❦Dami Ajayi’s poetry reflects the changing norms of social and aesthetic character in Nigeria, and the shift in poetics from the writing of the third generation to the fourth. As writers tend to reflect the dominating cultural behaviour of their time, his Clinical Blues, published a decade ago, is one of such books—besides Niyi Osundare’s Songs of the Market Place—which has remained a vivid witness to the changes and collective psychological drive of a new age. The book invites us into a clinic of an evolving generation: the postmodern, globalist, and hyper-capitalist affirmation, the new ways of being in Nigeria’s post-military era, and a diagnosis of the causes.
Divided into three sections, Love Poems, Hospital Poems, and Barroom Reflections, Clinical Blues portrays a new cultural energy grounded in a renewed representation of Nigeria’s individual and collective realities. This reality, as he already told us in Daybreak and Other Poems is a carryover of our imitation of the American mimesis:
But isn’t life a novel, a television series,
An endless love song? And in films don’t people
Fuck and fall in love?
Yes, they do. And they also watch the sunset.
Growing old with their bent spouse’s hands
In theirs. That is the life. Life is the American
Film to which we all aspire.
Hence, the aspirations of life as television series are no longer asked as a question in Clinical Blues; it became the full subject which calls for protest, now reflecting our lives as a people. But within this showcase of our new reality, there is also a transition in the last part of the book that answers what drove us into “ward seven” and the postmodern “glossolalia.”
The first section of love poems reveals a generation’s subliminal need for affection. This neediness is later reflected in Dami’s full collection, Affection and Other Accidents. The opening poem in Clinical Blues, “Promenade,” asks vital questions that reflect a spiritual expression of the age. The poet asks:
Aren’t love songs boulders
Siting stiff in the rivers of
Thought, ready to irrigate
The soul with promise of
Uncertainties?
Aren’t love poems love letters
Written in the hieroglyphics
Of the soul?
These questions shift from the erotic visuality of Daybreak; it seems that Clinical Blues moves from the basis that “Love poems are like cocaine, / Heroine, Met, LSD, Marijuana for / Those in touch with their feeling…” to its more subliminal illusions, or its forever unattainable beauty. Hence, we can agree that there is a shift of vision and aesthetic purpose in Dami’s writing from when he published his chapbook and the time of Clinical Blues. Iduma notes that “For most of my adult life I have shared uncertainties with him [Dami] and it is clear to me that uncertainty is good material for a poet.” However, the uncertainties in the subject of affection disappeared in the later poems published in CB.
What the opening poem “Promenade” offers is the poet’s yearning for a love deeper than sensual desire. He assumes a level of awareness for affection that tells us “Aren’t humans incapable of not / Loving? I see affection punctuating / Your words, cuddling your sentences.” Even when there is sex, it is with “Bodies glued with passion” and “Voices rose above skins / And ceiling and thrashed about / Like our feelings.” The commodification of sex which was the tone in most of Dami’s earlier poems gave way to a passionate space of desire and affection.
The uncertainty in the poet’s mind here is not about affection. Rather, it is reflected in whether or not he wants to be a poet who cares less about national and political subjects, which some scholars call political consciousness. One of the marks of poets who constitute Dami’s age is their rejection of the prescriptive appeal for protest poetry, what Sule E. Egya calls the “Achebean-Soyinkaesque prescriptive literary derivative.” Hence, Clinical Blues is not pretentious in its narrative of a society’s need for affection. But what makes the collection interesting is the boundary of protest and postmodern petit recit it occupies. Because within the poet’s soul and the section dedicated to love, he tells us:
In my country,
The brain drain persists
In spite of the healed abscesses,
The coagulum of promise has
Been lysed. Dreams iced,
Formalin baptised.
So we look in the direction
Of liberty and emphatically lisp,
God bless America. Black America.
At the interstice of exile—or what Egya calls mental dis/location and the nuance of political commitment—is the forum to locate poets who constitute Dami’s age (the fourth generation poets); and Clinical Blues is one of the collections that reasserts this age in what I call “The Boundary Poets.”
Egya notes that this feeling of ostracism is “a kind of displacement without movement whereby an individual has already developed a feeling of exile while at home, caused by a kind of disorientation that excommunicates the individual from mainstream social and political happenings.” However, the boundary poets, despite their displeasure, still commits to nationalist issues. These writers grew up during the military era, but were not old enough to engage in the activities of that time, save for the stories and eerie ambience of the period etched in their memory. They are also the middle children from the 20th century into the 21st, which placed them between the transitions from the modern age into the postmodern. Lastly, they are a product of the movement from the military era into democracy, hence, the children of hope, and of a changing country—so it is understandable why their disorientation would drive them towards a globalist or cosmopolitan longing.
The cultural switch that permeates this transition defines the poetics of the fourth generation, and Clinical Blues embodies this literary trajectory more than most of the books written around this time. In fact, while Daybreak holds the exuberance of the postmodern flu and rebellion against anything traditional and nationalistic, Clinical Blues defines the second phase of fourth generation writing which returns them to a clearer ideological pose. And a decade later, it still stands as a testament or hook holding the emergence of a new generation.
But because of the creative nostalgia of older writers—mostly the third generation, which makes them think everything written in the past is better than today’s, they fail to see how the aesthetic rupture of the fourth generation reveals a shape-shifting climate. These writers, who are the professors, lecturers, and leaders of most established literary organisations, believe that contemporary Nigerian poetry shuns a nationalistic impulse, or—by some younger critics—that contemporary Nigerian poetry is not yet Nigerian. Clinical Blues defeats all these assertions. Through material imageries that show the cultural movement from our locale in favour of a globalist aura, Dami takes us into a clinic where he evaluates our collective aspirations, hence, the psychiatrist poet tells us:
But I am no open chest surgeon
For I am a jazz pianist
With a little stint for blood
Driving us through the cultural impact of jazz as an art form that holds both high and low culture, Dami raises a change in a psychiatrical pattern, where “In the economy of sound / Music is found” in everything that relates to the human mind and society. The uncertainty that defines postcolonial Nigeria, mostly of young people born in the 80s and early 90s, who are children of two cultures—the radical de-neocolonisation and anti-military struggle, and the emergence of a new culture brought forth by the internet and death of nationalism—is one of the core subjects of Clinical Blues. But in this collection, the uncertainties in the earlier works of Dami’s generation tilt towards a certainty hinged on the radical diagnosis of contemporary African society.
Dami translates the collective confusion that comes with the modern age. He better achieves this in the poem, “Clinical Blues VI.” In the hospital ward—“The Man with the bald pate / Is ward seven. We / Are mere gate-keepers,” the speaker informs us. He moves on: “Isn’t that Upper Room glossolalia / But Keke says it’s a synonym / For God, the answer to all things.” Keke is the collective voice of a generation with a troubled present caused by postmodern illusions and doubts. As it seems that nobody can “buy reality’s wool,” there is an acceptance of the fantasies that “spangles on man’s consciousness,” so everyone is caught in the ward of psychological trauma—both psychiatrists and patients.
The Upper Room is the high culture, the American movies and novel life we had aspired to in Daybreak, and everything society presents as the basis of modern existence; however, the place is glossolalia, filled with a high level of incoherence which perhaps shows its inaccessibility. And because we are caught in the cultural psychiatric ward, we see it as a synonym for God.
It would seem Dami saved “the answer to all things” in Clinical Blues for the last part, where he shows the cause of the crisis which has led the modern age into a cultural ward for treatment. In “Calling Credits” he asks:
Where was I when civilisation
Caught up with nature?
I can’t even find my voice
In this drone of a wailing iPod.
Reality has become virtual;
With friends farther than horizons…
Related to this question here, in “Celluloid,” after he “tried to touch good times twice / But they elude me, like swinging / Pendulums, cherry mangoes, physics,” he asks: “So what are my options: Fantasies? / Grandiose ideations? Playback virtual reality?…” This reflection of the way technology has taken over his age, and the concern of whether it can redeem the human existential need, is a subject that Dami explored better than many contemporary poets.
This subject of technological annexation—as simple as it sounds—is what shows Clinical Blues as a gift to the issues of discourse in fourth-generation Nigerian poetry, a lurch into the postmodern era, an era Pius Adesanmi calls the period of “the suffocating influence of North American high theory over the global production of meaning and identity.” We have embraced Western technology, and this is not independent of embracing Western values as well. As we learn from Bryan S. Turner, we have to contend with the question of “whether one can embrace Western technology without Western values. Sociology suggests that you cannot have modernisation, technology, urbanisation and bureaucratisation without the cultural baggage that goes with it and this baggage is essentially a post-Enlightenment system of thought.”
Because Dami is aware of this truth, it is easy for him—and by extension, us—to reconnect to the assertion of what he holds as life being an aspiration towards American films. And, that by implication, such a life shuns the authenticity of an indigenous African identity. This is why in “Diagnosis,” he says:
Tell me of yesterday,
Of barns of history
Looted like our heritage
And stowed away into a global show glass
As collector’s items.
This diagnosis is reflected in the questions asked in the clinical room when Dami asks, “But what is the worth / Of Milk that has lost its salt?” Do we, like the doctors, “wield wide bore cannulae” claiming that plastic pistols repair tissues? No. Dami tells us: “The clinical truth is Post-Mortem / At least we can lie that we tried.” (Emphasis mine.) We can listen to the new culture of Euro-American mental war on us and their claims:
They say the chasm of our hue
Buries us deeper and deeper,
And only their dregs of civilisation
Shall save us…
Perhaps it is the structural placement of the poems in Clinical Blues that I find fascinating, mostly with the poem that ends the collection. The book ends with “Amnesia” and tells us it is “the cure / To haunting pasts.” The dismemberment that took Dami’s generation to the psychiatric ward, it would seem, as he finds a remedy for it, is an exile which makes us forget. So he ends, “Amnesia is the cure / Administer two milligrams stat.” But this end is conflicted by one of the assertions in the section Hospital Poems, in the poem “Hurford Titi, 2010.” Dami tells us we will return:
Sometimes later you
Will return to this
Antiseptic corridors,
To this aging town
To seek your ancestry
This assertion was made ten years ago when the theory of decoloniality had not found a prominent space in postcolonial scholarship. It was a vision that even with milligrams of amnesia—by latching on to an identity that, so far, only masks us—the contemplation of return remains a pressing concern in decolonial discourse. For “It is then you will / Learn of your communal / Conception…” which will teach you that you are “not some descendant / Of a quasi-British, missionary / Heritage.”
This sense of return in Dami’s work is carried on in the tone of the poets we call the New School poets of the fourth generation, who espouse a sense of decolonial return, a battle to invalidate coloniality, which thrived by, as Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gathseni puts it, “emptying and removing the very hard disk of previous African memory and downloading into African minds the software of European memory.” So despite the milligrams of amnesia we take, we are not healed of the collective psychosis that leaves us in a clinical ward.
Clinical Blues rewards its readers with cadence, not only poetic, but a cultural cadence that shows the music of new happenings and collective psychological aspirations. Despite Dami’s influence of foreign poets—reflected in his love poems structured like T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock”—he understands the position of his existence and the duality that comes with being a child of two centuries.♦
Editor’s note: the essay by Sule E. Egya cited above is “Diaspora Positioning, Identity Politics and the Crisis of Nigerian Literature,” which can be found in ANA Review (2018), pp. 143-158
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Oko Owi Ocho has a BA English. He is the founder and team lead of Afrika-Writes, the Creative Director for Benue Poetry Troupe, and Programmes Manager, SEVHAGE. He is an award-winning poet, performance artist, and scholar. He was longlisted for the Nigerian Student Poetry Prize (2017), earned an NSPP Award of Excellence (2018) for his poem “Zeyani,” and was the second prize winner of the Korea Nigeria Poetry Prize (2018). He is currently researching fourth-generation Nigerian poets.