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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