Jumoke Verissimo, Circumtrauma: Poems

 

after war
a mother and her family of four
            arrive in an airport taxi: a body of feudal songs

broken people              in dirty wrappers
            a fluent suffering body

we are of same material
our               body also collects feudal songs
before and after war     our body collects feudal songs

  

we know no sleep        we collect only fear. (“1001-a / 1001”)

From award-winning Toronto-based Nigerian poet, novelist, children’s writer and critic Jumoke Verissimo, following the poetry titles I Am Memory (Lagos, Nigeria: DADA Books, 2008) and The Birth of Illusion (Nigeria: FULLPOINT, 2015), as well as the novel A Small Silence (London UK: Cassava Republic, 2019), comes her first full-length Canadian title, Circumtrauma: Poems (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2025), a book-length poem that captures and articulates the details and ripples of the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967-1970). Histories such as these have rippling effects throughout a population across years, and history forgotten, after all, dooms to repeat. As Verissimo writes as part of her preface to the collection: “I began researching the Nigeria-Biafra War (also known as the Nigerian Civil War) because I wanted answers on why the conflict has stayed on the bodies of even the unborn. How does one capture the unacknowledged edged pain that resonates across generations and may even inform the lens from which social relations are formed?”

There are structural echoes of Verissimo’s accumulated lyric articulating witness comparable to Kingston, Ontario-based poet and critic Otoniya J. Okot Bitek’s full-length debut 100 Days (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2016) [see my review of such here], a collection of one hundred poems through one hundred days of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, or even, to a lesser degree, the full-length poetry collection articulations of history and the ripples of trauma through working archival materials of further recent titles such as Montreal poet, editor and translator Darby Minott Bradford’s full-length debut, Dream of No One but Myself (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2021) [see my review of such here] or Vancouver poet and editor Andrea Actis’ full-length poetry debut, Grey All Over (Brick Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Through Verissimo, her lyrics hold together precisely because of the way she pulls them apart, focusing on individual moments, elements and parts of speech, collecting together to form a far wider and complex tapestry. The length and breadth are entirely held though such deep attention and precision. “a rickety train pulled up / heads disappeared,” she writes, early on in the collection, “our brothers left home / for a godforsaken place / our brothers returned / with a gunshot in the head [.]”

Held with a short preface and hefty afterword, “METHOD NOTE, OR CIRCLING / THE WOUNDED,” the body of the collection Circumtrauma is structured as an assemblage of poem-fragments, an accumulation of short, layered poems titled via a numerical system, akin to government records that acknowledge a great and dark archival depth. Thoroughly and heavily researched, with an afterword that expands upon details within her poems, as well as a bibliography of primary texts and works consulted, Verissimo centres her storytelling across language, offering what is exactly necessary, with all that might be extraneous stripped away. As the poem “00010101-a” includes: “silence thickened our saliva / we cannot defend our children / when trouble come // uncertainty is a bomb / we do not want to die like chickens.” Or, as the opening section, “A TWEET, A TIKTOK, AND A LINGERING WAR,” of her afterword begins:

The passing of Queen Elizabeth II sparked widespread commentary, but it was a controversial tweet by a Nigerian American professor, accusing the queen of complicity in the genocide against the Igbo people during the Nigerian Civil War, that particularly caught my attention, sharply highlighting the enduring impact of that conflict. For many like me who did not witness the war, the stories from elders, fiction, and history books were how we learnt about the war. As of today, the war is no longer taught in schools, due to the exclusion of history lessons. In fact, generations younger than mine only came to actively know about the war following novels like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.

There’s a lot to admire about literary work that attempts to deliberately uncover and examine such brutal history, especially for those stories buried, overlooked or simply forgotten (I was first made aware of Ottawa’s “Mad Bomber of Parliament” in 1966, for example, somewhere in the 1990s, thanks to a poem by Judith Fitzgerald, from her 1977 Coach House Press poetry title lacerating heartwood). The stories might fade, but the body remembers, even across generations. Facts and stories matter, and to lose the stories of such brutality is to render an entirely different violence. “we were all brothers / massacred / albeit      on a very small scale,” Verissimo writes, as part of “10111110-b,”  “we are all memory’s children / superior in our pain [.]” Circumtrauma swirls a lyric notation of accumulated moments, offering archival moments across and through a devastation that continues, rippling across generations. Or, as she writes early on in the collection: “our body is a people:           before and after [.]”