The Medical Style of Chisom Okafor

From some of his early works, like “Otherwise, I choose to die interstate” where he writes, “nine times, I’ve found myself sprawled out, // etherized on the ECG table, in a room // peopled by cardiac monitors and // bespectacled cardiologists,” to his recent poem, “synonyms for tachycardia,” Chisom Okafor’s poetry has always been set apart by an infusion of medical terms in his verses. In continuing in this style, the Brunel Poetry Prize shortlistee and Sillerman finalist said in an interview, as recent as 2022, that “the therapeutic diet clinic has further broadened my artistic sensibilities and led me to the many possibilities of poetry.” 

Like many Nigerian poets today, Chisom Okafor’s poetry explores the traumatic, existential, and confessional, but his stands out significantly due to its persistent incorporation of medical registers. His poems, charged with a kind of visceral energy, allow him to interact with, sympathise, and share the despairing realities of his patients, seeking the “geometries of [their] bodies marked by disability and chronic illness.” Another contemporary poet known for the same approach is Dami Ajayi, a practising psychiatrist, whose poetry incorporates medical terms; his first collection, Clinical Blues, written on love, national trauma, and loss, was influenced by his medical practice where Dami manages to transmute medical life and barroom stories into sublime poetic statements. 

Anne Sexton’s personal rule of writing poetry is for the poet to never be boring. In spite of using medical registers, Okafor doesn’t make his poems obscurantist, and ensures his message and themes are neither elusive nor abstruse. He achieves this success because of his keen eyes and attention, transfering his omniscience to readers. We find an example of this balance in the poem “In which the cardiologist discovers, from electrocardiography, the aetiology of my heart malfunction.” The speaker here narrates the ordeal of learning about their heart disease:

I’m thinking of the parable

of the singular mustard,

hidden away, like a treasure chest, somewhere

between my cardiac muscles,

and now hardening into an embolic clot.

The same heart dysfunction is identified in “In another life, I am twenty-two, gifted and curious.” The speaker is “pressing a miniature paintbrush” to their chest, “tracing the shape of a heart, // feeble with cardiomegaly, and whispering // the words of the scriptures into it.” Cardiomegaly, also known as megalocardia, is a medical term for the condition of having an atypical enlarged heart. The disease is frequently encountered in Okafor’s  poetry, suggestive, perhaps, of an autobiographical truth. In Throat Song, he laments:

• in the peaks and valleys of an electrocardiogram bearing terrible news;
• This is how you long for love at nightfall while a wishbone grows where a lover should be. 

He reveals in a background of the poem “There are no synonyms for catharsis,” his personal struggles with this heart disease as the pandemic raged:

In the heat of the Covid-19 pandemic, I was diagnosed of right ventricular dysfunction, which is a hypertensive heart disease. I was just 26, and the cardiac clinic, where I had series of ECG and echo sessions, was filled with much older men and women, people in their seventies and eighties, who looked at me with so much pity and questions . . .

Read more

He further discloses how the cardiologist who made the diagnosis informed him that his heart might not ever be “fully corrected,” susceptible to cerebrovascular attacks or cardiac arrests. Okafor attempts to transcend this traumatic experience when he says, “the poems I now write morph into repeated echoes down a deserted landscape, calls out to a kind of healing.” 

While trauma and disease are recurrent themes in Okafor’s works, he also frequently gives voice to the grievances of the homosexual life. In “Birthing,” a poem written in memory of Akinnifesi Olumide Olubunmi—lynched on 17th of February, 2017, in Ondo for alleged homosexuality—Okafor conjures a sanctuary for Akin in the last stanza:

My lover swears he could trace the scape of the highland 

far into the village beyond, from this distance; 

the ridges stretching so thin that they disappear into the sunset.

And in the poem, “A piercing through the dark,” Okafor hints at his own sexuality:

After praying, my lover 

tells me he feels God has listened too much

to my arrhythmic heartbeats,

God sees your racing heart, he whispers.

This hunch became certainty in “A Shorter Note On My Coming Out,” where Okafor delivers a vulnerable but brave verse on the dangers of coming out as homosexual. “Pray the police don’t catch you making love to a man,” he muses. Many of his poems echo the acceptance of his sexuality, as in “Birdhouse”: “I do not keep diaries to save myself anymore, / or the men I love.” 

After being a finalist for the Gerald Kraak Prize in 2022—alongside Obinna Obioma, Ukamaka Olisakwe, Ernest Ogunyemi, among others—Chisom Okafor has published only a few poems. A couple of these appeared in 2023, but he went into hibernation until recently when, via X, he announced the acceptance of his full-length collection, Winged Witnesses, by APBF, slated for 2025. The future looks bright for him. We perhaps expect to see another marriage of an art-and-medicine aesthetic. Or it may be the revelation of a new poetic side we are yet to witness from Okafor’s ebullience.♦

Edited by Divine Inyang, Carl Terver, and Ancci

Eniola Arowolo has been published in The Republic, 4faced Liar, 20:35 Africa, Ake Review, and ANMLY. He was shortlisted for the inaugural Chukwuemeka Akachi Prize and is the poetry contributing editor for Barren Magazine. He is a Pushcart, and Best of the Net nominee. 𝕏