BOOK REVIEW Seyi Adigun’s A Child of Smell; Why I Keep Sniffing at It
With about five poetry collections, Seyi Adigun’s works are yet to be given enough critical attention they deserve. Considering the artfulness inherent in his works, particularly the collection under review here, in relation to, say, their place in the academy, one would agree with me that injustice is being done to art by those who ought to identify and preserve it: the critics. The collection houses forty-four poems dexterously crafted and categorised into six unequal parts. The lure and intensity of the poems lie in their brevity and economy of words. The longest poem in the collection, ‘Smell Amok’ has only twenty four (short) lines. The poems appeal to all the senses in that the reader can practically smell, hear, taste, touch, and see the colours and smells the poems are replete with; beautiful and ugly colour and olfactory images variously evoked by such words as coral, silvery, jasmine, green, lavender, purplish, asphalt, musk, sniff, rose, ginger and so on.
Adigun has made in this collection the kind of works that privileges art over socio-political commitment. They are poems that seem to say nothing. Whatever background that went into the making of or prompted the works are apparently silenced such that what we have is the kind of art very similar to the modernist: with language distanced from immediate experience, having no explicit reference or evidence of efforts towards clarity of expression. Yet the individual words are not strange, not quite difficult; only their adherence to each other seems so. Words are given unaccustomed functions as in ‘let hairy lips/ cough me out!’ This is why the blurb’s claim that the author is a symbolist is redeemable. Does not ‘smell of pain’ and ‘colour of air and water’ for instance exemplify the synaesthesia of the symbolist? The tensive language of the poems imbued by such metaphorical phrases as ‘bitter song,’ ‘glassy seas of heaven,’ ‘growing brown,’ ‘wakeful cornfields,’ ‘death’s ghost,’ and words that seem to be spontaneously strung together like in the Futurist poetry welcome the reader into an estranged world, with uncanny knowledge; something common in the poetry of the polish modernist poet, Lesmian Boleslaw. The dominance of trees and natural scenery is reminiscence of romanticism; the speaker’s relish and externalization of consciousness are surely modernist. However, the local colouration of the poems; something given off by the allusions to Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forest (in ‘Parturition’ and ‘Bridal Garments’), the Benue river, the goddesses, the hunter image, ‘folk anthems’ and the tropical smell of dry dust when wetted (in ‘Rain and Earth’) raise the poems to the status of novelty, new creations that arrive as a synthesis of local and foreign flavour.
Poems in a collection often possess idea(s) that run(s) through them and make for interconnectedness and logicality but rarely do we find a collection that presents itself as a serialized story, as one long sequence or plot, like a text in the sense of ‘a unified whole.’ What we find in the collection is the kind of connection in Soyinka’s Trials of Brother Jero and Jero’s Metamorphosis. Soyinka in writing the latter surely set out to do a sequel but one can be sure that Adigun did not intend to break a full story into verses of different poems. This is something unique about Adigun’s poetry. It is a curious sight to notice that his Princess of the Harmattan (2012) for instance has no poem in the collection with that title. One wonders how the title came to be. Perhaps, the atmosphere and texture of the poems which are beautiful and appealing yet coarse and dry account for it. I hazard that what we see in A Child of Smell is a better realisation of this previous collection in terms of smell and colour images as well as structuration. Notice that the second poem is entitled ‘Child of Smell’ while the collection is A Child of Smell. The presence of the indefinite article ‘A’ in the title of the collection makes it different from that of the poem with a similar title. This is because the entire collection is about the story of this child of smell, the mystic child that reminds one of Azaro in Ben Okri’s narratives.
The first poem ‘A Traveller in Blue’ and a couple of others inserted intermittently in the collection have what we may call an omniscient voice while the rest are spoken by the child of smell herself (the kind of mixture of voices in Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah); where she speaks of herself, makes her observations, fulfils her mission, addresses her mother (as Christ addresses his father), and bids her people farewell as she returns to where she came from. With this (implicit) narrative of the mystic child of smell, the collection seems to re-enact the Christ sequence, with a female Christ-like figure called ‘a child of smell’. This child uses her sensitive nose to sniff out evil and the ugliness of existence, and tries to atone for them. The first part seems to be about her coming and the prophecies about her. The child, like Christ, knows herself so that as she sets out as a traveller in blue from heaven, she is to be misunderstood by the mermaid in ‘Child of Smell’ which is why she reiterates in the last line: ‘I am a child of smell.’ The teacher here resembles John, the forerunner of Jesus. Like John, the teacher foretells the coming of this child: The teacher foretells In broken words He foresmells it […] A child shall be born With flaring nostrils The poem, ‘Parturition’ witnesses her birth, and in ‘Unknown Smell’ she presents herself to people, she tells about her ability to know all things by their smell and prays for guide in her mission. The second part introduces the child to the harshness of the world. She loses her master and she mourns all through this part. The third and fourth parts capture her wanderings and observations; something that can be likened to Christ’s ministerial journeys and functions. She notes the terror of night, the bitter song, the debris of earth yearning for water, a leaf in youth turned brown, the fire burning the city and people shedding tears, the wooden, iron, termiteridden, rust-clad gates, the separated sisters, and other evils that bedevil the world. The fifth part represents the time of suffering and sacrifice for the Christlike figure. The poems: ‘Vigil at the Tamarind,’ ‘The Goddess Shall Come on a Straight Road,’ ‘Orisa Mi,’ ‘Do Not Be Silent,’ and ‘Godmother’ remind one of Jesus’ moment of prayer and meditation at Gethsemane. Here, instead of God, the father, the child of smell beckons on her mother, the goddess, Orisa Mi. The last two poems in this part, ‘Turari’ and ‘The Ceramics Have Broken,’ echo the appointed sacrifice. Words such as ‘last tree,’ ‘sacrifice,’ ‘resurrection’ and ‘the broken ceramics’ call up the Calvary scene. The last part predominantly bids farewell and speaks of the preparation for return. Like Jesus, the child of smell speaks of her ascension in ‘Smoke, Burial and Lingerie:’ But I must return […] Do not erase my footmarks with your tide.
She then calls on the tender wind to lead her home, promising to write her people a letter so long.
The question yet to be settled is: to what extent can each of the poems be independent with this kind of chain? This is what the critics should discover. As expected of mimetic objects, often suspended and uncontexualized, the poems speak to different people; they respond to different critical turn of mind. The collection with its turn on female figures may appeal to feminist critics; its textuality is a possible matter of concern to poststructuralist readers; the mythic pattern has already been opened up for archetypal studies to interrogate; ‘All the Gates and Things’ and a couple of other poems herein have something Marxist about them; Ecocritics are not left out either, given the attention of the poems to ecology. A sociological reader may need to grapple with the singlet ‘spread in the lawn of West African morning’ and the connection ‘separated sisters’ and the coinage ‘hibock’ have with the Chibok girls. What is more, the generic vision is not yet settled: do the poems taken as a whole or individually yield a tragic or a comic vision? The ultimate question raised by the review is yet to be answered: is the collection a text or texts?
The numerous vistas and openings for interpretation which the work allows bespeak its character as what Stephen Mallarme, the French symbolist, calls ‘the absolute poem.’ The poems have no conspicuous historical and/or ultimate significance. Their meagre amount of punctuations rips them of the author’s guide in interpretation and leaves them in the hands of the reader. Only a close reading can discover a possible frame of significance. Here is true poetry, one that sustains our gaze and never allows itself to be concluded. This is why I keep going back to the book, why I keep reading it, why I may never finish reading it, why I keep sniffing at it like ‘the hunter’s dog’ herself, to discover a smell amidst smells.