The Origin of Name by Adedayo Agarau.

I have always been a fan of Agarau because of how he writes about grief, loss and redemption, like he is one with these subjects.

The poet says:

Imagine each closed door is a mother//crying her child back into her womb.

Imagine the grave as a reunion// of kids falling out of their mothers’ wombs.

- Abiku.

Mahtem Shiferraw, in their introduction of Agarau’s most recent collection, said:

“He labors to ensure that his craft and language are suitable conveyors of the intricacies and complexities of Yoruba thought. His unapologetic tone is tempered by moments of disarming softness even as he renames his people over and over again in what amounts to an act of both resistance and kindness.”

I like what Agarau has done with language in this offering; he is a storyteller and he is drawn to history, his and others, and with this he consciously samples different verses of the Ifa corpus, proverbs that affirms the identities of Yoruba gods and their folktales on naming. By translating them into a new language, new meanings are created and the weight of the old meanings are preserved in this work.

The first miracle he did was to teach us how to name things. We named sea. Named each bird according to their songs. Named each god according to what they eat.

[Orunmila]

This is similar to the many stories of how the Yoruba people came to be. Oduduwa was progenitor of the Yoruba people. Orunmila, a Yoruba deity known for his wisdom, was a spokesperson for other gods. It is not strange to me that Agarau chose to focus on Orunmila and Oduduwa because of his wisdom, evident in the history and poetry of the Ifa corpus. In The Naming of Things, he said:

Afterwards, our fathers named everything falling into and out of the sky after a god.

I am a ground, a soil, a field blessed with dead birds // I am a sinister wind in the east of this place.// My mother will rise to the empty window and bless the road.

[First Offering]

Agarau is an akéwì and I particularly enjoyed how he navigates his — and his subjects — identity and history by naming and renaming, with a certain awareness, as a witness.

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