I.
Everything beautiful has already been created; meaning is water, and interpretation is space. Creation is heavy with all that’s been written, painted, and sung, and comfort eludes me when I search for the pristine beauty in everything. Worldly beauty can be flat, and I don’t always trust it. I want the underbelly, the decaying garden, the abandoned bridge in the middle of an otherwise perfect place. I’m scratching through language for the slow, insistent drip of water in the attic that could make the ceiling cave in and flood the entire living room. I’m haunted by the grief that pools around your legs, the one that you hold firmly, bend into different shapes, and plaster over all the walls and surfaces of your home. What’s left to me, if not the pursuit of the beautiful in its most fragile, visceral forms? What’s left to me, if not to skin the flesh, expose the layer of nerves firing under, and linger in the spaces where ghosts live?
Edmund Burke said the sublime is born in terror—in pain, in danger, in the shadows that press too close. I want to write about those things—the terrible, the sublime, the loads that bury us. Yet, I cannot ignore the weight of this task, the responsibility that comes with undressing terror, especially when I realise that sometimes, I become the terrible thing. To confront such themes is to expose my belly to the world, to contend with the ugliness in my humanity and the sordid past that pushes bile up my throat.
John Green puts it simply in Sunsets, “It’s hard to trust the world like that, to show it your belly. There’s something deep within me […] that is terrified of turning itself to the world”. I confess the same fear. I confess my fear of turning myself inside out for the world to see. I confess that I betray my poems. I confess that the burden of capturing the inexpressible while spilling my ugliness on pages causes me to be unfaithful to the truths I want to tell. Still, courage becomes inescapable when the beauty of pain and danger stares me in the face every day, for when the Creator of all that is beautiful calls me to be strong and courageous, how can be anything but?
By subverting beauty and extracting decay, something raw is born, naked and flickering with honesty. From the ashes of what once seemed beautiful, a new form rises, more enduring in its promise of renewal. I feel it in the father who starts fires in a not-so-distant land, the mother who will no longer be known beyond her child, the daughter who could eat the world and still not be full, and the cold that builds a nest in our bellies. I rage against the fear of fragility, throw myself against the grotesque, the broken, and the unbeautiful. I descend in madness and trail along the edges of consciousness until I come to a place where the beautiful softens, becomes pliable enough to roll over, show me its belly and reveal its hidden agitations and exhaustions.
II.
Much of my poetry is (about) my body—the swollen body, the sensual body, the starved body, the resilient body, the abandoned body, the sacrificial body. My body is spilt over the pages, and my organs coil around each word.
I confront the absurdity of existence with these words until poetry becomes a burden. To carry the weight of myself, my body, in all its delirium, has broken my back more times than I can handle. I see the swollen foot, aching belly, strained neck and back, itch in my chest, blood under my nails, and body soaked in Dettol. Every time I see my body in my poems, I am both in awe and painfully aware of its porousness, that the beauty I once believed would sustain me is now exhumed by a constant terror that feeds my work.
Words are spirits, poems the vessel. These spirits need stillness and silence to whisper language to those willing to wait and bear their burdens. As a child, the only way I could tell that I was home was to listen to the natural rhythm of my environment—the silence broken now and then by the sound of chickens bocking and the rustle of leaves in my mother’s backyard. I grew up in the quiet, which means the spirits found me early. We did not have much electricity, so in the absence of artificial noise, the spirits could come and observe as I lived my mostly lonely life. I did not seek out the spirits in search of any kind of meaning. I was too young to know if life meant something or should mean anything. But they found me. Something urgent and piercing swirled around me, prickled the hair on my skin, and settled a delicious ache in my stomach. Their sharp, soothing presence layered the air with contradictions I could not pinpoint. Of course, I didn’t have the words for it then, but it always seemed that I was lured into a ritual with a dance I couldn’t escape as my life went on.
Sometime after I broke the bones in my leg and had to stay off my feet, my favourite pastime was lying still and listening to the world fill up with artificial sounds. Inside, the ceiling fan above me creaked, the deep freezer outside my room pulsed with its low vibration, and the distant murmur of the TV echoed through the walls. Outside, the city wore itself out. The flicker of streetlights, the blaring horn of a passing truck, the cars crawling in endless circles. Too many voices, too many bodies. I’d rest my left ear against the pillow, feeling my pulse thrum like a clock ticking in my chest—thump, thump, tick, tock. I’d panic that I didn’t have much time. Time for what? The constant droning of my starved, aching body dug its claws into my waking hours, into my dreams, into my words.
Months after the accident, it boggled me how difficult it was to find the words for your pain but how easy it was to love the process even when you don’t have the mind for it. In the screaming and thrashing against the beautiful, I always think of telling a story. I tell myself stories at all times—in whispers, in thoughts, in fragments. I do it even when I don’t have the courage for it, on days when something fractures inside me, on days when I’m reeling with bone-deep pain that I can’t even find the strength to walk on my own, on days when I can only write one sentence because my thoughts have fused into a tight ball that I’m unable to pull apart, on days when the thought of it reaches into me and pulls me out of the hole I sometimes dig for myself.
Sometimes, the spirits will not come when I’ve become too proud and preoccupied with the cares of this world to make room for them. Without ceasing, I knock on their doors. When I get no response, I throw myself against their erected walls, my bones and flesh meeting cold, unyielding concrete. I punch holes into their windows, the damning air sliced by my desperate movements. I welcome the pain, almost relieved to feel it, and then apply ointment on my scrapes and bruises. When that fails, I fall to my knees in surrender, engorged with unrelieved sorrow, drenched in turmoil. I lower all my weapons, place my hands behind my back, and lie flat on the ground.
Being alive in a body is excruciating in its torments. The body is an excavation site, a landscape of excesses and contradictions. Yet, there is pleasure in the limits and excesses imposed by the body. Limits that find their way into the poem—the hungry poem, the tired poem, the sensual poem, the poem that is pulled more than it can stretch. I lay my body on the rack, tie my wrists and ankles to the ends, and I am pulled in opposite directions because I’m the poem that wants to be beautiful but also sincere. My shoulders and hips dislocate, muscles tear in resistance, and my spine cracks so I can birth an honest poem. I offer my body to the poem, and the poem becomes my body. I gather its mangled remains and begin the tortuous process of glueing bones back together, sewing ligaments, and fashioning new cartilage.
Much of me is offered up in a poem; if I were to take it back, I would have no one else to give it to. So please, I say to the spirits, have my body and all its excesses.
III.
The time capsule is a container created to fight ephemerality. A poem is an object, and every element it contains will shift, fade, or be forgotten. I write knowing that my poems carry what is remembered, what will eventually be forgotten, and what will twist itself to create another meaning.
All things will erode. Only rust will remain long after we are all dust. Even the poet’s spirit is subject to decay and abrasions. I was not made to endure immortality, but in language, there lies the promise that I can. I can fling myself into the distant future and wait to be reunited with those yet to be born.
I am conscious of memory's ineffability, how it slips away as quickly as it is created. I poke and prod at each memory, but what to name it is often futile. Because memory is elusive, I turn to poetry. That is not to say that poetry is not elusive, but it is flexible in a way that memory is not. One memory I keep returning to is of home, the language it speaks, and all the versions of it I’ve lived in. The home where I speak my mother tongue, Yoruba; the home where I was entrusted with a seed to hold delicately; the home where grandma sat us down for dinner every night; the home that knows all my fears and still holds me; the alien home; the home in exile.
I write knowing that home is constantly changing, and while my memories may resist these shifts, my poems will embrace them. My poems will become the time capsule that preserves everything I need to remember about home.
I write the past I remember, with its cracks, and turn to language to help fill the gaps. I write (against) the failures of memory. I write because I am desperate; because I am yielding to maintenance and decay and decline; because I do not want to disappear and become a stranger to myself. Memory is a river, and poetry is the only way I know how to swim. It is the only way I can shift, distort, or relive what has happened. It is the only way (for now) that I can go back home.
IV.
Since I decided to step into the unknown and travel miles away from home, my body and writing have changed in ways I couldn’t have predicted. My skin has darkened from the cold, and my heart has reached the depths of weariness. Exhaustion seeps into my bones, not just from the demands of this new land but from the sheer effort it takes to piece myself together each day, to gather the fragments, and simply show up. I never would have known the extent of my fatigue if I did not have the privilege of language and the mirror it holds up that begs me to see myself and who I have become on the way to who I want to be. I am tired, and poetry has given me new words, images, and frames for it.
I have begun to spill over the limits I drew for myself, and unsurprisingly, the words are spilling over, too. They have shifted into something else. I have hunted for stories, and they have presented themselves in unprecedented ways—hybrid, abstract, concrete. In images that capture moments that words alone cannot hold, diagrams that map out the extent of my desires, and typography that reminds me of the spaces between memories. I have bent my words into shapes I did not think they could speak. I have seen the word spirits communicate with the visual spirits, working together, fighting, loving, but all the time, creating.
Creation becomes a shared song. Everything is in harmony, but not always. It is a thing of balance, of listening to each spirit and giving them the space to be. It is jumping into the river of the beautiful and the sublime, the self and the body, and memory and time. It is swimming against the currents, against constraints, against excesses. It is to live, and it is to die. It is to rejoice, and it is to sorrow. It is homecoming, and it is homegoing.
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