MAKING GESTICULATIONS TO SALAMAVILLE: A Review of Nengak Daniel Gondyi’s Gesticulations on a Bike and Postcards from Salamaville by Oko Owi Ocho

Memories are the vehicles through which we live our past. I am transported to my childhood through the rain and with travelling. There are blanks here and there but sometimes, I find myself there again. In places. Places inhabit the core of our being; they might be somewhere we created in our heads. Sometimes I think that I created the images of my travelling and the nights of rain, too. Nengak Daniel Gondyi’s Postcards from Salamaville explores the magic of places using what I call the McKuenian poetic style; a sort of simple poetry that holds you spellbound. Read Rod McKuen

Can it be wrong?
Lonely rivers
going to the sea
gives themselves
to many brooks passing.

The magic of these lines is a shocking simplicity that makes you ponder. There is a truth in the poem, and even though George Szirtes said poetry cannot be used as evidence in court, it does not strive for the ultimate truth. There is something about “certainties” which when we see them recreated in poetry reminds us of the journey of life, we cannot help but be amazed. This is the style that Gondyi employs in his two books.

Postcards from Salamaville is a collection of twenty short poems of twenty-eight pages. It takes us through the journey of an imaginary place in the poet’s head. Although the place is fictional, the events and everything that happened there are relatable, to some extent, they are possible events that can happen in a post-conflict environment. Gesticulations on a Bike, bigger than the other is a collection of sixty of poems of sixty pages. It explores more complex thematic focus ranging from love, rape, pain, new cultural construct aided by the Internet, and life’s certainties and uncertainties.

The two books not only embody the wandering of the magic of simplicity, the poems are moving on pages and the mind. From the first poem in Postcards from Salamaville, “The Space Between Places” you are already open to evidence of the truth that we possibly don’t give thoughts to daily, and that truth is that there are always spaces between places. The space between Adoka and Ajegunle, or the space between the lonely streets of Makurdi and the noisy towns of Abuja. In the poem, Gondyi asks:

Does another door open?
Is paradise ahead or just Salamaville;
A winding lane towards perdition?
We will never know until we set sail
So we go.

The tone of uncertainty into the journey to Salamaville heralds into packing our bags with the poet persona. We are unsure if another door opens, and as the persona urges, we will never know until we set sail. The remaining parts of the poem are a testament to the ‘reality’ of the persona’s journey in Salamaville.

The destination is a place of unrest, and from the introduction, the author forewarns us that Salamaville is a “recently renamed country which has fought or is still fighting a brutal conflict. The past, present and future of this conflict create the usual environment — victims, refugees, perpetrators, corruption, memories, and lovers… Nothing discussed here exists outside the atlas of my mind” (6). The condition of things that the author introduces is reflected in all the poems, picking on different angles of what happens in places torn by war. Even though the space is created in the poet’s mind.

In “Suing the Dead for Peace” the narrator, subtly and indirectly, tells us about “the pity of war” and how our reconciliation is a jab to the dead: “Before we agree to this peace/Let us crave the indulgence/Of the party more numerous than us -/The dead” and the question that we must ponder is “Are they committed to this ceasefire?” (15) Those killed are gone for good, and this is the sad reality, so why fight in the first place, the author seems to be asking. He further reiterates the agony of war in “Hotel Salamaville”. The language in this poem opens itself to the absurdity of life in a war-torn place. The setting, humans, and objects become a tool in the hands of the author, and the language. Talking of decomposing planes and bodies he states that they are:

A sign for all to see:
Not all who depart arrive
Some who arrive will never depart
The way out is through death (16)

Gesticulations on a Bike is also written in the prostitute language—the argument that poetry should sometimes be a prostitute in its accessibility raised by Niyi Osundare. It takes on a broader theme than the journey through Salamaville, maybe because the persona in there travelled on a plane and here the persona is travelling on a bike where he sees more, and is a part of the soil that he travels through.

This second book appeals to me more, and the reason is that the world here is where the poet does not invite us on a journey. The terrains are familiar and, even the destruction of our cultural memories in the age of postmodernism screams at the tip of the poet’s tongue. In “Stages” the persona shows the timeline of how we live in today’s world. Here is the poem in full:

Eyes wide open
Intense curiosity
Friend request
Effort
Withdrawal
Status posts – philosophy:
All men are scum
Ignored
Blocked (15)

Well, I will add a final line to the poem: “Life ends here”. There is no more accurate description of the social media stages captured in simple words than Gondyi did here. What is more interesting is how fragmented the poems are in a word or two words lines, and this depicts the shallowness of our modern cultural existence. I believe that the language of a good poem opens its body to the ideological pattern of the piece. A travelling poem flows with its language and when the journey is about uncertainty, the genius poet allows the line break to also do the work. The structure of a poem is the traffic warden that controls the work’s movement so that it does not get stuck in a hold-up. And this poem achieves what it sets out to do.

Also, in “Status” the poet shows us how much of our life is lived on social media. The persona begins:

I have viewed your status
But you have to tell me
Else I will keep on going
As before your beady status
Assuming that you love me still
And that all men aren’t scum

He goes on to show us how everything can end on just status: “Our love was, well, status deep/Now muted, you cross my mind” (16).

The collection has poems that cut across different themes like love, revenge, pain, and humorous poems like “Abuja Heat” (61). The collection has discipline and attention in maintaining its simple language. It offers itself to lovers of poetry who would appreciate the tenderness or the roughness of words when the poems require it to be. It also opens itself to people who are just discovering poetry. The two books, although Gondyi’s first appearance, offers something new away from what some critics have called the imitative trends in contemporary Nigerian poetry.

It is also vital to note the inclusion of simple but interesting images in the collection. Although the poems are accessible and does not pose any difficulty in understanding them, but there is a way that the images give life to the poems. In “Abuja Heat”, the way the image designer Idoko Emmanuel recreates the image of logs burning a man, and how this interprets the poet’s words is brilliant.

Although there are poems where the language of poetry was almost burnt at the altar of simplism. When in “Éclair” he writes that “Grumpy Stranger said to me/You know, deep down, and/In each one of us…” (51), one begins to look for the poetry. But besides this bit of tired expression, Gondyi’s Gesticulations on a Bike and Postcards from Salamaville are stirring collections of poetry. It beats the notion that poetry must be bones, Gondyi, like Rod McKuen seems to be saying, poetry can be as fluid as a journey, and soft as meat.