In the spirit of Ayokunle Falomo’s previous titles, most notably—AFRICANAMERICAN’T, which, in lyric and narrative poetry, defies the definition of what it means to be American (as a born African)—we welcome Autobiomythography Of (Alice James Books, 2024), a new collection of poems which, in Falomo’s signature avant-garde style, opens an examination into self, fatherhood, and national history. The collection employs an epic, almost-biblical voice and style, intersected with a fragmented, interdisciplinary approach akin to those in modern historical texts. It blends geography, mythology, biography, and history in an effort to define an African American self, and its place, in relation to a complex national past. While the search for home has always been a stable presence in Falomo’s poems, we feel its drawing most keenly in this collection which uproots itself from previous notions, and attempts, in what look like fury and hope, to redefine itself.
Autobiomythography Of, with its compelling, radical title, leaves an open-ended question to the reader, the first of many, that they must reckon with. Autobiomythography of whom? The answer is both obvious and not. Reminiscent of Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of, Falomo’s title evokes, even before arriving at the first poem in the book, the same spectral nature of Nguyen’s book. The “Of” in the title, followed neither by an ellipsis nor an object, paradoxically suggests through its literary negative space, an addition in absentia. It tells us “there is something that should be here that isn’t,” and we have to find out why. Unlike Nguyen’s Ghost Of, though, which confronts, in elegy and exile, the shadow of a life removed in form from photographs, and from life by suicide, the elusiveness of Autobiomythography Of is doublefold as the shadow is both the subject and the object it addresses—a living spectre of self that must arrange its many forms to write the one true story of its life.
The morphology of “autobiomythography” allows us to interpret the hybrid title as “self-life-myth-writing” or “writing about one’s own life as a myth or story.” This collection presents itself as an attempt to define the self, if not possible by fact or memory, by the creation and adaptation of its myths. “For/give me […] my memory,” Falomo writes, in “Ode to a Boy’s Missing (& Unnamed) Tooth,” the poem that begins the collection. Employing a masterful play, both on words and form, he tenders an apology for a forgotten past (forgive me my memory) and requests to remember (give me my memory), acknowledging simultaneously the fragility of fact in personal and collective memory, and demanding back its wholeness. And because there is no one to answer to it, at least not in the collection’s reckoning with the past, nor in its endless conquest for identity, Falomo must keep up his mythmaking, effectively differentiating fact from truth.
The theme of displacement is a thread that knits this collection. We are faced with it, even from the very first lines of “Ode to a Boy’s Missing (& Unnamed) Tooth,” where Falomo sets the deeply introspective and nuanced tone that guides the collection:
I was a boy once & / I did not show the world my teeth
Years separating the boy I was / & the man I’m trying to be
This fracture cuts deep into the collection even as he proclaims “my name is my name” in “Autobiomythography (Reprise),” restating, as if in the way of a reminder, the one, unchanging notion of his being.
Using a variety of innovative and experimental forms, Falomo, like an avid philosopher, explores in all facets and fractions the many definitions of the self. In “Notes toward a Conjugated Theory of the Self,” he asks, in the voice of an unnamed friend or colleague, “What is a choice that, if you’d made it, would have steered your life / down a pathway where, were you to meet yourself, you not have been recognizable to you?” and we are faced with the fractured selves of a person who has had to live in the liminal space between two countries, belonging fully to neither, holding two tongues in their mouth like the most legible trait of a past colonization and its continued present.
In this collection’s exploration of history, we see the oxymoronic cycle of similarities and divides between fathers and sons, the facets of love and conflict, tradition and change, “the exhausting enterprise of autobiography.” “We are both fathers now, my father / and I,” Falomo writes, “How’s that for having something in common?” The speaker in Falomo’s poems is aware, and in particular, afraid of the cyclical nature of history, its joys and trauma, loves and violence. In poems like “On Fire, Or Last Wishes,” he puts up a futile resistance to this, even as he is aware, ultimately, of the futility of the attempt:
The truth:
I wish to be a child again
but it is for all the wrong
reasons. There is a child
in me who thinks he can
rewrite the history
of his family, his country.
Tell the boy he is wrong.
Tell him he can’t.
The notion of history’s cyclical nature is evoked structurally in the poem, “Self-Portrait with Truth at the Bottom of a Well,” a Markov sonnet, following the form created by George Abraham, which, like history, actively forgets, revises, and repeats itself:
In Gérôme’s paintings, Truth assumes the form of a woman.
In the painting I love most, she sits at the bottom of a well—
Naked; & with her right hand, she holds up a haloed mirror.
In the painting I love most, she sits at the bottom of a well—
Naked; & with her right hand, she holds up a haloed mirror.
What is the name for it, what I, in haste, have called a life?
In “Fable,” the speaker reconciles briefly with a history he has decided to stay away from, and we see, in effect, the romantic retelling and idealization of a subjective past. It is in the sequence of poems for O.G, his daughter, though, that we first see a shift in tone. The speaker looks radiantly towards the future, hopeful to make the world a better place; inwardly to himself, hopeful to be a better father, to build a better future, though in the background lurking still, is his fear of the repetition of history. And so, the poem concludes, with uncertainty: “Lord, what have we done.”
The poems in this collection are less interested with the exploration of the past for history’s sake, and more with what can be salvaged from it, its capacity as a tool with which the future could be built. The poem, “Fugitive Fugue,” begins with an epigraph by Olaudah Equiano from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: “Let the polished and haughty European recollect that his ancestors were once…uncivilized, and even barbarous.” In the poem that follows, Falomo proposes an alternate idea to his autobiographical search. He dives deeper past a tainted colonial history and dons on, with pride, something more primal, unnameable, and perhaps as close to “human(e)” as any person can be.
Hey Self: What is a self after all?
Let me salvage savagery from its catacomb
& make of its skein a coat. Only then will I
be done, once & for all, with the unprofitable
& exhausting enterprise of autobiography.
If there is to be a bright, silver bone gleaming in this collection, it would be Falomo’s determination to name history for what it is, continuously, repeatedly, notwithstanding the violence it harbors, the horrors that have been successfully hidden in time, surviving only in faint memory. It is Falomo’s legacy of rebirth, in rich, outstanding text, that there are things that must burn in order to be birthed anew; that in order to change the nature of a thing, one must first learn its true name; that the rebirth of any nation requires at least one death—the death of its ignorance. In the first sequence of “Ode to a Boy’s Missing (& Unnamed) Tooth,” he asks:
if a people don’t know
what they don’t know
does it really kill them?
In the second sequence, we understand why he has taken to this human act of naming, following an ancestral path of knowledge which challenges the hegemony of oppressive systems that demand angelic obedience from minds long conditioned to submit. He writes:
And lately I’ve become obsessed /
with names & this sacred task of naming things
I remember
learning about the first man / assigned this duty & I want
to share what I imagine / would’ve been the joy of this […]
And so / I named my tongue
captive I named my country’s history
for what it is
Falomo realizing that his mother tongue, though present, has been suppressed both in its linguistic practice and use against colonization’s oppressive forces, admits to wanting to colonize the colonizer’s language, a defiant linguistic reclamation. He writes in “Notes toward a Conjugated Theory of the Self”:
Inside my mouth, the colonizer’s tongue lolls like a wing-
less bird inside a cave. Hidden, sometimes—even to me,
until my mouth’s agape before a mirror—there is, too,
inside my mouth, my mother’s tongue. I’m still unlearned, but
oh I want to do unspeakable things with his tongue.
In “Lord Lugard & I (Ars Poetica),” the first poem of the “Lord Lugard & I” sequence, Falomo follows this thread and presents colonization as a learned, strategic act; the ars poetica as a re-interpretative art form, the poem that ensues simultaneously acting as both accusation and reclamation.
Count the cost. Ask questions. Are they loud,
the nouns. Do they speak back.
Consider each word as a rider must his horse.
How fit. How strong. Your adjectives,
how trustworthy are they.
The “Lord Lugard & I” section of this book acts as a lens that zeroes in on and expands its view to capture the many aspects of life under forces of cultural imperialism. The speaker in the sequence is a series of voices compressed into one, at some points more recognizably Falomo’s and other times, not. The poems we read in this voice evoke a sense of complicity in loss, whether it is of love, or of country, all the while highlighting the many ways the losses of impoverished people have marked and continue to mark them. In “Lord Lugard & I (Invoice),” Falomo uses the form of an invoice to comment on the injustice of global economics:
Who can sell a thing if there is no demand for it
what if you wake up to a large sum in your bank account = daydream
A man sells his mother for a bottle of gin
broad well-worn roads = broad well-worn roads
Who can sell anyone if there is no demand
scarce cowries = not enough cowries (see daydream)
A man sells his daughter for a gun
The imbalance of the items of purchase and the price paid is instantly evident. Like in this poem, Falomo uses a variety of innovative forms and literary devices as a framework allowing every aspect of a thing to be considered. In the poem, “Nigeria Speaks,” the country, personified, asks, “What good is archeology?” wanting, for once, not to be judged by its past, however complicit it may be in it. And with this, Falomo turns the lens on himself, casts the blame on the present; on himself. “Can I say something / about guilt…?” he asks in the voice of the country. “Do you have any / space left in your heart / for shame? […] for leaving me? […] how did it feel when you / first found out sharing my secrets / with strangers could get you […] an award, $250, / $500…? […] what price / would you put on / Decolonization?”
The exile of circumstance is a constant ghostly presence throughout this collection. In “Autobiomythography,” the speaker provides context for his birth and immigration, his helplessness in the light of the situation. The speaker says, “My mother, / she was my first home. Her mother, too, / her first. Ask me what it feels like to be / so far away from home and I will say / I did not come here of my own accord.” In “Notes Towards a Conjugated Theory of Self,” the speaker confronts one of their selves: “Namesake, imagine / for a minute all the things humans have sold to buy free- / dom.
At moments while reading this collection, it felt to me, oddly, not as a work of personal history, but as an elevated text written to guide me through my African becoming. Falomo is not afraid to implicate, even contradict himself in this complicated history of reckoning and being. And as a result, the collection is a living, breathing animal. It is bold. It bites back.
Amidst the collection’s many reckonings, though, are also poems full of hope, poems which reclaim the softness of childhood, grappling it from the jaws of a long history of toxic masculinity and violence. In “Honeysuckle,” Falomo returns to innocence:
Tell me, what boy hasn’t
tucked manhood between
his thighs and tried on his mother’s
skin? Today, I try on elegance
and do not because of this call
the body anything except mine.
What I will never be, I am—if
only this moment. I wear my tender
As with tenderness, there are poems too, in this collection, which reconcile their imperfections. In “Notes on Archeology,” whose speaker takes on the authority figure of a god or father, Falomo goes on an explorative journey on the essence of archeology and concludes:
Your mind is yours to mine,
yes but know, too, that it is an excavation site. Everything you do or can’t remember
is an artifact. Remember to forgive yourself for what you can’t—or don’t—remember.
In “Two Truths & a Lie,” Falomo writes, “My father loves me. I am my father’s / Son. I am my mother’s first son. My father is his father’s.” In “Autobiomythography (Reprise), he writes, “I am the first / son of my mother. Translation: I am my mother’s.” With this analogy, Falomo culminates his search for identity, having previously wondered, “If I never left my mother/land” and now choosing the mother who “was my first home. Her mother, too, her first.”
At its heart, this collection is a love poem ode to mother, both land and familial (though Falomo writes that they are one and the same). It is an act, a call to action, by which Falomo posits the African man in diaspora might resolve his array of fractured selves, or at least model true his principal self.
Amidst the tumultuous landscape of immigration protests and the continued African brain drain, the publication of Autobiomythography Of, offers a poignant counter-narrative that humanizes the experiences of migrants and diasporic individuals. This collection emerges alongside other recent works of Nigerian/Nigerian American poets like Ajibola Tolase’s 2000 Blacks and Nebeolisa Okwudili’s Terminal Maladies, which collectively explore the anguish of leaving behind loved ones, heritage, and history in pursuit of new horizons. Autobiomythography Of provides a unique and deeply personal exploration of the migrant experience, opening deep insights into the emotional and psychological dimensions of leaving home. With brilliant lyricism and unflinching honesty, Falomo captures the complexities of identity, belonging, and the search for home in a foreign land.
