The least one could say about Roseline Mgbodichima’s A Body in Spice is that it’s charged, body-electric, daring, salty-confident, and that its affective resonance is uppercased by a certain frankness that comes about as a result of deep feeling that’s gone through a thorough self-analysis. But the most anyone could say starts from fascinating without an easy, clean end in sight. Not least because the poetry itself is not easy and its difficulty, especially in the earlier poems, the good and profitable kind. Throughout the book, she makes me pause in astonishment, and I have come to conclude that a poet who makes one pause here and there out of wonderment through a recognisable depth, among other proven competencies, is a poet worth fawning about everywhere.

Mgbodichima has twenty-one poems included in this collection, which is more than any other poet has included in theirs in the Kumi Na Moja box set. And, in the first of the bunch called “A Ghazal in Yeses,” she takes the notion that the true sense of a literary artefact is completed by its audience to the blatantly apparent and extreme. The poem is in twelve matlas (couplets), and the second misra (line) of each matla is ended with an adjective with “less” suffixes followed by an affirmative or a positive “{yes}” that the reader, in his or her own experience reading the poem or looking back at remembered memories, must now fill. The first three matlas reads:

The cost of living is a ruthless {yes}
Death proposes heaven to me, I accept—a clueless {yes}

In a nightmare, cinnamon tries to asphyxiate me & fails
I wake up with a nosebleed, Alive? I yell a breathless {yes}

Once, in a magical crowd, I saw a vision the depth of a root,
I spew out dreams, the universe lets out a careless {yes}

This is one of the instances of aesthetic or expressive category out of which her difficulty springs. But to have a full experience of the poem, one has to participate by inserting one’s own words and, by so participating, one destroys the formal perfection of the template poem because what had to be filled in, being our honest experience, are disparate and not as finely sourced by circumstance as a poem by its most serious craftsman. However, the matla I love the most and feel any other reader will be moved to brood a bit upon is the fifth one, which gets mathematical—which is to imply precise—if a tad opinionated, about the fact of living: “{Y = mx + b} where m is my body, x is death, & b is god / Solving for y in this wild world is pointless {yes?}” “Y,” it’s immediately obvious to me, is death and trying to solve it or understand such fundamental simplicity is “pointless {work}.” That is what I feel, which is what Mgbodichima is structurally encouraging through the open-source structure of the poem. Bryan Johnson, however, might have a different take.

Other matlas that come close to that above in ingenuity are the last three in the poem:

Come humid, come dust, bad soul makes bad weather
There is more to salvation than a godless {yes}

Can two walk together unless they agree?
The answer is a mindless {yes}

My body, a case; I & a rose robin are dimorphic
Furnish me an immortal form—I’ll bellow a deathless {yes}

A poet’s primary job of work is to be serious to the point of enviable articulation. The first matla is heavy with linguistic tact and tumescent with a thematic one. “Come hell or high water” is rejuvenated and throws at us a compressed lesson in Virtue Ethics. In these three matlas, I’m inclined to take the adjectives and their noun templates literally because they make for a more interesting reading. Of course, there is more to salvation than saying one believes in a godhead; one has to believe in action, too, rather than simply nodding “yes.” Also, as humans, we can coexist in disagreement, but the catch is not minding our having them. The last one is interesting because of the defining characteristics of a ghazal is the poet’s literal self-pronouncement in the last matla of the poem. Here, Mgbodichima goes the figurative way by way of pun in which “rose robin” is a play on her name Roseline, but here referring back to her “body,” which she tells us is “a case,” differentiating it from her, which is presented as “I.” But even as much as her body is not her being or true self or the lens for her to be viewed from, she wouldn’t mind shouting “a deathless {yes}” to “an immortal form.” Aesthetics, Mgbodichima too believes as I and Toni Morrison do, is an absolute necessity. And aesthetics is shown and appreciated first through appearance.

In A Body in Spice, subjects are combined that have no business of being said even in the same sentence. However, through her canny turn of phrases, she makes them clap and dance and twerk. In “Repenting,” which is at its end considered a prayer (strange), she talks about garlic and onion, men crying, a girl with romantic contradictions, flowers wilting, and godliness. What’s their connective tissue? I cannot tell you because there’s a particular waywardness to the poem that I find frustrating, but coming across lines such as “There is a street where the righteous lick their fingers, sweet as sin” is worth the time spent reading the poem. The simile is precise and brings home the criticizing sense of “the righteous lick[ing] their fingers,” which is ironic in the first instance, to be appreciated. Mgbodichima is also full of opinions expressed in and compressed to its most flexible state. The penultimate sentence in the prose poem reads: “Sometimes heaven is not a dwelling place, it is only an aroma, like shallot / like onions / like garlic.” Even those who believe in heaven, I take the lines to be saying in essence, sometimes doubt its existence and permanence in the literal sense. They feel it in their minds and heads as temporarily as one feels the scent of shallot, onions, and garlic in one’s nostrils.

Filled with steamy sex and contemporary body aesthetics cum politics, A Body in Spice is loud about its frustration with body shaming and frank about the speaker’s desire for intense lovemaking. Being heavy set, Mgbodichima puts her experience of living in that body in poems like “I Am Wanted Everywhere,” where the poet takes the effects of blatant body shaming to its necessary extreme, calling it “attempted murder” because it is coming at her, literally day in day out, from someone so close to her as to spend their mornings out and nights together being one in pleasure:

Or don’t you remember?
The mockery on that November morning,
how my tight dress became a circus
as you danced around me in blasphemies
saying there is no room for a belly as big as mine in a dress
as colorful as that.
Sometimes shaming is as potent as a bullet
& one shot is all it takes.

Do you know death has a fashion sense?
It is a garment of morphed wishes,
the one that wears itself on me when my lover says
we cannot make love with candles
because my body is not shaped like an hourglass.

But despite this incessant abuse on her being, she doesn’t see herself in that insensibly reductive light. So, in “Sauce Preserving,” she boasts of her body, describing, if indirectly to people given to body shaming because of the accident of their birth and genetics to be so lean and taut, an experience that they cannot possibly imagine, the advantage to being heavy they are too set in their parochial, white-and-blank thinking to see or even consider:

In this body, there is also joy. A mirror cracks at my reflection & my beauty grows in parts. On some mornings I am beautiful in bits. My broken face is a listing for light.

My crooked smile is sunshine persevering. In this body, there is also joy. My love handles hold water after each bath. When there is a famine my rolls may save me from drought.

And she seems to have much saucier appetites because her thirst for intense lovemaking is only matched by the galvanising force of the language of its description in her poems. So, in “Lord of Salt,” she prays to God to make of her body an instrument of desire, seductive, yes, but against the hypocritical men whose desire is incited at the sight of the same body they’re prone to shaming:

So use me still,
use me tasteless.
Let me cause ruckus in earthly
places. Use this saltless
body for temptation.
It is tasteless after all.
Christen this body
a burning city
that men may behold it &
become pillars of salt.

The prayer continues in “Spice,” but now for her own good and pleasure:

May we be tasty, may we be soft.

[…]

My womanhood, sweet like cinnamon
has frequent use for you.
Gloomy mornings expect your vengeful stroke.
In a wet dream, my hair is strung in a bun
& my thirsty essence has no clue
if your tasteful hands will this neck choke.

Throughout this collection, Mgbodichima is nothing if not herself, human, plus a poet who knows what she’s doing. Whatever her frustration about the world concerning how the world sees women with her type of body, she shows us in the course of the poems that, How much more human does anyone have to be than this? If the least we can say about A Body in Spice is that it’s honest, I think the most we can also say start from the fact that such honesty, combined with her serious craftsmanship, is magnificent and goes on almost without an end.

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