I Laugh at these Skinny Lines- Or Not
Su'eddie Vershima Agema
Poetry means a lot of things to different people. For some, it is a chance to show off and break the mental jaws of other people. Such poets would simply write for poets and hide their meanings in kernels of words that readers would need stones to crack. In essence, to find the meaning of the lines of such poems you would need formulas like you would an algebra equation. Largely, these poets are the purists who believe that every single rule of poetry should be applied to make verse magical. You only need to think of Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo (famous for his ‘I only write poetry for poets’ quote), Omadachi Oklobia and more recently, Servio Gbadamosi and Aondosoo Labe, to get a good grasp of these sort of writers.
There’s another group within, who hold on to style and some aspects of deep poetic tradition, without leaving you befuddled. A middle group use simple diction, infuse style and hold on to the tenets of tradition without being difficult. Such poets include writers like Hyginus Ekwuazi, Amu Nnadi, Agatha Aduro, Iquo Eke, Innocence Silas, Aidee Erhime, Romeo Oriogun, Ehi’zogie Iyeomen, Sibbyl Whyte, and Debbie Iorliam. They write deceptively simple poetry immersed in devices that make their thoughts stand out from the normal prosaic sentences cut into lines by some other people.
There are the others for whom the meaning is more important than the style; those for whom the beauty of verse is more in tandem with the delivery for easy consumption. Most of them discard the toga of the traditional poet and simply focus on crafting lines that would speak to the soul of their readers. After all, they think, of what use is a message if it is not received by readers? Enter the league of certain poets like Seun Odukoya, Terseer Sam Baki and Terver Chieshe who write poetry that would easily be accessible to readers.
Somewhere in between the second and third group of poets comes in Tolu Akinyemi with his ‘Poetry for those who hate poetry’ series. The series is a response to writing poetry that is marinated in ‘detail, simplicity, relatability, vividness and wittiness’ (21). The intention of the poet in his second collection of the series, I laugh at these Skinny Girls is to write poetry that is enjoyable, especially for those who would normally consider it as intimidating or boring – or so he claims. The formally trained architect who now draws words to paper in a tapestry of diverse verse weaves different lines and tales as especially inspired by nature and events that help to reveal the mind of his persona.
I laugh at these Skinny Girls is a collection of seventy-five poems divided into three parts. It covers a multiplicity of issues and themes from national concerns, public issues, mannerisms to personal observations. The poet brings in a bag of tools to achieve his aim of passing the several messages that he ensures – or hopes that the reader would get easily, almost like licking an ice cream.
The book is divided into three parts with no particular defined demarcation or explanation to show why which poems are in which section and/or not. In the end, one has to wonder what might have led the poet to put the various poems into what part and why. An attempt at classifying the poems show that the first part has a general thrust on issues, events and concerns. Most of the poems in the second part are concerned with a longing for certain ladies. The longing in this part somehow spills into the third part. However, the third part is largely philosophical and shows the poet, Akinyemi, as being a deep thinker.
The title poem, ‘I Laugh at these Skinny Girls’, is a satirical piece written from the point of view of an old woman who is reacting to “Skinny things (ladies) with glossy skin/That live near the cinema/With their chopstick necks/And matchstick limbs…” (56). They insult her and look down on her but she has the last laugh – in her mind, at least – when she remembers that “Whatever goes up/Surely comes down…” Thus, she can only laugh/ At what time would confirm” (56), which is age on their part.
In all, the poem is instructive of those who make mockery of people who are ahead of them, forgetting that what goes around comes around. The young ladies might be in their top forms but in time, age would come and transform them to that which they are laughing to scorn.
The poem, ‘What a Child Wants’ (41) is centred on the innocence of childhood that is fast lost. The poem posits that children usually have no pretence and state what they want without any ambiguity. However, they soon grow and lose this innocence and the persona is puzzled: “I wonder at what point along the way/Children that have become we-men/Lost this incredible gift?” (41).
‘Today I lived’ (44) talks about the disillusionment of contemporary life in our technological age. The persona declares that he escaped from the poison of his computer screen, then went wild in the joy of nature. The persona declares that he “threw stares at the stove/ And I farted into the winds” (44).
In the mould of the typical African writer burdened with the tradition of social commitment, Akinyemi tackles the raving issue of the missing Chibok girls in ‘276 Girls’ (25) and ‘Bring Back Our Girls’ (27). In the two poems, the poet uses traditional metaphors that conjure the image of the village setting, that must be Chibok, in the poem. There’s also satire evidenced from even the characterisation. There is the presence of the character, Jòná, which seems to represent President Goodluck Jonathan. The poem, ‘276 Girls’ informs us that there was little or no attempt by the government to do anything to salvage the problem of the missing girls until there was a knock on the centre of Jòná’s door. In essence, things finally got to a head and the President got to be personally affected. Perhaps this knock was the forerunner to his eventual loss at the polls.
Akinyemi reserves a special spot for girls, mothers and marriages. A great number of the poems in the collection are either about women, directed at women or somehow find a connection with women. Most of them are somewhat ironic and spit sarcasm. In ‘Halima’ for instance, a mother asks her daughter, “My fine daughter/You are not getting younger/ And soon (not later)/You should snatch for yourself/A rich handsome husband.” Her daughter replies ‘ You are right’…Whose husband do I snatch? (30). This is the same trend that one sees in the poem, ‘Which one’ (33), where a mother keeps presenting options to her daughter, who keeps rejecting each offer with answers like ‘Too short’, ‘The belly bulge’, ‘The starving purse’ and the like, till she eventually accepts one of the offers. It is the time of the mother to be critical; ‘but he is short?’ And the list of such other poems continue.
The poems in I laugh at Skinny Girls are short. One key thing about most of Tolu’ Akinyemi’s poetry is his use of narrative poems. He tries to pass a message with each poem while also trying to entertain in what ways he can.
A major problem with Akinyemi’s poetry is his overt simplicity in some poems that make his poems to tilt more towards prose than verse. In an age where a lot of people are looking towards the demystification of poetry, this would seem a plus and an encouragement to more people who would seemingly enjoy his works. However, one notes that there are certain rules that make poetry thick. These include the use of certain devices and patterns, without which a work might be looked at in many quarters as simply a breaking of sentences or prose into lines and stanzas. Some lines of Akinyemi can be accused of this. In ‘Which One’ (34), for instance, one finds out that the poem is largely question and answer in plain talk without a single spice to make it nice or poetic. The first stanza comes in as an example here: ‘Mama asks/ “This one?”/ She responds/ “No way! He is short”… This is the same sort of spirit that flows into ‘Saturdays’ (36), and many others.
One begins to wonder if his poetry isn’t too skinny in some areas too but just as one thinks of this, poems like ‘Stubborn Stones’ (62) and others like those mentioned above begin to hit at one.
‘Stubborn Stones’ is full of alliteration, allusions, keen imagery and other devices that show a proper poet at work. The poem which speaks of a childhood lost where nature was King as compared to these days when artificial longings occur, which cannot be half compared to those good old days before Facebook. If for nothing else, for poems like these and for the several themes that dance around in the collection, the book stands out as a piece worth reading; an easy tease.
For what is worth, in the generality of his work, Akinyemi passes a myriad of messages and succeeds in being simple enough to carry any willing mind on a journey through his works that will leave them laughing in some places, scratching their head in others but in all cases, thinking and wondering about issues that sure go beyond skinny lines and skinny girls.