Origins of the Syma Species

“I know I didn’t come to this earth by dust alone. Someone must have brought me here by hand?” says the speaker in a poem from Tares Oburumu’s Origins of the Syma Species. Oburumu’s quest after a point of origin is often eclectic, and thick with personal mythology:

We are at the Groundless, he whispers, to remind me of some familiar fear or water which keeps coming to us in the same vein we keep going to it, rowing to a vow we each must declare to dissever the fragments of a brother I buried here.

But Oburumu does not limit himself to the personal: in another poem, the speaker wanders restlessly through history, peering over a balcony on the Niger in the year 218 BC, from which he spots Hannibal crossing the Alps.

We learn from the poet’s “Notes” that Syma is the name of the Nigerian village in which he was born and raised, and where his own daughter, Sasha, was conceived. The book can read like a map of sorts for Sasha, but it is not didactic. She may locate or lose herself in the narrative, much as her father does as he wavers between the constraints of his life and of a world that far exceeds the individual’s place within it. While the English language wields a colonial grip over the speaker’s thoughts and beliefs, English poetry can be a passage to something that punctures the language’s dominance. In “Maud, or Letter to the White Egrets,” Oburumu writes:

my body is English, my mind English, my soul made in English. If God wasn’t an Englishman, my spirit, where would you be eternal? […] Now I stand on the precipice of a world different from the white egrets’, calling out for Maud’s holy hands screaming, Touch me, poetry.

Throughout this book, Oburumu attends to poetry like an excavation, advancing inward while remaining cognizant of the history that surrounds the site: “There is a door that leads only to you, open it.”