Review: Losing his country

Andrew Jones

The first aspect I noticed of “2000 Blacks” by Ajibola Tolase, winner of the Cave Canem poetry prize, is the lack of homes, of a place that feels safe and comforting. Many of the poems feel in motion, navigating the tricky mess that is modern immigration through winding lines and heartfelt imagery.

Eventually, I found a speaker watching the news at home, finding that “another Black man was dying / on the TV screen.” Even the comfort of a living room doesn’t allow Tolase’s speakers to find any rest.

Representing the repressed, unsafe, and hurting, Tolase masterfully engages with the larger issues of migration from Nigeria and the fear behind the West’s immigration policies. He creates an unending narrative within his poetry that denies positivity yet holds hope like it’s the last drop of water in an infinite desert.

There is a pain to leaving your home, and there is another pain to never truly finding a new home. Tolase powerfully takes this second step into the grief of loss. “One time I lost my keys, and it didn’t hurt since / I already lost my country.”

Tolase follows the Black diaspora to its inevitable end, and his ability to take readers with him brings new meanings to old stories and stereotypes about people’s movement from one country to another.

Tolase’s speakers struggle with what they find at the center of being Black: a well of sorrow that holds a pain without any expectation of revisionism. The colonization, and industrialized slave trade, of yesterday is today’s resource exploitation, environmental poisoning, and limited guarantees of safety.

And it’s unsettling, how the poems don’t ever find a home themselves, like they’re on the prowl for any sort of reprieve. “My relationship with the land / is the longing of my fathers / for their kin.” Even those who remained feel pangs of pain at their missing sons, daughters and friends.

In this roving language, Tolase’s poetry moves emotions just as well as he moves through places. His poems can be felt from the first line, all their terror and trauma pulling you to its last line. His poems are accessible in the best way possible: it’s almost impossible to not reread a poem you’ve just read, if only to find a few new moments hidden throughout.

To move away is to move away from something, and Tolase’s glass-half-empty approach to exodus has each poem drenched in despair. “It does not vex me that dead men walking through my poems choose to speak.” Even the dead are restless in his poems.

The second half of “2000 Blacks” is more introspective, focusing on the inner trappings of a speaker and his father’s relationship. Much of the strife comes from the distance between the two, culminating in poetry that speaks to the emotional distancing being performed as well.

This distancing affects everyone around the father, including the speaker’s sister. “She calls him / your father as if a pronoun / can make him more mine.” There’s a double edge to that pain: the realization that her word alchemy is ineffective in displaying the true situation, and the reality that even trying to join together the speaker and his father in such a way feels wrong.

This poetry collection holds this tone to the end. Toward the end of the book, Tolase writes to his image of what he left behind. “My homeland / was mortally / wounded.” After leaving, there is no going back, even if you are able to visit again.

Andrew Jones is a poet with an MFA from Chatham University.