Memories as Internal Structure in We Who Sowed Hurt and Beaded Pains
1Komolafe Ayodele Michael, 2Onyekachi Peter Onuoha
1Department of Theatre Arts and Music, Faculty of Arts, Lagos State University Ojo, Lagos, Nigeria
2Department of English and Literary Studies, University of Calabar, Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria.
*Penulis Koresponden: [email protected]
ABSTRACT
Memories are a defining characteristic of man; they are a form of socialisation of self-worth and they are the premise of the definition of what is good and bad in the African traditional environment. The social media space is now a popular site that is appropriated by depressed personalities to advertise their intention of committing suicide, and these social media sites are also used in the circulation of digital chapbooks. A “Digital Chapbook” is an electronic pamphlet containing creative ideas. The study adopts the discursive method to textual analysis and observes that Kukogho Iruesiri Samson’s We Who Sowed Hurt and Beaded Pains is a digital chapbook, which is hosted on his blog but shared through his Facebook page. There are a lot of scholarships on trauma studies in African literature, but little or no attention is paid to digital chapbooks. Through the application of trauma as a theoretical framework, we observe that memories are the internal structure of We Who Sowed Hurt and Beaded Pains. These memories, which lead to neurosis, make the poetic personas either attempt suicide or actually commit suicide. We submit that the return of the unconscious, which is part of the internal structure of the individual, motivates the individual to attempt suicide.
Keywords: Memories, Digital Chapbook, Trauma, Self, Social Media.
Vol. 1 No. 5, 2021
PINISI JOURNAL OF ART, HUMANITY AND SOCIAL STUDIES
85
1. INTRODUCTION
Memory plays an important role in the ability of a poet to compose a work of art.
According to Onuoha (2020), “an artist's life and literary memory empowers his literary creativity” (p. 304).The functional presence of memory enables the poet persona to reimagine the collective aesthetic presentation of a literary piece for the cognitive realisation of art within the framework of written poetry. Memory is seen as one of the defining characteristics of African literature before and after colonialism. African poets composed their poetic lines as a response to collective cultural history in Africa. The Euro- Modernists’ African poets who wrote poetry and appropriated language in such a way that they ignored the social structure of language used within the traditional African environment in the composition of written poetry and they “aped” the Western canon. In the concept of appropriating western style, which is a product of educated memory, Chinweizu et al. (1985) in The Decolonization of African Literature submit that:
During the period under consideration, there were three major tendencies discernible in African poetry in English namely:
(1) the euro-modernists, who have assiduously aped western practices of 20th
century European
modernist poetry. (…), (2) the traditionalists, who have model their poetry elements from traditional African poetry. (…), (3) a miscellany of voices of the middle
ground who, unlike the Euro-modernists or the traditionalists, share no strongly distinguishing characteristic (p. 163).
Whatever group Chinweizu refers to, they are all functions of poetic memory, either learned by immersing themselves in the dominant model of traditional composition or by becoming acquainted with the Modernists' style of writing, which they internalise and appropriate in their poetic presentation.
Language and memory are the defining marks of different artistic presentations and genre classifications because they are manipulated from the collective proposition of what they represent and what is internalised and upheld as the norm. Memory is the place that holds the norms of a society, and resistance starts with questioning of such norms, which finds expression in individual actions focused on the internal structure of memories that lead to depression and suicide. Through the application of trauma theory, we observe that the return of the unconscious and self-perception leads to suicide, as depicted in We Who Sowed Hurt and Beaded Pains, focusing on various factors that motivate those who are tired of their memory. E-chapbook poetry is enabling netizens to imagine the causes of trauma and suicide. Through the application of trauma theory, we observe that memory is a stifling of constantly recollected negative memories. Recurring memories and trauma in E-chapbook poetry provide a vivid literary depiction of the causes of depression, trauma, and suicide in the selected texts understudy Digital space is a vector for the emergence of new literary
forms in digital literature, and one of these is the digital chapbook. Onuoha (2020) note that; “The private space is symbolic of the shared public spaces to the extent that those who have the power of agency use the social media platforms to represent the plight of the individual as a metaphoric depiction of the collective” (13). We Who Sowed Hurt and Beaded Pains is a poetic illustration of the fluidity of spaces in relation to traumatic
2. METHODOLOGY
This study adopts the qualitative methodological framework, which has to do with the analysis of data from a purely discursive approach through the application of literary theory. In this study, the data were drawn from Kukogho Iruesiri Samson’s We Who Sowed Hurt and Beaded Pains and subjected to textual analysis. This approach gives the researcher the opportunity to critically examine the data by subjecting them to literary interpretation through the application of a literary theory. It enables the researcher to tell what patterned memories the poet’s persona goes through which informs the traumatic poetics.
3. THE INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF MEMORY IN IRUESIRI’S WE WHO SOWED HURT AND BEADED PAINS
Memory begets trauma in the sense that recurring memories lead to trauma, and the final bus stop, in some cases, leads to suicide. Through poetic distance, the poet persona accounts for dimensions of the internal structure of traumatic memories leading to attempted suicide and death, as clearly depicted in Iruesiri’s We Who Sowed Hurt and Beaded Pains. Through the process of memory presentation, this
paper interrogates traumatic imaginings of memoires as factors necessitating suicide in the individuals in the poem understudy.
Through poetic distance, the poet persona presents the memory structure of those who attempt suicide and what necessitates their actions. Through poetry, the persona lays bare the memory structures of those who attempted suicide. The poet persona observes that “tiny sparks fell, one at a time, from the furnace of clashing thoughts' ' (p.10) in the poem titled “metamorphosis,”
which is a symbolic representation of the gradually sliding into traumatic experiences. The poet persona is referring to the falling of human thoughts within the psyches of traumatised individuals to the point where the thoughts clash “unto the leaves of his troubled mind,” and what this does to the suicide patient is that “he withdraws into himself” (p. 10). And at that point in the patient’s life, he becomes a gradually transformed human being to the amazement of his friends, who “call it metamorphosis.” Unknown to them, it is a gradual movement to death.
The poet persona captures the recurring nature of traumatic memory when he submits that “the tiny sparks ignited tiny flames/and the tiny flames became fireballs/slowly eating the pages of his troubled mind” (p. 10). The poet persona suggests that suicide is not a day’s decision and that it is an accumulated effect of the tiny sparks that ignite tiny flames that burn the human minds. This burning drives the traumatic patient into committing suicide because his body can no longer bear the effect of the experience. These tiny sparks of traumatic memories eat away at the pages of the poet persona’s mind to the extent that the traumatised individual recoils into himself. This is in line with Caruth’s
submission that;”... traumatic neurosis”
emerges as the unwitting reenactment of an event that one cannot simply leave behind” (p. 2). The poet persona cannot leave his burning traumatic experiences behind to the extent that he relapses into silence. The poet persona notes that “yet, no one saw the smoke trails.../and as he began to swallow his words, offering silence as a speech at gatherings” (p. 10).
The burden of the fireballs in the traumatic patient psychic left smoke trails in the actions of the poet persona, although some of them knew that the poet persona was undergoing certain changes but could not link them to trauma. The poet persona suffers from trauma, and Caruth defines trauma as a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind” (p. 3), and that is why no one was able to see the souring wound in the poet person’s psyche. These recurring fireballs affect the poet's persona negatively, thus:
the fireballs, they coursed the veins of his troubled mind, until his thoughts became iced fire curdling his blood into a lumpy dirge silently chorused in his shadowed shell…and when he found salvation beckoning in the knot of a twine and the branch of a tree his friends, his kins, they called it suicide (p. 10).
The internal structure of stifling memories pushes the victims to seek for an alternative escape from stifling experiences that are personal to the poet persona, which others do not share in. This is in line with Caruth’s submission that; “trauma narrative, does not represent the violence of collision but also conveys the impact of
its very incomprehensibility” (6). This
“incomprehensibility” is both at the level of the traumatic patient and the friends of the traumatic victim. The structure of hurt is stifling to the extent that traumatic patient seeks for salvation through the knot of a twine and a branch of a tree which the poet persona calls self-help and not suicide in his reference of “his friends, his kins, they called it suicide”. This memory of suicide, which is in the structure of “iced fire curdling his blood”, drives the poet persona into “a lumpy dirge” so that in the poem titled; “3rd mainland bridge” the poet persona repossessing the continuous traumatic memory asks a rhetorical question; “i do not know why i’m standing here/ at the edge of the 3rd mainland bridge”
(p. 11).
The traumatic experiences of the poet persona tie him to the site of his pain into the site of his escape from pain. This need for escape from the stifling memory is so tense that the poet persona does not understand what motivates his actions.
However at this site the poet persona observes:
my back turned to the road and cars that pass by in a hurry i cannot see the cars but I can feel the air hit my back as they slice through it i can feel the ground quaking too…you see, this bridge, it is dying, like me and no one seems to heed its groans it is still standing, they are still passing (p. 11).
The poet persona no longer hears the sound of the world around them but can feel it even as he uses cars to illustrate the method of his state, whose touch has an impact on him. In accounting for the relationship of
trauma, Caruth notes that;”... one’s trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound” (p. 8). The poet persona’s trauma is tied up to another, which is the 3rd mainland bridge, and he illustrates the fate of the bridge in reference to his own silent groan, which no
one seems to acknowledge.
Metaphorically, the poet persona uses the silence of the bridge to poetically tell his story of trauma, the call for assistance, which no one pays attention to. The poet's persona in telling the poetic story of the 3rd mainland bridge as a reference to his own story, “I do not know why I’m standing here/on this dying bridge watching a canoe” (p. 11). A dying man satirises his fate, which society has ignored, wondering why he is standing on a dying bridge as a referent to his plight. This is so in the sense that Caruth submits that”... one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another...” (p. 8).
The poet's persona continues,
“paddling through continents of debris-/I cannot see the paddler’s face from here/but I swear his nose is crinkled” (p. 11). The course of suicide is alluded to as a continent of debris, which the traumatised patient is unable to paddle. The poet's persona’s inability to see the paddler’s face is symbolic of the inability of others to see the traumatised “face” of his heart. Still, through the referent of his heart, the poet persona acknowledges that his nose is crinkled from the stress of paddling through the continents of debris like him.
In telling the paddler’s story poetically, the poet persona implicates his traumatic experience thus: “beaten out of shape by
the stench that/crawls out of this water’s rotting innards...” (p. 11). Just as the shape of the stench of the water beats the paddler, so in the same way, the poet's persona is beaten by the stench of the world. He finds himself in Nigeria as a result of the failure of the system, which might include what Onyekachi Onuoha refers to as the fulcrum of the effect of institutional neglect. The poet persona, through metaphoric piling, accounts for the structure of his hurt and hunting memories through the vehicle of decaying infrastructure of the 3rd mainland bridge to the natural resources that have been conditioned by man. In all these, the poet persona highlights factors underlying his traumatic memory leading to attempting suicide; “you see, this water is dying, like me, and no one seems to heed its groans, it is flowing.” They are still paddling” (p. 11).
Through his experiences, the poet persona highlights the traumatic experiences of nature and the fact that the water is dying.
Since the water is flowing like he is moving, no one is paying attention to the salient groans. Caruth highlights what the poet persona passes through, which is “... an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled, repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (p. 11). And this is seen in the poetic refrain of “I do not know why I am standing here”.
The poet persona uses it to start the structural painting of what beckons the escape of his being from himself, which is illustrated in the narrative of the 3rd mainland bridge and the water that all groans in silence. As an example, consider the 3rd mainland bridge, which is in desperate need of maintenance, and the
water around it, which is troubled and suffocated by water hyacinths. In this delayed occurrence of the persona narrative of hurt, the poet persona uses natural elements to illustrate the structure of his trauma:
on this dying bridge, above rotting water counting debris with my back to the road i should not be here, but this bridge and water flowing under, they are like me men paddle my littered waters and heed not (p. 11).
In referent to the rot on the bridge and water, which symbolizes the poet persona’s affliction, he then goes to present his own hurt which made him to contemplate suicide, thus: “the stench of my rot. they ride on my back and ignore the quake of my wary limbs so, i will stand here awhile then take a dive perhaps the water will take my debris…” (p. 12).
The poet persona presents the structure of internal memory, which is a stifling memory of “rot” ride on the back of his mind to the extent that he contemplates suicide. The last stanza indicates that the attempt to escape from the torment of memory makes the poet persona to contemplate suicide. The poet persona as well as other suicide victims and survival see suicide as a form of natural redemption from their stifling memories as it is clearly indicated by
“perhaps the water will take my debris…”
of experience away from his mind. The poem does not end in full stop but in ellipses because the traumatic memory is continuous. In the poem, “there are shadows inside me”, the poet persona illustrates the burden of traumatic memories he carries like the debris in the
poetic 3rd mainland bridge, the poet persona foregrounds his plight thus: “there are restless shadows inside me buried in little boxes never to opened these shadows, they are multicoloured like the rainbow, but they are ugly” (p. 21).
The poet persona holds his hurt dear to him and has never expressed it to anyone and even as colours are as many as the rainbow, they are ugly and this is a source of stress on the poet persona. The poet persona highlights the physical contributors to his trauma and zeroed it on social construct which is reflected in his: “…my father, my mother, my kin they gave me these little boxes and said: “son, always hide tears, inside them for man’s tears must never be seen” (p. 21). The poet persona’s father, his mother and kin are prescriptive of the normal action of a man, which is a life devoid of the expression of emotions and this makes the poet persona to fence his hurt within himself. So in upholding the conditioning of his parents, the poet persona notes that: “so i murdered my tears, many of them and buried them inside my little boxes- a toddler’s sorrows, a teenager’s losses and a bearded man’s many failure” (p. 21).
The poet persona embodies such unexpressed hurt in him that the hurt is now fertile and conditions his existence into hurt because all through his life, he could not genuinely express how he feels. The poet persona accounts for the nature of his soul as a result of his parents subdued culture of not allowing a man express his emotion: “my soul is a cemetery for murdered tears whose ghosts now roam about in silence casting restless shadows with many colours just like a rainbow, but they are ugly” (p. 21). These traumatic memories that are never allowed to find
expression in tears and empathy keep on hunting the poet persona and casting restless shadows with many colours of torment on the psyche of the poet persona.
The poet persona is burdened by the memory of the past and the stifled therapy which tears give to the poet persona is in constant hunt on the psyche of the poet persona to the extent that: “so you see, I know “a man must not cry?” but there are many flaming shadows fitting amongst the tombstones in my soul please, let me quench them with tears” (p. 21).
At the last stanza of the poem, the poet persona believes that tears were the effect therapy he needs to clear his memory from pain and hurt. The structure of memory within the psyche of a hurt and subdued individuals are perceived differently as highlighted by the selected poems interrogated so far. In “There are tears in my bones” the poet persona attempts to open up his hurt when he states that; “there are tears in my bones/under this waterproof skin/ so tightly wrapped around/ my desiccated soul” (p. 23). The foregoing illustrates how powerful traumatic memory can be and how it influences the lives of individuals even when their appearance does not look like it. The poet persona highlights the depth of his hurt when he notes that; “will you sing me a sad song for
the tears in my bones
they’re coalesced, congealed
oh! strum my misery! drum pain! (p.
23).
The poet persona suggests music as a therapy to free himself of the drum pain in
his being. Still music therapy does not provide him with the needed solution to his trauma and he asks:
cut me! here! here!
perhaps i will bleed out
the tears in my bones
now concealed, congealed (p. 23).
The poet's persona begins to ponder if cutting himself and inflicting physical pain will ease the psychological burden he is facing as a result of accumulated memory.
Sadness as a result of traumatic memory becomes part of the poet's persona's existence. So the poet persona asks a rhetorical question:
do you not see sadness
forming crystals in my eyes?
do you not hear me?
There are tears in my bones! (p. 23)
The foregoing illustrates how personal traumatic memory is, although sometimes it is a referential type of memory but in the poet persona’s case, the memory resides within him and continues to stifle him.
The poet persona, through remembering, erects a memorial for Dave.
He emphasizes the reality of his remembering through the title of the poem when the poet persona says: “dave was his original name” and goes further to account for how his hurt was structured leading to his death.
Dave, that was his original name
everyone has forgotten it
Now that linda and friends have visited
the graveyard of his yesterdays
to exhume long forgotten ghosts
and give him other names… (p. 13).
The name starts with small letters and ends with a full stop. The poet persona repeated that was his original name twice as a poetic means to emphasize that the poet persona is remembering and through memory makes the dead persona back into the consciousness of the public. In an attempt to attest to the actions of others through poet remembering, the poet persona erects a memorial for Dave through the poet’s telling of what happened to him and through the eyes of Linda’s friends as the poet persona recollected their actions through memory.
In the second stanza, the poet's persona remembers how through naming, Linda and her friends recreated the name of dave. The poet persona, through remembering, holds Linda and her friends and other ladies accountable for the death of Dave; “do you know his new names/ the ones the blogs wrote about/ the hammers that nailed his coffin-/ pansy nancy shit stabber…” (p. 13). Dave died due to accusation of rape he did not engaged in and his perceived guilt was amplified on blog and other social media spaces to the extent that dave had to take his own life to escape the shame.
well, each name was a conviction
each a nail, a hammer each one sealed his oaken coffin…. (p. 13)
Those who were not there when Dave was accused took side and called Dave names to the extent that:
as dave threaded his many names
and wove for himself a noose…
…it seems no one knows (p. 13).
Name calling and false accusation is an internal burden of memory which Dave carried, forcing him to escape his body and to avoid the burden of shame and in the last stanza, the poet persona asked, it seems no one knows that that was what killed dave.
The poet's persona remembering Dave, is in line with Caruth's submission that,
“…history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas”
(p. 24). The foregoing accounts for the need to erect a poetic memorial for Dave because the poet persona is implicated in the plight of Dave. Although Dave would not withstand social spit, the poet persona highlighted another who did but with certain physical damage thus:
i know a man who cries with his fists
clenched, they flails at his sorrows
as though to scare them away
this man, cries with his swinging fists
each jab holding a wail and a tear
but his lips are silent, his eyes stay dry (p.18).
This is the poet's persona witnessing on behalf of a traumatic patient who faces trauma through his fist as if he wants to
scare it away. Each jab is a form of crying about his pain even though his eyes are dry. This is the height of trauma where the poet's persona feels it at the level of groaning to the extent that he could cry because the cut of the trauma is deep and stifles the life in him. The poet person engages in repetition of the traumatic experience, which is traumatizing as Caruth highlighted. And this finds expression in the continuous fist reactions of the poet persona;
each day, his fists cry a raging river
that crack bones and break down walls but his eyes, they never betray tears
so he hits-the air, his wife, his children
and he hits-in anger, in sorrow, in fear
and each blow is an outcry and a tear (p.18).
The poet's persona is psychologically messed up as a result of various layers of his traumatic memories, and by virtue of that, he becomes violent in an attempt to escape such stifling memories. Through metaphoric piling, the poet persona goes into naming the traumatic patient who hits him to escape his frustration and anger.
The poet persona acknowledges the taking away of the humanity of the man in how he was raised not to express an emotion thus; “but this man, who cries with his fists/was once told, ‘do not betray your tears/for that is not the way of a strong man” (p. 18). The man is deprived of a legitimate vent to air his psychic in the purgation of his emotions through tears and the expression of vulnerability, and as
such, he claims to be a strong man to the extent that his memory weighs him down.
In some of the poems already analyzed, the poet persona repeatedly emphasises that silence is a product of trauma. Through the portrayal of silence in the poem “Silent Verse”, the poet's persona demonstrates how trauma works. The poet persona notes:
i.
silence
is a faceless bartender
pouring random cocktails
in mind chalice
if the drinking mind
act drunk, or dies- poisoned
shall we not blame the silent lips/?
(34)
This is the illustration of the power of trauma in the poet persona’s psyche and it induces silence. The poet persona views the mind as a cup that absorbs whatever comes in which is a representation of a cocktail.
The poet persona accepts the fate of his suicide thought through the metaphor of “if the drinking mind/ act drunk, or dies- poisoned/ shall we not blame/ the silent lips (34). If in his silence, he absorbs the pain and commits suicide, his society may be quick to questioning his silence and may even refer to it as an act of cowardice on his part. The poet persona continues:
iii.
silence
is soundless noise
deafening
the
listening mind (34).
The poet persona uses silence as metaphor for trauma, indirectly illustrating that trauma is the soundless noise deafening the listening mind trying to exist and afraid of succumbing to the pressure of suicide. Unspoken trauma stifles the poet persona from life to the extent that he acknowledges that:
when the lips fail to say
is the mind not free to conjure?
Even if the poet persona does not say anything his mind wonders of the best escape from the hurt in his mind. The poet persona further illustrates the structure of trauma and how it is realized within the human mind when he notes that:
vi.
if i am silent
while the world makes noise
do not think me deaf or mute
i am only busy
with the sieve of my mind
divorcing grain from chaff (p. 35).
The society in which the poet persona exists already has a construct that restrains the persona from expressing pain.
Therefore, his decision to stay silent “while the world makes noise” becomes a defense mechanism, hiding his pain from the world and allowing his mind to run on its
own construct. The running of the poet persona’s mind on his construct is dangerous in the sense that some traumatic memories seek an escape from life, which is death, and conditions the poet persona to a zero option of death as the best alternative to life.
4. TRAUMA AND SUICIDE IN OF IRUESIRI’S WE WHO SOWED HURT AND BEADED PAINS
Suicide and trauma are two significant embodiments that work side-by- side in this poetry collection and sketches by Kukhogho Iruesiri titled “We Who Sowed Hurt and Beaded Pains.” The poems depict the challenges of the poet's persona as he sinks into depression and attempts to commit suicide. The attempted suicide is a result of the trauma faced by the poet's persona in the challenging society that inferiorises the individual. His inability to satisfy society with its lofty standards leads to the mental instability of the poet persona as he sinks into depression and ends it with suicide. Caruth (1996) pioneered a psychoanalytic post-structural approach, suggesting that trauma is an unsolvable problem of the unconscious that illuminates the inherent contradictions of experience and language. She opines that the concept of trauma is a recurring sense of absence that undermines knowledge of the extreme experience, thus precluding linguistic value other than referential expression. Trauma theory in poetry focuses a great deal on repetition that exists within the literary framework, as repetition is a common response to trauma and can easily be identified in a literary text. Many survivors of trauma repeat aspects or the entirety of the event that was traumatic in their life in their mind. The mission of the theory of
trauma is to bear witness to traumatic histories in such a way that they attend to the suffering of the other. Caruth goes further to suggest that “trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures” (p.
11). This culture, in this study, is the meeting point of trauma and poetry.
Stef (2013) in Postcolonial Witnessing states that trauma theory “continues to adhere to the traditional event-based model of trauma according to which trauma results from a single, extraordinary, catastrophic event” (p. 31).
Trauma is thus defined as “a frightening event outside of ordinary experience” (p.
171). This infers that it takes a severely disturbing event to carve a niche in the mind of the survivor. More often than not, it takes more than a single event to drive the survivor to a state of trauma. These events build up a climatic and traumatic situation in the subconscious of the survivor. Thus, trauma theory builds on the memories of the individual, who in turn builds these experiences on memories.
Rothberg (2009), in his book, Multidirectional Memory, suggests that:
…we consider memory as multidirectional as subject to on-going negotiation, cross- referencing and
borrowing; as
productive and not
private… the
interaction of different memories illustrates the productive, intercultural dynamic
that I call
multidirectional memory (p. 3).
Trauma is thus seen as a series of
disturbing and frightening incidents that stick as memories in the mind of the survivor. These terrible memories give rise to depressing thoughts in the mind of the survivor. The poet persona in We Who Sowed Hurt and Beaded Pains is every individual who attempts to commit suicide and who narrates incidents based on the challenging situations that society, family, and life throw at him. Memories become the yardstick behind the narrative as he uses them to open the eyes of the reader to the sobering situations that bring him to the severe state of depression. Caruth (1996), in support of the above opinion, suggests in The Wound and the Voice that trauma is “not located in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on” (p. 4).
In “I am Looking for My Childhood,”
the poet persona takes the audience reader down memory lane of some sort as to why a
“man, sane, sits by a dump to scribble unrhymed words.” (Stanza 2, line 9; p. 15).
The imagery in the preceding lines shows that the poet persona has been rejected by society as “no familiar eyeball greets me”
(stanza 1. Line 4). People who reject the poet persona, even in this demented state, fail to recognise that whatever the insane speaker is going through is a result of rejection and neglect from the smaller part of society, namely the family.The poet persona uses memories to draw the attention of the audience reader to join him in reflecting that he was an integral part of the society that rejects him now. He laments thus:
but how do I tell them that
I fell here and
earned this scar I fought there and broke this tooth
I buried a tear here and there…
i am standing before a door i used to open without
knocking soft-knuckled and softhearted
it feels very strange to knock and stranger to see unfamiliar faces
who peek and bark “what do you want”
in the house where you left your childhood (pp. 11-20).
The rejection of the poet persona by the people through whom his childhood was created becomes a source of trauma for him. The rejection becomes so heart- breaking that he gradually loses touch with reality. This breach in reality stems from the fact that these doors that the persona was used to opening without knocking did not need some form of special recognition. Thus, when the closest function of society begins to question the identity of the poet persona, he begins to fall out of mental order with the larger society as he has “smiles curving the junction of my lips,” indicating insanity or what some may see as a form of
“arrogance”-that psychological and character trait in human beings that is characterised by unpleasant manifestations”
(Komolafe, 2018). Also, the poet shows the challenges in memories recounted from the family angle in “I Know a Man Who Cries with His Fists” and “There are Shadows Inside Me.” These two poems reflect how the poet persona struggles to hold back from struggling as a man, facing challenges that could break him down. In stanza 6, lines 17-18, “... don't let your tears betray you, for that's not the way of a strong man.”
He is forced to be comforted by this idea.This infers that no matter how much the struggles weigh him down, he should not let his emotions get the best of him. The punches he throws at these challenges are such that “his fists cry like a raging river that cracks bones and breaks down walls.
But his eyes never betray tears (stanza 3, lines, pp. 9–12). These challenges that the poet persona faces well up in the subconscious such that it develops a form of hate for life such that “he hits—the air, his wife, his children, in anger, in sorrow, in fear” (stanza 4, lines, pp. 13–14).
In the latter poem, the poet persona is forced to hide these traumatic memories that would break him mentally and emotionally inside his “little boxes” (stanza 3, line 10) (p. 21). His many failures as a child up to manhood begin to have mental and psychological effects on him because society deprives him of an outlet through which he can purge the said emotions.
These emotions that become accumulated in the poet's persona stay in his memories as traumatic experiences. Further, in the poem
“I am Looking for My Childhood,” the poet persona seems to suggest that not all traumatic memories lead the patient to suicide. However, some are demented by
their experience, as the poet's persona remembers his childhood; “I stand on a street/I first traversed with tottering feet/barefooted and bare-hearted” (p. 15).
And then he goes on to lament his plight:
no familiar eyeball greets me
as i stop here and stop there
with tears
breaching the borders of my
eyes
and smiles
curving the junction of my lips
these people think me mad, i know it
for which man, sane, sits by a dump
to scribble unrhymed words? (p.
15).
The poet’s persona laments his plight as a result of his mental state. He feels he is not mad, but his actions show that of a mad man. His mental account was accounted for as a result of his experiences to the extent that his mind could not carry it again. The poet's persona highlights the cause of his madness thus: “I fell here and earned this scar/I fought there and broke this tooth/I buried a tear here and there”
(p. 15). The poet's persona accounts for how stifling his experience is to the extent that his mind could not bear it again to the extent that he runs mad. His family is rejecting him, and his plight illustrates the plight of those who have mental illness in Nigeria in the sense that they are abandoned at the dump by their loved
ones. The poet persona laments:
it feels very strange to knock and stranger to see unfamiliar faces who peek and bark
“what do you want”
in the house where you left your childhood
the strangest of all is to open your mouth
and find your
words have
evaporated (p. 15).
The poet persona is hurt and wonders:
but how do I tell them that
i am looking for my childhood
to give it the tears if hurt, and of joy
that were stolen from it… (p. 16).
The poet persona had an abused childhood memory to the extent that he is in constant search of a way to appeal to his childhood memory in the sense that it is that childhood memory that conditioned him, as the last scattered stanza indicates.
In “Illacrimo,” he further states how he bottles terrible experiences that would have led to him pouring out his emotions.
To him, the ability to hold emotions validates the strength of his manhood. He recounts traumatising situations that he experienced at home when his father
“would whip me and command the silence of a man” (stanza 4, lines 16-17) (p. 28). The place of solace to which he runs does not in any way provide consolation to him,
namely his mother, as she tells him to
“stop crying like a girl” (stanza 4, line, p.16). Overtime, in a bid to be the man that society wants him to be and to prevent the invalidation of “his penis’ size” (stanza 5, line, p. 20), which is a representation of his manhood and growth to maturity, these traumatic experiences are stored in the subconscious, and these stored memories grow with time and affect his mental health, leading him to depression, as seen in his next words;
Now my soul’s garden is dry
And its flower bespeak death
Ashened by these hungry flames
That only tears can douse
Gradually, the stored traumatic memories of the poet persona, numerous as they are, are bound to inject suicidal thoughts and tendencies into the mind of the persona.
Klonsky and May (2021) argue that the theory of suicide, which is a realisation of traumatic experiences, has its basis in the premise of the “ideation-to-action”
framework, also known as the “3-step theory.” This theory states that the idea of suicide results from a form of accumulated pain, usually psychological pain and hopelessness. It further infers that among those who experience this pain and hopelessness, connectedness is a key protective factor against escalating ideation. Thirdly, the theory views the progression from ideation/contemplation of suicide to attempts as facilitated, acquired, and practical contributors to the capacity to attempt suicide. This means that if the individual feels some form of psychological pain but hopes that things
will get better with time, there may not be room for ideation or contemplation of suicide. And this suicidal contemplation may be directed towards the connectedness or attachment the survivor or victim has towards that which may make him contemplate suicide. Finally, as long as there is some form of practical contributor to the victim, the progression from contemplation/ideation to eventual suicide may become actual reality.
Shneidman (1985) describes suicide as
“a response to extreme psychological pain”
(p. 1). Durkheim corroborates this definition by stating that social isolation may contribute actively to the ideation and realisation of suicide. The poem “Silent Verses” showcases the concerns that social isolation can cause. The poem depicts the poet's persona torn from society as silence concocts ideas that rip him from society.
Thoughts that do not form words but exist in the poet's mind distort the poet persona's mental state, “mixing random cocktails in mind chalice,” to show the level of the poet persona's disrupted psyche. It's no surprise that the poet's persona laments;
if i am silent
while the world makes noise
do not think me deaf or mute
i am only busy
with the sieve of my mind
divorcing grain from chaff
The mindset of the poet persona is torn from the world as he no longer pays mental heed to what is happening in his environment. This poem seems to draw comparison to the first poem in the
collection Metamorphosis, as it illustrates the societal withdrawal of the poet's persona from the people that make up a part of his life. The persona describes the situation thus:
…and the tiny flames, they became fireballs slowly eating the pages of his troubled mind
yet, no one saw the smoke trails…
and as he began to swallow his words offering silence as speeches at gatherings his kin, they called it metamorphosis (stanza 2, lines, pp. 9-14).
The poet persona feeds on the silence imbedded in the subconscious as the society around him is not quick to understand that the new feature that he displays is as a result of accumulated psychological trauma, which is mistaken for some form of evolving metamorphosis.
Baumeister (1990) described suicide as an escape from an aversive state of mind. This implies that an individual whose subconscious is psychologically disconnected from reality may begin to consider suicide as a means of escaping the hell hole in which he finds himself.This hell hole, created in the mind of the individual torn from society, arises as a result of the negligence on the part of those who would have listened to the silent cries for help on the part of the victim. And when the victim becomes self-conscious that the society he is a part of is deaf to the psychological demons that traumatise and taunt him, he sees suicide as the only way out. The poet persona states further,
concurring with Baumeister’s hypothesis;
…and when he found salvation beckoning
in the knot of a twine and the branch of a tree his friends, his kins, they called it suicide
Joiner (2005) argues that for an ideation/contemplation to become an attempt, certain factors come into play, namely the perception of low belongingness and high burdensomeness. O’Connor (2011) in his Integrated Motivational-Volitional Model also suggests that defeat and entrapment are the primary drivers of suicide ideation and acquired capability, as well as access to these tools that may cause bodily harm to the victim, may end up becoming the propeller for impulsively acting on suicidal thoughts. This infers that if a person’s day- to-day experience of living is characterised by pain, whether emotional or psychological, the person is essentially being punished for living, and this may decrease the individual’s desire to live, thus giving room for suicidal thoughts. These sources of pain may include physical suffering, negative self-perception, defeat, entrapment, etc. Two poems from the collection affirm the above theory, namely
“3rd Mainland Bridge” and “The Cross.”
The former illustrates the accessibility of the poet persona to places and tools that may speedily propel the ideation into suicide.
The poet stands at the edge of the bridge, with nothing infringing on his opportunity to actualize the idea of committing suicide.
He begins to see the water as the fastest way to end it all. He objectifies the river flow as a proper representation of himself as a place
where “men paddle my littered waters and heed not the stench of my rot” (stanza 3, lines 26-27) (p. 11). He also displays some form of defeat in attempting to live when he laments; “this water, it is dying, like me, and no one seems to heed its groans”
(stanza 2, lines 18 & 19) (p. 11). In the end, as if giving himself to some form of saving, he decides to “take a dive; perhaps the water will take my debris” (stanza 3, lines 19 & 20) (p. 11).
Ironically, careful assessment reflects that if the poet persona in the poem's 3rd mainland bridge is the same as that in Metamorphosis, this means that the persona needed all forms of saving, and it is reflected in lines 19–21 that “he found salvation beckoning in the knot of a twine and the branch of a tree, a move that signifies death by hanging. The Cross shows the feelings of rejection, dejection, and defeat in the mind of the poet’s persona. There is the realisation of aloneness and burdensomeness reflected in the fact that he suffers for the sins of the ancestors and the parents, as there is no one to carry the load of suffering with him.
He notes that “the many sins of my father and the pains of my mother have packed for me a fate too heavy for my pate”
(stanza 4, line, pp. 16-20), which signifies the burdens of the persona's life challenge.
The poem Lie-f also shows how the poet persona displays signs of defeat and how this leads to the death of any willpower to continue moving on. The choice of words he uses reflects the disillusionment and utter defeat such that he believes that to him “life is a lie” (stanza 3, line 5) (p. 38).
Society, as illustrated earlier, is not exempted from the death of the poet persona. The poem “Dave was His Original Name” depicts how the pseudo
relationship the deceased had with the netizen family turned out. In stanza 2, lines 7-9, the poem highlights how, in a bid to establish this pseudo relationship, especially after his demise, eulogies from
“Linda and the Chatty Kin” flooded the net with praise, “each was worth a million clicks!”, unfortunately oblivious to the many times he must have called out to them about his depressive state. Eventually, his suicide becomes the yardstick to raise nomenclatures that depict the netizens' disappointments in the victim, without taking into account the victim's gradual mental and psychological decline, as well as his detachment from family, society, and life as a whole. The poet's silence on the mental and emotional grievances of the poet gives room for the gradual shutting down, physically and psychologically, of the poet persona. Furthermore, society's instruction that the persona is expected to bottle up their fears and tears demonstrates society's egoistic and egocentric mindset, which ignores the collective relationship that they could relatively share with one another.
These bottled up tears and fears, especially in seriously traumatic situations, gradually break down the persona and he begins to see death as the only way out, as well as the range of options including the noose and the tree and the bridge.
5. CONCLUSION
In this sense, memory plays a very important role in conceptualising trauma within e-chapbook poetry in the sense that poetic trauma exploration allows the reader to understand the plight of the poet persona whose society fails to pay attention to his silence. The study also indicates various methods of the manifestation of trauma within the structure of poetic composition,
as clearly seen from the poems under discourse. This study suggests that traumatic experiences leading to suicide are gradual and take time to affect the trauma patient. It is necessary that loved ones and neighbours close to youths and adults always pay attention to changes in the behaviour of those who are related to them and try to assist their loved ones.
Traumatic individuals should always seek professional help when they feel weighed down by their experiences.
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