Affection & Other Accidents – A Poet’s Grief and Vulnerability watermarked in this collection of poems

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Dami Ajayi’s latest release “Affection & Other Accidents” is his third volume of poems, after his first volume “Clinical Blues” and his second collection, “A Woman’s Body is a Country” which were released to great acclaim.

This new release reveals a poet at the peak of his literary powers. Like the title, “Affection & Other Accidents,” the first few pages which comprise the title poem chronicles a poet in grief. Mourning a love gone sour.

The first poem gives us a peak of what to expect in this fine collection of poems- a poet who is a master storyteller, showing the multiplicity of his talents:

I

The party wound down; the crowd thinned out. Then you delivered an intimate speech about us, about getting engaged, about your missing engagement ring, about your unfaltering devotion to me & our aisle-bound affection & somehow, somehow, I found myself again kinking one knee, asking for your hand in marriage again. We have been here before. Not once.

Our human experiences are universal, be it falling in love, heartbreaks, grief, and death in equal measure. The poet introduces us to the turmoil of love, as alluded in the above, giving love a chance, hoping the affection would be aisle bound.

II

You picked the best place to have an argument. A train coach heading from Berlin to Cologne. You picked the best time too. The quiet time before travelers eased into siesta. You picked the best topic. But a black man & a black woman with a white audience observing their heated conversation?

The paragraph shows how love lilies become agonies as we traumatise over partners who are not willing to die to self. Would this not become an effigy of a dying love? Of affection built on quick-sand, where dirty laundries are washed in the full glare of the world, as postulated by Tolu’ A. Akinyemi in his collection of poems—“Never Marry a Writer”.

“A writer is a laundry man-

He will wash your dirty laundry without a fuss”

Would the verses not be part of the beauty or perils of marrying a writer? Having a seat in a poet’s hall of fame or shame.

In the third poem, the poet does more prognosis of an affection hitting the rocks:

The Colony House Rules arrived in spurts. 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.

While the above sounds comical, the nuance expressed by the poet are some encumbrances everyday people encounter in the name of love. The tragicomedy of a failing love, the bondage of being caught in the entrapment of love, maybe Dami is on a mission to rescue many who are caught in the web of a dying love.

The fourth poem lay bare how we can unravel quickly with frailties clear to the naked eye. How a wounded heart makes us susceptible to falling out of control and how disillusionment sets in when true love becomes a mirage, and we become a shadow.

And the last poem was an obsequy of a dying love. “You quickly walked back into your Colony House without waiting for the final trail of my disappearance.”

Is that not the end of dying affection, of flowery words flowing from lips that once dripped honey and hearts, where innuendos and sweet nothings were a vestige? Before the final trail of disappearance.

In the poem, “Aubade to my Greying”, the last stanza: If I were God,/I would do it differently./Grant those who pray for beards, breasts & buttocks/their dream bodies.

Maybe we have found a panacea for people going under the knife, to dream bodies and living happily ever after. A poetic god-

There are a lot of poems that form the accidents of our human existence, whether it’s in the poem “Funeral Dressings”, “A Requiem”, “Birthday Elegy” (For Pius Adesanmi), “How To Grieve in Time” and many others. Whether it’s the grief of an untimely passing, a tribute or an elegy, the grief pressed on these pages is truly heartfelt.

Affection & Other Accidents is an intricate collection of poems, and the Nigerian writer and psychiatrist, Dami Ajayi, cements his place in the top echelon of African Literature.

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HELL HATH NO FURY LIKE A POET SCORNED: A REVIEW OF DAMI AJAYI’S “AFFECTION AND OTHER ACCIDENTS”

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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.

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Dami Ajayi

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).

Screenshot 20220528 093313 1Just 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

Read more at AFROCRITIK

OF LOVE & ALLERGIES: A review of Dami Ajayi’s Affection & Other Accidents

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A Nigerian Poet’s Dangerous Amorous Episodes

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In the traditions that established earlier voices in modern Africa poetry, sociopolitical maladies have remained an arch theme. In the words of Omafune Onoge, what rocks African poetry most is the crisis of consciousness. And it is expected. Given the social political terrain of postcolonial Africa and the disillusionment that followed. Most African poets, ranging from Frank Chipasula, Dennis Brutus, to J. P. Clark steeped their poems in the post-independence conditions and subjectivities. Most poets, of African modern poetry, charge their lines with functionalist and social realist tempers. Okot b’Pitek’s Song of Lawino and Song of Ocol are landmark collections of poems that tap into the subject of love, but with a solemn caution of incursive Western modernity as it determines the emotional geography and desire in late colonial East Africa, specifically Uganda. Dami Ajayi emerges from the tradition of griots who have chosen love and amorous episodes of life as an impelling topic to carve their words around. But in retaining his own uniqueness, Ajayi does not eschew banality as subject too, seemingly giving in to what the Cameroonian philosopher, Achille Mbembe, inspires in On the Postcolony, that power is banal and the vulgar is aesthetical. In everyday life then, we can locate trauma, love, power, injustice, betrayal, and trust. The street, beer parlors, corridors of the nail fixers, the palm wine lounge, the barber shop, bus stop as the rhythm of everydayness informs Ajayi’s earlier collections, Clinical Blues and A Woman’s Body is a Country. In his latest return, Ajayi  takes a departure even though he retains his most unique element of the mundane. The Nigerian poet enters a dangerous amorous episode.

Perhaps what best captures the impulse of Ajayi’s latest collection lurks in the words of the Latin American love philosopher and poet, Pablo Neruda, who argues concisely and evocatively that, “Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” In “Tonight I Can Write,” translated by W. S Merwin, that contains the phrase, Neruda remarks about the imbalance of emotion, unrequited love, the transit of affections which is replete with several bumps. Without steadfastness, commitment, sacrifice, and emotional alignment, accidents may happen. Enter Ajayi who offers us in his latest volume what this mishap looks, tastes, and smells like. Across the forceful images and passionate stanzas that give life to his verses in Affection and Other Accidents, there is also a first-person witnessing going on.  Ajayi’s new bundle is a shuttle into tribulations, grief and the harrowing landscape of love. It is a rebuttal that love is never a utopian planet where two lovers are fired with meteoric energy that herds them the same way. Ajayi warns that if care is less taken there could be a detour. Affection can be accidental, he says, from his titular anchor. What does it mean then to fall in love accidentally? Is healing possible with wounds and the cost of sorrows that follow such a tragic slip? Does it mean such metaphoric accidents always come with their bruises?

In what one can describe as a personal narrative of pain, we see the restless mobility of lovers who are unable to triumph over the hurdles of affection. What informs Ajayi’s choice of non-fiction form in the first segment is immediately visible as we see him moving on “Third Mainland Bridge” to win his lover’s heart: “I was compelled to ask you to marry me again.” Soon after, we move from Lagos to Cologne, Germany, where the love fuse seems to be gradually melting. The voltage of emotion has dwindled. The psychical impact has brought a personal brunt to the persona, who Ajayi does little to hide, that he is the one speaking. Nonetheless, the painter’s brush stroke has left us brooding when Ajayi declares, “We were to be married that summer. A perfect Danish wedding with all your family & friends & none of mine.” I will reject the hypothesis that the first section of Ajayi’s latest work is prose poetry. It lacks the internal constituents of poetic evocation. It pays less attention to the beauty of lyrics, metaphor and bolts of imagery. It is untidily painful. I will agree it is an autobiography that throbs with soreness. Nevertheless, it is a choice that I would argue has plainly conveyed the poet’s anger in the most generative sense. It is not infused with embellishments, rather it takes you into the personal world of two previous lovers, one present, the other also present passively in her lover’s account. To go back to Neruda’s words, Ajayi is not forgetting all these memories that fold into a loss for him. What counts as a short time for us here as well is the three years of Ajayi’s love timeline as seen in the first “Interlogue I”.

Love is a windy social field with many pressures. There is the pressure of parents nudging incessantly that you are getting old as Ajayi would reveal in his “Aubade to Greying Hair.” In that episode, the parents purvey a thought that part of life achievements is seeing their son getting married. Hence, they enlist themselves in the service of matchmaking as cupid advocates. Ajayi does not evoke in the collection that he is all innocent as observed in the poem, “Youth,”  which unveils adventure and exuberance as deciders of inordinate desires. Ajayi moves into different themes such as global politics of the pandemic in “Interlogue II” and the results of the consequence of his emotional mishap where,

fantasies or traumatic pasts,
reach inwards
for the dove’s gentleness
& sit out the gale outside Waterstones 
(Waterstones 14)

In the poems under “Interlogue II” again, we encounter the unreliable narrator. Why the persona might have chosen “she” as a pronoun of choice is clear. It harks back to the subject Ajayi engages from the start of the collection. Even so, we cannot conclude from the vague imprint the poem leaves that the speaker is referring to the same lover. The lines are nonetheless filled with anxieties and mistrusts. For another accident, we can call in the instance of “Cancelling R. Kelly,” the American popstar who is currently serving a term for dipping into salacious adventure with  underage girls, sex trafficking anf racketeering. In essence, Ajayi’s poems spread across five different sections divided by interlogues. His poems dovetail into other incidents of grief, in loss of friends and families. Nevertheless, is Ajayi writing an anti-love manifesto if we are to agree by the temper that forms the artery of the collection?

Ajayi’s poems barely escape pessimism as a result of personal loss and cost of affection. Could it be a fatigue of forgiveness in the continuous error of affectionate transactions? It seems what we have as a chorus in Akeem Lasisi’s Nights of My Flight is completely absent in Ajayi’s work. This is understandable assuming Lasisi’s local address is the constituency of traditional Yorùbá lovers/audiences who are still ruled by the indigenous values. And the central persona is a female speaker anticipating her exit from her parents’ home. Even if Lasisi’s protagonist is a Western-educated figure, she does not exude the Western-inflected emotional paraphernalia in Ajayi’s work. In the cache of poems Ajayi presents, protagonists are modern lovers who are following new social protocols for love, yet do not find a match in each other. In it too, Ajayi has retained the  signature of his poetics by his deployment of accessible language and lapidary details of poems that cross into the poet’s personal life and everyday realities. Whether Ajayi is interested in the political moorings that steer the course of Nigerian poetry is a thing to be left for the future. For now, in his new theology of love and anti-love, he is still prejudiced with his old subject, still in a new way.

Read more at Olongo Africa