The first full-length collection of the Nigerian poet Adedayo Agarau, The Years of Blood, is exactly about what the title suggests and a bit more. “The years teach much which the days never know,” says the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Experience.” But the particular aim behind Agarau’s collection is that the years of blood in Nigeria haven’t really taught us more than our acquired knowledge living through its punishing days; in our relative as opposed to piping time of peace, our nation is still attended by brutality: kidnappings, mass murders, and ritual killings, each of which is the fundamental concern of Agarau in The Years of Blood. (Gore is its vivifying element.) Leavened with blood, pestled bones, and wailing mothers, The Years of Blood finds a way to get this particular portion of Nigerian darkest realities, aided by political incompetence and cultural attenuation, back into the minds of our endlessly hopeful people, reminding us of some of the most devastating occurrences that have happened in our recent memory.

As it’s now customary of poetry collections, the book is headed by a poem that introduces us to the nature of the phenomenon with which Agarau is engaging in his current poetic project. Titled “Wind,” the poem is thematically comprehensive of the interwoven tentacles of the book. A poem of terrible possibility, it takes a dig at the sloshy state of Nigerian security by saying in fact that anyone is vulnerable to the terrorizing decadence that renders human lives as a mere commodity in the hands of ritualists, rapists, and kidnappers: something to be killed, dismembered for parts, traded, and used. That the wind of that terror could blow anywhere and onto anyone is Agarau’s insistent position in The Years of Blood:

It could be me whose blood is crying. A pestle pounding a skull in a mortar. It could my father who is not coming home tonight. Or sister, who is raped, her breast sliced clean, her pubic hair shaved, her body dumped in a bush near Liberty stadium. It could be my mother’s headless body we gather around in the morning.

The expressive language of the poem, as of the whole collection, is blunt as death: there are neither euphemisms nor dysphemisms therein. The former would simply be inappropriate, if not a tad de-energizing, because the true nature of the phenomenon needs to be communicated as it exactly is. The latter, on the other hand, would be impossible for the simple reason that there is no exaggeration to arrive at when the fact of the stories being told already seems like a hyperbole. Brutal and graphic, Agarau’s descriptions in the poem thus anticipate the supervening intensities across the book.

Emotionally roiling, blisslessly articulated and dourly glowering at the terrible state of things, the eerie tone of “Wind” bleeds onto the next poem and the next and the next. In “Ìbàdàn”, the very poem that follows the introductory poem, child-kidnapping and ritual killings is as ubiquitous as the air we breathe and so is the heavy sorrow that flows as their natural consequence. The language of the poem is as dark as the nature of its concern; so gory it’s capable of shocking the mind wide awake at the dead of night:

everywhere weed grows is a wild mouth eating children

there are flowers you can’t touch             outside someone’s house

at night, a mother

pounds the head of her newborn         at first, it is music      then the silence of crickets

we gather dust sand        murals wilt flowers    worn sandals iron cast Ìbàdàn over dreams

we collect the first fruits        one older women snatch from us in sacred rooms

fried in sin

my aunt’s husband sacrifices her for riches       the shade of shadows stands still in his courtyard

Although every city has its own dark secrets and unspeakable truths, hearing about or reading these devastating truths about the same Ibadan that poets like J. P. Clark-Bekederemo, Damilola Omotoyinbo and Obari Gomba have written about with a certain grace that comes with the recognition of the inherent beauty and importance of the place, is nonetheless disenchanting. It turns out no place, no matter how highly literarily sanctified, is safe from the strange dichotomies of its own dailiness. In his exquisite poem “Victoria Island, Lagos” from his debut collection of poems called 2000 Blacks, the Nigerian poet Ajibola Tolase says one has to “ignore the city’s history / to love it.” This is more than a brilliant way to put the strength it takes to live in megacities because, although the kind of history he was “literally” referring to in the case of Lagos was long gone, it is now replaced by these horrors that to move beyond the necessity of living in them to admiring them takes a somewhat mild capacity for selective amnesia. Both poets are writing against the grain of the same terrifying happenings in their home country. However, what 2000 Blacks touches tangentially in its poetic leaves, Agarau’s The Years of Blood finds words for it in the appropriately affecting level as to what the physical experience of the thing itself might entail for someone who live through it to tell or merely hear about it. Except there are more people who live it but not lucky enough to tell.

And talking about megacities and the cruelties they accommodate, there is no poem more pointed about that than “Bámiṣé”. If Ibadan is an hot zone of kidnapping and killing sprees, the poem says Lagos is its bolder sibling. The poem is about a young woman, Bamise Toyosi Ayanwale, who, on February 26, 2022 boarded a BRT and minutes into her journey to Lekki made a video about her fear of being kidnapped and shared it to her friend. She was later kidnapped, killed, and her body was found beside the road nine days later. In “Bámiṣé,” Agarau essentially recounts the horror of her experience while connecting the summarised specific of her death to the general, overarching decay of our nation’s apparent disregard for the sanctity of human lives:

the hands salting the sea bring brass into the night—

the fervor of light we must carry to be found wanting,

the pound of flesh, the latitude of need

‍

whose hands are these that house these yearnings

who spits against the wall, what song must the body mime

to survive the threnodies of ritual?

‍

tonight an uncouth dog is barking in the dark;

half of her tongue dips in fear her body palpitating

in a bus where there is shadow, a plenitude of empty seats

‍

one woman & two other men. what we do not know

is what labyrinths we must map to walk through bones;

to wake in a city grappling with the skulls of children snatched from

‍

their mother’s backs.

Confronting the perpetrators and ritualistic nature of the violence, the poem follows Bámis̩é from the moment of her terror inside the bus to the inevitable, visceral aftermath. Agarau’s expressive language escalates the horror, suggesting an archaic, sacrificial motive in the subsequent stanzas:

her body is learning to singe with blade; it is slowly charring

as she is made to sit over a pot of her blood.

‍

a breath exits the gates of her body

before the body tears through the wooden doors

where retributions are seized with a grapnel.

​This gruesome description is then immediately juxtaposed with a chilling, clinical observation of the final desecration: “in the soft light of dawn, there is a man pouring / incantations over her lifeless body; / another slicing her breasts into a bowl.” The poem concludes by transforming Bámis̩é’s singular, documented tragedy into a testament to the nation’s enduring, collective grief, asking: “what prayers she must have screamed, / what inches of nails in the palm of her god; / we heard the scream, but the aftermath of her silence…” The poem is a perfect microcosm of Agarau’s poetic project: taking a well-known national horror and rendering it with the immediate, stomach-turning detail necessary to force emotional engagement.

​This consistent and uncompromising commitment to depicting the absolute worst of Nigerian violence is, however, where the greatest poetic challenge, and ultimately the book’s central limitation, manifests themselves rather lucidly. While the sheer intensity and emotional force of poems like “Wind,” “Ìbàdàn,” and “Bámiṣé” successfully achieve Agarau’s goal of shocking the reader back into awareness, the relentless parade of similar atrocities begins to flatten the collection’s overall impact. The poems are individual, devastating case files, yet the unifying gore that is its vivifying element, though effective initially, becomes a formal constraint, especially in poems like “Boys who never die,” “Doomsday,” and even “Sonnet with Blood Everywhere.” The Years of Blood often struggles to find varied poetic techniques that move beyond the purely descriptive and graphic which results in a kind of aesthetic exhaustion where one horror-filled account echoes the next without offering new modes of understanding or feeling. The book’s power, paradoxically, lies in its refusal to look away, but this refusal also curtails its capacity for sustained formal innovation and tonal complexity, which might have allowed the deep-seated terror to resonate more subtly and enduringly.

The poem that makes the limitation more glaring to notice later in the book come early and is called “Empty” because of how different and fresh its emotional registration and, by consequence, its aesthetic feel are to Agarau’s analyses of gore. The speaker of the poems often speaks as though present when the victims of these horrors are going through the thick of it, which signifies, if nothing else, Agarau’s imaginativeness or inventiveness. However, in “Empty,” the speaker is outside of the frame of the kidnapping and killing of his young friend, so the poem is relieved of the need to be graphic and admits the simple or not so simple task of describing how he and the parent of the victim feel during the boy’s funereal procession in which they bury an empty grave:

We begin gently,

go into the day like a prayer.

Hands stretching to collect

also to take. Our friend 

leaves school & does not reach home.

We search the street, & field, empty.

We do not find his body.

Months later, they dug him a grave

at the Òkè Bọ́là Cemetery.

His brother, Jay Jay, wears a suit

& his mother’s face shrinks in gloom.

My friends & I stare into the silence

filling his coffin, the farewell that follow.

The fire in his daddy’s eyes

meets the pastor’s prayers

dropping into empty open palms.

The moon leans upon the small stream

the night we cover his grave.

The poem is sad still and resonant not because Agarau appeals to our sense of sympathy as he does in buzzier and wordier poems like “Migration” and “Doomsday”, but because, in his rendition of this youthful and traumatic experience, he’s confident enough to write the poem in a way that trusts the reader to see and hear what the poet chooses not to hammer on our psyche. Other poems like this that are closest to offering something different from the overmastering project of the book are “Prelude, Christmas” and “Ileya.” Both poems follow each other in the last section of the book. It would have been great to end The Years of Blood on a more positive note, but life, in the world of the collection, is not so easily partitioned. These two poems serve as beautiful, if fleeting, diversions into the ordinary, lived reality of Nigerian life, where rituals of joy and memory exist alongside the threat of violence.

​In “Prelude, Christmas,” the focus is entirely on domesticity and preparation: women weaving their hair, talking about their husbands, and celebrating their minor successes like Funlola, who has “brought chickens home. Two of them.” The scene is scrubbed clean of the book’s ubiquitous bloodstains: “No bloodstains are on the walls lined close to the river, and no child is missing.” It is a conscious, momentary wish for peace, a beautiful, almost deceptive calm. This brief pastoral is immediately followed by “Ileya,” which similarly immerses us in the comforting rhythm of family and tradition. The poem is a sensory rush of old music, the smell of smoke, a family trip to an ancestral grave, and the anticipation of a simple pleasure: “Today, we will arrive at Oke-Agbo safely, and I will run to the arena to watch goats fight.” The final line, “They will come to look for me and find me. I will not be missing,” is the speaker’s profound declaration of safety and belonging, a defiant counter-prayer against the terror of disappearance that defines the collection. These poems succeed because they replace the graphic intensity of the earlier poems with domestic intimacy. They show us what is being threatened, as well as what is being lost. They feel like a deeply needed breath after being held underwater for a very long time.

​But even this breath is temporary and ultimately bittersweet. It provides an affecting counter-texture to the book because it demonstrates Agarau’s capacity for complexity and nuance when he chooses to step back from the direct reportage of gore. These moments of grace, however, are not allowed to define the conclusion. The final section, after these lyrical interludes, returns with a shuddering finality in poems like “Waiting for Her Son” and “These days of vanishing” to the collection’s central, unyielding thesis. Those poems are also about the gore. Their inclusion in the concluding parts of the book says something definitive about us as a nation and people, something horrific and terrible: that our moments of feeling safe, secure, and even happy are not sustainable. It’s sad, and Agarau sees to it in this debut that we see and feel that.

‍