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Any time I encounter form in poetry, all I see is a blueprint for survival, one that guarantees that the weight of a subject does not collapse the structure meant to hold it. I see form in the way we are held together by the very limits that define us and to be held together would not imply to be restricted, but to be given a shape that can withstand the pressure of existence. It is in this same vein that I always tell my friends that poetry saved me (in many ways), but what I forget to add most of the time is that poetry also holds the world together. I have been thinking about that holding together a lot recently, specifically in relation to my third poetry collection, Circumtrauma, and my use of the Ifá Divination and cut-up technique as the book’s primary form.
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In ancient texts: the Quran, the Upanishads, and the Bible, for instance; there is a recurring preoccupation with the “boundary” (specifically, Surah Ar-Rahman 55:19–20, Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 3.8.9, and Proverbs 8:29). When you strip away their theological intent, you are left with a masterclass in formal logic. One text describes two seas meeting side-by-side held apart by a barrier so that “neither of them transgresses,” and another speaks of a “mighty rule” that holds the sun and moon in their “positions” and directs the flow of rivers. A third describes the marking out of “foundations” and the setting of a “boundary so the waters would not overstep.” In these texts, what I see as a poet are definitions of form: the limit that allows the infinite to become visible. These texts offer a material resource that state that without the boundary, there is only the flood.
The descriptions of natural limits in these texts illustrate the necessity of taxis (placement and organization); the act of centering content so it is positioned to be meaningful. This is mirrored in the “marking out of foundations,” which is the process of establishing the rules and limits that define a boundary; I view this not as restrictions, but as constraints and contours, the generative rules that act as a creative stimulant, ensuring the work does not dissipate into a flood, but remains a concentrated resource.
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If form is resource, then it means it takes a stance on how a story can, or should, be told. In essence, form is survival, and this is precisely what I was thinking about when I began writing Circumtrauma years into a PhD program researching the Nigeria-Biafra War. But, in many ways, the Nigeria-Biafra war remains a fracture in the psyche of a nation with over 250 ethnic groups, so it demands a special kind of listening. During my research, I was overwhelmed with a body of material that felt both infinite and unmanageable and I knew I needed a resource, a form rigid enough to partition the chaos of silence for me and the readers.
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Circumtrauma is my third poetry collection. But something I learnt about being a poet who is always exploring and experimenting with form, is to discover that it is not only the poem that is being beat out of shape. The poet is also being reinvented by these encounters on the page. In all my years of writing, I have viewed every collection as a manifesto of its own becoming. So, I knew for a fact that I could not articulate a non-Western trauma through a Western form or, as the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite observed: “the hurricane does not roar in pentameter.” His point, which is also my point, is that only an indigenous logic can map a non-Western traumatic event. I also knew that I needed to capture the fragmentary nature of the stories on the War. With this as my guide, I sought a structure that would decentre my own ego, one that recognized that this was not my immediate experience, and function instead as a polyvocal mediation. I did not want to employ a poem that resulted in closure when the subject matter remained open. After all, the history I was writing about oscillates between silence and upheaval.
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While writing this I encountered Guy Rotella’s essay on the letters between poets William Bronk and Samuel French. Rotella begins with Bronk’s striking claim: “Poetry is what we don’t read.” These words resonate, because, one of the struggles of writing Circumtrauma was finding a form that captured the gaps, the silences, and the “unread” experiences of those who lived through the war and how their transmitted stories carry the negative emotions that determine social relations. Now, how does one articulate a trauma still unfolding, or find a language for pain that resists verbalization?
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The Ifá divination system is a framework engineered for inquiry that preserves a necessary open-endedness. It provides a structure that employs recognizable language while holding a depth we can never truly exhaust. Ifá is a primary repository of ancient wisdom and history across West Africa and its diaspora. It maps the human experience through sixteen principal signs (Odu), applying a binary logic of “open” or “closed” marks to navigate complexity.
Typically, this mechanism is physically enacted through the Opele (divination chain) featuring eight seeds (four on each side). The practitioner casts the chain to determine a four-mark signature, a geometric limit that provides the “root” for an infinite variety of human circumstances. While the system can generate 256 permutations (16 X 16), the power lies in its recursive nature: the way a single signature reflects and expands.
For Circumtrauma, I adopted the mathematical infinity of the Ifá corpus as an aesthetic framework, organizing the collection into a fractal structure that mirrors the act of divination. The book is divided into four primary movements, each governed by a foundational binary signature: Ogbe20, Oyeku (IIII), Iwori (I000) and Odi (0110). Within each movement, I generated sixteen mirrored (or nearly mirrored) poems, a direct nod to the Oju Odù, where the diviner marks two parallel columns (the right and left) on the divination tray. In the Ifá tradition, this mirroring signifies a totality of experience; in the context of Circumtrauma, it enacts a ritual of balancing unheard stories.
The 64 poems (4 X 16) function as a structural matrix for the “cut-up” fragments of four novels on the Nigeria-Biafra War that function as the emotional maps, and source texts to provide four distinct “voices,” on the varied experiences of the war, ranging from the perceptions of the gendered survivor, the observer, the perpetrator and the post-generation (inherited memory). Picking four cut-ups at a time, I anchor these fragments to specific binary signatures, and this ensured they were not merely scattered but “divined” into to query the silence supressed in shared stories. This arrangement does what collage artist Mary Frances describes: it yields “alternative stories and asks new questions.”
But, it is important to say that, I was not “divining” to predict a future but rather designing—to borrow Charles Olson’s term—“a projectile,” and, to paraphrase him, I was aiming for a poem that is an energy that moves from the poet, through the causation of the binary form, all the way over to the reader.
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The result of this experiment is what I describe as a vocalege: a method of listening to the unspoken by interpreting patterns. It is also a nod to the oral tradition that informs how I met poetry. It is an arrangement that functions as a ritualized grid and allows the voices of the war to collide within an indigenous logic where word placement is determined by the “divined” rather than the authorial ego.
While gathering these fragments was arbitrary, their alignment with the Ifá structure transforms them into emotional maps. I, as the poet, was as surprised by the “truth” that emerged—how the poems navigate the “untold” and the unresolved, creating space for voices that traditional historical prose often flattens. In these poems, the violence buried in the collective consciousness unfolds as a polyphonic resonance of shared pain.
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Could this Circumtrauma have been written any other way? I do not know, but as M. NourbeSe Philip writes in Zong!: “I want poetry to disassemble the ordered, to create disorder and mayhem so as to release the story that cannot be told, but which, through not-telling, will tell itself.”
My application of Ifá structure as a form meant that I embraced the reality of an ongoing narration where tension generates new stories through coincidence. One thing I aimed for in Circumtrauma was not to impose the meaning, but for the form to shift the focus so the event becomes something that happens to the reader-observer rather than something the reader-observer does. It also allows the poetry to happen through the framework, and ensure the poem remains an open frequency rather than a closed record. The structure of the Ifá corpus, synthesized with the cut-up technique, captures the quantum mechanics of trauma. This framework allows me to enact the ways collective memory is encoded into the very stories we carry, to reveal a bridge necessary for the wound I hope to make visible, a structure to make survive the voices that the silence would otherwise consume.
