Nome: It is such a pleasure to hear from you. I have been following you, though not closely, for a while now, and I must say you’re one of those writers I consider bold and resilient in paddling their subjects. I was quite anxious about this conversation. But what to do. I have been longing for a time like this, and it has presented itself in all its glory, thanks to Ebenezer. When I got your email, I quickly went ahead to reread your poem, “A premonition of a past we haven’t written yet.” As is my tradition, I paused to reflect on the weight of the title – the use of the ‘of metaphor’ but this time with two heavy words: “premonition” and “past.” I love the poem, particularly these lines:

  …Lit the
first candles in the first synagogue of this land.
Killed lovers. Faced the noose. Survived. Died.
As did everyone, really. How then does anyone
stand this template? You and I, we have no peace:
you fight until your lips blister. I have thrown more
vases than I can count. And I wish I was being
hypothetical: you almost left how many times?
We’ve got no damn mettle for mould. No stomach
for imitation. Not in these skins. We bruise too
easily, the evidence stays.

These lines hold a lot of meaning for me because they mirror the universality and conspicuousness of vulnerability. I admire the precipitous pace within the self and its external constituents. In this case, say lover. Say society. And when you write “we have no peace,” you pull me in.  I become not just a “witness” but a “witnessing,” a loyal partaker of this lack of “peace.” With these words you get the poem to transcend language while still holding the power to illustrate the inevitable possibilities within its strictures.

Megan: Hello, Nome. I am the worst – the worst! Please forgive my tardy upon tardy reply. Things are so damn overwhelming right now with my son at home and with the uncertainty of his schooling that I have let everything else pretty much fall to the wayside. That said, your words have been a source of constant inspiration to me since we spoke and I wish I could convey my thanks and appreciation for your sensitive reading of my work. I’m sitting in a cafe staring at my calendar and how I’ve been so impossible on this. Shall we just begin?

I would love to know more about your process: what comes first, the image or the word? For me, as someone who grew up with religion but has since cast it aside, or moved through it – I’d say post-religious, maybe – I think so often of poetry as being that unutterable truth of godly words spoken into a dark realm: bringing light, splitting the earth, moving waters and land apart. Creation.

Or is the image and the word the same?

Nome: I was having a conversation with a friend about life when I got your email.  

I would have said words come first but that’d be ignoring the fact that image has always preceded word. It is out of the image that the word sprouts. This doesn’t have to be true to anyone, but it is just what I think. The mind weighs what it wants to express and lets the tongue be its messenger. Your question makes me think of what happens between thought and speech, what lies in the invisible bridge that connects the image and the word, that connection we do not always speak about. I think image is that seed that grows into word: to create a thing you’ve to give it a face, and it is in giving it a face that you’re able to give it a name, to weave around it the cloak of words.

I am thinking also of the sacred relationship between the image and the word. As a student of English and Literature, I was taught words were formed to fit into what they’d look like.  Bird, Chariot, Horse, Snake paint pictures in our mind. The image is so powerful it could birth another image. Say a helicopter might have been modelled after a bird. A bike after a horse. A tricycle after a chariot. A train after a snake. And to be honest with you, we are constantly creating words for what already has a face in our minds. I think, then, that image and word are the same, but in poetry, in my own process, the image leads me into the word. And to prove this, words always point back to the images as references, and it is to an extent, contingent on the image.  It gives a whole new meaning to these lines by Richard Siken:

“This is how you make the meaning, you take two things and try to define the space between them.”

Like you, I have been able to stay out of religion, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to stand outside the reality of God’s existence. And that brings me to the question: is there a way creation/creating can paddle us towards understanding the core of our own existence? I realize that this question would help me understand what you meant when you said “poetry…bringing the light, splitting the earth, moving waters and land apart.” Perhaps, poetry teaches us to understand what comes before and beyond us. Perhaps, in fusing images and words we’re doing what He did at the edge of creation when we weren’t yet born but a speck in the chapel of His imagination. Perhaps, trying to separate image from word is trying to rip the flesh off the bones.

I’d like to know, Megan, what has poetry done for/to your being? How has it shaped your ways of navigating a world where we are always seeking safety outside the usual? For me, poetry has been the mirror into which I see myself truly. It has become the room where I can undress myself and never be afraid to marvel at the dust of my being. If it allows me be anything at all, it allows me exist briefly without the shame of failure or the fear of uncertainty. Poetry has left me restless and deeply attentive to not just the world but to myself, to my fears, to my doubts, to my future. Poetry has left me uncertain, more than it’s left me certain. Do you feel this way?

These days I write so many sad poems because even with all the goodness going on around me,  which I am thankful for, there’s still that moment when sadness envelopes me. And I am scared of becoming or being seen as a sad person. It was Elizabeth Bowen who said, “the moment one is sad one is ordinary” and that line has stayed with me for a very long time.

Megan: So it seems I leave months between replying and for this I apologize – why do I feel like I’m always apologizing for late replies? Does everybody else somehow manage to keep track of endless emails and WhatsApps and DMs and letters? It just never stops.

Since we last spoke, my son has turned five and lifelong friends of mine turned out to be sociopathic thieves who have been trying to ruin my life for thirteen years. It’s been a helluva discovery and something I’m hoping will get me a Netflix deal one day. A writer-girl can dream, right?

I love this line of yours: I was taught words were formed to fit into what they’d look like e.g., Bird, Chariot, Horse, Snake. I studied literature at Rhodes University in South Africa’s Makhanda, then Grahamstown – an old colonial name only recently changed. I think my favorite course was modernism and postmodernism, and studying the breakdown of language and the collapse of the signifier and signified in Paul Aster’s New York Trilogy, particularly in the first book, City of Glass. I loved my copy of that book and had so many good notes in it. But a digs mate of mine, who recently became engaged, took a liking to it, so much so that I haven’t seen it again. This was 10 years ago, so I should probably invest in a new copy. Still, that particular copy was special to me: it seemed to hold in its pages the absolute essence of the story.

When I’ve tried to explain this to people, I’ve often failed. Perhaps it’s this: when I lived in Bangkok, I had a tower of books beside my bed, many of which I’d never read. They all had covers in shades of dull and egg blue, greys and faded yellows, and as the year progressed, along with loneliness and all my longing for home and simultaneous love for my new life and its adventures, the books became different objects. “Book” was just not the word I’d attach to them anymore. Volume, perhaps, but only because volume connotes liquid and there was something deeply liquiditous about my life, then. But I would say that “temple” fitted what they were far better than any other word. It came closest to signifying their true worth and meaning and function, to me. Do you like Mathematics? I always thought that I hated it but it’s because I mostly had terrible teachers in high school. Now I am endlessly fascinated by it. I wish I could return to high school and finish the Maths syllabus of grade 11 and 12, the grades in which I’d dropped it for business economics.

To your question, “Is there a way creation / creating can paddle us towards understanding the core of our own existence?”  So much of us is water. Water. And then it meets the walls of cells and mitochondria and skin. So that splitting of the universe into earth and water is, I guess, exactly what we are, what we started as, and how we’re always multiplying (meiosis, mitosis).

What has poetry done for/to my being? Poetry is my spacesuit in which I navigate this strange, foreign-seeming planet. I said this before about my poetry collection, Milk Fever, and I spoke about it specifically in the context of motherhood but I think its applications are wider for me, in my life. I have never felt I belonged, anywhere, except for the ocean and certain mega-cities. But I’ve been alone in that moment – I’ve never found myself feeling at home in a group of people, or finding myself settled. So perhaps poetry does the opposite for me, perhaps it’s my sense-making system, my navigation tool, my life’s great translator, like one big Google translator. Yeah, that’s what it is. Something happens, or I recall something, and I’m in there, writing a poem, trying to figure it out, writing out the colours and smells and tastes of what “it” is. I don’t think I do it fantastically well. Certainly not technically well. I’m a better prose writer. But the act of writing poetry is very important to me. And not therapeutic – therapy is an entirely different psychological process and I hate conflating the two – but still transformative.

I love that poetry keeps you attentive to you, to your fears and future. Is it in the act of writing, in your process, or afterwards, once the poem has left you? I would say that what poetry has done for me is that it’s shown me how unimportant or impermanent the state of feeling certain really is. I think it’s a very good reminder of impermanence. I have this image of a glass conservatory and the poem being both the glass as well as the natural beauties inside of it and that is something that can weather all storms but also be destroyed in an instant. I don’t know if that makes a stitch of sense. Perhaps what I’m trying to say is that the poem can also break and it can break down the certainties and structures within us and around us, while also recreating them and interpreting them anew.

I adore that saying from Elizabeth Bowen. It’s so helpful. I hate the positivity police. There is this insidious culture of almost fascist toxic positivity that’s made it nearly impossible to feel anything or express anything outside of happiness without being ostracized, ignored or pathologized. When this is the human experience! I mean, you say so yourself, that you’re afraid of being seen as a sad person. That’s terrifying. It’s like being afraid of being seen as human. And in the face of global mental health crises, we are still punishing people for responding in very natural ways to highly unnatural circumstances. I’m glad you have that saying. I think it’s healthy. I’m certainly going to keep it close at hand now.

Nome: I am sorry about your friendship. One thing about friendship, like most things in life, is that sometimes it will cut us open, drain us when we least expect it to. I cannot feel your pain, but I can try to imagine it. I guess it would hurt that someone whom I have invested so much trust in would hold a knife to my chest.

Mathematics is a nightmare for me. It has always been. However, I find mathematics fascinating. You know, how you put this and that together and you come up with something scientific. Mathematics makes me think of the openness of language; one could arrive at one solution with multiple approaches. In poetry, we are only constantly uniquely reiterating one another. And it is amazing that instead of feeling exhaustion at this recycling of stories, ideas and philosophies, we feel anew, much eager than ever to go deeper into the plains of language.

Yes. It is the act of conceiving and writing the poem that keeps me attentive. It is the process, has to be the process. I think I am constantly edging towards tenderness and loss and memory and innocence and mortality. It is safe, I think, to know that in the process of exploring these things I would need to pay attention to not just what is around me, but what has been shaping me. I think poetry for me is a double-faced mirror, one reflects my past, and the other reflects my present, stretching its gaze into my future. It would be the end of me, of my religion as an artist not to pay attention. However, I think a poem, even when it is out there in the world, never leaves you. A poem is a voice when you’re here alive; it becomes an echo when you are dead. The thing is we are all edging towards attentiveness as poets, we are constantly saying to the world, “here is language” and the world holds up this language acknowledging its effect. This can’t be done without attentiveness, even if the attentiveness is minute.

I agree with most of what you said about the creeping toxic positivity that’s made it impossible for people – for poets – to feel anything or express anything outside of happiness without being ostracized, ignored or pathologized. There has been some talk about the romanticization of grief amongst Nigerian poets, and how most Nigerian poets use such “narratives” to get into foreign journals. The motive behind this claim is unhealthy because it pathologizes victims of grief. People don’t want you to be too loud about your joy. Neither do they want you to be too loud about your grief. And all this is really sad. I do not see any reason why people should dictate how others should tell their stories. I mean I am in Nigeria; we don’t wake up in the morning chasing butterflies. We can’t even chase our dreams right. This is not to say we must constantly write about poverty, corruption, killings; grief. This is to say we must write what we want to write, be it a benediction or a ballad, be it a eulogy or an elegy.

Not too long ago, I was in a workshop with Chris Abani. He said something about going deep into language. And I kept thinking about many poems in 20.35 Africa’s anthologies that do just that. In his “ode to david’s ennui// or the land of babel ii” Agbaakin writes:

i come from woodcarvers chiselling their bodies into
gods. i want to leave this land, still toothed with
enough mountains

Beyond its title which carries biblical allusions and the fact that it borders around ancestry and masculinity amongst other themes, the poem itself seems to be probing language. It seems like a remaking of the Story of Babel where the collective “we” has been narrowed to the “i” of David’s ennui. I am amazed at how religion and history play a great role in our stories. I love to think humans are curious species, I also love to think we are constantly running to religion and history to make sense of our existence.

Then there’s your poem, “God is a Mother and She is Everywhere, Everywhere” which is such a terrific poem – what I would call a mad poem. The opening lines

I quit church and see God in a thousand
different ways

are part of my most favorite lines in the anthology, because it sort of restates my own act of not going to church for a while now. Though this poem is a lot, says a lot, and does a lot, it had me thinking about Alice Walker’s book, The Color Purple. I love how your poem keeps shifting my mind to that book. You know, the idea that God is beyond the Big-daddy concept that the Church has constantly fed us. Your poem gave us a distinct perspective about Godhood.

And in his poem “I swallowed him whole”, Ekpenyong Kosisochukwu writes, “i swallowed a river ten times the size of heaven”  then continues in the next stanza: “i feel like a loose God.”  Goodness Ayoola Olanrewaju in “Celestial Observation” also writes “God’s/ quietness is a thousand times louder than loudest/ i blare so fervent/ whenever i pour into a prayer.”

Megan, do you think the acknowledgement of God’s reality adds salt to our existence as humans? Does it give us some kind of hope just thinking we have a supreme being watching over us even when he’s silent most of the time?

What was on your mind when you wrote “God is a Mother and She is Everywhere, Everywhere?”