Chapbook Chats: Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto Interviews Yaanom Author Sarpong Osei Asamoah
To celebrate KUMI New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set, Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto is talking to poets whose chapbooks are included in the KUMI edition of the wonderful ongoing series. Enjoy this conversation between Chinua and poet Feranmi Ariyo.
Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto: Congratulations on the release of your chapbook, I Watch You Disappear, featured in the 2024 New-Generation African Poets series! Could you share your experience of seeing your work published in this acclaimed series, and what it means to you personally and professionally to be part of this important moment for African poetry?
Feranmi Ariyo: Well… like with winning the Evaristo Prize, the news that my chapbook would be published by the APBF which came a few weeks earlier, came as a surprise. I consider myself an early-career writer. It was too much good news in such a short time that I had to dissociate myself from it. I consider myself to be an early-career writer. I had won awards and edited magazines on a tiny scale. And even with those, I considered myself undeserving. To this date, I still, to some extent, try to ignore the reality of what it means. But I am profoundly grateful for the honor to have my poetry as part of a collection of great authors.
C. E-O: How did you arrive at the title for your chapbook?
F.A: The title for my chapbook is the title of one of the poems in the book. I have always been terrible at naming things so all of my poetry is named in reference to something or some other poem I love. The title itself is a reference to one of the songs I listened to while creating these poems, “Disappear” by Beyonce and a poem by Kechi Nomu.
C.E-O: Can you talk about the organisation and how you chose the poems included in I Watch You Disappear?
F.A: Organization and sequencing have always been a part of my creative process. I had followed the Brunel University African Poetry Prize entries and I read an interview where Romeo Oriogun talked about how each poem in his prize-winning collection led to the next. Other than that, I am a music nerd and I love listening to sonically-cohesive albums and concept albums so I decided that I wanted to make a body of work that wasn’t just thematically related poetry brought into a collection but something so sequential that it reads like a personal essay. This makes the work of selection relatively easy for me, but it isn’t really selection it is more of creating a poem to close a gap. There is a clear progression of the disease from discovery (“My Father Undoes Darkness”) to clinic visits and treatments (“Cancer Wards”, “Healing” etc.) to Death (“My Father Dies”…, “And Goes to Heaven”, “Or Hell”) to existential contemplation (“For The People Who Console Us With Psalms and Homilies) and reflection (“I Watch You Disappear”).
C.E-O: Your poems deal with a deeply personal subject—a father’s illness. In the poem “My Father Undoes Darkness” reveals the diagnosis of the persona’s father. What compelled you to write about this experience?How did it feel to put such vulnerable emotions on the page?
F.A: “My Father Undoes Darkness” was one of the last poems I wrote in this collection and it was created to connect the dots. I had been writing about singular isolated moments from a father’s experience with cancer. So, I had to make a preface and a summary of everything that happened. But I wanted to create something holistic and detailed. For this reason, I experimented with distance. As someone who has had a lot of clinic visits, both as a pharmacist and as someone whose best friend and brother was about to die, the experience and understanding of death are different in these scenarios. Losing my brother felt a lot different from losing a patient with whom I had no relationship. With the persona “Malik” who is too young to understand death, cancer cells on a scan are no more haunting than a constellation of stars. For the doctor in the poem, who has a better understanding of the nature of cancer and the risk of mortality but still lacks the context of what cancer means to that particular patient, the platitudes he gives are “ceremonial.” And for the wife and father, it means much more. They all are witnessing death but producing radically different reactions. I wanted to juggle, as with, physical cameras, the proximity to death because I believe clarity is achieved not only with nearness. Sometimes the outlines, boundaries, and exceptions can only be properly viewed when you are far removed from an event.
But I wasn’t just writing from an investigative standpoint, it was cathartic. I had to revisit the many losses I had witnessed from diagnosis to departure. And it was not a pleasant experience.
C.E-O: In your poetry, you often explore the theme of familial relationships. I am particularly interested in the poem “Cancer Wards.” What role do you think family plays in shaping identity?
F.A: I don’t particularly explore this within the chapbook, but I do talk about it in one of my poems “Love Refrains.” Family and familial relationships play the most significant role in shaping our identities because family is mostly what we have in our formative years. There is a study that identified certain “risk factors” as regards dysfunctional parenting and how it affects the quality of life of the child. There is a common saying that “hurt people hurt people” and this is true. One of the interesting things that this study shows is that even when the child lives a relatively risk-free life—does not drink or smoke etcetera—the quality of life and life expectancy of the child is still significantly impacted by parental absence or abuse. So yes, I think family plays an indispensable role in shaping our identities; so much harm could be done that non-familial communities would struggle and sometimes fail to undo the damage done by dysfunctional families.
C.E-O: The tension between hope and despair is palpable in “He Reads a Cancer Booklet.” How do you balance these themes in your writing, and what message do you hope to convey about the human experience in the face of adversity?
F.A: My poetry is more descriptive than it is prescriptive. To quote the German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin, “it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation.” I’d like to contextually interpret this as keeping the story void of strong recommendations. I toe a relatively neutral but logical line as regards things that pertain to faith—in this case, hope. I don’t particularly think I want to convey a message either to persuade or dissuade people from holding on to hope in the face of adversity. If anything, my poetry is an inquisition on why people hope and why people persevere against all odds. I, too, am in search of an answer as to whether hope can severely alter the course of lives or if it just prolongs suffering. I think “If One Must Hope’ describes my stance perfectly.
C.E-O: In “Fission,” you mention “the body limping against its own walls”—what does this phrase reveal about the struggle between life and death in your writing?
F.A. In this poem, I specifically include the word entropy which, in chemistry is a state of freedom and disorder—to introduce the concept of death as a natural function of the body and how the body, by design, yearns for fragmentation. The Michael Dickman quote which introduces the poem, to some extent, highlights this notion. Functions like apoptosis (“cells chugging on their suicide vesicles”) and other phenomena proves the existence of this phenomenon. And contrastingly, the body’s immune system and other features that battle to preserve life exist in contrast to the body’s desire for death. And similarly, for anyone with a chronic illness, there is a longing for wellness that co-exists with a yearning for an end to suffering by means of death. During my clinic rotations, I watched some patients discharged against medical advice because they were tired; one could say that for them their desire for death superseded their willingness to get well. I also witnessed the opposite happen a number of times—patients burning through their savings, their families and friends’ savings just for a fraction of a chance at life. So I think I attempt to emphasize the existence of this struggle throughout the collection.
C.E-O: The poems in this chapbook are powerful and haunting. As one who also lost his father to cancer, I would like to say that in the poem “The Last Smoke,” there’s a strong contrast between the father’s past life and his current condition. How did you approach portraying this transformation in the poem?
F.A: I am deeply sorry that you had to witness such a profound loss.
There is a gap between the state of father in “He Reads a Cancer Booklet” and in “The Last Smoke.” There is a lot that has happened between these two poems. In the earlier poems, there is still some chance that he could survive, there is some amount of hope to latch onto. In “The Last Smoke”, the father persona is faced with the certainty of his demise and there isn’t much to be hopeful about. As with depression, a symptom of despair can be crankiness and self-centeredness. I guess that’s in part what I try to portray here. But really, what I wanted to portray is his desperation to find something positive to be excited about even while faced with his impending demise.
C.E-O: In “I Watch You Disappear,” you observe the gradual decline of a loved one through the lens of illness, exploring the physical and emotional impact of dying. The poem vividly portrays the transformation of the body as cancer spreads, likening the process to a cosmic event with “smaller stars” igniting within. In what ways do you believe witnessing a loved one’s decline shapes the relationship between memory and loss?
F.A: Well this isn’t an easy question to answer because there are several nuances to understanding the relationship between witnessing death or loss and memory. The human brain has a “negative bias” with regard to memory. So, traumatic events are usually remembered in detail compared to happy or quotidian events. It is a defense mechanism against reoccurrence of pain or traumatic stress. This “negative bias” can be so dominant that it impacts even the happier memories and it becomes nigh impossible to have solely good memories without associating them with the pain of the loss. Contrastingly, the mind has a mechanism for “deleting” memories that come with significant emotional stress— “psychogenic retrograde amnesia.” But the latter is less common. And of course, it also depends on how early in life this happens, for a child who cannot process the complexities of emotions, emotional memory would be way different than for an adult.
C.E-O: Are there African poets who are of interest to you? How did they shape or influence your writing process?
F.A: This would be a long list. Gbenga Adeoba is my biggest inspiration as a poet. In fact, this chapbook is addressed to him in the poem “Preface to My Living.” Olajide Salawu, Kechi Nomu, Adedayo Agarau, Gbenga Adesina, Logan February. And a poet of African descent—Megan Fernandes. Every child learns to speak by imitating the words of their parents. My earlier poetry was imitations or responses to their poetry and they have shaped my language. But I think growth as a poet comes with learning to sound like yourself and not your inspirations. So, my recent work has been geared towards finding my own voice and style.
Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto is an Igbo and Nigerian poet, fiction and nonfiction writer, and essayist, exploring the themes of culture, religion, lineage, ancestry, divination (dibia afa), post-colonialism, migration and the complexities of existence. His full- length poetry collection, The Naming, will be out on December 1, 2025 with African Poetry Book Fund via Nebraska press. The Naming explores the movements, excesses, and extremes of existing as a postmodern individual, connecting these experiences to familial ancestry and lineage.