Ceremony of Survival: On Funto Omojola’s “If I Gather Here and Shout”

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In his seminal essay from Hopes and Impediments called “Colonialist Criticism,” the Nigerian novelist and essayist Chinua Achebe made a bold statement about African literature that we are only too happy to discover still rings true in our time: “Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.” This statement is always rousing to read as a writer using English as a second language, but you have to read the preceding statements in the essay to truly appreciate the efforts of such innovative, contemporary Nigerian writers as Funto Omojola for the advancement of Nigerian poetry from its clichéd past into its newer, bolder expressions: “Most African writers write out of an African experience and of commitment to an African destiny. For them, that destiny does not include a future European identity for which the present is but an apprenticeship.” Their literary lineage and personal ambitions, as Achebe anticipated, have enabled writers like Omojola to transform English into a tool for confronting both colonial legacies and contemporary realities. This commitment to an African experience and destiny manifests in the content and aesthetics of Omojola’s work.

So, in their debut book of poetry If I Gather Here and Shout, Omojola’s preoccupations are interweaving but direct: the book perpends not only patrimony, both colonial and familial, but also sickness, healing, community, and survival, each dedicated to anatomizing the western medical practice, most especially in its discrimination or violence against the Black body. (According to Omojola in an interview with Kristen Kubečka, considerable parts of the book were first scribbled down ‘in a hospital bed or after the fact when I would have really bad days and couldn’t get out of bed.’) They go about examining the intricate relation between these conditions through their Yorùbá cosmology and cultural lineage, which they go back to after modern medical systems failed them.

The lineage appears in the only relevant form to their concern in medicine and healing: in the form of the ifá divinatory system. Simplistically, this system can be said to be to the Yorùbá people what the Bible is to the Christians, the Qur’an to the Muslims, and the Bhagavad Gita to the Hindus. However, ifá is not a religious guide because it is not in any way related to religion, which not only tends to be discriminatory but also reductive, quite paradoxically, in its supposed panoramic view of the world and human condition. The best way to describe ifá, however, in its total essentiality to the Yorùbá essence and existence, is that it is a way of knowing, which includes every single epistemic plane any religion, culture, or civilization can come up with: from philosophy, mathematics, biology, economics, to medicine. It is in this last plane that Omojola features ifá in their collection with the “babaláwo,” which means “priest”—the Christian allotrope of bishop or vicar, if you will—as their mouthpiece to the gods.

The book contains a series of prose poems, structured in a straightforward manner: the left side of the book only feature the ẹsẹ ifá—that is, ifá incantations as chanted by the babaláwo—and the right side is composed of fig poems, which are primarily about the speaker’s conditions: many of them are in their own voice. “The eses [sic] and fig poems,” says Omojola, “tell two different but converging and interdependent histories that are necessitated by and continue to reflect one another.” The ẹsẹ ifá poem that opens the book reads:

pa sad today

pa before pa been sad. today,

pa is a tailor: stitch whole

village. pa scrape

inside of pa’s pa’s mouth, found whole

village blood underneath white coat tongue

stone down pa’s pa’s throat. nothing

gets put back where it belongs

In Yorùbá, when it comes to naming familial relations in precise terms, the language gets rather prolix, but necessarily so: “pa” is thus father, “pa’s pa” is grandfather, and “pa’s pa’s pa,” as we would later encounter in the more intense parts of the book, is great-grandfather. Here, Omojola is examining, through ẹsẹ ifá, the violent stain of past history on the present and the last two lines are particularly about the sort of disruption engineered by Nigerian colonial history: something so disruptive, almost to the point of obliterative, of our cultural memories it cannot be indemnified. For the fig poem on the right, it opens with an encouraging note in which the speaker engages in a sort of daydream about marriage and giving birth to twin daughters. However, daydreams are daydreams because they are averse to sunsets: what comes after their vanishing renders this particular daydreaming in the poem as mere reminiscence, the present being gut-wrenchingly disheartening:

maybe wón se oògùn, but it only takes a handful of guests to tap on something

swelling before you realize raw can’t go through you the same way anymore.

what a silly thing it is to not really be able to shit!

by the time they found my mother, she had rolled under the bed.

they found my mother rolled, under the bed screaming, “my child!”

The code-switched Yorùbá entry translates literally to “maybe they are doing voodoo”—that is, maybe some forces, otherwise known as wicked, unknown familiar people, are doing voodoo to inflict the speaker with sickness. In Yorùbá, it is less a superstition than a truism that you can be inflicted with pain and illness through curses and spells. It is in this regard that even though each side of the book are primarily concerned with different things, they are concerned with the same thing at the plinth: that it is not only believed but also true that these wicked, familiar yet unknown people will inflict pain on the child of whom with which they take offence without any moral squirm is itself another kind of violent inheritance that permeates the book.

This violent inheritance is further exacerbated by Western medical systems, who typically claim to be advanced, Hippocratic, free of discrimination, and universal in their care. Omojola thus holds up a mirror to those dehumanizing experiences Black people face within these systems—their own body being the said mirror:

what is this tumbling place where only i am center unmoving? what is this tumbling stage around me and around me where there are jesters and sticks curved toward my chest? in a different time time we are gathered in perfectly-shapen basins in a different time time a worm croaks around us and around us and we are preoccupied with where the croak will land not with its projection or mouth.

The later part of this passage is where the stark contrast between the sacredness of the Yorùbá healing tradition and the coldness of Western medicine is most manifest. It not only makes you question how we define care, but also how we value different ways of knowing the body. But are they implying we substitute Yorùbá folk medicine for the Western one? That seems risible, and they know. Rather they challenge us to bring an holistic approach to medicine in which the advancement of the latter in both medicine and technology can be combined with the community-driven or pastoral process of healing of the former.

Not merely acrimonious but outright ireful, they then dedicate almost all of their inventive powers to critique the medical system that treats them as though an experiment. The surgeon takes the fatter bite of the critique because who else is perfect for standing in for such an imperfect, deeply flawed system of healing. Rage, rage, they rage against the recklessness of the blade:

look at the sew er pretending to know how to wring me look at the sew er pretending to bathe me look at the sew er pretending to know how many scalpels were used that day look at the gashes he has made look at the way he reaches into belly to pull out seeds look at the way he reaches into belly to pull out seeds look at the way he cleans it look at the seams he has made here and here. look at the way he seams look at the way he seams look at the sew erlookat his disciples lookat his disciples look at the way they seamlook at their nails look at their calves the way they run in

We might as well be in the 1940s when “grandpa ado rode his motorcycle to èkìtì and broke his arms on his way back,” treated with the medical capacity of the time, a superannuated system of healing that “covered him in plaster of paris and he spent january with arms outstretched like jesus.” So calling the surgeon a “sew er” is about the most cutting critique they, holding true to their culture, can come up with: in Yorùbá culture, there is nothing more critical and embarrassing than being assigned a designation with a euphemistic overtone. Both the surgeon and the cloth sewer sew and cut, but for the latter to be called a “sew er” in so disparaging a tone is to imply—or even stress—that human lives are at a dangerous stake in his hand just as human lives will be at stake should the cloth sewer be drafted to the daunting and painstaking role of a surgeon. Both the body and the cloth can be repaired, Omojola understands that much. But they also understand as much as we do that a Gucci material is easily brought to repair another torn Gucci than, for instance, a torn human heart or liver is brought to repair the torn heart or liver. The body and its various components are not fashion materials, but the surgeon’s attitude, despite its storied, even expected clinicality, is suggestive of the kind of recklessness we would expect of a fourth-rate Savile Row wannabe. This is where Omojola’s power of implication is most manifest.

As hard as it is to tear a piece loose for critical illustration in this tightly integrated book, the following is nonetheless representative of the supervening rhythm of the book when every liberty has been taken to estrange the English language from its conventional usage and syntax. It is also reminiscent of the central symbolic artefact in the book—the dùndún drum, a talking drum that is used during rituals, festivals, naming, wedding, and other festivities in Yorùbá culture:

ẹsẹ 

pa keeps sentiment-ing things in white cloth in white basin in tilt washed white

pa’s sentiment-ing things are village’s sentiment-ing things

pa keeps village’s sentiment-ing things in white cloth in white basin in tilt washed white

fig

i am unsteeling. what is the measure of sac and sac rubbing? what is the measure of long gathered tend? i have disguised this tend as steel. in a different time time she is speaking. my mother is speaking. through steel i am holding. she is speaking lungs. birth-body hears heavy. she is asking how far? birth-body hears throating empty.

The meaning of both passages is instantly in flight from the reader, but the syntactic parallelism of the former forecasts a sense of community and shared interests while a sense of frustration and hopelessness is the dual implications of the latter.  But what strikes the reader like a love attraction is their intricately preened sonic sensibility. Easily one of their rarest moments in the book, the passage shows them calming their nerves as though they are at the edge of their resilient spirit. Their punctuations, for example, are so correctly placed—which cannot be said for most of the passages that come before—as though they are correcting their last bits of transgression. But those transgressions, at their best, propel their poetry towards inventive vitality, a shining vitality that not even E. E. Cummings, Charles Olson, Gertrude Stein, or J.H. Prynne, in all their experimental proclivities, could match in its unrestrained, introspective flow.

Although when they take their dragnet for emotional resonance—which is an interminable or legato rhythmic flow coupled with minatory repetitions in restless succession—too far, we are once again faced with the terrible corollary (which is a special kind of badness) that the lawlessness of poetic originality could produce. Towards the end of the book, they go back once again, in a clearer mode, to the memory of the reckless surgeon, that his “needle is stabbing my thigh,” describing his professional attitude as “impudent turns gasp turns devout,” the last bit of which has a suggestion of contrition on the part of the surgeon. However, the passage ends with Omojola describing the devastating effects of the surgeon’s handling of their treatment in an embarrassment of blithe alliterations: “so, i am brittle balming blame-ing brittling bash so i am bash bark bashing brittle breaking brakkkking braking breaking britllbraking break breaking breaking breaking breaking breamingbreaking breaking breaking breaking breaking breaking breaking.” Here, it is obvious the invention has become the ensorcelling succubus and the poet, irretrievably seduced by it—to considerably underwhelming, even cuttingly irritating, degrees.

Despite their histrionic tendencies throughout the book in recording their medical plight, they still find questionable the claim that writing poetry is a form of therapy. But what they cannot dismiss out of hand is that If I Gather Here and Shout is nothing short of a celebration of ceremonies that begin with healing and, with the support and love of their community’s cultural lineage, ends with joy. Judging by the free-flowing originality and finesse with which they unify their disheartening experience and artistic as well as cultural élan, to say this is an incumbent book to do on their part wouldn’t be far-fetched but just apposite. As the overriding sentiment in the book intimates, the book turns out to be nothing but a ceremony of their survival, for as they keep reminding us, “ceremony is survival, [and] survival is joy.”