Cite this article as: Oladeji, F. O. & Shehu, A. (2025). Form and Feeling: A Formalist Reading of Some Selected Poems in Rasaq Malik Gbolahan's the Other Names of Grief. Zamfara International Journal of Humanities, 4(1), 154-166. www.doi.org/10.36349/zamijoh.2025.v04i01.015.
FORM
AND FEELING: A FORMALIST READING OF SOME SELECTED POEMS IN RASAQ MALIK
GBOLAHAN'S THE OTHER NAMES OF GRIEF
By
OLADEJI,
Felix Oluwabukola
Department
of English, Faculty of Arts
University of Ilorin
And
SHEHU,
AbdulRasheed
Department
of English, Faculty of Arts
University of Ilorin
Abstract: In literary
studies, the question of how literature should be read—whether as an autonomous
art form or a reflection of socio-political realities—has long sparked critical
debate. Formalist critics, particularly those aligned with New Criticism, argue
for the primacy of the text itself, contending that meaning is best derived
through close attention to a work’s formal elements rather than its external
contexts. This study situates itself within this intrinsic tradition by
offering a formalist reading of Rasaq Malik Gbolahan’s The Other Names of Grief
(2020). Through a qualitative analysis of three selected poems, the paper
explores how poetic devices—such as imagery, repetition, tone, and
structure—coalesce to portray the theme of violence. The study demonstrates
that the internal architecture of the poems is not only central to their
aesthetic appeal but also to their emotional resonance. Ultimately, the paper
reaffirms the value of literature as a self-sufficient artistic creation and
accentuates the critical potency of close reading in uncovering the layered
meanings embedded within poetic language.
Keywords: Formalism,
New Criticism, Violence, Intrinsic Analysis and Rasaq Malik Gbolahan.
Introduction
The interpretation of literature has
long been a subject of scholarly debate, reflecting the inherent subjectivity
of the term itself. Among the most dominant schools of literary thought that
reflect this divergence are the art-for-art’s-sake school and the functional
school. While the former emphasizes the autonomy of a literary work—limiting
analysis to its internal structure and aesthetics—the latter insists on the
societal relevance of literature as central to its meaning and function.
Advocates of the latter perspective often prioritise political, historical, or
psychological readings that align the literary text with external realities.
However, this approach risks undermining what Dunmade (2019) calls the
"artistic integrity of literature" (p. 233), by neglecting the formal
elements that define its literariness.
In response to this interpretive
tension, this study adopts a Formalist approach—particularly through the lens
of New Criticism—to the analysis of Rasaq Malik Gbolahan’s The Other Names of Grief (2020). This choice is necessitated by a
noticeable gap in existing criticism. Whereas scholars such as Ayobami (2023)
and Oseni (2021) have offered important biographical and thematic readings of
the collection—focusing on trauma, war, grief, and the sociopolitical climate
that inspires them—there has been little effort to isolate and examine the
intrinsic elements that give the collection its poetic strength.
This study, therefore, shifts critical
attention to the formal features of Malik’s poetry, including diction, imagery,
rhythm, mood, and sound effects, with a view to illustrating how these elements
contribute to the aesthetic beauty of the collection. In line with Culler’s
(1997) assertion that "to consider a text as literature is to ask about
the contribution of its parts to the effect of the whole" (p. 33), this
paper locates the meaning and significance of The Other Names of Grief within the boundaries of the text itself.
Accordingly, the study proceeds with the aim of illuminating how the formal
devices used by the poet map out violence, thereby underscoring the artistic
self-sufficiency of the work.
Theoretical
Framework: Formalism and the Autonomy of the Literary Text
Formalism, as a literary theory,
foregrounds the autonomy of the literary text by emphasizing the internal
features that distinguish it as a work of art. Central to this school of
thought is the conviction that the meaning and value of a literary work reside
within its formal elements—structure, language, imagery, rhythm, and narrative
techniques—rather than external contexts such as biography, history, or
politics. This internalist orientation is seen as a reaction against earlier
interpretive traditions that relied heavily on extrinsic factors to explain
literary meaning. Abrams and Harpham (2012, p. 131) describe Formalism as “the
theory of literature that treats the text as a distinct object, an autonomous
whole whose meaning is to be derived from its internal structure.”
Although literary theories often draw
on insights from disciplines outside literature, Formalism is fundamentally
rooted within the domain of literature itself (Culler, 1997). Two major strands
of Formalism—Russian Formalism and New Criticism—emerged in the early twentieth
century, each contributing unique methodologies for literary interpretation
while sharing a core emphasis on the text as a self-contained object.
Russian
Formalism and the Concept of Literariness
Russian Formalism, pioneered by critics
such as Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, and Boris Eichenbaum, sought to
establish a scientific method of literary study by isolating the qualities that
render a text “literary.” This led to the concept of literariness, which
denotes the distinctive features that differentiate literary language from
ordinary discourse. Shklovsky (1917) introduced the term defamiliarisation
(ostranenie), arguing that literature reinvigorates perception by presenting
familiar objects in unfamiliar ways. This is achieved through foregrounding, a
deliberate distortion of linguistic norms that compels the reader to engage
more consciously with the text (Wales, 2014; Culler, 1997).
For Russian Formalists, form is not
merely a container for content—it is the very essence of the literary work. The
narrative devices, poetic structure, and linguistic patterns are not secondary
to meaning but are themselves the primary conveyors of significance
(Eichenbaum, 1926). Thus, literary analysis must focus on how the text
functions rather than what it represents.
New
Criticism and the Unity of the Text
New Criticism, which gained prominence
in the United States and Britain through figures such as I. A. Richards, John
Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and W. K. Wimsatt, extended the formalist impulse
but with a different emphasis. While Russian Formalists were concerned with
literariness as a structural phenomenon, New Critics focused on the text’s
capacity for organic unity—the harmonious interrelation of its parts. According
to Brooks (1947), a poem or literary work possesses internal coherence, wherein
tension, paradox, and ambiguity serve to deepen meaning rather than create
confusion.
Central to New Criticism are the
intentional fallacy and the affective fallacy, two critical concepts introduced
by Wimsatt and Beardsley (1946, 1949). The intentional fallacy warns against
equating a work’s meaning with the author’s intent, while the affective fallacy
cautions against judging a work based on the reader’s emotional response. Both
fallacies underscore the New Critical tenet that the text should be interpreted
as an autonomous verbal artifact.
New Critics advocate for close
reading—a meticulous examination of the language, structure, and figurative
elements within the text. This approach assumes that all necessary evidence for
interpretation is contained within the work itself. As Rivkin and Ryan (2017)
note, New Criticism places the literary text “at the center of a critical
process that treats it as a self-sufficient object” (p. 16).
Convergence
and Divergence: Russian Formalism and New Criticism
Despite arising in different
intellectual and cultural contexts, Russian Formalism and New Criticism share a
fundamental orientation toward the internal dynamics of the text. Both schools
reject biographical, historical, and sociopolitical readings in favor of
intrinsic analysis. They also converge in advocating the autonomy of the
literary work and in positing that formal features are essential to
understanding how literature produces meaning.
However, they diverge in methodology
and philosophical emphasis. Russian Formalism is more interested in the
mechanics of form and the literariness of language, treating literature as a
special use of linguistic material. New Criticism, by contrast, views the
literary work as an organic unity whose parts interact meaningfully, and it
focuses more on the interplay of meaning through paradox, irony, and tension.
This study draws on Formalism,
particularly New Criticism to analyse the formal structures and stylistic
features of the selected poems. By employing close reading and attending to
devices such as imagery, diction, and narrative arrangement, the study investigates
how the internal elements of the poems shape their thematic concerns and
aesthetic effects. The framework underscores the idea that meaning is not
imported into a literary text from external sources but emerges through the
interplay of its formal components.
Malik,
His Poetry And His Critics: Critical Perspectives
Rasaq Malik Gbolahan is a poet deeply
attuned to the realities of his society. Aligning with the age-old dictum that
literature mirrors life, Malik’s poetry provides a poignant tableau of
contemporary Nigeria—capturing a spectrum of national tragedies including war,
insurgency, religious extremism, gender-based violence, and their cascading
consequences: grief, displacement, and death. In a 2017 interview with Africa in Dialogue, Malik affirms his
literary mission as both documentary and interventionist:
“I am passionate about the occurrences
happening in my country... I think as a writer, you have to mirror society.”
For Malik, art is both witness and
weapon—a conduit through which forgotten voices and unknown stories are
retrieved and illuminated for global consciousness. He regards poetry not as
escapism but as a continual, transformative engagement with reality, intended
to stir empathy and inspire social action.
Yet between the poet and his poem
stands the critic. The critic not only evaluates but mediates the meaning and
reception of literary texts. Ideally objective, the critic applies various
interpretive lenses—historical, cultural, psychological, biographical—sometimes
unveiling dimensions of a work unintended by the poet. This critical liberty,
however, can also blur interpretive boundaries and raise questions about the
limits of authorial intent.
In the case of Malik’s first chapbook, No Home in This Land (2018), most
critics focus on the thematic urgency of the collection, echoing the poet’s own
declarations. Toheeb (2018), for instance, views the collection as an archive
of terror and memory, naming sites like Borno, Chibok, and Yobe as symbols of a
nation in flames. He praises Malik’s capacity to hold together binaries—dreams
and death, fear and survival—and commends his “lucid language and highly fecund
poetic expression.” The review acknowledges aesthetic form only in passing,
despite the rich poetic devices at play.
Ezenwa-Ohaeto (2021) offers a
trauma-theory reading, emphasising the psychological toll of Boko Haram’s
violence and the disintegration of home as a safe space. The critic highlights
Malik’s depiction of women and girls as doubly victimised—first by war, then by
the very agents of their supposed protection. He cites lines like “we do not
know where we belong because in Borno / everybody knows how to narrate the grim
stories of war” to underscore the instability of identity in spaces of
prolonged conflict. Here, again, the critical gaze prioritises
socio-psychological content over formal literary structure.
Ayobami (2018), while aligning with the
aforementioned readings, extends the critique to a more global lens, arguing
that Malik’s themes of displacement and trauma transcend national boundaries.
The poem “How to Worship Allah” is highlighted for its clear dissociation of
Islam from extremist violence—a necessary clarification in the Nigerian
context. Drawing parallels with J. P. Clark’s ‘Casualties’, Ayobami implies a
literary genealogy rooted in war poetry. Still, his analysis remains tethered
to the content rather than the craft.
Olaniyi (2018) similarly explores the
humanitarian crisis detailed in No Home
in This Land, spotlighting the poet’s depiction of women, children, and
even soldiers as victims. His concluding remark—that Malik’s poetry is marked
by “free verse, plain English... accessible to the common man”—touches lightly
on form but stops short of a detailed stylistic exploration.
While Malik’s second chapbook, The Other Names of Grief, has received
less critical attention, it is no less potent. Ayobami (2023) engages the
collection through the poetics of grief, attributing its emotional register to
war, domestic violence, and personal loss. His reading adopts a psychological
lens, linking certain poems to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s model of grief. However,
Ayobami’s attribution of the poetic voice in “Waiting” to the male poet is
critically flawed. The line “my husband leaves home for office” clearly
identifies a female persona, disrupting the critic’s biographical assumption.
This misreading exemplifies the pitfalls of overly aligning the poet with the
speaker, a common risk in biographical criticism.
In a more balanced reading, Oseni
(2021) commends Malik’s universalization of “global conundrums” like war and
domestic abuse. Though he acknowledges the thematic breadth of the collection,
Oseni, like others, offers little discussion on Malik’s prosody, metaphoric
structure, or poetic techniques.
Hence, while existing criticism has
been valuable in spotlighting Malik’s social consciousness and thematic
preoccupations, it has often privileged contents over form. Critics have been
largely unanimous in recognising Malik as a poetic witness to national trauma,
yet they have underexplored the formal architecture of his poetry—its rhythms,
imagery, symbolism, and narrative strategy. There is a need for scholarship
that not only situates Malik’s work within political and psychological
frameworks but also attends to its literariness. Such a shift would provide a
fuller understanding of how Malik’s poetic how strengthens his thematic what an
essential balance for appreciating the full scope of his craft.
Research
Methodology
This study adopts a formalist
methodological framework to examine the aesthetic and structural features of
Rasaq Malik Gbolahan’s The Other Names of
Grief. Grounded in the principles of Formalism, this approach prioritises
the internal mechanics of the text—its language, form, imagery, and stylistic
devices—over extratextual factors such as authorial intent, historical context,
or socio-political background.
Key to this methodology is the practice
of close reading, which involves a detailed analysis of how Gbolahan’s poetic
techniques generate meaning, emotion, and literary effect. Drawing on Viktor
Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization (ostranenie), the study explores how
the poet’s use of startling imagery, elliptical syntax, repetition, and
enjambment resists conventional perception and heightens the reader’s sensory
and emotional engagement with grief. Similarly, the formalist emphasis on
organic unity, as championed by New Critics like Cleanth Brooks, informs this
analysis of how disparate poetic elements—tone, diction, rhythm, and figurative
language—interact to form a coherent and unified artistic whole.
Through methodical textual analysis,
the study investigates the poem’s internal structure: its formal tensions,
paradoxes, and linguistic patterning. The aim is to uncover how the poet's
manipulation of form contributes to the expression of loss, trauma, and
remembrance—without recourse to biographical or sociological explanations. Each
poem is treated as an autonomous artistic object, where meaning arises not from
what the poem says, but from how it says it.
By focusing on Gbolahan’s formal
strategies, this study positions The
Other Names of Grief as a rich site of poetic craftsmanship, where grief is
not merely depicted but aesthetically enacted through the precision of form.
This methodology thus reinforces the central formalist claim that literary
meaning is best apprehended through the rigorous analysis of the text’s own
devices and structures.
Analysis
‘Peace
Pieced’: The Mappings of Violence in Malik's The Other Names of Grief
This session entitled, ‘Peace Pieced’:
The Mappings of Violence in Malik's The
Other Names of Grief, presents an analysis of three poems in the collection
referenced in the title. The poems are ‘Waiting’, ‘Subhi Prayer at a Masjid’
and ‘After the Bomb Blasts’ and the analysis is premised on the theoretical
framework of New Criticism. By this, the work focuses only on the poems by
identifying their intrinsic features which consist in the techniques deployed
by the poet and the manner in which the various techniques are used to achieve
unity, particularly with regard to the portrayal of violence in the poems.
These techniques, which include the use of metaphors, ironies, paradoxes,
personifications, contrasts, tone, mood/ atmosphere, lineation and diction — characteristically
collocative and sometimes ambiguous — showcase not only the unity but also the
tension in the poems.
WAITING
Waiting for the masjid to reopen for
people to worship,
for the muezzin to climb the minaret
again to call the adhan, for our children to lift their tender palms as they
seek for Allah's infinite mercy, Waiting for my homeland to become a source of
bliss, for the walls of bombed houses to resurrect, for laughter to ring like a
bell in houses smoldered by machine guns. Waiting for rain to erase the blood
that stains the streets of my homeland, for children to gather again to hear
folktale, for my grandmother to cradle me in her arms as night arrives with a
river of stories. Waiting for my brothers to return home from war, for my hands
to shape love into a cup of water for people to drink whenever they thirst, for
years bereft of bullets spinning in the air, for months without my heart
quivering as my husband leaves home for office, as my child leaves home for
school. Waiting for days without my feet threading on bodies in the streets,
for the luminous rays of the sun to weave light all over the world, for the
woman waiting at the doorstep for the corpse of her husband to find comfort in
the happiness of her children. Waiting for the earth to shelter us, for the
earth never to crack like a wall burrowed by bullets, for the canopy of moon to
stretch in the sky tonight, for people to sleep without racing to where their
beloveds dissolve in the smoke, for another dawn to come without the stereo announcing
there are people dying, dead.
(Culled from The Other Names of Grief)
The
Mappings of Violence in ‘Waiting’
The poem, divided into twelve stanzas,
has twenty-four lines which are made up of couplets that run on one another.
This effect, technically called enjambment, enhances the flow of the poem,
which introduces a series of separate events in form of wishes and prayers.
Through the form—made up of couplets that collide into each other—the poet
mirrors the chaotic situation at the centre of the poem. The unsettled nature
of the minds and environment suggested by the form is effortlessly identifiable
in the third couplet: ‘of bliss, for the walls of bombed houses to resurrect/
for laughter to ring like a bell in houses smoldered by machine’ (5-6). The
title ‘Waiting’, which is a present participle, suggests a delay of action in
expectation of a certain phenomenon. This feeling of expectancy permeates the
whole poem, particularly through the repetition of the present participle. The
repetitive use of the present participle verb 'waiting' is indicative of a tone
of hope and longing; however, the absence of the subject to whom the hope and
longing can be attributed marks the beginning of the suspense in the poem. The
anonymity of the poetic voice creates anxiety in the reader and thus the title
‘Waiting’, in the context of the poem, connotes not only the realisation of
poetic voice's wishes and prayers but also the reader’s anxiety with regard to
the identity of the poetic voice. The clear reference to the agents of the
events portrayed in diverse angles, say, religious, political, domestic and
family lives — in contrast to the anonymity of the poetic voice — hints at the
tension in the poem. For illustration, the line ‘[Waiting] for the muezzin to
climb the minaret again to call the adhan’(2) references the muezzin, with the
omission of the person — the poetic voice — looking forward to his ‘climb[ing]
the minaret again to call the adhan.’
The poet's diction, which is
characterised by collocations — words that normally co-occur — ties the events
in the poem, hence showcasing unity. In line one, masjid, an Arabic word for
mosque, collocates with ‘worship’, here a verb, denoting a devotion for a
deity. In line two, muezzin (also an Arabic word) is an individual who issues
the adhan (another Arabic word meaning the call to prayer) having climbed the
minaret, the Arabic word for ‘the tall slender tower of a masjid.’ The
collocations point at religion which is further evidenced in ‘lift[ing] their
tender palms as they seek for Allah's/ infinite mercy…(3-4). Allah is the
Arabic word for God in Islam to whom the believers direct their devotion. The
relationship between the words can be summarised thus: the masjid is meant for
worship; the muezzin climbs the minaret to call the adhan' so that the
believers can have communion with Allah. This summary will aid in pinpointing
the atmosphere of the event being related. The prefix ‘-re’ occuring with ‘open’,
giving ‘reopen’ (1) echoes the sense of ‘again’ (2), meaning ‘once more'. By
this, ‘reopen’ and ‘again’ signify a halt to the religious activities
summarised above, a change to which the poetic voice longs for. The suspension
of these religious practices foregrounds the death of spirituality, occasioned
by violence as captured in ‘...for the walls of bombed houses to resurrect'
(5). The poet, in the line, deploys personification in the visual depiction of
dilapidation and ruins ‘walls of bombed houses’ which the poetic voice hopes
will ‘resurrect’. The humanisation of ‘walls’ through ‘resurrect’, meaning come
back to life, creates an image of death — a portrayal that resonates with the
mournful mood inherent in the poem. The expressions 'bombed houses' (5),
‘houses smoldered by machine guns' (6), ‘a wall burrowed by bullets' (20),
‘years bereft of bullets spinning in the air' (12), in addition to picturising
the restlessness and destruction brought upon domestic life by violence, evoke
fear through the use of onomatopoeia, with attention drawn to the sounds made
by bombs, machine guns, bullets — all of which are agents of massive
destruction resulting in, among other things, loss of lives and property,
insecurity, separation of family. Apparently, loss of lives as an aftermath of
violence is expressed in ‘Waiting for rain to erase the blood that stains the
streets/ of my homeland’(7-8). The image of disfiguration visualised in the
lines, through metaphors, is aided by the contrasting images of blood and rain.
By way of juxtaposition, in nature rain and blood are liquid; but, through the
poet’s mastery of diction, the two are portrayed in different light: blood
suggests killing and paints a gory picture of chaos beleaguering the poetic
voice’s homeland; on the other hand, rain symbolises solace and ease from the
chaos. A further note of the contrast that plays out in the co-occurrence of
the two words lies in the recognition of their relative cause. The coming of
the rain, which the poetic voice is praying for, is natural unlike the shedding
of blood which is usually perpetrated by man. The poetic voice’s prayer, the
point can be made, is aimed at the intervention of a supernatural being, most
likely Allah referenced earlier, in restoration of orderliness.
The prayer for ease and restoration of
peace ‘smoldered by machine guns' (6) is central to the poem. The poetic voice
longs ‘for my grandmother to cradle me in her arms as night arrives/ with a
river of stories’ (9-10). The arrival of night is personified as a comforter
and source of solace from distress. Interestingly, the metaphor ‘river of
stories' is unusual. While the atmosphere of the poem signals violence, the
word ‘river’ in the context signals ‘flows’ of many stories aimed at comforting
and endearing. The thought that ‘river’, which might be destructive, occurring
near to ‘night’ — a word that also might connote danger — symbolises ease, is
ironic. In the context of a poem which has a fingerprint of violence, readily
‘night’ and ‘river’ should signal destruction and danger but rather in this
case, the poet carves out an image of ease, comfort and endearment with the
co-occurrence of the words. The image of ease and endearment, though
contrastingly, connects with the emphasis (in the poem) that violence, which is
a form of war, disrupts family relationships. In the poem the poetic voice is
‘Waiting for my brothers to return home/ from war’ (10-11) and a ‘woman [is]
waiting at the doorstep for the/ corpse of her husband to find comfort in the
happiness/ of her children' (17-19). The persona craves for a reunion with ‘my
brothers' who have taken up arms during war, and the woman with her children is
bereaved and is awaiting her husband's corpse. The havoc wrecked on the family
life in both scenarios is correlative: that the woman's husband, who is not
directly involved in the war, is dead gives the impression that the persona’s
brothers who are actively involved in the war might have had a more tragic
fate. The irony here is that ‘waiting’, which often denotes an expectation and
hope for something worthwhile, is synonymous with futility in the two
scenarios.
The pervasive insecurity caused by
violence breeds and induces fear in people. This is appropriately expressed in
‘...my heart quivering as/ my husband leaves home for office, as my child
leaves home/ for school (13-15). The line evokes fear and panic with regard to
the persona’s husband and child. The reference to ‘husband’ and ‘child’ gives a
clue to the gender of the poetic voice who hitherto has been referred to by the
genderless possessive ‘my’. Perhaps the poetic voice is a married woman with a
child, who is bothered by the fate of her family in time of violence which
makes her ‘feet thread…on bodies/ in the streets' (15-16). 'Bodies’ here is a
synecdoche for dead people, which further captures the carnage of violence
emphasised in ‘...for people to/ sleep without racing to where their beloveds
dissolve in the/ smoke’ (22-23). Sleep connotes peace of mind, the meaning of
which is negated by ‘racing’, suggesting restlessness that accompanies the
deaths of one's beloveds. The poetic voice's prayer for ‘another dawn to come
without the stereo/ announcing there are people dying, dead (23-24) is laced
with a tone of anguish, mourning the pervasiveness of death during violence:
while some people are ‘dead’ already, some are ‘dying’. No one is immune from
the tragic fate, including the poetic voice, who is still privileged to be
alive. Her invulnerability, perhaps, informs the prayer for ‘another dawn to
come'. The dawn becomes a symbol for the restoration of peace and orderliness
in her homeland — a new beginning when her ‘homeland will be a source/ of bliss
(4-5) and expression of love and generosity ‘shap[ing] love into a cup of what
for people to drink when they thirst' (11-12) will be the order of the day.
This is the ease the poetic persona is ‘Waiting’ for.
SUBHI
PRAYER AT A MASJID
Instead of echoing the call to prayer,
the muezzin whispers into the microphone.
The imam is careful enough not to
recite a long surah.
The congregation follows the Imam's recitation
with minds halved by the fear of being bombed.
The Imam recites the Surah quickly in
order to escape sudden blasts from outside.
Instead of waiting to observe the
Nawafil, the worshippers vacate the mosque for the fear of being turned to
remnants to blasted bones, to injured bodies, to maimed lives, to buried souls,
to bodies axed out of the walls.
(Culled from The Other Names of Grief)
The
Mappings of Violence in ‘Subhi Prayer at a Masjid’
The poem details the situation under
which the Subhi prayer is observed at a masjid. Referenced in the title, Subhi
is an Arabic word for the dawn prayer in Islam; likewise, masjid, another
Arabic word, meaning a mosque, serves as the place of worship for the Islamic
believers. This depiction of religious practice is also conspicuous in such
words as muezzin, imam, surah, nawafil — all Arabic — that appear later in the
poem. By way of explanation, the muezzin calls the believers to prayer; the
Imam leads the prayer; surah is a portion of the Quran required to be recited
during the prayer; and nawafil is a supplementary prayer. While the noticeable
relationship between these words indicates unity, the inherent disconnection
between the act of prayer, often marked by orderliness and peace, and the
context of its occurrence, clearly marked by violence, points at the tension in
the poem.
In the poet's diction, the recognition
of the meaning relation of certain words that co-occur in the poem is pertinent
to the understanding of the irony that plays out. For instance, the first
stanza, which like the other stanzas is a simple sentence broken into multiple
lines, contains the onomatopoeic expressions 'echoing' and 'whispers'. Echo
suggests a repetitive sound, often lasting a long time. This sense is in
contrast with 'whispers', a quiet sound that is often inaudible and brief. The
opening phrase ‘instead of', meaning 'rather than', signifies that what is
supposed to be is the former (echo) and not the latter (whisper). This contrast
mirrors the irony inherent in the poem, starting from the muezzin's call to
prayer, to the imam’s leading the prayer and the congregation’s attitude during
the prayer. The call to prayer is a notification, so echoing it is necessary to
call the attention of the believers but the muezzin decides to say it quietly
even when he has the microphone: ‘whispers/ into the microphone’ (2-3). The
deployment of the microphone, in the first place, is intended to magnify the
call to prayer to a wider audience, thus the decision to say it quietly is
ironic. This unusual act is not only characteristic of the muezzin but also of
the Imam and the congregation. The Imam does not only recite short Surah but
also 'recites the Surah/ quickly’ (10-11). There is a connection between the
Imam's actions and the image created in the preceding stanza. That is, the
muezzin's decision to 'whisper' the call to prayer and the Imam's carefulness
and swiftness in recitation are parallel. This similitude suggests, perhaps,
that the recitation in the Subhi prayer should be long and slow-paced. The
third party in the act of worship, in addition to the Imam and the muezzin, is
the congregation of the believers. Expectedly, the attitude of the congregation
during the prayer correlates with the actions of the first two characters as it
‘follows the Imam's/ recitation with minds halved' (7-8) and does not ‘wait…to
observe/ the Nawafil' (13-14) before vacating the mosque. By implication,
attentiveness is required of the congregation during prayer but — in a show of
irony — what prevails instead is a lack of concentration which is also
signalled in the haste to ‘vacate the mosque' without observing the
supplementary prayer. Here, the poet's diction is worthy of note more properly.
The congregation, a collective noun, at first is seen as acting as a unit — the
choice of the third person singular verb ‘follows’ supports this claim;
however, 'minds', clearly a plural noun, with the plural marker -s, in the next
line, is a reference to the congregation, previously presented as a single
entity. The same thing applies to the use of 'worshippers' in a later line
where the members of the congregation are now presented as acting individually.
While the discord in reference (in the first instance) and the change in
representation (in the second instance) hint at the tension that surrounds the
observation of the Subhi prayer, the expression of the individuality of the
congregation implies the widespread of the panic of violence: every individual
is thinking about, and finding, a means of safety.
Accordingly, the incongruity in the
series of events results in the invocation of fear later referenced in the
line: 'the fear of being bombed' (9). The auditory image in the line, enabled
through the alliterative use of /b/ in ‘being’ and ‘bombed’ — the latter of
which is also onomatopoeic — maps violence. The act of violence is as well
conspicuously pictured in 'sudden blast from outside' (12). 'Sudden’ in the
line rephrases ‘quickly’ in the preceding line. This sense of brevity is also
perceivable in the connotations of such expressions as 'whispers', ‘careful
enough’, ‘mind halved', ‘vacate’, and particularly, it is best expressed
through lineation. The stanzas in the poem, with the exception of the last, are
triplets broken up into uneven lines. The breaking up, a clear use of
enjambment, suggests an atmosphere of uncertainty as well as serves as a
pictorial representation of the fragmented actions of the three characters in
the poem. For instance in the second stanza: ‘The imam is careful/ enough not
to recite a/ long surah' 4-6), the last line ‘long Surah' is the shortest in
the whole poem and in effect, it picturises the Imam's short recitation which
is the focus of the stanza. A feeling of urgency is foregrounded by the
individual actions of the three characters and the motivation for the actions
is the fear of being victims of the 'sudden blast from outside.’ The
onomatopoeic ‘blast’ is a symbol of violence, an elaborate picture of which is
given in the list of parallel lines that ends the poem:
to remnants
to blasted bones,
to injured bodies,
to maimed lives,
to buried souls,
to bodies axed
out of the walls (Malik, 2020, 16-22).
The lines, through the use of anaphora,
build up a climax in the harrowing events resulting in violence. Essentially,
the participial verbs in each of the parallel lines imprint physical assaults,
decay and death to individuals, as referred to by such synecdoches as ‘bones’,
‘souls’, ‘bodies’. By implication, the part-for-whole representation reflects
the negative impact of violence: humans — a whole — become ‘blasted bones' —
parts. Hence, the muezzin's whispering instead of 'echoing the call to prayer',
the Imam's insistence on not ‘recit[ing] a long Surah' and the congregation's
absentmindedness and unusual haste, during and after the prayer, are all in the
bid to avert the various shades of tragedy that accompany violence, as pictured
in the parallel lines.
However, beneath this obvious fear is
the steadfastness of the three characters. The line 'sudden blast from outside’
is a representation of a world riddled with and troubled by violence. Despite
the adversity, the Imam, the muezzin and the congregation endeavour to perform
their religious duties, though dysfunctionally. This accentuation of faith
signals their resilience as against their vulnerability in time of violence.
AFTER
THE BOMB BLASTS
The color of terror is dark a woman
say, as she opens the eyes of her dead husband.
The voice of sorrow is deep, deeper when
you sit alone in a room that once housed two, three, four people, now reduced
to a person, by bombs, by bullets, by those who use blood for survival.
My love for my nation wanes, a boy says
to his mother. Another boy, whose left hand is severed, watches as they whisk
his father's body with a wheelbarrow.
And another woman remembers the last
time she cuddled her daughter, the last time she let her go to the street of
Yola, only to be returned as a body ravaged by fire, an item used in a rite of
violence.
(Culled from The Other Names of Grief)
The
Mappings of Violence in ‘After the Bomb Blasts’
In this poem, the poet experiments with
different forms, opening with two triplets, which are followed by a couplet
which in turn is succeeded by two quatrains. An examination of this make-up
reveals the poet's masterful and cinematic presentation of the horrific events
in the working of the poem. For instance, the opening triplet, being an
introduction, defines terror with an ample illustration: ‘The color of terror
is dark/A woman says, as she opens/the eyes of her dead husband’ (1-3). The
poet amplifies the illustration by drawing on the consequence of the terror in
the following triplet: The voice of sorrow is deep, deeper/ when you sit alone
in a room that once/ housed two, three, four people, now reduced….’ (4-6). This
triplet then bumps into the sole couplet which, by being only exudes
uniqueness. The uniqueness of the couplet consists in not only identifying the
causes of the terror in the poem: ‘...to a person, by bombs, by bullets, by
those who/ use blood for survival’ (7-8); but also serving as the linkage
between the two opening triplets, which define and demonstrate the consequence
of terror, and the two concluding quatrains, which heighten the horrific terror
that is portrayed as well as bring the poem to its inevitably tragic end: ‘an
item used in a rite of violence’ (16).
The prepositional phrase ‘After the
Bomb Blasts’, which is the title, foreshadows the ruins that are at the centre
of the poem. The preposition ‘after’, meaning ‘later in time' and its object
‘bomb blasts', meaning ‘explosions’, as a whole captures the aftermath of
violence — as embodied in ‘bomb blasts’ — which is often characterised by loss
of lives, despair, nostalgia, decay and destruction, among other things.
The focus of the poem is portrayed
through the perspectives of four individuals, in order of their appearance: a
woman, a boy, another boy and another woman. These individuals, by virtue of
the choice of determiner and the manner of presentation, belong to two separate
groups. For instance, the first two ‘a woman’ and ‘a boy’ are connected,
firstly, through the indefinite article ‘a’ — which indicates their
individuality — and their making an assertion: the woman says, ‘The color of
terror is dark' (1) and the boy says, ‘The love for my country wanes' (9). The
activeness of this first group is in contrast with the implied passiveness of
the second group, ‘another boy' and ‘another woman’ who ‘watches’ and
‘remembers’ respectively. Interestingly, the use of ‘another’ for the last two
individuals is distinguishable. The word has multiple denotations, two of which
are ‘same’ and ‘different’. These two senses of the word, which are antonymous,
play out in the poem. That the second woman is bereaved like the first woman
shows that ‘another’, in that context, denotes ‘same’; however, in the second
instance, ‘another’ denotes ‘different’ as the experiences of the first and the
second boys differ: while the former is despaired, the latter is bereaved.
This, with the other contrast earlier noted, is indicative of the tension in
the poem — a phenomenon further reiterated in the first stanza, which is a
complex sentence, divided into three lines: ‘The color of terror is dark/ A
woman says, as she opens/ the eyes of her dead husband' (1-3).
The first line ‘The color of terror is
dark' is paradoxical. ‘Color’ has the common denotation of ‘visible light', a
meaning that is obviously opposite to ‘lack of light', the common sense of
‘dark’. Merely looking, saying visible light is lack of light, at first,
beggars sense; however, the recognition — after a thorough look — that the
expression is the poet's way of picturising the dreadful hopelessness prevalent
in the context of the poem reveals the sense in it. Likewise, the case of the
two women presents an irony. The first woman dreads the sight of her husband
whose eyes now house ‘terror’ at death — the same eyes that must have been a
source of bliss to her when the husband was alive. As for the second woman, her
bereavement, to some extent, is self-inflicted for ‘…she let her [daughter] go
to the street/ of Yola to be returned as a body ravaged by fire’ (14-15). The
description of the death ‘a body ravaged by fire', in which 'a body’ is a
synecdoche for the daughter, screams the brutality of violence and its
aftermath, which (here) is loss of lives. Moreover, this tense atmosphere is
trivialised, particularly in the line ‘an item used in a rite of violence'
(16). The line showcases the use of euphemism, a device in which a tense and
serious situation is expressed in a rather mild and sometimes humorous manner.
The daughter’s corpse becomes ‘an item' that is an integral part of a rite. The
unusualness of the expression ‘a rite of violence' lies in the fact that a rite
is characteristically orderly, contrarily to violence, which is characterised
by disorderliness. The combination of the two words, which clearly shows
tension, is used to express the commonisation of tragedy: violence is so
rampant that it becomes a ceremony (rite) — an everyday occurrence.
The nostalgic feeling of the second
woman about ‘...the last time she cuddled her daughter’ (13/14), though appears
in the last stanza, relates with the event in the second stanza, which lacks
any particular referent besides the second person pronoun ‘you’, perhaps
signifying an address to the reader. The stanza, categorically, gives a vivid
picture of the aftermath of violence. In the opening line of the stanza ‘The
voice of sorrow is deep, deeper’ (4), sorrow is personified with a voice. This,
however, is ironic as the so-called ‘voice of sorrow’ is the silence and
voidness experienced by the bereaved in the reminiscence of their dead. The
auditory image in the line, firstly noticeable in ‘voice’ is reinforced in the
repetition of the voiced alveolar plosive /d/ and the long vowel /i:/ in ‘deep’
and ‘deeper’. This use of alliteration and assonance calls attention to the
distinction between the positive adjective 'deep' and its comparative
counterpart 'deeper' which are used to picturise the horrific state of terror
in a domestic life, as depicted in ‘...in a room that once/ housed two, three,
four people, now reduced/ to a person…’ (5-7). The decrease in the number of
people in the room, as signified by the serialised numbers, and the time
adverbials ‘once’ and ‘now’ showcase the contrast between the past and the
present time: ‘once’ evokes a nostalgic feeling due to the tragedy being
experienced ‘now’. The identity of the agents behind the tragedy that befalls a
domestic setup, as contained in the reference to ‘room’ in the preceding line,
is shown through the parallel structures ‘by bombs, by bullets, by those who'
(7), wherein the voiced bilabial plosive /b/ alliterates — it is no coincidence
that the release of /b/ comes with an explosion like bombs. The parallelism, it
might be claimed, signifies that the havocs wreaked by the identified agents
are of equal magnitude. However, the portrayal of the last agent (humans) as
sadists, evidenced in ‘trade blood for survival' which translates as ‘kill for
livelihood’, in addition to being paradoxical, suggests that the human agents
are the masterminds of the havocs wreaked by the non-human agents ‘bombs’ and
‘bullets’.
The tone is marked by despair as
identifiable in the first boy’s assertion that ‘My love for my nation wanes'
(9). Though, the motivation for the assertion, which is borne out of the boy's
frustration, is portrayed through the perspective of the other boy. That is,
the second boy's travails become the mirror reflecting the reasons behind the
first boy's frustrating assertion. The second boy is a casualty of the violent
act at the centre of the poem. First, he is disabled; his ‘...left hand/ is
severed' (11-12). By breaking up the bit ‘is severed' from the preceding line,
through enjambment, the poet, accordingly, gives a graphic representation of
the boy's disability. His other tragedy, which is nonetheless unconnected to
the first, is the death of his father: ‘[he] watches as they whisk his father's
body/ with a wheelbarrow (12-13). Through the alliterative use of /w/ in
‘watches’, ‘whisk’, ‘with’ and ‘wheelbarrow’ attention is drawn to the
objectification of the dead father and the passiveness of the son. For an
illustration, a wheelbarrow is meant for transporting loads. Therefore,
transporting the father's body 'with a wheelbarrow’ — as if he were a load —
strips the man of his dignity, and that his son only ‘watches’ throughout the
process is even more unfortunate. While the boy's inactivity with regard to the
preparation of his father’s body is a sign of helplessness and dormancy — a
sense expressed by a connotation of the verb ‘watches — he is not to blame for
the inactivity, which obviously takes roots in his disability. The death is the
third in the poem, and like the other two which involve the deaths of a husband
and a daughter in the case of the two aforesaid women, the victim in this
instance is a father — another member of the family. What all this points to is
the attendant effect of violence on domestic life, often marked by throes and
anguish. The recognition of these throes and anguish underscores the first
boy's assertion that ‘My love for my nation wanes' (9). Pervasiveness of
violence is a death of patriotism as a nation beleaguered by bomb blasts is not
a fertile land to grow love. When everyday is ‘a rite of violence’ (16), loss
of lives and property, despair, insecurity reign; and a nation is reduced to an
abode of dilapidation and ruins, which births nostalgia. All these, according
to the poem, are what obtains after the bomb blasts.
Conclusion
This study has demonstrated that Rasaq
Malik Gbolahan’s The Other Names of Grief
deserves to be read primarily through the lens of its artistic construction
rather than external affiliations. In recent literary criticism, there has been
a growing tendency to foreground socio-political, historical, or psychological
contexts at the expense of the formal elements that shape literary meaning.
While such perspectives offer valuable insights, they often overshadow the
aesthetic and structural features that give literature its distinctive
identity.
By adopting a formalist approach
particularly the principles of New Criticism, this study has underscored how
Malik’s careful deployment of poetic techniques such as imagery, diction,
structure, and tone unifies the poems and deepens their portrayal of violence.
The analysis reaffirms that the meaning of a literary work is best uncovered
through close reading and attention to its internal coherence. As Dunmade
(2019, p. 233) aptly puts it, this is essential "to recognize the artistic
integrity of literature."
Ultimately, this study advocates for a
return to the intrinsic features of literature as a basis for interpretation.
Literature, first and foremost, is art—and its critical evaluation must begin
with an appreciation of the form, language, and technique that constitute its
aesthetic core.
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