Finding the Boy: A Review of Adedayo Agarau’s 'The Arrival of Rain'
By Candice Kelsey
ADEDAYO AGARAU’s brilliant new collection, The Arrival of Rain (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020), is rife with the urgency its title implies. The setting is his homeland of Nigeria, a country healing from political unrest yet refulgent with promise.
Much of this promise lies in its wealth of artists who, like the late Chinua Achebe or the contemporary Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, unapologetically speak their own personal Nigerias, not shying away from its ambiguities and complexities. Not only is the rain arriving in Agarau’s collection, but more importantly his voice is arriving to join the legacy of Nigerian writers in this important conversation – one that is essentially global – about identity, community, and language.
Reminiscent of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Agarau seems to capture the 21st Century Nigerian consciousness and collective Niger Delta memory while also chronicling his very personal griefs and triumphs. Essential to this collection is water, the heartbreak of its paucity, the struggle to possess its source, the loss inherent in its destructive power, and the blessing found in its sudden abundance. A controlling trope of sorts, this progression echoes Agarau’s own experience of heartbreak, struggle, loss, and ultimately blessing.
The opening poem, “Look How Far I’ve Come,” deceptively offers a look at adolescent despair caused by the rejection of a girl. Deceptively because Agarau woos us with the voice of an awkward and innocent boy grappling with such a universal dilemma; however, his weaving of the lyrics from a Yoruba song mark a significant point of maturity. He initially responds “mo ni fe’re” and ends with “fe mi / fe mi,” a broken marriage proposal. Here he offers the first of many startling comparisons – her “wound” is his “door,” both open.
And so he opens his collection.
The subsequent poems demonstrate masterful line breaks which complement the tone and purpose of each piece. Nothing is superfluous or affected. With the precision of a Renaissance sculptor, Agarau artfully chisels the silhouette of his verse, revealing each poem as it was meant to be. Not unlike the women in his family shaped the boy into the man, even into a poet.
These pages gather sister, mother, grandmother, and self to remember when they “were briefly beautiful.” While offering an overtly male perspective, his voice is layered with the whispers of feminine power, as if the gentle strength of these women were puddles of rain cooling his feet.
In the pivotal piece, “How to Love a Bird Right Back into the Sky,” Agarau juxtaposes “a gun in the head” with a “bird in the mirror” and “a war three oceans away” with “morning dews sitting at the tip of a tongue.” But these images are merely prelude to his meditation on the difference between the superficial and the eternal.
Here he begins his study of the mouth; he dismisses the girlfriends whose mouths have both tasted and alienated his body by prophesying his failures. The same lips that “wrapp[ed] their lips” around him tell him he is but “a plantation of seasoned blues.” Indignant, he answers them with mention of his grandmother’s first kiss, her eternal mouth affirming that he in fact “is home.”
Her voice arrives as rain.
Most powerful, however, are the eight self-portrait poems wrestling with loss, specifically the loss of his father, a motif that serves as the gravel and bone in this collection. The maturation process undergirds this collection with a self-awareness that breathes the smoke of burnt offerings. Does he reconcile his father’s death as some sort of forced sacrifice, and if so, a sacrifice to whom?
He begins with his name as we all do. He follows with a study of his kinship with the sea even becoming urchin; his final portraits find him imagining the self as barren tree while ultimately realizing his brotherhood with all children who have lost their fathers to violence. The final portrait poem is aptly titled “Fifth Portrait as Adedayo, or As Just Any Other Child from this Country.”
In a final act of self-love and allusion to his title, Agarau asks us to “water the tree when [we] find the boy.” We are left both parched and satiated. We wonder who the boy is, how it is that he can still be missing, and what role we have played in the search. We ask if the boy is Nigeria, if his father is the bird perched on his tongue, if his body is still running.
But most importantly, we find ourselves, our own stories, our songs hiding like ghosts in these poems.
These poems, where an aubade can “unbuckle a kiss,” and a body can “sunflower a grave into petal.” These poems that see a mouth as an ocean, repeatedly polluted and cleansed, with birds on its lips. And like the brave speaker who finally sees himself – as his grandmother did – in the “mirror that spreads across the wall,” these poems can, and do, fly!
CANDICE KELSEY's debut book of poetry, STILL I AM PUSHING, releases soon with Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has appeared in Poets Reading the News, Poet Lore, and other journals while her first micro chapbook THE PIER HOUSE is forthcoming with the Origami Poetry Project. She received Honorable Mention for Common Ground's 2019 Poetry Contest, and her creative nonfiction was nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She is an educator of 20 years' standing, devoted to working with young writers. She is currently working with the O, Miami Poetry Festival on an exciting project for 2020.
