Chanelling memories through verse: Edwardsville by Heart by Kólá Túbòsún

So memory returns
of the many demons from
which hope had sprung
that brought me here,
for which the journey
into this promise of a life
was some act of fleeing,
to which America
was both a saving grace
and distance a respite
in shawl and shield.

— from “Stepping Out: at Cougar Village”

When a Fulbright Scholarship brought a young Nigerian student to the American Midwest in 2009, the culture (not to mention climate) shock must have been considerable. But linguist and writer Kólá Túbòsún survived his first winter and returned to the University of Southern Illinois Edwardsville to complete graduate studies between 2010 and 2012. The town, as he advises in the Preface to his first collection of poetry, was a place which was, in the time he lived there, an open and tolerant community, welcoming to refugees and immigrants from distant shores. However, the scars of colonial expansion and the after-effects of slavery were not that far behind, and, now, with a mistrust of the other on the rise, one can only wonder how that mood is shifting. But that is not the immediate concern of Edwardsville by Heart. This book is one man’s poetic journey back through a particular period in place and time, mediated by memory.

Although Túbòsún does describe his process of composition in the introduction, in the reading I had the impression that the experiences he recounts in this memoir/travelogue were recorded during his time Stateside. The poems, which cover early encounters with a strange environment, visits to local historical sites, and tales of friends, lovers and mentors all have the feel of a diary, a recording of events as they happened. But in truth only one or two were actually composed in America although the idea of somehow capturing his time there did percolate. These poems were written over a six-week period in 2017, while the poet’s wife was away and he was at home chasing after their toddler.  At last the memories he had carried with him could be sorted, developed, and given voice.

There is a sense in which this collection speaks to a very specific place, experienced with an outsider’s eye, and a student’s youthful enthusiasm. The image of America that comes through is a remarkably positive one. Did Túbòsún arrive at a sweet point, or is this an effect of the nostalgia of youth? The poems of the first section, “The Visitor” capture a sense of wide-eyed openness to a new environment and, as the quote above suggests, to the freedom—romantic and academic—that distance from home affords. But as the poet recalls his first months in the US, and his first encounters with winter cold (recalling practicing with a freezer back home in Nigeria) he does not shy away from the reality of the racial profiling he encounters, accepting it with a disarmingly casual tone.

When his circle of experience widens to encompass cities like St. Louis (the first visit being a visit to a hospital ER as unlicensed driver transporting an injured friend) the tension and threats of violence become more of a concern. Friends warn him to avoid the city, but it is difficult to deny a peculiar pull:

But E.B.R. lived there,
I thought. Redmond the poet
shuttled poetry from here,
black as Ethiopian coffee beans,
to Lagos and Ìbàdàn
in my undergraduate days, with
a smile on his oak-hued face,
a deep crack in the velvet
voice in which his verses rolled
into colours that rhymed
with grace, Civil Rights lore
in quartets of memory.

—from “East St. Louis”

Moving through poems that recall his times in the classroom, at house parties, on road trips with friends, Túbòsún negotiates a balance between African and American classmates and friends and there is a sharp sense that being away from home is part of a necessary process of coming into an ability to understand and articulate his own language and identity. As a student of linguistics it is only natural that this otherness shapes and informs his academic experiences. This process colours the third section “Teacher, Student,” witnessed for instance in a poem like “Being Yorùbá”:

How do you teach a state of being?
You don’t. You teach instead tone,
do-re-mi like music on the tongue,
and greetings and norms; clothing,
and where caps bend on the head;
dance moves to restless beats that
skilled bàtá drummers replay
when you taunt them with
a semblance of competence.

Later, as his travels and adventures take him further from his temporary American home, he finds that his Nigerianness not only informs his encounters, but cannot be escaped. He is always a visitor.

Edwardsville by Heart is a quiet, reflective book. The fact that this collection was, for the most part, birthed through the filter of temporal and geographic distance, the clarity of the memories preserved and presented is remarkable. Rather than muted details or blurred recollections, we are offered an uncluttered vision—emotionally contained and all the more powerful as a consequence. Strongly grounded in place, time and experience, these poems do not shy away from the brewing politics and social dynamics at play in the part of the American Midwest where the poet found himself. But above all it is, as Túbòsún himself admits, his Edwardsville. And he freely opens it to us with this, his first book.

Edwardsville by Heart by Kólá Túbòsún is published by Wisdom’s Bottom Press. 

Author: roughghosts

Literary blog of Joseph Schreiber. Writer. Reader. Editor. Photographer. View all posts by roughghosts