Drifting Cords review: Damilola Olaniyi Navigates Pleasure, Place, Memory, and Loneliness

Every human wanders through different phases in life. Sometimes we drift towards something; other times, something drifts towards us. Whether it is the former or the latter, what remains important to this effect is memory—how it absorbs the situations and conditions that reflect human experiences. Memory holds and releases, and what better way in art form to express these experiences than poetry? Damilola Olaniyi takes poetry by the neck, as a wheel or tool, to let us into her little world of memory, especially as a creative in the diaspora.

When it comes to memory, Damilola’s poetry seems to operate on different wavelengths. In her debut chapbook, Drifting Cords, there is a unique temporal organisation that accompanies the poems therein, with their rhythmic patterns and structural regularities, which I believe is the key to the collection’s memorability.

The most intriguing aspect of poetry is its ability to balance meaning and form. Like music, poetry often employs rhythm, meter, and other sound devices to create a musical quality. Yet, like prose, it conveys meaning through words and language. This blend of characteristics makes poetry an ideal subject for exploring memory. The presence of alliteration in the opening poem, “This Death Called Life, and Vice Versa,” is evidence of how poetry uses sound to make the theme being explored stick to one’s memory, or to let the memory shared by the poet resonate with her audience. Damilola says, Dawn is for dew, dawn is delicate. The poet transports us back to the lived experiences of what a typical early morning looks like—the pleasure of letting grasses soaked in dew caress our skins, and the sheer joy that accompanies this experience is immeasurable. However, this extreme feeling can last only a couple of minutes—a short-lived experience, but an enjoyable one nonetheless. These days, Damilola makes us understand through her first poem in this collection how delicate pleasure is; sometimes, only memory remains to let us into some moments that have become rare or can no longer be in our faces—maybe due to adulthood struggles, a new environment, or other possible circumstances.

In another understanding, this opening line can be considered metaphorical, reflecting the way our world works. As humans, we are sometimes so occupied with life that we do not enjoy the pleasurable moments that offer themselves to us, so the poet is saying that moments like this are quite fragile and must be lived, so we can have enough memory to revel in. This understanding of memory also extends to Damilola’s second poem, “Heart of Sand”, where she says: 

& I WONDER: will I be engraved in sand or a wall of hearts… what is a life without an impact? 

The lived pleasurable moments, Damilola is saying, are as important to a person as the people around them.

Rhetorical questions are literary psychological tricks to size both the writer’s and the reader’s psyche—this often opens a lot of memories, and probably the comprehension of some situations that resonate. The poet uses this device to hammer on escapism as a creative writer. I see myself in “Cords of Feelings”, the third poem in this collection, where she pushes her loneliness cum depressed feelings into my face as an audience with similar interests to the poet. Although the triggered experiences that bring about the poet’s current feeling are not explicit, it can be deduced through other poems in this collection that there are many lived experiences the writer longs to hold again, especially a writer now settled in the diaspora. With the current feeling of discord, what does she do? Damilola makes her room a vehicle of escapism with writing as an important drive:

such lonely prison I find myself; 
dour-faced beauties alone for escape. 
what recovery haven’t i sought? 
What more can I write, 
except to stagger on paper? 
What more can I write, 
if not that I’m down in spirit.

In this collection, Damilola recalls the memories of home in Nigeria, and Lagos (Oshodi) is brought into the picture. Its political landscape of materialism is well spelt out in “Two Sides of a Coin”. The poet lets us into the worlds of the elites who continue to amass wealth and materials, while the masses keep up with struggles to make ends meet, trying to survive in an environment that barely rewards their hustle:

WE CALL tails sour faces with broken countenances: 
hungered and starved 
sudden and painful… 
black oil and dry skin water 
and black skies 
phone calls and job hunting 
Yaba clothes and Oshodi bags

Speaking of the masses hanging on survival through their daily hustle-bustle, this easily extends to another poem in the collection titled “Oshodi”, a place poetry, and as an advocate of place poetry, I have a little bias with this poem. It resonates greatly with me. I believe there is no form of poetry that offers you a balanced mental picture like place poetry; it is most of the time genuine and not forced. Damilola explores the struggles of the lower-class people eaten up by capitalism on Oshodi Street, in Lagos. A poetry of place is that form of poetry which values locales, and which sees and lets readers experience what makes a place unique among other places—this is Ramazani’s position, which is in tandem with what Damilola sets to achieve with Oshodi and its people, even though she is writing as a personae who has obviously missed the scenes in Oshodi unfold in her very eyes:

paradise of mud & grime 
dirt & rubbish 
buses & people like the arteries 
of its pounding heart that says— 
I wake up in the morning and run 
like rats & roaches 
cavorting for space 
the noise, the muezzins, the early bathing melodies 
of hawkers & conductors, where no one owns the floor 
submerged by the race of survival.

“Once Again” opens with an intense longing of a lover, even though the love seems severed due to the lovers being miles apart. There is a sickness that grows with a barrier, Damilola is saying, and such sickness has the ability to end a potential love life—lacklustre communication grows as a tool of separation. Once again, Damilola is standing on the memory of a severed love, sponsored by migration: seeking greener pastures or a better education system. This reminds me of Obinze and Ifemelu in Chimamanda’s Americanah:

I’m truly disturbed, disconcerted
…that communication 
has been severed 
ONCE again 
I seek your voice 
Once again 
I hum our melody 
Once again 
I cherish thoughts of you 
Once again 
I wear our love 
like a cloak 
Once again 
I pat our frame 
Once again 
In that time frame 
Of tomorrow 
Ah . . . if only you were near…

Damilola successfully adds to the poetics of memory with this collection of brevity, which explores personal conflicts of pleasure and displeasing moments; memory of home with discordance between materialism and destituteness; and also the craving of love and loneliness that come with migration cum settlement.