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The Faults of the Superficial

December 24/January 25NigeriaReading
Terminal Maladies

Illustration by Charles Owen / THE REPUBLIC.

the ministry of arts / books dept.

The Faults of the Superficial

In Terminal Maladies, Okwudili Nebeolisa’s poems of care, reminiscence, and longing are imbued with vulnerability and clarity. However, the expressive lucidity does not fully compensate for the lack of depth.
Terminal Maladies

Illustration by Charles Owen / THE REPUBLIC.

the ministry of arts / books dept.

The Faults of the Superficial

In Terminal Maladies, Okwudili Nebeolisa’s poems of care, reminiscence, and longing are imbued with vulnerability and clarity. However, the expressive lucidity does not fully compensate for the lack of depth.

In the literary world, particularly in Nigeria, it is often said that the hardest task of the poetic imagination is the happy versification of our happy experiences. Yet, time and time again, the realities of life and imagination reveal a brooding truth: that this romantic notion, elevated to conviction, is just as valid—or perhaps even more so—for the opposite claim: that the gloomy versification of our even gloomier experiences is a greater challenge. In Okwudili Nebeolisa’s debut poetry collection, Terminal Maladies, the preceding premise resonates with an air of irrefutability. This is not due to the poet’s inability to express himself—across these 41 poems of care, reminiscence, and longing, he undoubtedly does. Though sad and melancholic throughout the book, Nebeolisa’s expressions often feels weighted toward empirical narrative, relegating poetry to a secondary role.

Terminal Maladies is Nebeolisa’s intimate recounting of time spent with and apart from his mother, who lived with cancer ‘in her thigh for twenty-seven years,’ as described in the poem ‘Nomenclature of My Mother’s Name’. She passed away on 23 July 2023. The book is divided into three sections—‘Home’, ‘Abroad’, and ‘After’—each as reflective of its theme as the clearing of the cloudy sky after rainfall. Having left Nigeria for the United States in 2021 for his graduate education, Nebeolisa uses the first section, ‘Home’, to reflect on the moments shared with his mother at home as her illness took a lethal turn. The ‘Abroad’ section is filled with longing, particularly in Nebeolisa’s imaginings of home, shaped by the necessary circumstance of his travel abroad. The final section, ‘After’, offers a poignant, universal meditation on the memories of his mother following her death.

OF CHEAP IMAGINATIVE ECONOMY

If the opening of a book offers insight into its entirety, the smartly titled poem that opens Terminal Maladies, ‘Eventually’, leaves readers in a state of ambivalence. On one hand, Nebeolisa’s allusion to the impact of Norman Lewis’s abstract expressionist paintings—doubling as a metaphor for his unrestrained, tearful public reaction to the terrible news of his mother’s worsening cancer just a night prior—is apt: 

I did not know how to tell my colleague
what I had heard last night. I buried my face
sobbing, while he stood there, looking at me
as if I were a Norman Lewis painting.

This allusion feels apt because, when observing Lewis’s paintings, what one feels—at least for this viewer—is both surprise and a sense of consternation. It is a blend of mild amazement and confusion, a reaction that aligns seamlessly with the allusion’s comparison. In the poem, the speaker releases a necessary wave of vulnerability in the presence of a friend who remains clueless about the cause of the ‘sobbing’—a reaction akin to that of a neophyte stunned into silence by the strange simplicity of Lewis’s artwork, ‘American Totem’. On the other hand, the preceding lines that set the stage for the dramatic incident above read, at best, like a callow English translation of an unyielding Latin poem: 

The night my older brother told me
that our mother had cancer, I cried
for so long and then went to bed.
I dreamed that she had died. I woke up and cried.
If it happened in the dream, would calling it
trauma be apt? I buried my face
in the pillow so my brother who shared
the bed with me would not be aware.

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Though Nebeolisa’s diction—from the quoted lines to the pregnant ending that encapsulates the speaker’s sadness—is plainly constructed, the lucidity of his narrative alone cannot sustain the poetry. Even the simplest poems, if they are any good, require a sense of deception—a tinge of irony or a daring symbolic leap. These elements must seamlessly intertwine with the poem’s essential message, forming a relationship where neither takes precedence, but both exist in complementary harmony. Their interpretive symbiosis should be as close-knit and essential as the language of the poem itself. Naturally, many of Shakespeare’s works come to mind, as does Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ and more recently, Ross Gay’s ‘Thank You’. Nebeolisa’s ‘Not So Sure’, for instance, is simple and quite clear. But what underlying sense or layered insinuation—while not the telos of poetry, but nonetheless can signify both ambition and competence when present—exists in the following passage? Beyond its free narration, it remains just as figurative as any empirical fact stripped of every accompanying scrap of exaggeration: 

One evening while my mother and I watched
a miracle session on Synagogue TV,
she laid her hand on her swollen thigh,
closed her eyes, and asked God to heal her.
Since the diagnosis, Synagogue TV
or any channel where a pastor
was casting out demons or healing the sick,
were the only channels my mother would watch,
just as I became engrossed by articles
about the kind of my mother’s cancer
was discussed.

This particular stanza neither plumb beneath the surface of the words nor transcends their immediate sense—nothing is subtly inferred; no formal prestidigitation is employed to provoke deeper reflection. Nebeolisa’s consistent expressive lucidity, while impressive in its singularly self-serving sense, lacks sufficient imaginative economy necessary to convey the kind of profundity essential to poetry of lasting impact. In essence, clarity alone is an insufficient substitute for depth, simply because it is not a special achievement of great poetry. Rather, it is a baseline quality, unlike the mastery of irony or symbolic transfiguration, which, when executed well, elevate poetry to enduring significance.

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POUNDS OF GENUINENESS

Most of the poems in this collection—such as ‘Taking Stock’, which underwhelms for being imprecise in fulfilling the cultural contract it attempts to establish, ‘Memo’, and ‘The Last Thing’, which acquire a stronger interpretive status for ending the book—only resonate on the surface upon first reading. While Nebeolisa’s sincere vulnerability is commendable, there is a lack of symbolic depth. From the representation of his mother’s enduring sense of duty even in the face of terminal illness in the somewhat cheerful ‘My Father’s Clothes’, to the less accomplished variation on the same theme in ‘Kitchen Scene’, none of the poems offer a line of symbolic strength that might alleviate the monotonous tone of Nebeolisa’s poetic retelling. His frustrations, understandable given the terrible circumstance of his mother’s illness and his inability to be physically present for her care, remain expressed without the symbolic weight that might elevate them to the level of the poetically profound.

The second section of the book, aptly titled ‘Abroad’, revolves around the tragedy of the speaker’s restrictive circumstance. This theme culminates in what may be the most poignant line in the entire collection, its impact amplified by the simple technique of starting the poem with an often-dreaded truth. The line simply reads: ‘I only gave her money.’ The power of the line lies not in linguistic or syntactic showmanship, but in its utter plainness—a speech act that lays bare the speaker’s sadness. Compounded with the suggestiveness of the title of the poem in which it appears, ‘Things My Mother’s Children Did for Her’, the line encapsulates the speaker’s grief inflected with resounding clarity and emotional weight.

Although circumstance is the apparent reason why the speaker isn’t present to care for his ailing mother—unlike the rest of the children referenced in the poem, such as his older brother, who ‘traveled for hours / to spend a night with her in Zaria’—the title of the book’s second section, ‘Abroad’, suggests another plausible explanation, which is further explored in another poem. In the first stanza of ‘Open Windows’, the speaker narrates his previous traumatic experience of seeing the diminishing vitality of his father during his own bout of sickness. His father’s pervading voice, visually indistinguishable from the speaker’s, adds an ironic tint to the stanza. However, in the second stanza, the poem takes on a conjectural and heavily rhetorical tone, as the speaker unearths the destabilizing impact of parental ill health on the family—a condition that brings with it the constant thought of death’s proximity. The stanza reads:

Everyone keeps saying I haven’t come
to the end and I can only wonder about
the deficiencies of their best intents.
Do they not think I may want to rest,
like my father, who struggled in bed
who, when I hurried in to save his life, said
I should allow him to die? Do they not think
that while I kneel before my body, praying
day in day out, mumbling to myself, I may
be trying to unravel the code to life with the hope
that I will ironically find that of death?

Though it may be tempting to dismiss this revelation as weakness and cowardice, to do that would be reductive. A stronger argument has been raised in the first stanza of the poem, accentuated by the rhetorical question that ends the lines above—one that amplifies the speaker’s love for his mother, now realized through a spiritual lens. The effect of the final rhetorical question is heightened by the fact that the speaker fashions himself a realist throughout the book—as in the poem ‘Not So Sure’—a stance that stands in stark contrast to his mother’s unwavering spiritual devotion. Yet, who would not consider surrendering to a place of immediate comfort rather than braving the sea to endure a familiar trauma—first with one’s father, now again with one’s mother? It is human nature, after all, to recoil from personal pain and the suffering of our loved ones. So, it requires a profound honesty to cop to this ultimately human impulse we have come to see as a shameful imperfection. 

 

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CODA

In a book fraught with numerous shortcomings, Nebeolisa’s moments of gorgeous formal intentionality—his brilliant allusion to Lewis’s paintings and the succinct precision of the beginning of ‘Things My Mother’s Children Did for Her’—are alibis to his poetic gift momentarily subdued by the stultifying weight of his current preoccupation. While this reflects a compassionate stance toward the difficulty of exposing the grieving self to expressive vulnerability, it also underscores the poet’s enduring obligation to artistic self-awareness, even when confronted with the paralyzing weight of tragedy. Otherwise, how do we fully attend vengeance on the unfeeling circumstance that would rather see us cowed, afraid to live on after existential pain and hurt? By writing this book, Nebeolisa exemplifies this defiance only to some degrees. Yet, the body of his uncollected individual works—particularly ‘Strange Rain’ and ‘Near the End’—suggests that the flaws of Terminal Maladies are not the total reflection of the poet’s abilities but of the book itself. The stuttering flashes of ingenuity scattered throughout the collection indicates that we might yet be dazzled with the full potential of the poet in his next book, should he decide to write one⎈

TERMINAL MALADIES 
OKWUDILI NEBEOLISA
70 PP. AUTUMN HOUSE PRESS, SEPTEMBER 2024 
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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