One killingly frigid morning in March of 2023, Carl and I were having a brief undisciplined duologue about the current state of Nigerian poetry in the global hall of poetics—contextually, systemically, and craft-wise—when he demanded to know out of nowhere which living contemporary Nigerian poet I would love to interview once given the opportunity. It was a tricky, difficult question. Difficult, on one hand, because I have an obviously exhaustive list of the contemporary Nigerian poets I love, and I consider choosing a single poet from such an already tight list an unforgivable sin. Tricky, on the other hand, because I think there was something specifically, casually, hinted at on the formative grounds of the question. Something that lives beyond mere lay-reading and liking the structural or linguistic aspects of a poet’s poem, an uncommon interest in or obsession with how a poet’s mind works. How does he create a free verse or couplets so intuitively abstract and yet so elegantly mundane? What books can be found on his TBR listing? The trickiness also extends to the fact that I did not realize until it was too late that I was actually being baited. It was an intelligent direct proposal framed as a pedestrian inquiry. However, I chose O-Jeremiah Agbaakin with a joyful ding.
I first encountered Agbaakin’s poem in the Cordite Poetry Review during my second MBBS. Like every federal university medical student who has heard endless stories of unwarrantable failures, I was playing an almost inextricable game of romance with despair. Here today, gone tomorrow. I remember going to sleep in my hostel room that night echoing the first line of the poem: “the tears continue to pour like a wet season.” Lying down on my bed in the morning, I’d google all his published poems online and put on an invisible notification to read every poem he’d publish in the future. If anything, Agbaakin’s poems are like wet matchsticks spread out in the sun. It may not produce fire on the first stroke, or even on the second. It takes only a persistent hand and a sharp mind to light up its artistic theatre. Most cottonheaded armchair performers of criticism may classify him as “obscure” or “elitist”, a somewhat bairn of the likes of Soyinka or Okigbo, but his poems, when closely pruned under critical eye, are fundamentally grounded in biblical anecdotes, cultural traditions, and a masque of ancestry.
This correspondence took a long while. Even the founding editor of Afapinen, Carl Terver, was exasperated at some point of waiting for its completion to give it a negative sign and drown it in the roadside pool of every editor’s unrealisable dreams. In case you want to know how long it took, you must imagine that between the time I messaged O-Jeremiah Agbaakin on Facebook to inaugurate our interview and its publication, Agbaakin has completed two residencies and now heading to the next; while I, on the other hand, have had the pervasive experience of nursing a sick mother back to good health, healing a strained ACL, and watching a family bitch take on his second, if not third, pregnancy.
NJOKU NONSO
I’d love to start by asking, Do you believe in God? Or should I say, do you believe in the Idea of a God? Since all your poems—at least those in my reading stack—hold a semblance of someone catching up with, interrogating, fighting, sensing, holding onto, becoming, or mapping supposedly different invented shadows of God? Sometimes, you “finger the rune of the nail print on God’s crucified palms,” other times, as in your “ode to a dead poem,” you proclaim “the gods are not dead, never gods.” Is the God (or gods) in your poems a metaphor, a hyperbole, or the persistent stroke of a destination?
O-JEREMIAH AGBAAKIN
My approach towards the existence of God or in the gods in my art is similar to the approaches of both theists and non-theists. On one hand, I come with the kind of knowing which Prageeta Sharma has described in her Grief Sequence as learning without knowing; this kind of knowing in fragments can only be parsed through the dream logic. These fragments come from our religious conditioning, our daily encounter with wonder or mystery, and most importantly, the artist’s conflict with language. This conviction is vivid and is rooted in what is known as implicit learning. It is the same knowledge that binds us to our kin even though we were not present either at their conception or birth. (It is why their death feels like our own death.) But I know that this person is my brother because he is. I have never come across someone who was allowed (or who would like to be present) in the delivery room when their sibling was born. But we don’t question the validity of the knowledge of our relationship to them. It is an immaterial fact that is sustained by the evidence of reciprocity. I believe my family is real and loves me dearly because they acknowledge the same thing about me. I believe in God because he believes I exist as my own agent and voice, albeit finite in the face and volume of wonders that embody his own existence.
Unfortunately, the scale of this balance tilts more often. This is why, on the other hand, I approach the same question as the non-theists: I don’t believe in the gods which have been sold to me at the expense of my own capacity to question them, the way I question all things, even the idea of touch. The Bible affirms that we “are gods.” The power structure in our society has concentrated this power in the hands of a tyrannous few: the systemic gods and every god that goads us into silence. My path of resistance is not just by disavowing their existence like the non-theists are wont to do, but by moving closer to them and flexing my own divinity, by touching them to be sure of what I am touching and stay far away. The distinction between good gods and bad gods can be blurry. But here is my simple trick: any god that has invalidated my existence or experience as a condition for their existence is not my god. These gods are dead.
NJOKU NONSO
Is this also how you approach your art, as a form of “learning without knowing”?
O-JEREMIAH AGBAAKIN
Yes. I approach my writing exactly that way. The natural theory of knowledge is that every knowledge is a product of our experience—empirical and instructional. There is also the theory that some knowledge comes from a previous life and has to be discovered within ourselves; or to put it into better perspective, the kind of knowledge we have before we are born. Indulge me when I use the baby analogy a lot in this exchange. (There have been a few childbirths in my life lately. I was frustrated when my first nephew was born last September, and the little man sleeps so much when I can barely scratch a half-dozen sleep at a stretch. Babies are believed to sleep for so long because they are learning about their environment, absorbing sensory information into their inchoate subconsciousness, registering the contours of faces, calibration of touches, demeanour, etc. Or maybe they are recollecting the memory from a previous life?
Let me stop here. Anamnesis, the theory that we know some things before we were born, is radically opposed to the doctrine of epistemology. But it is the theory that holds true to us in the spiritual sense. We are just like babies. We go about our daily lives as if we are fully formed, zooming out the mosaic of our lives into the blurry quotidian: going to work, eating, calling our friends, going on road trips, complaining about the weather, the oppressive systems, and so on. It is an oppressive clockwork. It makes sense when Charles Simic said, “The secret wish of poetry is to stop time.” I push this thought to the question. Of what use is stopping time if not to step into the past, to disrupt the dialectics of labour which Wole Soyinka describes in his essay, “Who’s Afraid of Elesin Oba?” as the devastating encroachments on individual self-fulfillment by the private exploiter of others’ labour.
“Learning without knowing” becomes more credulous when you put this into the context of the poetic process which Jane Hirshfield describes in her poem, “The Destination” as an “irremediable rock of refusal.” In my poem, I want to face my demons squarely. One of my demons is a lack of natural faculty in singing (like my sibling), painting (again, like my sibling), or any other artistic pursuit you can think of. In fact, if being a “decent” painter/instrumentalist/dancer is a ticket into the writing life, I’d be drenched in the rain outside, clutching the wet canvas, brushes, violins, etc. One of my demons is my anxiety about surprise. Nobody is ever ready for surprise (it’s why it’s a surprise), but I believe that mine has a psychotic edge to it to the point where I can be paralysed by it. My desire is thus to prepare for surprise in my own writing. I don’t try to find it. I try to wait and listen for its jarring whisper or apparition. It might be the turn of a line, an epiphanic image, a segue to the operatic progression or rehearsal in the poem. It might sound cliché, but I write to be surprised by what I didn’t know I had learnt.
NJOKU NONSO
I’m quite fascinated by your inch-perfect allusion to Jane Hirshfield’s “The Destination,” as she has constantly fronted herself as a stubborn devotee to the idea that poetry must dwell precisely on the glade between “a larger existence and a profound mystery.” And the Wole Soyinka reference, I must say, calls to mind a line from The Interpreters that emphasised how sometimes a bridge doesn’t move from here to there, on a translational plane, but in reverse order. Such an expression, I think, in my opinion, partly if not wholly, exemplifies what you imply by the theory of Anamnesis: to enter back into a world far beyond this domain in search of “materials” or knowledge untainted by the cataclysmic essence of human invention, a perfect world where I foresee language as a soft, forming animal waiting for a badge of experiential reality to attain maturity or definition. And what intrigues me more than the invented image or post-creation yield is the becoming of the image.
Speaking of creative approach—although I feel there’s a quiet ceremony of darkness enveloping your work in the same fashion as when one encounters, be it Soyinka, Okigbo, or Neruda—do you prefer writing in the early hours of the morning, noontime, or at night? And what effect can you say that ritual has had on your writing?
O-JEREMIAH AGBAAKIN
I must say that you describe the concept even better. About my ideal writing time, I seriously have no preference. Sorry to disappoint you, Njoku. But really, it feels surreal and flattering that you think of my work in that light. You should have met me four years ago when I had a more interesting ritual. I used to write straight out of a sleep, out of a dream or on some occasions, nightmares. My poem, “Revelation,” in Rattle was a product of such a ritual. I literally kept a pen in my pocket and a book under my pillow and close my eyes, as if I were not shutting down but only muting one body for another, powered by the subconscious. Now that I think about it I cannot help myself referring to the poem, “Magun” by Ejiofor Ugwu, where the speaker says he is “a sea child. / I armpitted my paddle, / my boat on my head, / and set out for the sea under.” I would write this way and revise the poems, by taking long walks, to bring them back into the world. These days, my writing comes from a different discipline. I realise that I don’t need complete silence to write. Silence is not the same thing as attention or surrender that a poem desperately needs. This summer, for instance, I have found out that I cannot function creatively inside the box of a library carrel. An image can whisper itself in the loudest city and it is my duty to write it. For instance, during my first summer in Atlanta I found myself writing more than I ever did in the very laid-back town of Oxford, Mississippi. These days, I usually devote the month of April to write continuously and spend all year revising the half of them that I know are good enough. That is not to say that other poems don’t come outside of this schedule. Sometimes I find myself rewriting old poems with a new language or a new experience. I still prefer to write first thing in the morning but they are nothing like the dream series. Those were more surreal and animalistic. I think I stopped writing that way because I stopped having vivid dreams or I found that the ritual had trained me better to listen to the ineffable whisper of the poetic spirit. As to what time of the day I prefer to write, I don’t think it matters a lot these days. I use every material I can find to keep on writing. I write lines instead of a poem as a complete body (ready to be named so and thus, stripped of organic conception and nurturing), either to transplant for another needy poem or write the lines until a full body is formed out of it. The process is liberating and also frustrating, especially in a world that rewards “visible” labour. I am starting to find beauty in the mediocre and quotidian like stepping on a dry leaf or commuting by bus.
NJOKU NONSO
I have noticed that most of your poems seem to uphold in the grandest a certain portrait of pure African consciousness: tone, topography, sensibilities, even metaphors are not spared the onslaught; it’s like grazing perpetually through the extensive stem of an old African soul. Is this a deliberate act? Plus what does Africa mean to you—both as a heritage and as an inspiration?
O-JEREMIAH AGBAAKIN
I think my method is more syncretic than a pure African consciousness. We should be careful with terminologies like “pure.” I completely understand where you’re coming from but you’ll agree that the African consciousness is not homogenous. Any attempt to homogenise has always been laughable. It’s not just a whole made of many parts, so we can’t simply braid these parts together and name it something. We rob these parts (made up of their own parts) the opportunity to develop their distinct expression. Whose “undesirable” voices do we leave behind when we do this? Look at all the criticism against Afropolitanism, for instance. Yet, I have a fascination with the lives of people thousands of years before us. How did they live? What mattered to them? How did they love? What were their flaws? What was their rhythm? How did they dream? Western literature with its standard documentation gave me access to see these things (think Homer, think Shakespeare, the Bible, the school curricula, and so on). The consequence was that I wasn’t seeing my own people. The African–Nigerian–Yoruba religious and cultural system has nothing to make me see that in place. We have a very rich oral literary canon (from our praise poetry, ijala, Ifa divination system, folklore, and so on) but there remains the question of reference and access. It’s no surprise then that the personae in the poetry of some African poets may often reference their “mother” as the voice of wisdom or poetic insight, while our non-Africans may name-drop dead white writers, sages, and philosophers in their poetry. It’d be naïve to think the “mother” in our poems and songs is only the earthly or the poet’s mother and not the mythical mother whose umbilical cord threads through all of us, even when the language she gives us may differ. It’s just like the “Mother Idoto” in Okigbo’s poetry.
Obviously, the influence these thinkers and Mothers have on us goes beyond the instinctive name-dropping. Thus, it’s a deliberate (and desperate) act—to tackle your question directly—to remain authentic in the way I think, feel, and write; and listen to the voices that speak to me when I am short of words. I cannot have or say it in another way without sounding like a poor caricature. This is exactly why I turn to Yoruba proverbial sayings after I have long exhausted my own mother’s voice (haha!), and attempt to translate them to fit the spirit of the poem, my own life, and the time. I also owe this sensibility to the influence I draw from a favourite poet, Ejiofor Ugwu. Reading his poem, “The Land of Uz,” in Guernica literally shaped the trajectory of my style. His poetry gave me the permission to continue doing what I was doing, to braid the many influences that instruct me, while I keep digging into the soul of language unencumbered by its own expression. It’s just like how you put it earlier: “a world far beyond this domain in search of ‘materials’ or knowledge untainted by the cataclysmic essence of human invention, a perfect world where I foresee language as a soft, forming animal waiting for a badge of experiential reality to attain maturity or definition.” No contemporary poet I was reading at the time was/is doing this the way he does it, with great skill, artistry, and this “African consciousness.”
NJOKU NONSO
Do you consider yourself an African poet?
O-JEREMIAH AGBAAKIN
Yes, but on this premise: a poet who is also African, and an African who is also a poet.
NJOKU NONSO
All the poets you underscored, from Soyinka to Okigbo, and then Ugwu, have been onetime accused of obscurantism—what critics might call “pleasurable nonsense,” a picky-sticky reference to the kind of poems that just be but don’t mean. More still: Nigerian contemporary poetry has also received an extensive share of such a play-by-play, sometimes fastened to be a consequence of Western modernist influences and “a failure of craft.” What are your thoughts on this, both as a contemporary Nigerian poet and as a poet whose poems may run the risk of being considered “obscure” since they tend to transmit from “indigenous” to “modern” poetry?
O-JEREMIAH AGBAAKIN
To start with, I think every meaningful art will always carry that risk of “sounding” obscure. That is the fundamental difference between the implication of literal speech and figurative language. The problem is that we’re always seeking for the meaning (of an experience) instead of the experience itself. Worse still, we’re quick to judge figurative language by the same standard of literal speech. Actually, it’s because of the failure of literal speech or rhetoric that we turn towards figurative speech. Were it not so, how do we still misunderstand one another after thousands of years? Why do we, to quote Hirshfield again, “each nod, pretending to understand”? Therefore, poetry or my poetry says that: “If we must fail, let us fail beautifully.”
Moreover, the human language as a signification of our desires is random and absurd. For instance, as you may already know, the word “bear” is not the name of the animal itself but a description of the animal, “the brown one,” in common Germanic because it’s considered a taboo to say the actual name. This isn’t even the most alarming illustration of how absurd language is. Yet, it is an absurdity that we have agreed upon. We have agreed that this means this, this combination of letters and sound means that, until you enter either my own truth, experience, or another’s language. Rarely do these two match each other in weight or significance, with what is said usually far outweighing what is meant. I believe poetry and art attempt to question this agreement even when the diction is very simple or accessible. What we may call obscure but meaningful language is, to me, an incompleteness of truth, experience, or language that the readers need to possess before they can experience the reproduction, through language, of the poet persona’s psyche. It is a voluntary derangement and disorientation.
The question then is: what are the rewards associated with these risks? There must be some rewards, right? For me, the primary reward is pleasure. It is a pleasure of resonance. Sometimes, a poem is powerful because we can’t explain it; but really it’s because resonance isn’t translatable, when the language that captures and reproduces the experience matches the experience itself. This is no mean task or victory. We cannot judge a work of art because it “resonates” with us (that is one of the qualities) but because of the resonance within its own medium. It’s like hearing a beautiful violin tune or the omele drum. One doesn’t say that because it sounds obscure, it is nonsense. In the hand of a good player, the last thing we think about is its resonation with us. The second(ary) reward, as you may guess, is the resonation. Does this resonate with someone? This isn’t necessarily limited to the question of has it happened to this person? After a reading in New York, one lady walked up to me and said she was moved by my reading of a Caravaggio ekphrastic poem because she had recently been to a baroque museum. It resonated with her because she had that kind of education. At the end of the day, readers will have different tastes as they should. At the end of the day, there are still many readers who have been waiting to meet us.
NJOKU NONSO
Are you trying to say the appreciation or resonation of art hinges mostly on some primordial knowledge of the art itself, perhaps its composition?
O-JEREMIAH AGBAAKIN
That is one way to look at it. I think everyone has the potential to appreciate the mystery of life and the human condition that true art attempts to capture. To say otherwise is to present art as exclusive, is to say that some people don’t deserve to compose or experience art. But I would be naïve or dishonest to say that when I compose, I am thinking about everybody as the readers of my work. Surely, I am thinking about life, about people, about the lives of people disappointed by the failure of language itself, the limitation of love, family, and our lives.
At the end of the day, art is for all of us. We don’t really need anyone to intercede for us through language to be able to access it. Like I said elsewhere, it’s no mean feat. It requires training, intuitive awareness, and discipline. The appreciation of art—its resonance, and resonation with us—depends on the question of “do we have the patience or interests to surrender ourselves to the wonder of life?” It is a question that critiques our postmodern world, which filters everything through the lens of the capitalist value system, even our time. We are always in a rush, not because our time is limited but because it is measured for us. And why should it? Art forces us to pause and find ourselves. I will close this response with these lines from A.R. Ammons: “so many people / with bodies only. / so many bldgs with / mere addresses: / buses, subways, cabs, / somebody everywhere:”
NJOKU NONSO
I presume it’s been years since you moved from Nigeria to the United States. How has the change of domain impacted or affected your craft?
O-JEREMIAH AGBAAKIN
I will have to start by talking about how it has impacted my life. Migration has given me a privilege of distance that allows me to access—and sometimes depend solely on—memories to write about some subjects I would not be able to if I were home. When you are far away from home, you live two half-lives. On one hand is a present life that’s inchoate in the new land; on the other is a past life suspended, like a “static mould” (to quote Soyinka), in the homeland. You can catch up with your family, friends, the news, the cultural (re)productions of home, but it’s impossible to catch up with the landscape itself, on which all these are contingent.
In craft, a lot can be gained through restraint, whether voluntary or involuntary. One has to improvise. For instance, one has to improvise for the lack of structure that traditional form enables when writing in free verse. How do you create music in your lines when you are not working with a traditional metric system? You will be surprised at our ingenuity and adaptation. This breakaway from traditional prosody into free verse is an analogous situation to how being away from home can impact one’s craft. In my writing, I have developed a richer inner world. I was also fortunate to study under Aimee Nezhukumatathil (who is unbelievable!). My attitude towards the natural world has changed drastically. I am now more interested in the identity of our flora and fauna and take the extra step to know their names, their qualities, and so on. Knowing the name of anything is the first step towards acknowledgment of that thing. I came into the MFA programme with a full-length manuscript. Today that manuscript is very different. The thematic concerns have embraced many other things like the environment, homelessness, alienation, migration, labour, and so on. When you have to draw a booklist, write a comprehensive exam, and do a defence about your manuscript, you will see that a lot has improved in your writing. Moreso, you are able to clearly articulate the book’s concept.
NJOKU NONSO
Did your obsession with Judeo-Christian tradition begin before or after your migration?
O-JEREMIAH AGBAAKIN
I wouldn’t call it obsession. I’d call it fascination with this strange thing that’s embedded within our cultural landscape. To answer your question, it started way long before I called myself a poet.
NJOKU NONSO
Do you think that perhaps the dearth of experience heightened your interest in content rather than form?
O-JEREMIAH AGBAAKIN
What do you mean by content rather than form?
NJOKU NONSO
I mean your earlier poems were more concentrated on form and technique. Your latest poems still employ them without a doubt, but it seems you have swapped your interest in form for your interest in content. Do you think so, as well? If yes, do you think the change in environment might have contributed to the barter?
O-JEREMIAH AGBAAKIN
I don’t think there was a time my writing consciously emphasised on form at the expense of content. That may be my own blindspot talking, so I’m grateful I know this now. It’s a great privilege when someone views our work differently from us. Yet, I like to think that I’m still the same poet I was five or six years ago. I fondly remember a conversation with a friend who’s a favourite poet and also here in the US. (If he’s reading this, he’d know I’m talking about him.) In that conversation, he said he’s outgrown some things in his writing, that he’s abandoned his manuscript. But I didn’t think that’s the case. I thought his craft had obviously improved but I could still see the same approach, voice, and style in his writing. Of course, I never told him this at the time. But I will tell you this by way of admission: I subconsciously started shifting towards a more accessible language during my MFA programme. When you’re in a workshop, sometimes they want (out of good intention) to trace a narrative arc in your poetry, even when the language, technique and form are doing a good job. Poetry is not a narrative. It can be, but a poem hasn’t failed because it has no story or what I suspect you call “content.” I don’t think I deliberately avoided content in the past or that I focus on it now. I wrote poems the way they came to me. I write poems the way they come to me. The gift of a workshop experience is that it allows you to see how a wider audience may be (mis)reading your work. And this gift, when received well, challenges you to try new things. To answer your question, I don’t think my environment has anything to do with this beyond the fact that my full-length manuscript, which I’ve been working on since 2017, has absorbed many ideas, stories, and contents from this new environment that it wouldn’t necessarily absorb were I in Nigeria. But my education is definitely a suspect.
NJOKU NONSO
I know we should be done with the interview. But I’m curious. How did you become a poet?
O-JEREMIAH AGBAAKIN
Ha! It’s like asking how did you wake up or how did you fall asleep. It just happened. But I can’t answer the question without boring you on how I became a writer. So indulge me. There’s a story I’ve made up about how I became a poet (it’s usually the story on my artist statements, cover letters, comprehensive exam response, and statements of intent, and so on). Out of every other possible version, this one seems to be closest to the truth and to the fidelity of memory. But it’s not an extraordinary story, so let me cut to the chase. My writing began through a rite of passage. We spent our childhood in a family house that my paternal grand-uncle owned. We had a lot of relatives (uncles, aunts, grand-aunts, cousins once removed, and so on). And a lot of gossip. And a lot of stories that straddled reality and fantasy. We told ourselves tales by the moonlight (this is true). I don’t recall if I ever got to tell any stories. There were simply more competent narrators. When we relocated from the family house, we didn’t stop. In fact, all my siblings and I wrote stories. Sometimes we narrated these stories in the darkness of the living room when power cut as usual, colouring the dim fog with our imagination, filling in the gaps where the screen went blank before us. I wanted to be an engineer or doctor but I switched from science to art in the second year of senior secondary school. My love for literature consumed me. My parents opposed my decision; they felt I switched because of laziness or unseriousness. I think they’re right about the unseriousness. (LOL.) Anyway, I worked hard in art. I was primarily an essayist and story writer but I was drawn to poetry because of its attention to language, and the interiority of an inner world it enriches, instead of just relaying a story (which I had had enough of at that point in my life). I could not say it’s an autodidactic process because I was taught by teachers without hands or chalk or board. I imitated the writing of the poets we read in the curriculum. Lenrie Peters, Oswald Mtshali, and so on. It was unbelievable that I could reproduce what they did. That’s exactly how I started writing poetry. I called myself a poet right at that moment. Anything (successes and setbacks) that’s happened since then is just a validation and affirmation of that first realisation for me.♦
O-Jeremiah Agbaakin is the author of The Sign of the Ram (APBF/Akashic Books, 2023), selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the New Generation African Poets Chapbook series. Other poems are published in Kenyon Review, POETRY, TRANSITION, Poetry Daily, Poetry Society of America, and elsewhere. He’s received scholarship and fellowship from Mass MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), Bread Loaf, Key West Literary Seminar, and Tin House; and was a finalist for the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. He’s currently a doctoral student of Creative Writing at the University of Georgia where he’s won a Graduate Research Award from the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, among other honours.