal and diaspora history with Nigeria’s colonial past, anatomizing the psychological and cultural impacts of colonialism on the Nigerian identity.

In 2020, when I first encountered the late American critic, Harold Bloom’s pronouncement of Walt Whitman as the poet of the American consciousness, I wondered what a poet could possibly have done to deserve such venerable estimation. I discovered that the poet had to have written poems such as ‘Song of Myself’, ‘When Lilac Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’, ‘The Sleepers’, ‘As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life’, ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, and ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’. The first of these, in particular, teems with the sort of strangeness that defines literary originality, as it does fazing folderols. The defining characteristic of this literary equivocation is the centrality of the American consciousness to the poems. In his latest poetry collection, Autobiomythography of, Nigerian-American poet, Ayokunle Falomo, aspires to a similar feat of cultural representation, drawing inspiration—albeit with some anxiety—from Whitman’s stylistic approach to explore his own cultural and historical inclinations.  

Although the title of the book, Autobiomythography of, is a mouthful, much of the 45 poems that follow cast an immersive light to its ambitious scope. The ambition is promiscuous in nature, encompassing the poet’s autobiography, the biographies of others, and the grand subject of his mythmaking: Frederick Lugard, the British colonial administrator in Nigeria. It is also ambitious in its attempt to hold all these diverse threads into a single, cohesive collection. At over 125 pages, however, the book is brimming with poems of varied motivations.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF EVERYTHING

After the complex, stylistically disjointed, histrionically interwoven, part depressive, part historicizing, and notably baggy revelation of the poet’s origin story in ‘Ode to a Boy’s Missing (& Unnamed) Tooth’, which opens the book, comes the first eponymous poem in Autobiomythography. It opens with a grand allusion, comparing the fateful birth of humanity with his own:  

In the beginning, there was a garden.
And then, a fire. Except it was no fire.
But what to say of the furnace that was
my mother’s womb. And my father,
without whom there’d be no kindling.

In this poem, Falomo reflects on the intertwining of personal history with broader cultural, historical and mythological narratives: ‘the body is a country, this tangled history / of flesh, bone, and blood.’ Fashioning his self as both individual and collective, he establishes the blending of the personal and the mythic as a recurring motif throughout the collection. However, before the unification of the true self and the imagined in the character of Lugard in the later parts of the book, Falomo first explicates the personal, shaped by the history of his transformation and the legacy of displacement. As a history of the transformation of Falomo the man, poems like ‘Two Truths & A Lie’ and ‘Autobiomythography (Reprise)’ brim with effusive impulses but offer too little in terms of poetic substance, making enduring them twice a commendable feat. Even more irksome is ‘On Fire (Or, Last Wishes)’, with its jobbing ruminations: it meanders from wishing joy for his loved ones in its opening, dabbing in the creation myth of the Yorùbá people, to lamenting the imperfections that history reveals over time—all without any marked thematic coordination:  

To wish myself a marriage-
less existence is to wish myself

the certainty that I won’t repeat
history—an echo

of all the wrong notes
in an unending song.

Did the first caveman to
discover fire sing

its vibrant flame to embers
and did he call it a love

song? What is the name
for the wish for everything

to stop burning? Does the arsonist
ever wish to one day grow up

to be a firefighter? Is it wrong to wish
for a different origin story

for the consummation that brought
me here? Is it wrong to wish

I was consumed in the first fire?

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The poem continues unremarkably for the next eight pages. However, in the impressively titled ‘Toward an Apophagic Genealogy’, Falomo’s talent for compression comes torrentially to the fore. Set in Ann Arbor, the poem reflects on the poet’s distance from his ancestral homeland and the challenges of tracing his lineage. For instance, in this foreign land, in which the poem is set, everyone and everything is unfamiliar. In Nigeria—especially in one’s birthplace—it is a socio-cultural norm that everyone knows everyone else in their immediate community. But in this foreign land, Falomo writes:  

I can’t tell you who birthed Comfort,
Jeremiah, Janet, or Isaiah, but I am
here, ankle-deep in snow, in a here

no one I come from has ever stepped,
might never step, foot on.

In the poem, ‘Country as Khaos’, Falomo explores displacement. He questions the creation of Nigeria and the role of colonialism in shaping its troubled trajectory—a critique that is more subtly inferred than overtly declared. The poem is quoted below in its entirety to show how every lineation and every departure from convention contribute to its interpretive power. 

Who created Nigeria? Almighty God or Lord Lugard?

—@HENRYSHIELD

at the beginning there was
you—vast & unbounded,

without form, though not
for long: for the hands of

the lord formed you into
what he saw fitting, you

a mystery he could not a-
void & oh when he beheld

the work of his hands, did
he see, then, the void you

were & would become?

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With that rhetorical question, Falomo suggests that we continue to move as though formless, much like before the unification of the protectorates over a century ago, rather than as a cohesive nation. Considering Nigeria’s bloody history—one that continues into the present—who could convincingly dispute this inference? Essentially, ours is a fragile unity, and ‘Nigeria’ itself often feels like a term of mere patriotic convenience. The formal intricacy and thematic depth of this short poem, ‘Country as Khaos’, are not only matched but outpaced by the pervading music of celebration and joyous anticipation in ‘To You in Your Dark Lake Moving Darkly Now. In this sequence of poems, charting the speaker’s varying moods during his first few weeks as a potential parent, Falomo delivers what amounts to an anthem for beginnings: 

My blue,
it could be true,

it could be myth,
that boiling blue-

berries in milk
gave the early

colonists gray
paint. It matters

little, my truest
blue. I cannot

wait to paint
the world with you.

This is the speaker at the seventh week of his child’s conception. But following the playful imaginings of the 14th week, the cute didactic ruminations of the 21st, and the depressive historical reminiscences of the 28th, comes the inevitable reaction of any responsible prospective parent to the horrors of this tumultuous century—a world their future child will later have to face alone. By the 35th week, so close to the child’s birth, the speaker’s excitement about the world awaiting their child turns sour as he becomes freshly attuned to the harsh realities of the world: ‘are you ready, / are you dear child, dear lord what have we done…’ As far as Falomo’s autobiographical poems go, this is as close to impeccable as he gets. Not even ‘Self-Portrait with Truth at the Bottom of a Well’ and ‘The Motherland Cento’—both laden with lethal debilities yet central to the collection in their formal and thematic ambition—come close to registering the same universal resonance.  

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THE BIOGRAPHY OF ‘LUGARD & I’

At the heart of this collection lies Falomo’s commendable attempt at mythmaking, where he elects the British colonial administrator Frederick Lugard, also known as Lord Lugard, as one of the central figures. The mythologizing sequences are collectively titled ‘Lugard & I’, with specifying subtitles. However, the poem that serves as the essential introduction to Lugard’s character is not among those bearing the primary title. Instead, it is a piece ironically titled ‘Litany’, which, despite its placement as a conclusion—appearing after all the ‘Lugard & I’ poems—functions more aptly as a prelude, setting up how history and Nigerians perceive the deceptive colonialist. According to Falomo, the poem, ‘contains social media comments about Lugard, and we can imagine the nature of those comments, filled with the characteristic serio-comical tone of Nigerian expression:  

Lord Lugard, may Satan double your Portion
of Fire in hell. No matter how wide the gates of heaven
are you will never get there. Lord Lugard, it shall not be
well with you. Lord Lugard Chineke Kpoo gi Oku any-
where you are! Oni sun re o, wherever you are.

These points are all valid, particularly when considering Lugard’s racist characterization of Africans in his 1922 The Dual Mandate and the casualties of the 1918 Adubi War, which arose from the imposition of direct taxes by the colonial government under his governorship on the ̀gbá people. However, the poet does not overlook the irony of Lugard’s central role in the unification of Nigeria. This is reflected in the thematic complexity of the work, which aims for a nuanced representation rather than resorting to simplistic and convenient vilification. 

Indeed, Falomo’s approach to the character of Lugard exemplifies what distinguishes poetry from mere rants and volatile speech—terms that might technically apply to the litanies quoted above. Falomo’s engagement is not only measured and deliberate in language but rich in imaginative reinterpretation. In the notes appended to the book, where Falomo discusses his influences and sources, he offers further guidance on reading and interpreting his myth-making poems: he cautions against reading the sequence as if the only two characters featured are himself and the infamous colonialist. Yet, even with Falomo’s caution, the ultimate accomplishment of this mythic sequence remains evident: it compels us to examine our colonial history with a finer sense and keener interest, even in poems where neither Lugard nor Falomo is a central figure.  

There is no helping going back to history when confronted with the challenge posed by the final entry in the sequence, a poem titled ‘Lugard & I: Invoice’. Perhaps the most pregnant and definitely the most poignant poem in the collection, it delivers a devastating resonance that encapsulates the worst of the colonial era: 

A man sells his mother for a bottle of gin   
broad well-worn roads = broad well-worn roads
Who can sell anyone if there is no demand
scarce cowries = not enough cowries (see daydream)
A man sells his daughter for a gun

Saved from the apparent sentimentality of ‘Litany’ and juxtaposed with the mire of history, the content of the poem, ‘Lugard & I: Invoice’, is no less terrifying than the revelation that the same people our forefathers called their own were capable of such inhuman acts as selling their kin to slavery for such trivialities like phials of gin. Teetering on the dark shores of our bygone yet rebounding history, the poem shows us our own limitations and complicity in a bagful of myth. Through poems such as ‘Slice of Life’, ‘Yesterday Was a Very Dark Day’, and ‘Father, God, Lugard’, Falomo crafts a kind of twisted patrimony, merging the historical weight that Lugard embodies and the intimate roles he represents. By ‘digging into the past’ and expressing a desire to transform violent legacies into something new, the poems tackle the uprootedness, and the lasting psychological and cultural impacts of colonialism on Nigerian identity. History, myth and introspection blend seamlessly to create a complex reel of postcolonial experience. Imbued with imaginative tact, Falomo’s Autobiomythography of is to each of us an essential reading. 

While it may be an overstatement to crown Falomo the new poetic pontifex of the Nigerian consciousness from the diaspora—especially given the equally deserving contributions of poets like Gboyega Odubanjo, Theresa Lola and ‘Gbenga Adeoba, with their recent or forthcoming works—it would be equally unbecoming to overlook him as a strong candidate. As the coined term Autobiomythography implies, both in its lexical substance and conceptual form, this book is a profound exploration of the Nigerian experience—at home and abroad. It is also a collection of stories from Nigeria’s past and present, interweaving these temporal residues into an enlightening and deeply reflective documentary

AUTOBIOMYTHOGRAPHY OF 
AYOKUNLE FALOMO
125 PP. ALICE JAMES BOOKS, SEPTEMBER 2024 
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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