Original Psalms is remarkable for the punchy brevity of its episodes, which goes directly to the heart of their subject matters without dalliance. These poems position Abiodun as a poet of passion and personal philosophy, heavily influenced by his upbringing.
By Chimezie Chika
Since the turn of this decade, spoken word poet, Toby Abiodun, has built a reputation for his consummate lyrical poems on topics as wide-ranging as politics, sensuality, and youth angst. His craft—which evidences calm, measured enunciations of words accompanied by background music—is part of a contemporary canon of spoken word poetry in Nigeria spear-headed by the likes of Dike Chukwumerije, Efe Paul Azino, Titilope Sonuga, Graciano, and more recently Faith Moyosore Agboola, Christtie Jay, and others.
This tradition, as a keen observer would find, is concretised by the poets’ highly political temperaments—a reflection of the poets’ direct and indirect confrontation with the Nigerian condition. Abiodun’s poetry, as a matter of course, possesses this peculiar accessory.
Abiodun’s poetry album (he calls it “series”), Original Psalms, contains twelve episodes of single spoken word poems, varied in length, and covering a range of topics. The title of the series references its musical influences as a conflation of oral poetry and music (the spoken word genre lays claims to both music and poetry via its structure) and Abiodun, as he performs these poems, strikes one as embodying the emotions and feelings which his subjects exude.
The biblical allusions of the title also overarches Toby Abiodun’s ultimate purpose here, as it were, which is to form or to find the appropriate musical form that mirrors the poet’s own experience of Nigeria.
Accompanied by a mellow, melancholy soundtrack, Originals Psalms is thus a curious inversion of the idea of worship; it elides worship for interrogation; thus in its individual episodes we find rhetorical questions or hints of it. The overarching rhetoric of the series thus seems to be: if the biblical Book of Psalms majorly praise-sings Christianity by forming its own unique hymnology, could the poet himself devise a similar representative hymn for his own experience?
In that sense, Original Psalms is more a continuous journey of discovery than a poetry series whose subject and intent are finite and already long determined. Here the poet leaves everything open for us.
The first episode, “Love Notes”, is an illustration of this. Here, as the title suggests, the poet riffs on love from the first line: “I must confess that I have been trying to/ write you into a perfect song.” Again, as I have previously hinted, what we see here is the poet’s desire to fashion the right psalm—or song, if you will—with which to express his experience of love. “Maybe because what I feel for you isn’t plain-sheet music/It is complex like a violin.”
The innate musical references and images carry the poem rhythmically, as Abiodun continues to express the language and manner in which he hopes to recreate the love he is reliving in the lines. It is like a manifesto of what the entire series will be about (“I promise to write about your eyes and nose/I promise to write about your highs and lows”).
And as the poet heaps images of upon images—a curious admixture of the anatomical, the sensual, the biblical by turns (see also the poem “Touch” in Episode 6)—we are drawn unwittingly into a kind of hypnosis in which we do not so much hear the words as the rhythms they make.
The second episode, “Let it Be Death”, while moving slightly away from the romantic eroticism of the first episode, considerably heightens in lyricism. One notices at first, through its length, the passion of Abiodun’s delivery. This is a poem of androcentric existential angst. “Something could kill a man,” he recites at the beginning in a variant of the Pidgin English proverb, “and that something could also be a man.”
This stressed parallelism, offering a paradox of man’s existence, dominates the poem’s length. In the poet’s understanding, a man’s major woes are his pride, mentality, loneliness, empty stomach—in short, his moral ferment. As his philosophising thickens, his lyricism rises with it. The poem becomes an affirmation of his belief that only death is worth a man’s final liquidation, hence the poem’s refrain “let it be death”: (“on the road where you discover yourself, let it be death”, and so on).
The poet’s existential angst takes a different, more obvious dimension in Episode 3, “Fuck You”, which speaks directly to his torment as a man trying to understand the legacy of Nigeria’s political history: oppressive governments and systems (“Fuck your systems and its atrophy” “Fuck the Nigerian dream, if it exists”).
By its nature, the poem is less rhythmic than the rest of the poems in series, but its proletarian dimensions seems to reject that aesthetic. Instead, it follows its revolutionary project through its vulgar refrain: “fuck you.”
In the poet’s litany of fucks, there is an exerting insistence on accountability from everything around him, even himself. “Fuck me”, he says, “for writing with this much rage”. (An explanation of sorts for that ‘rage’ is given in the poem “Loud Only Before A Mic”, where he delivers the following lines: “I know it wasn’t from the fire, it was from the heat.”).
A similar poem occurs in Episode 7, “Resilience in Blood and Flesh”, which affirms his centrality in his own story, and his ability to make or mar his own legend amidst the troubles of existence.
All these mean that Toby Abiodun places himself at the crucial crossroads of the country’s becoming, so that the two seem to become one in the poet’s language by a peculiar alchemy of images. His angst can be seen from the vantage point of his relationship to the country. His passionate declarations of love for his beloved evinces that same emotion for his country.
Thus, we find a love-hate paradox prevailing in Original Psalms. The music, the ultimate hymn that the poet is seeking, is a thoroughly personal one—a way to deal with the problems he encounters and his determination to live fully.
But it’s clear by the end that the poet does not find a concrete solution to the appropriate music he seeks. At one point in Episode 11, “Moving”, he seems to have come to an understanding: “We have spent all our lives on open secrets/and now we are moving away to learn how to bury them.”
That understanding takes a more expansive form in Episode 9, “When I Say I Am Learning To Love Myself”, in which the poet briefly journeys through the circular route by which he had come to self-understanding. Self-understanding here is not an epiphany of any sort; it is instead a resignation that life is untamable–especially life in Nigeria—and one has to take it slowly.
The poem “R Factor” in Episode 5 says something about that sense of resignation to what might essentially be the associative problems of living. Here, the poet ruminates on this using the story of a visit to a dentist. Surrendering to the dentist—“heads thrown back on the dentist’s chair”—is likened to the necessary surrender that every man must make in the end.
There is also the religious sense: the idea of letting a higher power take the wheel. It is not entirely clear what the poet is aiming to achieve here, but the poem’s parabolic structure touches the philosophical center of the entire series: self-understanding.
In Original Psalms, Toby Abiodun is particularly persuasive when he conflates love, self-improvement, and an understanding of his place in the world. He seems most interested, not in the colloquial allusions he makes, but in the innate spiritual journey one undertakes, wittingly and unwittingly, as a Nigerian and African.
In poems such as “Chasing Perfection” and “Hieroglyphs”, he comes close to finding original hymns that give life to his art; that is, the perfect expression for his creativity as it were. This is not to say that these poems are perfect; a number are indeed flawed in their potlucking of clichés; but the poet is in his elements when he interrogates himself (and thus society).
By asking questions of himself, he fashions the sensual, the sacred, and the marginally historical into the ongoing music that seeks the right note and lyric to express the truth and self-knowledge.
Original Psalms is remarkable for the punchy brevity of its episodes, which goes directly to the heart of their subject matters without dalliance. These poems position Abiodun as a poet of passion and personal philosophy, heavily influenced by his upbringing.
Having built a performance reputation for the use of Nigerian Pidgin English—the command of which came from growing up in one of Nigeria’s perennial pidgin cities, Benin City—Toby Abiodun’s performance here leaves pidgin behind for a kind of fluid introspection absent in his previous spoken word engagements.
Suffice it to say then that with Original Psalms, the poet is entering a new stage in his lyrical journey.
Chimezie Chika’s short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Weganda Review, The Republic, The Shallow Tales Review, Terrain.org, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, and Afrocritik. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on Twitter @chimeziechika1.