(A Review of Dami Ajayi’s Affection & Other Accidents, published by Radi8 Ltd., Lagos, Nigeria, 2022)

The therapeutic and healing properties of poetry are not necessarily definite for the genre, but they exist and can for poets provide all of the relief for the mind if taken up as a mirror of the self.

For the man or woman who is heartbroken, poetry can become a journey into the self, a retrospective X-raying of fortunes and misfortunes, with the aim of understanding the course of one’s own existence as a being. To make meaning of life, of love and losses. Here, where life is a rope, a strangling rope. A noose. With all the properties to transmute into a broken rope all to the same consequence of death, leaving the living with nothing but a thin thread of a bridge to navigate this heavy knotted maze of a rope.

The Clinician Dami Ajayi with his collection, Affection & Other Accidents hands us poetry with a stethoscope on the human heart and emotions. He examines how love fates us on the rope called life, how steady love and his travails hit hard with pain than the expected pleasure. The accident of broken promises and betrayed expectations, the same love we fall into to hide and provide us with reasons to go on living inflicts pain and other accidents of death and dying on our frail frame and being.

The first take of the collection is the shattering of the myth that the man is always and has always been the player; the man is the one leaving the woman in the hang and walking away. Here we meet a poet personae of a man taking us through his odyssey in the hands of a woman.

The story like reading of the title poem AFFECTION & OTHER ACCIDENTS doesn’t betray the beginning of most love stories of always “A perfect beginning” (p.2). The sacredness of words imposes stinginess on their use. This does not now dismiss history and chronology from poetry. In INTERLOGUE I (p.8), the love runs its course and in “Three years &/four proposals later/we stand annulled, a premarital divorce.” From the time we go on to place/s in INTERLOGUE II (p.19), where the poem reads “… you did me dirty/ in five cities.”

The first of the city is Lagos, four others are to follow after… and this is where the collection, in reality, kicks off too. On “the Third Mainland Bridge at top speed.” With the poet personae set to deliver “a replacement”/’s “engagement ring”. We do not get to know how the original was lost. The heart in love is most incapable of reading meanings outside of consolidating and consummating love; this is all there is to a thesis. An antithesis in the opposite direction in the sense of an anti-love does not exist. Readers cannot help but wonder how a lady can be chatty to an audience about a “missing engagement ring”, and at the same time express an “unfaltering devotion” to the same man without a clue as to how an engagement ring went missing “barely three months I slid it into your finger.” (p.3)  

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”Yes, love fails, many a times it is never enough. The economics of existence, our class, our morals, even simple things like how we eat, the sound of food in our mouth, when we eat, how we defecate can break and set two hearts apart.”

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Love is a blinding floodlight, without the need of eyes to behold the change of currents in the underbelly already undermining the love in pursuit. With love, the heart is all the mind that is needed, and the confession of words; the pronouncement of the four-letter-word; and the “aisle-bound affection” is all there is defining reality.

We motion from Lagos to Germany; inside of “A trained coach heading from Berlin to Cologne” (p.4) with the goal already for “A perfect Danish wedding with all your family & none of the mine”. The rude response to his mother over “questions about Denmark”. And to now suffer “our relationship” to ridicule to feed the other’s hunger and “appetite for public spectacle” and the terrible conclusion to end everything “to get off and never see you again”.

But love is notoriously known for its power of elasticity and so we hop to the fourth city of New Delhi in India. Is the poet coming to New Delhi to plead with Parvati; the dark skin goddess of love? This is a reversal of Hindu mythology; a reversal of role for Shiva is not now the one playing hard to get.

The poem reads itself out as a podcast from the Vedas: “Love endures. Love is relentless. Love trudges.” (p.5) to find out “if there was any love left, anything we could work with to bring our affection back to speed”. All of the bribe of favourite cuisine condiments of “locust beans, dried fish, dried ewedu leaves, fiery ground pepper” fully loaded on suitcases from Lagos was too poor for appeasement to make room for the purported lovebirds to engage each other in a question and answer session on the future.

The poet proved to be too Cain-like with his vegetable load of offerings. The Abrahamic God of Genesis was alive in India already eager to taste blood. Again another reversal of role. The poet personae are unable to play Cain to the end, and suffer love to a murder, as the thunder of don’t dos come raining down; “Do not leave the light bulbs on. Do not leave skid marks on the porcelain. Do not leave used plates in the kitchen sink. Do not play music too loud. Do not sit. Do not write at night. Do not ask questions.”

From India with no answers we head to the fifth city; London. Distance should no longer be a hindrance to love, not when it can be obliterated with the touch of a button and two hearts can to and fro be connected, enabling the flow of soothing words to help temper the crisis of navigating the capital of the former British empire and the demands of a new job. Day one: “a deluge drenched me”. Day two: “slid & fell on Sunderland Avenue”. Day three: “tripped on the underground station & fell. I sat on the floor with my overtly yellow luggage & wept.” And nothing but the damning verdict of “incapable of living in Europe”.

London becomes the city of finishing off. The “London days, / days edged like a bet … /days trembling from denouement, /… /days notched by uncertainties, (p.11). But not without flickers of the flame of hope for a love already “threadbare” (p.7) and thinning out to sparkle light back to life has the He receives the news of the She coming to London. Alas, however the bomb drops, delivered by a precise phrase from of her coming to London “to apologize, not to beg”. More like two Generals of opposite camps at the peace talk to end the hostility with “a handshake & keeps dignity intact.” There is no understanding of the reason for the bitterness even in “a small war over toilet rolls” (p.25).Everything is in reversal form. How love came to feel like war and peace-making leaves the other with a broken heart.

The pain is on exhibition in AUBADE TO MY GREYING (p.9) the unrealisation of the dream of fatherhood (at least for now). They look forward to in a congenial coupling of man and woman in coitus copulation, for a “daughter” calling on “Daddy ….” Now we know everything is gone burst. How consoling is poetry to a broken heart even when it gives birth to poems to “progenies” that “don’t breathe air;/they sit on shelves/& I wear/proudly the badge “author.”

Ebu is the Yoruba word for curse, as the poet plays Jesus in full blast damning the fig tree for fruitlessness in the poem MARY’S IN INDIA (p.20). The woman in our story finally gets named; Mary. And the poet discards civility to pass a harsh sentence of condemning her to loneliness. “Mary, /the sun will rise &/set on you alone today” and “… tomorrow” and “… always”. This is the final walk away; there is no return anymore to this love.

UNRELAIBLE NARRATOR (p.23) is the title for this fallback to the memory of the good and beautiful times. Of “shades of the nights, /the sour edges of the forbidden. /She would rest her head on/my bony knee & wait for daybreak, soft music cooing.”. “The night hasn’t changed its /shade & texture much, but people change/ & their circumstances” This much is what has rocked the DECLARATION (p.24) of “unflinching affection”. The poet poaches on the entire meeting of the classic song: LIFE GOES DOWN LOW (p.25) by the Lijadu Sisters to next fete us with his transition from the hilltop of desires and feeling of forever bliss to the valley of “despair”.  

And love is “the dyspnoeic flame of an oil lamp” that gets no spark to life as “strangers do not offer smiles” of light “from behind dark face masks”. And the flame is assailed by the constant “cold calls” without any protective shield of a warming heart. What more is left as the poet announces his disentanglement with the line “I acknowledge my exile” from love.  

And the night becomes the refuge for the broken heart. The sense of loss is now acknowledged, the man can wander into the dark unknown and alone to behold “Lupita dancing alone” (TONIGHT p.27). This is where therapy can begin, yes in a “nightclub”, burning the pains out of the heart watching other men “licking” the dancing Lupita “with their eyes”, and as well as listening to “the DJ” playing song after song. Lupita is medicine, prescribed in music and dance. Lupita is medicine in is self-indulgence without temper for anything or anyone else “outside her body/she will mind her business & whine her waist/as though there is no haste,/as though she made time.” The Broken heart is one and at the same time a split personality sharing the same space as the eyes watching Lupita dancing on stage and other men watching her but also as Lupita in her disregard for life’s “complexion & its complexities” and “sublime her worries”.

BIG HANDS (p.28), transports us back to tricks the mind can play on a broken heart seeking healing, the temptation to dwell in the past and not put it aside. How interruptions and eruptions of erotic desires even as ghosts can further damage the heart to continue to ail. So in sharing a table once again, “the urinal” is a sanctuary to aid the mind to not forget the handy lesson of Lupita. The poet’s personae are healing, and temptations must be avoided. Please keep your handshake to yourself, “I had folded your memory into/shelves where cobwebs belong.” WE MOVE. The reader is all with the poet, no doubt in full empathy. This is nothing but WOKE. To walk out into the night and “navigate [existence] with a Samsung & song.”

Dami Ajayi succeeds so beautifully well in crafting for the broken heart the necessity to find from deep inside the courage with which to move on, only then can the exorcism commences and Time, the ultimate Chief Priest of fates, performs the finality of rituals and “ellipsis becomes elision/becomes a dot becomes/a blinking cursor/beginning to blur.” INTERLOGUE III (p.30).

Only on the path of healing can the Broken–hearted take the past to task and reconfigure the history of the affair for causations of the fall of this Empire of Love & Desire. The flaws of the emperor permit me in this case the Empress, which before now the mind blinded by love could never have seen, and so doing strengthens the will to sane oneself out of despair and sail away free. This is the function performed by the next series of poems, an exposé on the character’s defects.

In SHOE STRINGS (p.31), the subtle word “filch” helps to disguise this act of stealing “shoestrings”. But hear the poet why not “a column of good books” and he explains it away “where is the head?” He points to the lack of “Opolo” and “patience to dwell/on sentences poised to shapen your life”. The failure to bring to fruition the dreams of “proposed writing” projects. With CANCELLING R. KELLY (p.32), all of the labour of love to build up the needed crescendo to set the ship for two to sail is suddenly halted as “You disrupt pleasure to shut off the music, /You will not fuck me to a R. Kelly tune. And the menial mount climbing to bring fire to desire begins all over again. And painfully “at dawn, you don’t thank me/ & say bye-bye”. In THE BODY KNOWS (p.33), yes the body of the other knows when the player or the slay queen prowls.

With THE CRUCIBLE (p.35), we are back to “the logistics of saying goodbye” and “Nothing was promised/… at the departure bay”. In A POEM FOR RALIAT (p.43), we cannot help but to be happy with Raliat and “her groom”. With both of them “Love finds itself & that is enough”. And there is a wedding, there is a marriage. But why not the same for the poet personae? “It hurts to be alone”, Bob Marley’s 1965 song “Love & Affections” is here appropriate and fitted to play: “I was the one who always feels the pain”.

In INTERLOGUE IV (p.50), the therapy sessions make a turn and the poem engages the Brokenhearted being with a question that lights the possibility of an end of therapy. The two to tango’s prerequisite comes up in full motion as the Clinician takes the patient to task with the questions to confront the other of “what is love without reciprocity” and “that what you have given/is given back?”. And “what is the use of anger/if not to dissolve resolve” (FIRST STRIKE (p.51)). Everything begins to Fall in place. The poet’s personae are not the reason, did not fire the first strike. This power of revelation clears existing “doubt” to see the supposed if you don’t mind my expression here “fake love” of the other and the poet exclaims “if this is all of your love,/then my food allergies must be kind”.  

INTERLOGUE V (p.56) is the last of the in-between engagements of the whole affair. This recaps of one of the beautiful moments of bliss… “Two lovers are caught” trapped in a blast of “Summer rain“, and the next scene is not a dream. It is live stream…without the need for blanket cover…two bodies rock…the way a woman can make a man rain… jigging a seed to grow a sun inside of her to life… To the power of her attraction “…makes it rain” to drown the rain outside. Only that after she “fails/to bring the sun back“. Is the imagery not overstretched? In Cologne, the two hearts in unison worked body together to shut out the sun. “In the middle of the night, alone” the verdict of “accident” as a memory to banish from the mind of the Poet personae is a battle to be won for healing to fully become for the Brokenhearted.

Affection is not the only one rocked by accident, death and dying feature a great deal in the collection as the “… OTHER ACCIDENTS” rocking life out of existence. Death breaks the heart no less in pain in the same way love unconsummated can do. In THE WAITING ROOM (p.22), we behold the “waiting gestures/pressed on faces/ while the mind runs amok” of people with their loved one caught “between coma & eternal sleep”, painfully she passed on as the poem is tagged “(In memoriam Mrs Ojuri).

In A PANTOUM FOR GABRIEL (p.38) poetry is feted with another task to “ferry” the dead “to the hereafter/ where beauty is song”. Idealism and all of the poisons ever invented in relation to death comes up to air in the poem. The religious hogwash of “pearly gates and things promised/where the body becomes eternal.” Except that the journey to this abode for the dead is not a sky bound as concocted by Abrahamic creeds but on earth “across the River Nun”. And like Babalola in A REQUIEM (p.42), the “dead … are better than us … have crossed the threshold to join the gods to become gods”.

Can poetry intercede on behalf of the dead? In BIRTHDAY ELEGY (p.45), we are told that when the “ephemeral farewells acquire permanence,/poets must shut up/& commit to silence.” The verdict however is that it “is a treacherous thing” to embrace silence when a great mind like Pius Adesanmi suffers an accident in an Ethiopian  plane crash and died on March 10, the birthday of the poet. The intersections between poetry and death and failed love comes to the fore. Both grieves the heart no less to be broken. The arresting silence of the mind at such accidents on one’s affection and on loved ones, is why “Silence is too fatal an act/ for a poet to commit.”

So Broken–hearted or mourning, yes “Grief is a slippery thing” UNTITLED (p.52).  “Grief is what we the living must do” (ON GRIEF)(p.46).  But still we must learn HOW TO GRIEVE IN TIME (p.47) for “time is balm,/its reassuring calm/comes to those/who put theirmemories/out at night for the dew”.

The comic relief moment in the whole of the pain and accidents in the text is the next poem FUNERAL DRESSINGS (p.38), the poet journeys us through a Fashionista pageant of the dead. The first on the parade roll call is “great grandmother”. The audience has a “four-year-old mind-” marveled by the performance despite the fact that the clothes on display were merely “sun-dried by camphor”. Followed by “nan”, who is dressed “like an English bride with white platform shoes”. Grandfather “Dressed in beige aso-oke” comes on stage next.  

With Ife “someone failed to roll-up his sleeves/in case of a tyre blowout en route heaven.” Heaven turns up here our creation. Nothing feeds the human imagination better than our existential realities. The road to heaven can therefore not fail to replicate our reality of potholes in Nigeria. Not there to behold Tolu on stage. The poet “wonder if they let him wear dark shades”. Then there is the grand failure of costume at the pageant with Seyi, and his fuming with words against the beautician, sorry the “mortician” who “wore him white nylon gloves like an antiquated groom”.

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”The poet proved to be too Cain-like with his vegetable load of offerings. The Abrahamic God of Genesis was alive in India already eager to taste blood. Again another reversal of role. The poet personae is unable to play Cain to the end, and suffer love to a murder”

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But let’s make a return back to affection, back to therapy and NAKED I AM BEFORE YOU RIVER DUN (p.57) does that perfectly for us. The search for guilt, stripped to the bare, the quest continues as to why this has happened… this Broken-heartedness. The poet qualifies himself with three damning epithets “A dunce, damned, done.” But not so quick…There are no supplications on hand to offer like other poets before him Gabriel Okara at River Nun… Or even Christopher Okigbo at River Idoto. River Dun offers wise counsel to the brokenheart … “The most adored affection, too/become undone./& you are not done“. Suicide is not “an option”. The broken heart can find “love enough” inside of the self to heal and restore one’s “flailing heart“. Even from the depth of “silence of flailing love” (THE ANATOMY OF SILENCE) (p.58).

Healing demands learning “the lofty lesson of silence &/ its kinship with patience”. The internalized battle demands strength and courage from the inside to weather through and behold the light of the shinning sun smiling life back on one’s face to go on with light. Poetry must here not play pretense that it is an easy task to recover when suddenly one is cut off from the other. What the poet refers to as “this silence between two lovers &/two phones.” Ever so busy before, and operators at the connecting end already contemplating keeping the lines permanently connected. How then can anyone understand the sudden coldness? This new fever of “silence“, what is it? The poet tours through different versions of it, but the focus is not lost …it is “The response to unrequited love …”, but this love of the poet was requited, only that now the other one chooses to move up along into the territory of fresh possibilities outside of a country whose name in everything else spells the reversal of fortunes.

A POEM FOR THE CONDEMNED POET (p.61), If anything the poet betrays his affection, how can anyone be guilty of love…can anyone go stand trial for love… Except for the crime of wanting more than the other can give… But this poet is not guilty. If anything he is a worthy ambassador of affection, who carried himself and aired his mind with all of the possibilities that can pregnant the future when two hearts intermingle.
What state is this that docks a man for love? But here… the poser in reality should be what country is this… Is this a criminal or civil suit? The state suing on behalf of who? Who is the Plaintiff? And the ‘witness’ is definitely a she and please mind the answers. And then you begin to penetrate the crimes of the poet. “Do you know this man?” And she answers “I do not know this poet“. A mindful response…this is. Not when both the woman and man have been seen together in public and private spaces. So is it the poet that she didn’t bargain for in the man?And the poet in the man acknowledges the self to have grown “frivolous desires” and expectations is why the lover of a man has brought this on himself.

The accident occasioning the loss of the future and separation of the hearts… and then this trial… When both partners shared the driving seat. Except that the poet and poet personae continued the reversal of roles into a state of confusion that succeeds to make one not to see that this trial is a double tragedy on account of the fact that the poet is the accuse and at the same time the trial judge and indeed the court itself that has “condemned” the poet to “drown”. It is even more heart wrenching when the partner in crime is the one playing “Pontius Pilate,/hands washing water” self away, saying she has never seen him before “No, not in a lifetime”.

Can we completely take side with half of this story.as told by the poet? Is there another side to this story? The right of a woman to be a player. Now that Ocol is the protagonist. Should Lawino not be granted her own right of reply? Or to play the payback. Or are we face to face to economics, the refusal to stoop the ladder down… yes we see this every day, the quest to make love into a ladder to escape from pain and penury. The journey for some others is the Sahara desert for working class youths. But the Big and mighty who already see Nigeria no more as a home, already with the nationality of advance Capitalist country, a citizen already of a European country… and for a young lady, possible coming home whether out of any curiosity or not or even from a parental push, then love cannot be anything but a fling. No more no less. There is a huge difference in sociology in relation to the Diasporan African descendant with Nationality on the African continent or distinct and different with nationality and birth in Europe or America with parents tracing their genealogy to slavery.

This would be my first full read of Dami Ajayi, not because he does commend himself to others in the craft as worthy of the name of a poet but more of a question of failing on my part both in relation to disposition and time. Lagos is a damned heartless city. A city of no measure. Acity of many death of love, and many birth of lost love… aptly described by Jahman Anikulapo as “the city without a soul”. Yet for many it is the city for becoming and for failing at becoming. The hustler’s city of destination for those who cannot dream London, New York, Paris, Berlin, Cologne or Toronto as their home. Then imagine a girl from the ranks of those who can dream these cities of lush and posh crazy enough to fall in love with Lagos, she will never fever the mind to be resident here, For with such status of birth and class what should be “ephemeral” stays ephemeral and not permanent.

In the end there is the monstrous fingerprint of the grand failure of governance in all of our little tragedies, even in a failed love affair that had everything working for it. Pain for the Broken–hearted is not fiction. Nor are these poems mere exercises of the imagination. Dami Ajayi has scripted for us the making of our warmest of true feelings, the possibilities of love. How love can traverse cities. Imprinting places eternally into our consciousness, and still fail to hold itself up to the sun and strand erect to be counted affirming that love never fails. Yes love fails, many a times it is never enough. The economics of existence, our class, our morals, even simple things like how we eat, the sound of food in our mouth, when we eat, how we defecate can break and set two hearts apart. Chemistry is important but economics and sociology are subconscious factors in the background determining the staying power of a love affair.

Those who think class doesn’t define the poetry of our existence, don’t know life. Can anything else outline life more than love? Where everything is possible in the very heart of ‘affection’ and abundance of affiliation …distilling everything good to pleasure the heart…’accidents’ in the best of times minus the mind to think the other way, but then not all accidents are sudden. Some accidents come the way of affection on account of class and country… Where the accident we will suffer tomorrow to come is suspended for living here today and making good of the time… Then we move… No more together… I have also been there.

Affection and other Accidents is Dami Ajayi’s third poetry collection. The previous collections, Clinical Blues, and A Woman’s Body is a Country gathered critical acclaim and sealed Ajayi’s place as one of the most important poetic voices in contemporary African poetry.

This latest collection continues the poetic tradition that has now become Ajayi’s trademark, except that it includes a minor experimentation in form. The two most important features of A Woman’s Body is a Country are the references to songs as well as poems that treat the mundane, almost to the point of self-deprecation. Affection and Other Accidents departs slightly from this, introducing other issues and maintaining a storied arrangement.

Historically, much of African poetry has been concerned with such serious, social issues such as in Niyi Osundare’s The Eye of the Earth, and Ijeoma Umebinyuo’s Questions for Ada that deal with climate change and feminism respectively. Ajayi breaks from this norm with his definition of a personal poetic style which involves writing about everyday issues. Nonetheless, his latest collection shows a maturation and a more urgent concern with love and its ills. Ajayi is not a stranger to love poetry, and he shows love in a different light.

A preliminary reading of the collection and a consideration of the title suggests that it is a collection of heartbreak poems, but a deeper reading would show that the poems are not ordinary heartbreak poems but expressive ones that show vulnerability and attempts at writing pain vividly. Heartbreak poems are a subgenre on their own as heartbreak and unrequited love are phenomena that have been proven to, more often than none, inspire poetic expression. The poet calls affection an accident, and the second poem in the collection, “Aubade to My Greying” exposes the poet persona’s regrets, wishes and experiences, a good follow up to the eponymous opening poem,
“Affection & Other Accidents” which itself is a long-winding experimental poem that reads like a short story of the poet’s love and the many upheavals he faces, from his own individual perspective. The retelling of the love story makes it feel like a villain origin story. The merit of the narrative is that it shows vulnerability, that love is not all glamorous. The heartbreak narratives are so beautifully told that they suggest a convincing honesty.

The words are fine, even though they carry pain. Beyond lyricism, Ajayi shows that words are amoral things; they can carry pain and still look beautiful. The collection hosts 51 multi-topical poems, almost as if invoking David’s plea for repentance in Psalm 51, only this time around, perhaps a poet’s repentance from loving. Despite the pain, Ajayi’s typical popular culture-inspired narrative showed up right at the start of the collection with the opening poem, “Introit” which begins with the phrase, ‘Bless Up.’

If Ajayi’s previous, sophomore collection, A Woman’s body is a Country was like writing poetry in songs, this new collection feels like writing poetry in prose. It is a collection of poems that could also have been a series of essays on love, lust, loss, affection, and other accidents as stated by the poet. Poetry does the work of suppressing these feelings and stories into poetic expressions. The poems in this collection are those that do more good to the poet than readers, definitely not what a debutant poet would write. As an experienced poet, Ajayi is able to dance at the precipice of truth and poetry, painting vivid images of a failed love encounter without giving away enough details to get in trouble with the other party. This is shown in some of the lines that require some context for interpretation. The lead poem contains the following lines that might require some background for readers to understand:

My heart pounding against my chest, I wanted to do two things. One was to get off & never see you again. Two was to call my mother & apologise for being rude to her when she began to ask questions about Denmark. & you kept going at it (4).

The poems also show a peripatetic poet whose commitment to the love affair is not limited by geography. However, the stories behind some of these travelling remain elusive to readers as the poems do not contain enough context. The journey motif seems to recur with the mention of many cities across the world: “I was waiting with questions, waiting for your answers, but we would not speak of Lagos, of Berlin, of Cologne” (4).

However, sufficient context is not provided for these journeys. The journey motif is a thread that has potential, but the poet refused to push it further.
Another important feature that runs through the love affair narrated in the collection is the poet persona’s dismissal of their own flaws, making a casual mention of it as “What happened in that train? I am not a perfect. My past loops into the present, a trail of dalliances returning like the proverbial abiku” (5).

These lines only suggest that the poet persona has flaws that they would like ignored or glossed over. The extent of the dalliances referenced remains unknown.
There are other topical poems that reference recent historical events like the COVID-19 pandemic. These kinds of poems not only express the poet’s feeling, but also speak to recent events in history. References to music also recur in the collection. The poet mentions musicians like Ebenezer Obey, Dido, John Coltrane, and the Lijadu Sisters. There is also a reference to an exclusive night club, a pointer to the centrality of music in Ajayi’s oeuvre. There is an authorial intrusion that is reminiscent of Ajayi’s Clinical Blues, which relies heavily on his experience as a psychiatrist: “Somewhere in the psyche ward
a registrar discovers Freud” (18).

Just as the collection progresses and other themes threaten to overwhelm the pain which is central to the collection, “Interlogue II” refer the readers back to the poet persona’s heartbreak with the following lines:

“It is still surreal
that you did me dirty in five cities” (19).

These lines restate the scorn that the poet persona feels, and makes it difficult for readers to objectively assess the situation.

These are poems written in low moments, conveying truth and honesty. They show a poet persona who is now conscious of their body and how they look. Asides from the reference to popular culture, the poems in the collection also draw a lot from poets like Derek Walcott, Christopher Okigbo, and Gabriel Okara, perhaps a little too much.

The intertextual influences from music and popular culture overdiluted, almost, the poet’s unique voice. Sometimes, poets use their poems as a glimpse into their personal lives, but this collection offers more than a glimpse. There is a high degree of honesty which, when combined with the obvious authorial intrusion, might show that the poet wrote the poems

Dámì Àjàyí’s recent book is Affection & Other Accidents (2022). Dàmì Àjàyí is a poet as well as a psychiatrist, currently living in London.

I caught up with him over Google document and Twitter DM — this is while he is touring with Affection & Other Accidents. We discuss language, naming and healing after a heartbreak.

Silence moves through your poems as if it isn’t the passage of time we are mourning.

Àkpà: Hello Dami. Thank you for agreeing to do this. I am excited. Congratulations on the publication of Affection & Other Accidents. How’s the book tour going, and how are you making sense of the world as it is right now?

Dami: Thanks Akpa. The book tour is going really well, thank you. The reception of these poems have been warm in Abuja, Ibadan, Lagos and even London. We have just survived a pandemic but its dent on humanity is something that still sits with us. There is a dimension to this grief, to the inexplicable and intangible passage of time during the COVID-19 lockdowns. That impact is one that we are yet to unpack, but there is time hopefully.

Àkpà: I am suspicious of time as a catalyst for healing and getting by or moving on. Esiaba Irobi writes in Inflorescence, “time wounds all heels” — something that resonates with Clinical Blues IV from your debut collection, Clinical Blues:

Wishful Drinking

My milk has spilled everywhere:

Lecture theatres, Cadaver rooms

Hospital wards, Operating rooms

Everywhere 

Like unbreakable plates… 

Doctors wield wide bore cannulae

Plastic pistols don’t repair tissues

The clinical truth is Post-Mortem

At least we can lie that we tried. 

I mean here is a poem from 2012 detailing our 2021 till date experience of being everywhere but nowhere, especially for medical practitioners. But what hits me about this poem when I think about the pandemic, Nigeria and time, is that last line. Hope is a lie in disguise. I am afraid of what might be unpacked with time. Do you think above all that, joy is possible? That beyond here is a country called hope, or is this a clinical truth? In On Time, from A Woman’s Body Is a Country, this line has me: ask fathers the time it takes / for dreams to become undone.

Dami, what are you dreaming now? What does hope mean for you? Where does grief go when hope is made manifest?

Dami: A friend used to say death is the cure to life and that makes sense. I suppose as humans we find ourselves agonising over the meaning of death and a death of meaning. By a death of meaning, I mean legacy which could be anything from memories to memorabilia to progenies and so forth. When one reflects on time and death, it thickens the plot. I suppose this is probably what the great bard Esiaba Irobi meant. I like to think time is complacent but he opined that time is a noxious agent.

Thanks for bringing this poem to mind. I haven’t read it in a long long time so it is lovely just to see how it has aged well enough to give a perspective to the pandemic. Covid-19 did put a lot of things in perspective about health, wellbeing and our health systems.  But then, in the face of grim realities, how do we forge ahead?

There is a place for hope, optimism and redemption, if you like. And I suppose that hope is that elixir we need sometimes to help us to look beyond the bleakness of our lives and that of our kind.

Funny you ask me about my dreams. I wanted to say I am not dreaming at present but then I imagine that you are asking about things that I wish to come to fruition.

Àkpà: Yes, if you don’t mind. Because now that I think of it, I am also thinking about moving; living now in a distant land. Surely, I wonder what an émigré would make of loneliness at night, just like you captured in 328 to World’s End:

night

& the waiting starless sky,

the shrivelling cold too

that reminds an émigré of

home & unanswered prayers

outsourced waterproof warmth from a pullover

does not compare to that of the genial Jamaican lady

explaining her small actions like they matter to

an unlikely stranger.

night

& Fela’s horns deign to

pierce the night vicariously

through my ears.

night

& the night soil man

makes peace with his

serfdom.

Perhaps, loneliness is an expat’s comfort, birthing the longing for home or for a different warmth? There’s so much unease going on in 328 to World’s End, there’s so much silence happening. Is there something you think could be made manifest for you at this moment? What is it we need to know of a dying cigarette or friendship, as regards the diaspora? Silence moves through your poems as if it isn’t the passage of time we are mourning.

Dami: I wrote 328 as a tribute to the bus that took me to and from work in Northwest London in 2019. It is the 328 to Chelsea and World’s End but I shortened the title for impact. I believe World’s End is a pub but I have mobilised that pub’s name to represent a certain kind of disquiet and unease I was experiencing at the time.

My engagement had fallen apart. I was working in a new country, navigating a new culture and learning things as basic as travelling on a train and bus afresh. It felt like my world was really coming to an end. In retrospect, my world as I knew it then came to an end. But growth does not come without its own crisis. Same applies to dislocation, relocation, emigration. It comes with its own demands. But better not to have many things changing in your life at the same time. It is stressful and I think that would be my counsel for anyone considering relocation.

Also there is a caveat. Relocation is final in the psyche. Call it an exile’s curse. The man who leaves is never the man who returns. The place you left is not the one you return to. That’s some kind of existential limbo, being trapped in the interstices of an existence in which you never quite fit in on either side.

Hardly do you get warned about this subtle but permanent change. Hardly do you get warned about the lure of over-integrating, or the hard bristle consequences of holding back. And in all of this you just reflect on the morality of your privilege to just hop and leave lest you acquire the diasporic condescension.

It is hard work. And you have the weather to “weather” too. Which circles back to my poem. There will be a lot of silence. A lot of time to sit with your thoughts. I wrote that poem one cold Sunday evening at Wembley Park station and I wanted to speak about the camaraderie I experienced with a kind Jamaican lady. It was less than a minute, she told me things about her life which felt like a gift, a blessing and ultimately, it brought me warmth. I must warn you also about these kinds of unexpected warmth. Because that is the very nature of humanity.

Àkpà: I was going to tell you I had imagined this poem written on a trip somewhere, and here you have said it already. I think the beauty of art is to engage the audience in such a way it seems they are a part of it. Affection & Other Accidents is a shift from your two other collections — from the Dami labelled “a hopeless romantic” by Ayodele Arigbabu, to a very emotionally vulnerable poet existing in metaphors and experimentation. “We were to be married that summer. A perfect Danish wedding with all your family & friends & / none of mine…” is a closure once encountered cannot be undone. I am wondering how much of existing outside of or within the self took place for these poems to be written. Did form lend itself to you when these poems decided to be written, or were you the one who lent your voice to it? Anne Carson tells us “language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes the wounds come open again.” These poems are a trapdoor. We are in. There’s no escaping [chuckles]. Do you understand what I mean?

I was just writing, as a way of recreating, of making sense of what had happened, of bearing witness to my experiences at the time.

Dami: I am grateful to have an audience in my lifetime. Some greats were not that lucky! You are right, people have said there is a shift in my work. I suppose that should be expected. If I am still writing poems like Clinical Blues which I completed in 2011. Or writing poems like A Woman’s Body is a Country (which I completed in 2016) then I am not channelling any kind of growth. But I also remain a lyrical poet, my poetry remains loyal to song. It is just that the hopeless romantic gains his cynicism. I believe we call it breakfast these days (chuckles). But how then do we display our vulnerability with the same verve that we displayed our hopeless romance? That is the pertinent question that demands our truth and open-ness. You have spoken enthusiastically about form and experimentation and I agree with you, this book is an exercise in form. Before I wrote free verse for 10 straight years (2007-2017), I flirted with the sonnets. I was quite traditional in my approach to poetry pre-2007. I cared very much for metre, rhyme and so forth. But the allure of free verse has always been that it rids you of formal constraints. Poets serious about craft can tell the difference between constraint and restraint. I think formal constraints can be sublimated. So I wrote pantoums, ghazals, several kinds of ghazals actually, because these two forms are repetitive and that draws a kind of lyricism. I also wrote a lot of haiku-like things and the prose-poems, the longest of them is the titular poem which you quoted.

Truth be told, I did not know I was writing a poem when I wrote the title poem. I was just writing, as a way of recreating, of making sense of what had happened, of bearing witness to my experiences at the time. The entire book is obsessed with movement; perhaps this is why accidents become the metaphor to match with affection. There is all that kinesis, all that free energy thrashing about. How do you transmit that into an experience? Language. So if you say the poems drag you in and shut the door, then that is a measure of success. Anne Carson already said it better. There is a therapeutic impact from telling your story perhaps because it dissipates energy for the storyteller. But when that story is set in form, poetry, prose or worse still, prose-poetry, then it is best to say it in pidgin, you don enter am! The title is the door that sucks you in.

Àkpà: If we have language, we are capable of wonder, bewilderment. It seems to me the poet has both wonder and exasperation as captured in this Interlogue II: It is still surreal / that you did me dirty / in five cities. When desire morphs into hopelessness, we are suspended in wonder. Sometime ago I travelled interstate to go see a lover who served me the metaphorical breakfast. All I had left in me was the words of Ejowvokoghene Divine Odururu: I never expected it! You know, in your words, “love also leaves scar tissues.” You mentioned writing one’s story being therapeutic. Is that what this book is, considering it is a tribute to departures? How much healing can one get from art? I mean, being present in the work, bearing witness/testifying, does not mean healing is possible. Do you agree?

Accidents are mundane even if they have that element of surprise. No one leaves home expecting not to return.

Dami: You must know that quote from Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture. “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” Breakfast is an important meal of the day. It is so important we also have brunch. Breakfast will be served because every person who loves must also grieve. That is the very nature of life, our essence. But these things are mundane too. Accidents are mundane even if they have that element of surprise. No one leaves home expecting not to return. And I suppose this is why you travelled interstate without any expectations. Accidents scar and I know this both as a human and as a doctor.

I have also been cynical about the healing power of writing. But something interesting happened in 2019 when everything was suddening. I read my second collection, A Woman’s Body is a Country, and I began to find some prophetic affirmations therein. I came to my own work as a humble reader who could now use these words to reflect on my current feelings.

Put simply, I think I wrote the book forward for myself because it set things in perspective for me. The book soothed me through that crisis and writing Affection & Other Accidents is partly documenting that in the best language possible.

I have heard that it is an uncomfortable book to read. But discomfort is a deeply human experience. And vulnerability can be quite repulsive. But then again vulnerability is about bearing witness, about being naked. This is why I mobilised Okigbo’s Idoto. But here I was in another country, by another river, physically and in my psyche. Healing is a long process but bearing witness and submission may be the first step. How do you heal if you do not acknowledge that something happened?

Àkpà: This is a revelation. I agree with you that for healing to take place, acknowledgment must be done. How does one heal from something that never happened? It is ironic. In the poem written after John Coltrane, you write: Call them lovers & you may be right. / Call them lovers & you may be wrong. / There lies the dilemma—in naming.” Naming is an important element in this collection. Cancelling R. Kelly has this line: “You will not fuck me to an R. Kelly tune.” What you have named is what got power. But I am also concerned about what isn’t named — the unspoken, which haunts this collection as well. Thinking of it, about nineteen of these poems are set to or are written after songs. What was your process? What went into making this, and for how long?

Dami: Naming is empowering. Perhaps one of the true gifts of language at its basest. Think Adam in Eden, his first task with language was naming things. We are wired to name things. It is almost impulsive and there is a particular kind of distress that comes from being unable to name things. A disequilibrium of sorts, if you like. That goes to the heart of that sultry poem, set to the smoky jazz of John Coltrane. Say it. In another iteration, it is Delroy Lindo’s popular primetime TV joke. There is politics to naming things, a kind of inclusive politics, think password. Come to a clandestine meeting with the wrong password and see if there will not be consequences. This ultimately leads up to cancel culture, the anonymous mob, braying for blood and twiddling thumbs. Cancelling sometimes seems like the easier option for dismissing the proximity between good and evil. That cognitive dissonance that comes with agreeing that R. Kelly can be both a serial abuser/paedophile and still retain his ability to sing like an angel. It is difficult to contend with and this is not spoken about often. It is this dilemma that I bring into this account of a bedroom ballad gone wrong. It is fictional I should add but people have challenged the veracity of that claim. Because it did not happen to me in particular does not mean it is not someone’s truth. Actually, all the poems in this book were set to songs. My process is another kettle of fish. Keeps changing. With Affection, I did not know I was writing a book of poems. I had sheepishly told Kwame Dawes in 2017 that I did not think I had another book of poems in me. He was understandably upset. I wrote about this in my monthly newsletter on Substack. Little did I know the plan of the universe. You could say the book happened to me too, like an accident.

Perhaps we are all one accident away from a masterpiece.

Àkpà: [chuckles] I believe every poet is one masterpiece away from another. They don’t even know when it is coming, and of course, accidents. You teased us on Twitter about a playlist based off of these silences and odes to departures. Are we getting it now?

Dami: There is a playlist already on Spotify. I am writing some sort of liner note for this edition of my newsletter. Perhaps we are all one accident away from a masterpiece.

Àkpà: I have gone through the playlist. Reread this collection while listening to it, and it makes so much sense. If these poems are accidents, I wonder how many of them you took to the Accidents/Emergency Unit to take this form. I am talking about editing. You are a doctor as well as a poet. Do you silence one for another or do you bring everything to a surgical room? If I walked into your room this summer, writing a poem, what would be on your desk?

Dami: I meant Accidents as a metaphor but I must not betray the allure of my practice as a doctor. I am a psychiatrist in the community so banish thoughts of antiseptic ORs from your mind. If you were to come into my consulting room, you would find a formulary for appropriate dispensation of medications, a text on prescription guidelines and Roy Porter’s seminal book, Madness.

There’s an Igbo version of this conversation. Click here to read.