Funmi Gaji

On Ambivalence and Circumvention
by
Jumoke Verissimo

Some years ago, my younger brother tried to introduce me to a friend of his. He explained that beyond being a student in the department of English where I graduated from, this friend of his also shared my passion for poetry. For some reason, I never got to meet my brother’s poetry-loving friend physically or talk to her on phone, until Facebook happened. It made it possible for the friend, whom I got to know as Funmi Gaji, and I, to become virtual acquaintances. I was soon introduced to her poems on social media and a few blogs and magazines.

On reading her poetry, I discovered that her writing inserts personal conversation into the public space and traces personal meditations as the fear and doubt of the collective. This is still evident in poems in The Script of Bruises. In this book, Funmi interrogates subjection with an understanding of one who has learnt to read the silence of the distressed. Her poetry moves between the simple struggles of being, of locating self in the din of selfhood, to emerging into something that seeks to be recognised. There is a curiosity in her writing. She is writing to know more than normalized, to navigate a world that spits out people it does not recognise. In her curiosity, she asks the reader to learn and know this world with her. She imposes on the reader an implicitness. So that they can as well be vulnerable, imperfect and filled with doubts like the personas in her poetry. From writing the battered woman, a disoriented world, an unassured self into her poetry, Funmi populates her poems with us. She creates poetry with a function, which is to navigate the space of in-betweenness, where the reader and poet can decide to move forward or stay around introspecting possibilities that can arise from a new knowledge of what it means to be vulnerable. Funmi also employs dissonant phrases to capture the dilemma of being woman (or not woman), as well as the miasmatic violence of living today which is both physical and psychological at the same time. In all, one might say that her word choice and imageries, though sometimes jarring, are significant enough to be called her capital.

In the poem Collage, for instance, Funmi uses dissimilar parallels to pry normative disregard for violent acts of racism, bigotry, and terrorism, and our furtherance of narcissism.

You can make out voices in the din
How does London Bridge fare?
How does my afro hold up?

This is a collection of poems from a poet that will grow if she persists. She is requesting that we journey with her. Perhaps, in enjoying her pastiche of Wole Soyinka’s Telephone Conversation in the poem In Conversation with a Lagos Landlord we can claim her self-doubt as an assurance of attentiveness and curiosity, where something must emerge.

Ultimately, I write this introduction with immense joy and with the hope that Funmi’s poetry would never arrive at that point where she stops seeking to know. I also hope you will enjoy reading these poems that spring from lines of ambivalence and circumvention.

Jumoke Verissimo is the author of A Small Silence which won the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize and was a finalist for the RSL Ondaatje prize shortlist and the Edinburgh Festival First Book Award. Her first poetry collection, i am memory which was published in 2008 to wide acclaim, won the Carlos Idzia Ahmad Prize, second prize for the Anthony Agbo Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the Association of Nigeria Authors Prize.