Grief is real. It is a valid expression in art. In fact, it is as if we all came into the world for it: for we grieve about our existence; there’s always a grievance of things, such that grief and grieving become more acute when we are hit by devastating events, locked in its sadness that never leaves us. In Lacan’s theory of psychoanalysis, all humans experience loss that haunts them forever: This happens when we transition from the imaginary order—a stage where as infants the conception of our self is governed by a preverbal state, mediated by our relationship to our mothers through a mirror effect—to the symbolic order, where we become more perceptible to the real world, via language, and are conscious of our expulsion from the intimate union we had with our mothers. As such, we become restless, unconsciously trying to recover from this loss, grieving, always unsatisfied.
It used to be said, few years back, that if you pick the digital copy of a poetry anthology and search the word “body,” results will appear on each page, and on some pages—meaning in a single poem—more than once or twice. Today, the word “grief,” symbolising the theme grief or depression, anxiety, pain, sorrow, anguish, trauma, death, Nigerian death, and many tragedies, has been a dire staple, nearly abused, by the community of Nigerian poets. I decried a similar scenario in a Facebook post in 2019, which received resounding backlash. It read in part:
The current crop of young and aspiring Nigerian writers and poets (not all, but most of) are strapped to a singular trope in their works. The Body. While the market or quasi-establishment jumps on this as a mark of writers’ sensitivity to current issues and promote such writing, are we being deceived or not that we are encouraging a whole generation of writers to become lazy and less creative?”
Seeing the fulfillment of the last part of that concern today, I should have completed what began as an essay then, tentatively titled “The Imagination of the Singular Trope.”
My concern was the repetition of stock imagery, reinforced by the usage of repeat words in creating them. Words like “body” “water” “throat” “my mother/father” “God” “skin.” I didn’t include “boy.” Add it now. There’re today: wishbone, shapeshift, quicksand, hyacinth and mistletoe (generally, all kinds of flowers appear in our poetry today). My position of then still stands: We expect that poets, as they claim to be, are able to invent new modes of pressing the fine wine out of language, not dressing up similar imageries that run through the works of so many of their contemporaries, under the guise of style, when writing their poems. As a poet may argue today, as one did with me then, “it is not the reappearance of these imageries that matters but how they are applied.” I submit still, that it is laziness if a whole generation of poets has to rely on similar tropes for imagery. Another argument is that poets are writing about the same thing—oh, that in fact during the reclamation phase the word “Africa” appears in most African poets’ works; this is a very lazy comparison—but does this excuse the language deficiency of these grief poems?
As earlier stated, grief is real, sadness is real, pain is; they are valid and are to be expressed with art. And their expression has resulted in what many consider profound art. Aristotle, in Poetics, differentiates drama into three: tragedy, comedy, and tragicomedy; and praises tragedy to be the superior among them. Surely, because the human spirit is attuned to tragedy, having a more heightened sensitivity, and experience, towards it than joy and happiness. And, after all, through its catharsis, it purges us—nay, cleanses us—of hypocrisy, and influences us to become better human beings. In my opinion, such genre of art shouldn’t be theatrical and less nuanced that its accomplishment is a mere elevation of bathos. Approach matters.
Someone has written what is arguably the Great Nigerian Novel, at least in this first quarter of this century. That author is Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, the novel, When We Were Fireflies. He has written about a subject quite common of Nigeria’s reality today—the state of the nation’s accommodation of violence, especially in the northeast. But this is so finely done via a technique of suggestion that is subtle and penetrating at the same time, and with a careful hand never losing touch of humanity across it. The amateur, inexperienced or bad writer will make sure to instruct us about bomb blasts if they told this story; or of vultures picking corpses, or the bad government; everything in the checklist of trauma writing. It is important that I repeat a quote by Sebald which explains this: “There’s no point in exaggerating that which is already horrific. And from that, by extrapolation, one could conclude that, perhaps, in order for one to get the full measure of the horrific, one needs to remind the reader of beatific moments of life.”
In essence, art without humanity or the heart behind it may just be trash, which is what one feels from reading some of our grief poems, because of the poverty of imagination on the poet’s part. Why are you writing about dead bodies littered in the streets? Your job is not to regurgitate; you’re not the news. (Here’s the infamous one: the corpse of a pregnant woman whose womb is slit.) This is gory, yes. It is messy and tragic, and yes—while there’s no obscenity in art, it is also obscene. There’s no point in exaggerating that which is already horrific. There’s a term for this: it’s called “used thinking.” In other words, cliché. Cliché manifests not just in single word or phrase usage but in the process of thought and the product thereof. If an artist’s creative process is a product of—nay, repetition of—the mushrooms of the tribe, ideas so overused and stale, the mind of the artist is stale, as well as infertile. And the poet, the holies of holies, is not permitted to dwell in this ghetto. Our job is to hold the last front on language finally being destroyed in this age. Or are we minions in this too?
We may be writing about the same pains, collective trauma, but approach matters. Nuance matters. Our humanity matters. As Chimezie Chika, one of our stellar and admirable essayists today tweeted not long ago, “A piece is worthwhile because of the writing, not because of the subject matter.” So grief, then what? The word appears in the title of the poem. Appears in the first line. Second line. And maybe even the third, fourth, or fifth line, and littered throughout the poem. At some point, don’t you expect us to be exasperated by our grievance over this? Especially when we don’t read this from just one or two poets but from almost everybody? Let us not be the ones to finally send language to its grave. For God’s sake, YOU ARE A POET. You’re the magician of words, the bouncer at the entrance to the defiler of language, you are the Sufist, the enlightened one, the Buddha, you are the one whose muse doesn’t allow you sleep until you put that grievance on paper, the one who runs out from the bathroom, lather over your body, to write that line so you won’t forget it, as Niyi Osundare wrote, the one who “sees Tutankhamen’s army / Marching from the left to the right side of [your] brain,” “…an x-ray of the ribcage of the sky,”1 the protector of words.
In this age of coddling, writers have become so antagonistic to critics or anyone who calls them out. It is a funny thing to experience from people whose profession is to think. I am using this as a shield for what I’m about to say next, but without fear, for those with their agendas about what weapons we use criticism for. Our poets whose career begun earlier than now and who have been writing for sometime are not found writing like this, in this singular-trope-laden tradition in which the word “grief” has taken prominence. (There are signs sadly, that it has rubbed off on many anyway.) There’s the profundity of reading lines like this, “What is the night’s ache? / What is the emptiness of a city full of voices? / Exile is the dying voice of a wounded angel” (Romeo Oriogun, “Cotonou”). “Far in the wilderness near the northern eye of God, there is a river nicknamed ‘grief drifting through the magma of death’…” (Umar Abubakar Sidi, “I Can’t Be Present”). “We remember you, martyr of the wind / A desire we couldn’t rescue. / You were the flame / We dragged in / And exhaled, / A bale of smoke then / Robbed by the wind; / A memory stub now” (Ahmed Maiwada, We’re fish). “No one will tell you a man died here / Decked in the glory of a mighty home . . . It is the hanging axe at your neck / Pushing you to breathe a lie” (Su’eddie Vershima Agema, “When walks turn to dares after Greek legends”). Or the fine minimalism in Warsan Shire’s poem “what they did yesterday afternoon.” Chinua Achebe’s “Air Raid,” or “Mango Seedling.” Samuel A. Adeyemi’s “Rimrock”—you ultimately need to read this one. Pamilerin Jacob’s “January Nocturne.” Tares Oburumu’s “say love.” All poems about grieving, but almost with no usage of the word “grief” in them.
This is not to say using the word “grief” is not allowed. By all means, it is. But it becomes trite and banal when used in the imagination of the singular trope, simply evoked as staple, as manifestation of imaginative laziness. Profundity is often lacking in these singular-trope grief poems, as a result of language monotony, the sadness in the poems themselves paralysing, in turn paralysing readers’ appetite. Unlike the quoted lines above which state the grief but, also, with adept language, uplifts too. If you already sense who my criticism is targeted at, you may be right: those guilty of this. There are beginner poets in their ranks, still inchoate and learning language, which gives room for pardon. Nevertheless, it is important we talk about, and by all means even, criticise, the proliferation of this trope and lazy exercise, especially when it appears we are all agreeing this is the way to write; even more so, be critical of the poets who can be better but choose we all perish in the poverty of language.
It is important. This is all we have, our literature, against the antagonism of life and society, our language, which Toni Morrison says we should do. And do it well we must, which is also a duty to ourselves to protect. It is important that we know what grounds we are treading on, that the future of our literature is in good care. It is right to point out what is bad, even if no one listens, for those who may listen and appreciate it. Criticism is essential to art. If bad writing emerges, it shall be pointed out. If one doesn’t have the stomach for it, leave art to artists, or form niches where to rub each other’s backs and praise kitsch. “Literature isn’t a children’s foot race; you don’t get a medal simply for participating,” William Giraldi says. Many of us are basking in these shallow poems but if we are kind enough to ourselves, we can acknowledge our collective shallowness. This worry of the new artist fooling his way into greatness by his craft was addressed centuries ago by Alexander Pope:
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts;
While from the bounded level of our mind
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind,
But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise
New distant scenes of endless science rise!
In this age of bluepilled leftism where writers have also joined the bandwagon, nobody has the right to have an opinion on art and the words of a critic cannot be interpreted without straitjacketing. This is some schooling for when they cry “policing” and interpret criticism to suit their narrow-mindedness. Here is what criticism does: it is an essential part of the forward-moving mechanism of art and literature—because it says, here is the art we have created, but how good have we enabled this art in the celebration of life? It shows us our abilities and our faults, and that in-between these two, we must strive to be as close to the former than the latter. I leave us with these words of Mawaida and if their concern is what we want to keep perpetuating: Poetry “…used be a diamond-decked yacht, / Until the high sea pirates rose, / Wrecked and sank it. … / Butchers over the fallen masterpiece.”♦
1 Lines from Umar Abubakar Sidi’s “The Peninsula of Poets II”
Carl Terver is the founding editor of Afapinen. He graduated with an arts degree from BSU, Makurdi, and writes on music, literature, and film. He has been published in The Stockholm Review, The Republic, Iskanchi, and Goethe Institut Nigeria. His forthcoming photobook is Glory to the Sky (July, 2024).
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