The Twitter handle @boloere_sod no longer exists. Like the poetry of its owner, it may have morphed into the disruptive. Boloere Seibidor was the name behind the account; she now tweets @Boloere_Seibidor as Black Swan. She is a poet of Ijaw descent from Port Harcourt. For readers coming to her early works—“Everything Is An Illusion,” a quartet published in The Kalahari Review, and “Showpiece” published in Night Music Journal—the reborn Twitter handle is also illusory.
Writers today have learnt to straddle different horses at once: poetry and fiction, or genre writing and literary fiction combined, to subsist. Either way, the writer serves more than one master and sometimes shares strange bedfellows. In 2020, Seibidor won first place in the Glass Door Initiative’s Poetically Written Prose Contest with her work “Plague.” There had been forays into fiction prior. “To Pull a Lion’s Tail” was shortlisted for the 2019 Kreative Diadem Annual Creative Writing Contest, and “Star,” a story about an experience she had with a dog growing up, appears in Pack Light Series: Memories of Growing up in Africa, curated by Ibua Journal. In her debut interview with PIN Literary Interviews hosted by Semilore Kilaso, Boloere Seibidor, self-acclaimed literary gangster and seasonal romanticist, spoke on what she feels poetry and the “poetically written” to be:
Poetry is a means of ferrying words/emotions from one soul to another. If a piece of art is doing this with a befitting dosage of literary devices, such as simile, irony, innuendos, imagery, and my personal favourite, metaphor, et cetera, then it is most likely poetry.
Another poem, “A Canvas for Pain,” may shed more light into her ars poetica: “If asked why I write poetry that title is a good hint,” she said to Kilaso. “I write to speak to another soul, too, but that’s only rarely. My main reasons [for] writing poetry are to relieve myself of a burden, or to carry the weight of happiness.”
How does she accomplish these tasks? The metaphor is Seibidor’s weapon of choice.
In “Plague” we have an idea of Seibidor’s grasp of metaphor: And fear built tents in a little boy’s heart. The metaphor, however, is not peculiar to Boloere Seibidor. It is the language of contemporary poetry and the communal tongue of a generation of writers. But it is also symptomatic of a malaise. If one, for instance, picks Okara’s “One Night at Victoria Beach” and something from Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino, the qualities that separate either poet are apparent: nuance, consciousness, to the circumspection with language or otherwise. The metaphor of the new school does not necessarily lack nuance; it favours the arbitrary. It is why there is an increasing absence of accountability in contemporary poetry. Poets evade this task by stylish ambiguity.
Her poems “Execration,” and “Vestiary” suffer this distortion clearly, but fortuitously she manages to frame both poems in a way that the imageries serenade the reader, despite inconsistencies in diction between the poems. “Execration” is a missive disclosing the details of a sour father-daughter relationship. The title execration, used, perhaps unwittingly, suggests the persona purging itself from the spirit of emotional abuse. Read in context of purgation, the line I lobby for the safe passage of his soul to wherever the ship sets its sail makes a good conjunction. It continues:
I descry a river, bathe his name
off my skin. every place his fingers have left its prints
The exorcism of the abuser completed, a second exorcism follows: that of abuses suffered. This is the crux of an existential problem. Instead, she chooses to dream and renders the supposed execration null, hence:
I am a wasteland, waiting for the harvest of a dream,
for the merry bloom of a miracle.
—which itself is the ultimate execration: an execration upon one’s own self.
“Vestiary” transposes this disaffection into a different dimension: an appeasing, candid one-ended conversation to an erstwhile lover:
that hot February night, we waxed into oceans, my legs separate bays reaching for the shores of sky.
Both poems signal an aggressive force that pinions the persona into physiological and psychological submission. “Vestiary” vis-à-vis “Execration” portrays the repurposing of the masculine in different relations. In “Vestiary,” not pain, but pleasure, is felt: I felt the hair-raising, chest-aching possession in my womb, shifting everything in its path, stirring butterflies like leaves in a tornado. This ecstasy is symbolised by the feminine imagery of the Vestiary. Seibidor possesses a canny sense of the dramatic. We see that the relationship is not ended by mutual discontent between the lovers but by external causes such as cancer, which by virtue of their being appendages of their family, irrevocably throws their love into disorientation, so that it is sacrifice for the greater commitment: family:
I see your voice in every vanity. I’m touching myself, opening up like a flower
rose flower, wet pink vanity — come again, inside me . . .
The sensibility of pop influence is ascertained in the above lines. “Ring” by Cardi B echoes similar sentiments; though, for a fact, any credit for pop influence is due preferably to James Bay and Ed Sheeran, songwriters who have portentous influence on Seibidor’s work, especially as they share affinities in themes.
To great extents this is a predominant impression effected by Boloere Seibidor’s adopted Euro-Asian worldview. The older poets, Okigbo, Clark, Okara, and Osundare, et al, came from an earlier, relatively pristine background, growing up in their villages, with preset and cogent worldviews and experiences. Boloere Seibidor and her generation have been hijacked by Europe and Asia through high consumption of cultural productions from these regions, aided by the Internet and mass media. The native aesthete is blurry; hence, an indigenous or local identity cannot be readily divined from these works as with the works of earlier African poets. This is not inexplicable because Seibidor herself is without an identity; through each of her works we progressively see her confront this dysphoria in the contexts of familial relations, bond, faith, morality, and sexual repression.
Indicative of this Western (gothic) susceptibility is the imagery in the poem “Man in the black trenchcoat,” which deals exactly with a litany of oppression. Although alien to Nigerian idiom, man in the trench coat symbolises Nigeria. The imagery is distinctly dark, a horror staple in American paranormal and horror movies repurposed to portray danger. Its imagery is a representation of institutions rigged to mete oppression and injustice on Nigerians; the family, the foremost unit, aided by religion and the state:
for a fortnight & half, a man in a black trench coat wakens me into a dream—this man without face or name, with eyes culled from
the bottom of God’s blue sea, walks me through a blank baked city.
The black colour of the trench coat is indicative of oppression as are the eyes culled from the bottom of a sea attributed to God. These imageries signify omnipotence and retribution. The individual ego in effect is crippled:
buried within me is an unsung prodigy, rotten secret. no abomination dwells under our family’s roof.
Sexual liberality subverts this bondage in defiance to society, but more importantly against God:
this fragile flesh,
kissing the feet of temptation, stretches into a garden of coruscant flowers, into shivering splendour.
Through sensual experience, which society inhibits via moralism with a bias for the female gender, Seibidor seeks to make her way towards an overall self-liberation from dogma. Sexual liberation is of especial significance and internal import for her. She tells me:
That’s another side of me. I feel like people love to deny or want to look away from their sexual side. And I don’t like that people want to turn away from their sexuality. I tend to embrace it; in my writing, everything: the way I dress. I dress to please myself not caring if people look at it in a certain way. I write about it a lot. I have no issues using words like fuck. [Laughs.] I don’t feel like people should shy away from it. I feel more comfortable embracing these things than running away from them.
❦
“Is everything an illusion?”
Boloere breaks into craggy laughter. “I don’t know what I was thinking at the time.”
Her laughter is both chastisement and protest. She tries to brush away a private misgiving with bamboozled laughter and is lightly dismissive about the work—the quartet published in The Kalahari Review titled “Everything Is An Illusion”—though it is in many ways a strong and remarkable early work, a precursor to what would be found in her later works. Seibidor dissuades that line of reason: “My style has changed a lot.” What changed is little, due to trends, but not much else. The themes and the prosaic quality of the poems are still evident. There is also the overriding “literary gangster” attitude which many (like me) might wrongly presuppose is a poetic licence to indulge slur words.
The poems in the quartet are best by their uniformity. The first of them, “Parables of a Body Lost in Itself,” opens evocatively: one chilly morning, July is here with its tear-filled eyes & cold breath.
July is notorious for incessant showers. For this reason, it readily personifies an irreparable anguish. At the same time, the line eerily mimics a welcoming call of sorts, which signals that it is also a dilemma she knows well. As such she has beforehand knitted gabardines from fibres that grow on soils of aloneness (& trust them to keep me warm). Not much time is spent in the percipient gloom. The mundane affairs of the world: couples debating who gets to name their child and even the spectacle of a cock mating a hen: the unmusical moaning of a hen being violated by a cock affects the poet viscerally in a way that only intensifies her loneliness. In other words, the gabardines are useless, they are just another ritual of habit she indulges. When paired with the crudity on display in the lines above, the innocuous scene that follows, the sound of school children laughing with the ice-cream man, mirrors effectively the disaffection that plagues a mind without love, especially love of the amorous kind. The mating of the hen by the cock is fittingly portrayed as a form of brutality against the hen and something undesirable. Similarly, the school children with their laughter and the ice-cream man are not altogether innocent bystanders. The joy of the school children mocks Seibidor’s desolation, perhaps even more than the bells of the ice-cream man.
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In a different setting, this same spectacle will be something fond and not looked upon with sadness. The proof of love provides the exact opposite; when compassion is found everything around is beautiful and all other things become inconsequential, even for the mind in love to take notice of. When there is a separation, however, these same things take on a darker portent than they should and all beauty vanishes. The body, lost in itself, suffers this because it has denied itself happiness and the permission to love due to low self-esteem. What we witness in this poem is the last act.
The reader comes in on Seibidor enumerating her past failures and past loves, which are all too agonising, even for her to find a way to forgive herself for not giving love a chance. This is the trap the body has fallen into; the trap of regret which reproduces deepening grief such as which sucks meaning out of life. It paralyses and holds her in bondage. She, at last, reaches a threshold: suddenly I become a belvedere, looking down at a world mirroring beautification. at all the people that have tried to love me but have given up. Will she break this vicious circle and be free? We hope she does, but it is hard to know. She languishes in it joyfully: before you call me names that I haven’t already called myself, know that no man is an island; instead, some of us are blue-faced oceans.
“The Parable of a Body Lost in Itself” successfully places the failures and struggles of the past self with the present self and we are presented with the parables of the body lost in itself: but tell me who the fuck loses his step into an ocean & makes it out alive? Here, ungratified sexual desires and the tenacious hold of the past on the self are strong forces that do not oppose each other but are similar in more ways than one and leads to self-destruction.
“Everything Is An Illusion,” the titular work, takes a direct manner where the former is tongue-in-cheek. It is retributive, not to say the less of it. Instead of looking inward to place blame, she looks outward. And we are presented with another dimension of her existence with the hope that we can find out what has been misplaced. But she still does not throw her darts boldly. She observes and mediates things through the relationship of the father and the mother, a husband and wife. These two figures are just prototypes that represent other relationships in the life of the poet: The society (patriarchy) against the woman; and the poet against her lovers (who perpetuate the patriarchy). But reducing the phenomena to just the aforementioned is uncritical. It is also Seibidor versus her very own insecurities, at least in part.
Thus, in the second poem she pokes at something with a stick. Society’s injustice against women is addressed in the lines She chops veggies & fakes a groan / when the knife bites into her flesh, whereas the man answers a call / in the unnatural accent of an old / drunkard trying to woo a fifteen-year old. In the eleventh line, we are presented with the locus: I know it is just her way of punishing / herself for her inadequacies (because / why else would my father cheat?). In other words, the problem is of self-abuse. Seibidor knows this because she suffers from it and can identify it.
Consequently, this second poem is a shedding of the burden and guilt from the first poem “Parables of a Body Lost in Itself,” because, unlike the mother figure she is in danger of becoming, Seibidor prefigures sensibly that: Men [patriarchal ideas] are like fires. One day, you will forget a lit candle on / the rug, & wake to a burning home (or / bone-chilling glaciers displacing / the affinity in your man’s eyes). There is a parallel here to her manner of denouement in the former poem: who the fuck loses his step into an ocean & makes it out alive? It is hard not to see this depiction of fire as the insecurities themselves growing out of measure.
The first two poems in the quartet represent a process of intimate self-reckoning and a search for truth within the individual. The last two explore territory and place in separate manners, but move from the self to be inclusive of family, country, and home. “When I Sleep, I Pray” strikes in equal tone and measures the chasm of displacement felt in the work of Romeo Oriogun, particularly Burnt Men. The imagery changes consequentially. They become paroxysmal—a threat, not to the plausibility of the work, but the integrity, and integrity, not of the work, but of the subject treated. Put in different parlance, we may call it justice.
“When I Sleep, I Pray” is a product of a type of poetry/fiction based on paroxysms, duly false, that blew exponentially in Nigeria’s literary space in the past decade. Of particular note will be “American Dream,” a short story by Nonyelum Ekwempu, shortlisted for the 2018 Caine Prize. The fact of the setting of the story (Lagos) and the ethnicity of the characters (Yoruba) are not even the height of the red flags. These lack probability enough. The misconfiguration of reality, even as a work of fiction itself, occurs toward the end of the story when the hapless mobbing of a boy—who the writer inveigles readers with cunning to perceive as homosexual—inexplicably takes place. The incongruity would be justifiable and the odds appreciated if the writer actually cared about the character and storyline, and weighed both thoroughly. “The Folded Leaf” by Segun Afolabi and Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s “The Ache of Longing” treat the theme in the same manner as Ekwempu. In both cases, especially of Nonyelum, it is the portrayal of a country and a people that is questionable. It is a perjury of our collective identity as a people, and country, perpetuated by its writers, firstly due to second-rate craftsmanship, and secondly for profit.
“When I Sleep, I Pray” is not blatant misconfiguration, but it embraces the aesthetics of the paroxysmal. The sharp and vivid images—no one walks into the arms of a carnage & makes it out unscathed / without a few broken ribs—give much, but this tends to foster a kind of vagueness. We begin to question Seibidor’s intimacy with her subject, and her sensitivity, when the rhetoric turns blandly unconvincing: what do you make of a father who devours his own child in the case of dearth? / of a mother who deserts her newborn babe at its birth? here, morning fog is the smoke from enflamed flesh.
“Boxes,” the last in the quartet, is little above a greater exaggeration of the qualities of paroxysmal writing. It is mostly ambiguous, chronicling a family’s movement to new residence. An impression is intended from the onset: an inexplicable emptiness is held where the family portrait had been, but it is obstructed from a fragmentary arrangement and bombastic words: a lovesome ambience on quiescent nights.
The themes and subject in “Everything Is An Illusion” appears elsewhere in Seibidor’s other works but the mother figure remains central and recurring. Two other works illustrate this well: “I wish that I could change the sadness behind my mother’s eyes into something beautiful.” This sentence begins the nonfiction piece titled “Reflections.” What is this sadness? Why is Seibidor perturbed by another’s sadness that she has no control over? The answer is not simple but can be deduced. “I remember, one day it rained so much that I thought the sun had shredded itself into oblivion,” Seibidor continues in the second paragraph.
Profiles and Interviews
Where has the mother gone in the interim? Something suggests that the mother is not merely an external, existential being, but an inner self, part and parcel of the writer, and what ensues is a confrontation between two opposing sides concerning morality and principles. The battle is not waged for long: “But after a few hours, the sun peeked from behind a curtain of dark clouds, and the rain birds chittered across the sky.” The moral conscience of the daughter, although uncertain and impressionable, weans itself from the control of the mother who represents the past ideal, which is likely not only to trap but to prevent the true identity of the daughter from being realised. The paragraph concludes with the sentence, “A rainbow spilled across it—oh, if only you had seen it; it was the most beautiful thing.”
The piece is little less than a poem but it is structured with the intent of the poetic, a blend of narrative and lyrical qualities. Arguably, it works where some of her poems are not fully realised due to mild obscurity and inversely stilted affectation of style. Obfuscated metaphors are sacrificed for clarity instead in this work. In the penultimate paragraph that ends part 1 of “Reflections,” Seibidor pronounces after the battle: “I want to be my mother’s rainbow, but I am too much of a rebel.” This carries material and non-material implications. Rainbow symbolises pride and also connotes divergence.
Children are the pride of their parents. When the child contravenes socially-accepted norms, their parental upbringing is called to question. The African child is at all points faced with divergent paradigms. Achebe’s No Longer at Ease chronicles this sort of impasse through Obi. Likewise, in “Dead Men’s Path,” a headmaster faces a similar imbroglio between orthodoxy and deviance. Most are bound to find the middleground, like Rufus Okeke in “The Voter,” who splits his vote for different ballot boxes; but both ways, retributions and backlashes are sure.
The persona in Seibidor’s “Reflections” fusses over the use of language which the mother, a figure of tradition and its values, stands against. This might not seem highly theatrical like Obi’s dilemma, but it is equally traumatising. “Reflections” is a succinct tale by the way it dramatises but also displays the qualities of the poetic by the sheer strength of language deployed with unusual sensitivity.
“And the sky is blue,” the narrator denounces: “And I really do not give a fuck.” Unlike her poems, the denouement is not a fluke. It is clear about its meaning, and interwoven into it is the reference to “the day it rained so much that I thought the sun had shredded itself into oblivion.” A catharsis is reached and the work possesses the rare mark of artistic integrity.
A takeaway from Seibidor’s PIN interview from 2020 is not necessarily her comment that
…poetry is a means of ferrying words/emotions from one soul to another. If a piece of art is doing this with a befitting dosage of literary devices, such as simile, irony, innuendos, imagery, and my personal favourite, metaphor, et cetera, then it is most likely poetry.
This is a misleading perception of what makes poetry poetry. Besides, as Seibidor points out, “I don’t know what I was thinking at the time.” But to say the mores has had no effect on the work produced would be false. I. A. Richards noted that
The sensory qualities of images, their vivacity, clearness, fullness of detail and so on, do not bear any constant relation their effects. Too much importance has always been attached to the sensory qualities of images. What gives an image efficacy is less its vividness as an image than its character as a mental event peculiarly connected with sensation.
Richards admits the inexplicability of this phenomenon but argues that “emotional response depends far more upon its being, through this fact, a representative of a sensation, than upon its sensory resemblance to one.” In effect, what matters is not the sensory resemblance of an image to the sensation which is its prototype, but “some other relation, at present hidden from us in the jungle of neurology.”
Adjudging so, “Reflections,” which is nonfiction and a hybrid form, is truer to the task of the poetic. Regrettably, less can be said of the author’s poetry. But if we look to Richards’s strict conception, we deny the potentials of the art form. We do, however, hold Seibidor’s idea of “all about painting vivid images, leaving a long-lasting, stirring after-effect on the mind of its reader, with just a few words” to test, especially in the context of her work.
Latter-day poetry loves to fabricate where it should be selective and sputter when it should be quiet. Seibidor is a scintillating poet when her apparent insecurities do not besiege her creative process, when she is audacious enough to be genuine. This is when there is no importunate rush to the next line. Her poem “Showpiece” then justifies her claim to a changed style. But it is a dubious claim as a whole. It is not a change of style, but originality.
The backstory of “Showpiece,” narrated to me by Seibidor, is similar in detail to the poem but not entirely. “It’s about this ornament we had,” Seibidor tells me. “We still have it till date. There were about three of them. They are like little glass eggplants. I don’t know why they are sentimental to my parents. My dad is always this kind of arty kind of person. My mom takes out time to clean them, then clean the house, and all of that. So it was like she grew even more attached to them than my dad who owned them.”
This ritual, described in felicitous diction, she holds it, like a child. like you can closet your ears to it & hear its heartbeat, conveys a tenderness further delineated in picturesque detail: little glass facsimile of an egg, with a small red brushwood inside and a spillway snaking through. That “other relation, at present hidden from us in the jungle of neurology” is almost complete by the auditory sense struck with the image: her throat always astir with hums. We are not privy to her thoughts, though we feel them intimately. We can only witness her dedication and obsession:
she never speaks of it, but its decades old.
she holds it in all its delicacy, like she has done for the past twenty years. so it doesn’t fall & fragment.
An element of self-obligated slavery is sensed. But it is not out of savage servitude, but protective. The showpiece is a more potent image than the rainbow, which earlier, Seibidor had fought to retain. Both objects of interest are varied in their level of importance to both women but they represent, equally, independence. Something that is recognisable in the crass of chaos. The prodigal child takes recourse:
& this is how I love you [I don’t really know how to] weaving my breath through every second. scared that one day I’d be the reason you shatter.
But the line is not tied to a lover as Seibidor indirectly tries to insinuate. It is an easier denouement employed to deflect. Had she pushed further, this would prove different. It would be reconciliation of prior segmentation (of self) and a commitment. It would be her coming to terms with what it really means to love and care that much, to hold on to memories and their memorabilia. Essentially, it would be her coming to terms with what it means to be as devoted to the memory of love (because what else deserves that much commitment of care?) as her mother who “holds it”—what is merely a “showpiece” to her—“like a child,” although without any destructive paroxysms which seem to be Seibidor’s subversively convenient interpretation of the caring act.
In a climate of writers often assuming homogeniety in both craft and aesthetic conviction, Seibidor’s self-pronounced wildness and gangsterism is a completely different look. However, that attitude has to be equally and painstakingly integrated into the poetry to sublimate that attractive difference. In these poems, her tendencies and constructive decisions, writ large, are not different from her contemporaries’, but her moments of individual, cultivated insights in poems like “Parables of a Body Lost in Itself” and “Man in the black trenchcoat” are indications of her potential for the truly fascinating.♦
Edited by Carl Terver. (Note: Ancci provided editorial inputs and contributed to the completion of this essay.)
Lyambee Aorabee is an assistant editor at Afapinen. He lives in Jalingo and Makurdi; a writer, poet, and music producer, he’s finishing a BSc Sociology at Benue State University, Makurdi. 𝕏
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