Songs of Absence and Despair
By Toni Kan
56pp; Cassava Republic
We grow hungry for the road/
Poking our noses into the business of the world/
While the hearth grows dog- nose cold/
Like a step- mother’s bosom
- ‘When Home No Longer Feels Like Home’.
Richard Nixon, addressing the first astronauts on their return from the moon in 1969, said inter alia:
‘I was thinking, you know, as you came down… it had only been eight days, just a week, a long week, that this was the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation.’
Absence is a power and time is relative. The writer that can handle these well is blessed indeed. When a poet sets out to consider not just absence and distance but also the human frailty called despair, that poet should be taken seriously. In the best of times, any one strand in the braid suffices to engage any poet.
To engage intensely personal issues of loneliness and despair in the wider context of societal alienation and dysfunction is a daunting task, especially if one’s medium is poetry.
The essayist, the novelist, the storyteller and even the playwright have an easier time of it. Apart from the intrinsic difficulty of handling the material in the medium, there is that other matter of consideration for the audience.
Kan’s way of solving the latter problem is to use easily accessible language, shunning what would further alienate the very people on behalf of whom he sings.
There are no long poems in this collection, perhaps a reflection of the poet’s own struggles with the subject. There is the apparent preoccupation with the senses in this collection, perhaps a reflection also, of articulating experience through overburdened sensibilities.
In the shortest work in the book, ‘I Read Your Body Like Braille’, a poem which Kan indicates was written in Lagos in 2006, he intones: “In pitch darkness/I read your body like Braille/My fingers are my eyes.” Here the intensity of emotion in a benighted realm is explored in three erotic lines — three lines that relate volumes of the human condition at home.
The idea of sensory deprivation doing duty for deprived sensibilities also surfaces in ‘I Want To See My Daddy.’ This time, the innocence of a child is used to demonstrate the frustration of explaining a bewildering reality. Darkness features again and sensory substitution, a ready invention with this poet, again makes an appearance.
I read through Kan’s new collection at a sitting. What struck me particularly was the way in which the tone of the poet triggered my memory of what one other poet, Benedict Vilakazi, did with his own Zulu lament of lost blood and land.
Vilakazi’s poetry, which he wrote in his native tongue, treated in part the spiritual turmoil of the Zulu nation in the wake of the Zulu war. In ‘Now Do I Believe’, Vilakazi’s lament for his father, ten years after the father’s death, he wrote what was translated into English thus:
I can hear your guiding staff tapping/In front of me although I cannot see you./I am like a blind person with my bodily eyes./ Yes, now I do believe that he is dead,/And that he has gone away for ever and ever.
The shared sense of palpable darkness in the laments of the two poets, the resort to other senses for guidance and the tendency to then invent comfort in the face of loss — these struck me.
Whereas in Vilakazi’s poetry, written in Zulu and cured by time — the odes have this air of ceremony, in Toni Kan’s poetry, the immediate torment is quickly processed into English and shared with the audience, still raw and bleeding. Again, while Vilakazi treats physical decimation for the most part, Kan’s principal trouble is psychical displacement.
In the commonalities and differences, across time-schemes (Vilakazi died in 1947) the burdens of history, loss and recuperation track these poets like their own shadows.
Kan’s enterprise and aspirations in this little volume is large. It is not surprising that the material groans under the weight assigned. But the poet’s chief merit is that he does not ignore the pertinent; and he makes every resource serve. He can still see amidst the tears. He is not a prude, he is upfront with the emotional complications of living here and now.
I started with Nixon’s take on time. We may not all relate to it. But we can all relate to Toni Kan in this collection. When he hints at the root of our travails as he does in ‘Lets Conversate and Provocate’, a poem dedicated to Benjamin Zephaniah, dub poet extraordinaire, or when he sings his Blues for Naija, we feel his heartfelt cry for home and hearth.
Kan’s poetry matters because it helps us, all of us, ask probing questions of what really matters in our relationships. Even though the collection as a whole is dedicated to Kan’s spouse, it is not, as T.S Eliot once described his own poetry similarly dedicated, private words addressed to us in public.
The poems are public truths that we do well as a people to ponder in private.
Tade Ipadeola, author of ‘The Rain Fardel’, lives and works in Ibadan.