Speculative Poetry as an Anaesthesia for The Space Struck Between a Nigerian Poet’s Body and Their Nearest Grief

By Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan

It is almost very unconventional, in the Nigerian poetry space, to enter a poem and come out of it happy. To connect with a typical Nigerian poet, as an empathic reader, you must be ready to first give out your body to the next reader coming after you and wear the poet’s body which has been devoted to the unhappy stanzas of the poem. Unconventional as it may seem, the happy part of the poem is always in how the poet’s body wears unwavering metaphors that stick with them throughout the heavy journey of creating the poem, and this it is safe to say that to survive through the poem against all odds is the easiest way to hush the bruises, and not be silly by coming out happy and unbothered amidst the poets grieving body. This is very understandable considering that the hardship and bad governmental policies ravaging the country currently, forms the huge part of most poets’ muse. Metaphors like “my body is a forgotten nation”, “my body is a broken boy”, and so many other “my body is…” metaphorical expression has become the easily cliched route to representing the deplorable state of things or rather a way through which the poet, attempts to escape their gloomy share of the heavy cloud the country offers them for the sole crime of being her citizen; an attempt which ends mostly gloomphilic. I too, have had my share in this in the hardest possible ways until my awareness of speculative poetry — the anaesthesia for everything that has been plucking my teeth without empathy.

Twice in the past, I died through my poems, and it wasn’t even intentional, which is to say that the magnitude of this sadness vehicles most of us beyond the grasp of our own wills, and sometimes into heavy depressions. I needed to come out of my poems alive and happy or emerge bright from my environment and everything that connects me mostly to my sadness without losing touch of the happenings in my surroundings.  The idea of speculative poetry where I can alternate my life came up, and this was through my association with two bosom friends who were also poets that needed an escape pathway from the ‘grieving-body’ poems. Speculative poetry came handy and air-lifted me to a borderless space where I no longer need to pass through my sadness and depression to create a poem. It became so glaring to me that, a poet does not need to stay sad throughout his poem to be noticed. To add to it, I had to make sure I avoided the metaphor of ‘body’ so as not to call up the heaviness that comes with it.

In trying to achieve this, I adventured into writing a bunch of poems that permitted me an alternate space, where I am able to narrate the happy opposite of the ugly situations of my country and its adverse effects on me without telling them as lies. There, I met a whole lot of happy cyborgs in place of grieving bodies, I saw a lot of empathic aliens in place of politicians, but here, they cared so much that a poet’s muse has no reason to come out sad. You see, even Nigerians are not the Nigerians you know in the space speculative poetry allows; here, they are not the ones bearing the fangs of the leftovers of the leaders who so much cared for their country that they ignored the plights of the citizens, spurring their poets to grieve all years in their poetry with no ears to listen to their cries, nor a trophy to celebrate their sadness.

Ever since this journey, I have been steadily positive, and my mental state have been stable. Although, I have written less number of poems since then but I didn’t die in any of them. What I now do is devise an alternate path parallel to the actual situation that inspired the poem, that way, I’m able to tell my story without making lies out of it or boxing myself into despair as one of the dividends for presenting myself as an unbiased witness to such a story which mostly ugly in the concrete sense. This is never to say that I have figured it all but to stay mentally stable which is neither extreme or rare, although uncommon and expensive in the sort of literary space that Nigeria allows her poets, is something that makes me feel like a beautiful ordinary thing, an unusual survivor, mild enough to pass through a poem and come out of it sunny and pink with a blush.