Dami Ajayi Records the Inner Life of Nigeria

A moment 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 line runs:

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

In a less careful poet, the image would simply be funny. Pickled onions in a salad is a kitchen detail, slightly absurd, the kind of thing a stand-up comedian would use to deflate the seriousness of sex. In Ajayi's hands the image does the opposite. The pickling is real. The salad is real. The libido is real. The strangeness of putting them in the same sentence is the point, suggesting that 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. The poet has noticed both things at once and refused to choose.

This is the move Ajayi makes most often, across three collections. Those books, Clinical Blues, A Woman’s Body Is a Country, and Affection & Other Accidents, form a loose trilogy of body, city, illness, love, and drift.

Across all three, he sees the small physical detail and refuses to let it stay small. He notices the body and refuses to let it stay only a body. The detail is always precise. The image is always slightly off-centre. The reader is always asked to feel the ordinary thing more carefully than they were going to. It does the John Updike thing of giving “the mundane its beautiful due.” It’s a capacity that makes him one of the most distinctive Nigerian poets of his generation.

Ajayi is not a public poet in the Soyinka mode. He does not write to address the nation. The Nigerian poetic tradition has been so dominated by that public address since the 1960s that any 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, Ajayi has located his in the country's most underwritten subject: the inner life of the contemporary Nigerian person. In love and out of love. In health and in sickness. Drunk in the bar and sober in the consulting room. The Nigerian critical apparatus has historically expected its poets to carry the weight of the nation. A poet who writes about a love affair across five cities, or about the look of a hospital ward at three in the morning, can be accused of writing trivially. Ajayi can be misread this way. There is nothing trivial about the inner life. It is where most of any country really lives, and the poetry that pays attention to it is doing the country a quieter and more enduring kind of service than the poetry that writes the country's name on every page.

The ward poems are the hardest of the three collections, and the ones that have stayed with me longest. The title poem of Clinical Blues, a ten-part sequence, treats the hospital not as setting but as a site of moral attention. Watch it:

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.

The lines are clinical. They are the language of a registrar who has written too many notes and seen too much. Pregnant like physiologic scenarios is the kind of phrase a tired doctor would write at three in the morning, half-resigned, the simile reaching for the textbook because the actual description is too painful. Then the last line lands and it is not clinical at all. Mummy does not love you again. The simplicity of the Nigerian English construction and the catastrophic tenderness of again.

I have enjoyed his poems since I first encountered them, and his rather eccentric choice of imagery is a craft signature. Ajayi will sustain a register, slip in a sly symbol, and then break everything with a single sentence in the language people speak at home.

The second collection, A Woman's Body is a Country, is the temperate book. In it, the experimental playfulness of the debut goes underground, allowing emotions to come forward. It is also the book in which Ajayi finally turns his close-noticing attention on Lagos itself. Lagos Bunnies is the central document, a sequence 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. The third is the one that has not left me:

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

Five lines of bourgeois inventory ending on the small disclosure that even Ikoyi has its power cuts. Manicured foliage and old orchard trees and bougainvillea are the things Ikoyi wants you to see. An occasional power cut is the thing it cannot fully hide. The poet has placed the inconvenience inside the inventory of finery, lightly, as if it were just another item, and the reader feels the whole class structure of the city in the placement.

This is the Lagos move. Unlike the public address of the political poem, this is a close reader's attention to a single neighbourhood and the small thing it cannot conceal. 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. Both are true at once. Ajayi has filed the city the way he registered the body: in close-up, with affection and without illusions or pretence.

There is also the metaphysical move, in the 17th century sense. My Love For You Is Psychosis is the clearest example. The poem proceeds by stacking unlikely images and refusing to resolve 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.

The poem builds for fourteen lines and then closes on a confession of method:

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

Love is psychosis because love is the place where the mind keeps producing metaphors that won't resolve. The poet has named his technique inside the poem. The Donne move, made on a Lagos bridge in 21st century English, with a burst pipe-line and a Redemption Camp sharing the same stanza as a blacksmith's forge. That ease of inheritance is the gift his generation has, and Ajayi is its clearest beneficiary.

Whatever comes next will meet a Lagos that has changed registers since the trilogy began. There are subjects waiting for him that did not yet exist when the trilogy began. It should be presumptuous to forecast for a working poet but, who knows, the next collection might land in a country whose new subjects are already visible. The algorithms deciding which face the lover will see next or the dating app that flattens romance into a list of swipes and metadata. None of these has yet had its serious Nigerian poem. Ajayi is the lyric poet best placed to write them, because he has spent three books proving that the small interior detail is large enough to hold the country.

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, and almost no contemporary Nigerian poetry has held it close. A fourth-book Ajayi could write the going as carefully as he wrote the staying. The poet who wrote five-city heartbreak in Affection & Other Accidents can write five-city emigration in book four.