Smoking the Bible

In “Scythe,” from Chris Abani’s Smoking the Bible, the speaker, a Nigerian immigrant in the midwestern United States, intones the multiple nuances of two Igbo words to pay homage to his complex relationship with his brother, who is dying of cancer:

Nwoke, you said, man. Just that word, which is to say,
brother, warrior, protector, heart, soul, harbor.
And I said, Ikpiripiri, which is to say, braveheart,
grace, fighter, strong, love, brother.
You closed your eyes, fell back into oblivion
and I thought of the grave,
which is to say, resurrection.

The poems here resurrect memory through scrupulous characterization, especially in depictions of the speaker’s brother and their late father, whose love was “caught in his anger and his fists.” The image evoked in the book’s title—of two adolescents smoking a rolled-up page of the same volume that their father used to beat them with—recurs several times, serving as both oblation to the father’s memory and immolation of the violent masculinity that he represented. Fire and flame—“Word is flame,” “The chemo in you is / fire too”—flicker throughout the book. As Abani writes in “The Ghost Speaks”:

You tear Psalm 23 from Father’s leather-bound Bible,
roll it. Silently I recite, The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not— 
You consider the scroll and with the match and flame 
already licking the edge of the paper, you ask if I think 
God remembers my name.

These elegiac meditations on faith, heritage, masculinity, race, and familial loss are particularized in the manner of well-crafted fiction, while reaching beyond the afflictions of one man’s family to something vaster, as in this variation on “smoking the Bible” from “The Familiar Is a Texture We Cannot Trust”:

You take a deep drag and thyme fills the air,
a fragrant smoke. You exhale slowly,
the white cloud plumes, a cloak for your hands. 
Passing it to me you stretch your arm
across pages, across myth and history,
your shadow invisible in this deep
night but present.