Dami Ajayi Records the Inner Life of Nigeria

In Konji Blues, from Dami Ajayi’s debut collection Clinical Blues, the speaker compares the rawness of a first sexual encounter to pickled onions in a salad:

The first time was raw
Like the pickled onions
In a salad of insatiable libido.

A stand up comedian would use the image to deflate the seriousness of sex. Ajayi lets it carry weight. The body in heat is also a body that ate something earlier, that lives in a kitchen, that is funny and self knowing about its own appetites. The line is comic and quietly sad at once.

He has been making this move for three collections now. Clinical Blues, A Woman’s Body Is a Country, and Affection & Other Accidents form a loose trilogy of body, city, illness, love, and drift, and across all three he takes the small physical detail and will not let it stay small. Updike called this giving “the mundane its beautiful due.”

Ajayi is not a public poet in the Soyinka mode. Public address has so dominated Nigerian poetry since the 1960s that a poet who declines it is liable to be read as having declined seriousness itself. Ajayi declines the mode and keeps the seriousness.

Where the Osundare and Ofeimun generation located their work in the broken country and its public weather, he has located his in the country’s most underwritten subject: the inner life of the contemporary Nigerian, in love and out of it, drunk in the bar and sober in the consulting room. A poet who writes about a love affair across five cities, or the look of a hospital ward at three in the morning, can be accused of writing trivially. The inner life is where most of any country lives, and the poetry that attends to it does the country a quieter and more durable service than the poetry that writes the country’s name on every page.

The ward poems are the hardest of the three collections. The title poem of Clinical Blues, a ten part sequence, treats the hospital as a site of moral attention:

Little angels become sickly,
Bespectacled, pregnant like
Physiologic scenarios.
Your pathologies are case noted in the mist
Of growing bills and dying resolves.
Then Mummy does not love you again.

This is the language of a registrar who has written too many notes and seen too much. Pregnant like physiologic scenarios is the phrase of a tired doctor at three in the morning, the simile reaching for the textbook because the actual description is too painful. Then the last line abandons the case notes altogether. Mummy does not love you again. The plainness of the Nigerian English construction, and the catastrophic tenderness of again. This is his craft signature: sustain a register, slip in a sly symbol, then break everything with a sentence in the language people speak at home.

A Woman’s Body Is a Country is the more temperate book. The experimental playfulness of the debut recedes, and feeling comes closer to the surface. It is also the book in which Ajayi turns his close attention to Lagos. Lagos Bunnies is the central sequence, a set of small portraits of city locations: Johnny Just Drop, Go Slow, Ikoyi Blindness, and others. Each section names a place and makes a small claim about it. Ikoyi Blindness:

Ikoyi rarely sees beyond finery
beyond visual precepts
like manicured foliage
old orchard trees, bougainvillea
& an occasional power cut.

Five lines of bourgeois inventory end with the small disclosure that even Ikoyi has power cuts. Ajayi places the inconvenience inside the finery, lightly, almost casually, and the class structure of the city enters the poem.

Go Slow does the same work for the Third Mainland Bridge:

smile at the unperturbed lagoon
shimmering with the full moon’s affection.
This gridlock detours at Redemption Camp
& this will be the longest day of your life.

The lagoon is beautiful. The traffic is biblical. Ajayi files Lagos the way he files the body: in close up, with affection, and without pretence.

There is also the metaphysical Ajayi, in the seventeenth century sense. My Love For You Is Psychosis stacks unlikely images and refuses to settle them:

This gridlock is a blacksmith’s forge.
This love, this anvil, this fulcrum.
This splurge, this spring welled up
like a burst pipe line.
This forlorn poet, this failed academic,
this fumbling minstrel, this futility.

Fourteen lines of this, then a confession of method:

contrast, similes, metaphors, quotidian realities.
My love for you is psychosis.

The Donne move, made on a Lagos bridge in twenty first century English, with a burst pipe line and Redemption Camp sharing a stanza with a blacksmith’s forge. That ease of inheritance is one of the gifts of his generation, and Ajayi uses it with unusual freedom.

There is also the older subject he has only glanced at: the city in the moment of its emigration. The japa wave is one of the defining social movements of recent Nigerian life. Oriogun has written the exile's side of it, the arrival and the ache of elsewhere. Nobody has yet written the departure lounge, the sold furniture, the last embrace at international departures, with the domestic attention Ajayi gives to everything else.

The poet who wrote five-city heartbreak in Affection & Other Accidents can write five-city emigration in book four.