Attending to those lost and found
Mantra Mukim on the searing vitalities of Gboyega Odubanjo’s Adam and Anthony Vahni Capildeo’s Polkadot Wounds
Review by Mantra Mukim | Originally published in the print edition, October 11th 2024
Before the Nigerian-British poet Gboyega Odubanjo tragically passed away in the summer of 2023, he exchanged three full-length drafts of his first collection, Adam, with his editors. The collection, perhaps by design, makes this experience of firstness its subject.
This firstness is embedded in the title ‘Adam’, referring to the provisional name given by police officers to an unidentified black boy whose torso was discovered in the River Thames in 2001. Odubanjo uses this unfortunate act of naming to set up a visceral encounter between language and its other: loss.
Loss is without sovereign, without archives. By naming the unidentified boy ‘Adam’, the officers make this loss legible for the state machinery. Odubanjo’s collection takes this loss of loss – named and measured, but not recovered – as its locus. Speaking from nowhere, from the perspective of death, adam offers gratitude to everything that constitutes him: the ‘ceremony’, the ‘tradition’, the ‘river’, as well as the police ‘who named him adam because he was the first they’d seen because all of him was torso was body was ribs because they knew adam was where knowing began’.
Pitted against adam’s sense of self is the endless genealogy of the British empire, its claim to firstness as civilisation: ‘generations have come and gone and still it holds. this immaculate empire without stray.’ The only way Odubanjo’s speaker can be accepted in this grand genealogy is by sacrificing a piece of himself: ‘the water drinks me / london is a bit of me /london is the place for me’. Beyond the grand narrative, adam’s origin—like the Biblical Adam—is tainted with shame: ‘if adam is naked and someone owns a pair of orange shorts from woolworths and covers adam what then is shame.’
Embracing shame, Odubanjo dreams of another genealogy, a series of beginnings, with repetitions welcomed and refuge denied: ‘we called him the beginning. we begged that he stay but/ he didn’t hear word. instead he came and went for the first/and repeated time and when he returned he was two halves/ of a gourd longing to flesh.’ There is no religious or historical repair possible. Invoking the ‘biku’, a Yoruba belief that the spirits of children who die before reaching puberty will return to the same mother to be reborn multiple times, Adam finds hope in repetition rather than rupture, hauntings rather than firstness.
Anthony Vahni Capildeo, a Trinidadian-Scottish poet known for their innovative and deeply evocative work, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2016. Their new collection, Polkadot Wounds, pays close attention to wounds that afflict our bodies, our friendships, our landscapes. These wounds demand repair but they also promise vitality. Polkadot Wounds commits itself to such a labour of repair. Forsaking genealogies, Capildeo instead creates spaces, resting points, commons, crevasses, shelters, where this work of repair can take place: ‘pleasecomeflying patterns/ invitations to lyric/meanwhile moor/on the edge/ welcome also ferrets’.
As a site of prediction but also predation, weather confronts Capildeo’s speaker in their various biomes: ‘What shall we do now we’re saved from the storm? /Breathe dust-reddened air and wake before dawn.’ The weather preys on the subject as it seeks refuge in other spaces but also among others. A multiplicity haunts, or rather elevates, the body throughout Capildeo’s collection, imagined through a radical cohabitation: ‘Kitchen digested to garden, horsemen redressed in a kilim, worms’ undreamt audience/ dispensing endless blue-sky, endless lavender, Iraqi figurative endless piece of birds–’.
The many ‘infrasongs’ in Polkadot Wounds act as a listicle, footnotes to other, unvoiced songs. Here the footnotes ‘border delimit cover’ that which itself remains uncatalogued or absent from the official texts of world-making:
‘pedestrian rivers somnambulant rivers imaginary rivers innumerable rivers commercial rivers unaccustomed rivers phantasmal rivers collaborative rivers incontestable rivers unmappable rivers Adda the river’.
These are footnotes as renegade paratexts. In Capildeo’s response to Dante’s Divine Comedy, they similarly use questions as an act of affinity without immersion: ‘Who cleaned your shoes, when you got back from hell?’. Or they provide a pithy erratum to the Ur-text: ‘No, no! Even in hell, you were being/ repaired.’ The dialectic of wounding and repair speaks to the larger eco-reality, equally rich in acknowledgement as in inaction. Capildeo’s three-pronged approach or reproach sums up this predilection: ‘see a storm, be in the storm, or stop’. As landscapes erode around language, how can the latter remain untouched? To find this impossible language of erosion, of mourning, Capildeo turns to fungal modes of expression: ‘i say don’t forage mushrooms/ at all the dark woods they say/ are uncool but thank you thank/ you and we refuse to know/pure mourning is happening’.
The poem ‘He/They’ reminds the speaker, almost palliatively, of things that will be held for them or that will hold them as they mourn: ‘the sea remembers you in its prayers/sentimental untenable’. Through transfigurations, mutations, at times uncanny equivalences, repetitions, Polkadot Wounds offers the urgent possibility of repair: ‘The window when I can do things/is very small.’
Both Capildeo and Odubanjo attend to the wound – whether through repair or genealogy – as history’s revenge on the living.
Mantra Mukim is a poet and essayist based in Paris.
