I suspect that most people will, at some point, have their significant other invite them for a dance in the rain. The act can easily pass off as a final ritual in the merging of hearts: What can be more vulnerable than dancing with another when nobody else will? But given the certainty of getting soaked and the accompanying stripping—which evokes the postlapsarian anxiety of feeling exposed when the child in us dies, or the irreconcilable habitat loss symbolized by our forced removal from Eden, or in this writer’s case, the fear of being struck by American lightning—the ritual becomes a very tough sell.
But what about other defenses, like the fear of acid rain? What about the fear of getting washed off in a flood when “the puddle sometimes gets large”? These are not the excuses to be found in colloquial speech. Bienvenue, poetry. Bienvenue, Blue Exodus (Orison Books, 2024). In Hussain Ahmed’s sophomore poetry collection, the speaker laments the extinction that happens “when it rains and there’s no girl to dance in it.” It is an apocalyptic image because the creative force that the girl, the female body embodies (in Yoruba cosmology and throughout this book) is painfully absent.
Blue Exodus follows up on his brilliant debut, Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile and turns from its war-scape subject to a more universal concern about ecological crisis. Although the war motifs appear in poems like “Lineage,” Paradise,” “Bridge,” “Preach,” “Myth,” “Curfew,” and “Exodus,” they are placeholders for the all-encompassing conflict and disturbance to the harmony of the earth’s ecosystem and the universe at large. Thus, private and intimate moments of the girl dancing fracture into what happens when “the cloud [turns] from blue litmus to red.” However, the concern with the ecological catastrophe is not the only reason why thiscollection is so important.
Blue Exodus is rooted in regenerative and transformative sensibility, with one eye turned toward the certainty of faith in prayer, the other toward the reason for that prayer. In “Cosmology of the Cloud with Baba as the Rain Maker” (and like in many other cosmologypoems in this book), the speaker notes that “We were made in the image of our dead / because God relies on recycling.” replanting the root of this collection in the Yoruba cosmology that we exist in is triune. That is, the world of the dead, the living, and the unborn are all in a cycle. Human materiality is indestructible. Nothing is left to waste, and even our insignificant actions have purposes, such that “[the] ritual of whirling in the first rain has no origin story.” It has no beginning. It has no end. It just is.
There is a sense of emergence in this work, yet regenerative sensibility does not come from blind optimism. In fact, the book warns us about the danger of such an attitude. It warns us that even the seemingly regenerative force of nature is not always positive. At best, it is neutral. For instance, in “Landslide,” “a new city emerged from the red earth” and quickly “buried everyone caught sleeping” at the end of the poem. Early in the book, a new “country emerged from the shores after the flood,” but the result is not all that optimistic.
These poems are most evocative when they reveal our helplessness, how even our efforts to intervene usually create more problems as “sacrifices [made] after each prayer, until there was no rooster to usher the rise of the sun.” The roosters go extinct so that the flood may abate. So, what is the best way to reverse the apocalypse? The speaker does not answer but moots the efficacy of Khalwa, which means reflection in solitude. In a world that has enjoyed massive technological transformations in the course of a few centuries, it is technology that policymakers often turn to for damage reverseal. Sea levels are rising, so let us elevate the levees or reclaim more land from the sea, like the Eko Atlantic project in Nigeria. There’s an increase in global warming in the United Kingdom, so let us install air conditioners like Americans, and so on. The stars are no longer visible in cities due to air and light pollution, so let us recreate the planetarium. Rarely are the art and humanities consulted, and when they are, it is for succor. Yet, without the spiritual experience of introspection in Khalwa, all these efforts are futile as the sky becomes a frozen mirror. The speaker warns us that without evaluating our place in the ecosystem, all these intervention efforts are palliative at best.
Cosmology is the science of the formation of the universe, which is always in flux. While our default experience now is to witness rapid deformations, the speaker in this collection reimagines a simultaneous construction. In the book, matter ruptures at the elemental level, defying the categorization that we have created in our obsession with order, exaggerating only our power of destruction and hardly our constructive powers in the matters of policies and language. This order is often mediated with force. Think about the irony of armed soldiers marching on a peacekeeping effort. Think about the poem “Lineage,” where
Officer S [was] back
from a peace-keeping mission
without his index finger
So disruptive is this elemental change that even the sky looked “freshly molded from clay,” echoing the origin story where both used to exist in the same realm before their separation. Thus, in the same poem, the speaker’s baba’s endeavor to make rain reveals its own irony. “The sky was a rolag carded with . . . dew.” The rolag brings down the sky into our hands. The woolen object itself resembles the cloud in its texture; the poem provokes a haptic response that compensates for the lack of visual acuity as the baba’s eyes morbidly are a “globe of brown worms.” Yet, it’s the search for light we see. The baba no longer reads his Quran without his glasses. Is this, the failure of seeing, not the perfection of faith itself—to allow the elemental transformation to unfold like an apparition in our mind’s eye? In fact, at this moment, the baba’s supplication for rain materializes in a way that transcends materiality that can be contained, held, or exploited. At the end of that poem, the speaker laments that:
The puddle sometimes gets large, it drags a child away.
Everyone lost to the water was recovered without their eyes,
That’s how I know that fish love to swallow whatever resembles a lamp.
Those who are lost to this water are recovered “without their eyes,” like the one who has made the rain. The speaker trains our haptic senses slowly in teaching us a new way of experiencing the universe, the way one teaches a child how to walk. Instead of grabbing it greedily, let us hold it dear.
Blue Exodus brilliantly traces all migrations from the personal, communal, and universal, as in the universe itself. Disrupting the order and questioning the skewed power structure that legislates the world. It teaches us that the universe is always evolving on its own, shifting from the Darwinian evolutionary theory that centers the organism in the evolutionary process. Whereas the former is not a means to an end and is post-humanist in its scope, it articulates an evolution of harmony and ecosystem—the latter pursues the evolutionary advantage by which other species are eliminated and humans, ultimately lifted.
But it takes a great art to resist ideologies. A trained environmentalist himself with a master’s degree in ecology and environmental studies, it will be tempting for the author to produce a kind of climate change poetry book and for the reader to expect a kind of rhetorical posturing on the subject. But the speaker is unpredictable. Ahmed’s book resists even its own ideology of permanent impermanence as early as the first poem in the collection: “Blue,” where “the Mediterranean remains blue across centuries of swallowing.” The speaker invites us to a deeper symbolic significance, with the Mediterranean not only as the beacon of “hope” for migrants crossing into Europe but also as a postcolonial place that has not ceased its oppression, where its memories go undated as if to reduce all the cruelties in Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History to one undefined epoch. It is a critique of the Euro-America posture of the savior/saved, migrant/native binary. It also models W. H. Auden’s notion of nature’s cruelty of inattention in the poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” to other important struggles. It complicates the logic of the pathetic fallacy into a device of painful irony, such that instead of the moody sky or turbulent seas reflecting the bad times that we are in, the sky remains blue. Or is the blue itself an artifice? It warns us that the danger is not that the sea is tumultuous but that nobody believes because it is so beautiful.
Yet, the sea narrows into an intimate space the size of a home and home wreck. The polyvocal voice of the speaker richly expresses itself right at the beginning, where, in “Self Portrait as a Beach,” it helps to fully unveil the ocean’s role for
memories
[that] hide beneath the swollen skin . . .
broken eyeglasses, missing pair of children shoes, and
misplaced wedding rings—that are better left misplaced.
Two sections later, the blue meets exodus. The speaker exposes the war that we are waging against the earth, and its deadly pushbacks. It invites us to break the passive posturing or the cheap comfort of aesthetics of a nature that endures, a language that invents, and even the prayer that undergirds this collection.
Throughout the book, the speaker engages with the crisis—our crisis—using philosophical fluency. It raises philosophical questions about the nature of objects—the postmodern and capitalist attitude toward objects is that they exist to serve an assigned purpose, confined within assigned value and utility. In a poem like “Exodus,” “the telephone poles [resist] the ebb.” Despite their resistance to the menacing force of nature (or perhaps, the ebb of people on the queue outside the telephone booth), they succumbed in defeat to “pigeons / with nowhere else to go.” It is as if nature will not allow human waste. Here, the speaker throws our idea of value-assignment into a flux as their mother tells them that “all birds came from the desert.” Therefore, the ebb here is not the natural one mediated by the lunar forces but is a euphemism for the worrying rise in sea level, where the birds represent our state of homelessness in the face of increasing ecological crisis. The bad news is that our machines will not save us, not when we have to “sing so high / for our prayers to be heard above machine noises.”
The book also challenges our survival techniques in poems like “Wi-Fi in a floating colony,” where our lack of attention or manufactured myopia destroys our capacity for empathy and care when “survivors were mistaken for tourists because they were half-naked.” The humor that emerges in this moment is powerful and found throughout this collection.
Blue Exodus is a cohesive project. The internal logic of the poems is strong, and the language is secure in the speaker’s childlike wonder, observations, and deductions about the nature of being. The result can be surreal and astonishing, especially when constructed in the syntax of formal reasoning, “Because X, Y” as seen in “Blue,” where the Mediterranean does not date its memories “because it is not a cemetery”; in “Abecedarian . . .” where the speaker thrives on what would kill him “because his stomach is full of water. The best instance is in the final poem, “Beach,” where the speaker observes “a squadron of white pelicans / [swimming] back and forth / to hinder the water from freezing.” This sort of language helps to register the biggest idea of this book, which is that everything exists in harmony, in an ecosystem. The pelicans are not noted for their aesthetic appeal here, as any artist will predictably iterate, but for their role in keeping a southern place like Mississippi, mentioned in the epigram, above the freezing point.
My first winter in Mississippi, there was a winter storm, the type that had not happened in recent memory, according to the natives. I was happy to experience the snow, but it was an anomaly. As we all know, climate change creates extremes in temperature change. It is the speaker’s need for clarity, the need to see what is beneath an ice sheet, that helps endow the pelicans with a sentience so that the speaker can notice the “Do Not Swim / No Lifeguard” warning that may as well be useless for the birds. The gaze shifts to the ominous presence of fishbones and feathers that we see earlier as “enough to make any country float in the wind.”
So many migration books have come out of contemporary Nigerian poetry. Including ‘Gbenga Adeoba’s Exodus and Romeo Oriogun’s Nomad. Awinner of the Orison Poetry Prize, Blue Exodus sits comfortably in that same company. It is its lack of specific travel destination, time, speaker, or witness that enriches its contribution not only to contemporary African poetry or postcolonial literature but to the broader field of ecopoetics. It is difficult for any work of migration poetry not to grapple with nature along the migration routes—the desert, the ocean; their flora, and fauna—but Hussain Ahmed’s speaker pays the closest attention to them in a way that establishes the profound harmony of the condition of life. Blue Exodus adopts the local narrative about flooding in which a dam bursts in the speaker’s locale, highlighting a trembling sound beneath the big sound of our lives. The new country that emerged in the book straddles a local one, as when the brown-eyed speaker with a snowball in his hand “prayed in a new country” and a global one. The time that we experience “after the new millennium” is all of time itself.
