Reviewed by Justin Goodman
Read my interview with Adedayo Agaru here: https://compulsivereader.com/2025/08/21/an-interview-with-adedayo-agarau/
The Years of Blood
by Adedayo Agarau
Fordham University Press
September 2025, 96 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1531511616
“What the West considers as speculative is everyday African life.” These words from Adedayo Agarau in his in 2025 interview with CỌ́N-SCÌÒ fittingly mirror Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s famous “surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America.” Everyday African life, as depicted in Agarau’s debut poetry collection The Years of Blood, is a concrete space where “God is somewhere withering in his envelope of silence” – but how to overcome both God’s silence and the West’s speculative consideration? Infliction. In a style diagonal to Ocean Vuong’s arcane confessionalism and Charles Reznikoff’s documentarian ache, Agarau aims to inflict the griefs and hopes of life in Ibadan, during “the years of blood.” You may be asking what years these were? Befitting both the confession and the documentary, both those years “waking up in my own sweat, hallucinating, and reliving the horrors of childhood” (as he says in the Acknowledgments) and the roughly 25 turmoiled years that the Fourth Nigerian Republic has had following the death of military dictator Sani Abacha. Not the accumulation of days, but that uncountable noun that becomes a person, a nation, and a history.
It’s a point that can’t be overstated since Agarau has worked tirelessly to plant Nigerian literary culture on firm ground through the canonizing anthology Memento, work as the Editor in Chief at Agbowo, and co-creation of the UnSerious Collective, something of a poet supergroup with fellowships for emerging Nigerian poets. Central to such work is the building up of a community that, as “God” does in “Fine boy writes a poem about anxiety, “asks me how Nigeria is/who, when I say dáadáa ni,//does not ask what I mean.” This is the unspeakable’s shape in The Years of Blood:
On a sidewalk on 7th street
A dead cat is someone’s petIn Ibadan, a dead cat
Is someone’s grandmother.
Being, whether specifically Nigerian or human more broadly, becomes an apophatic theology. It’s not enough to be when a grandmother can become a dead cat. As such it’s potent that “Fine boy” begins with “miss[ing] everything I worship” from God to girlfriend to grandmother since it connects, anxiously, desire to the bloody transfiguration of grandmother into dead cat. The flirtation of being called a “fine boy,” of being desired, withers into negation. If such dissociating violence is the start and consequence of intimacy, one wonders what being together could ever look like.
“This trembling is/not without a destination,” the “fine boy” reassures. This is as good a description of the arc of this collection as any — beginning with harrowing understatements such as “a father of four intact bodies” (“Wind”) and “And like phrases, their bodies,/an incomplete sentence” (“We daydreamed of angels”), the reader discovers the controlled burn hope of “teach death about itself, wreck the ship in everyone’s grief” (“On Joy”) before finally settling uneasily in the wreckage of “they all go to sleep./We all go to sleep” in “Litany in which my father returns home safely at night.” And as is implied by the via negative of saying “not” without a destination instead of the positive affirmation of a destination, this ends the collection on a tentative, tender, and yet, ever tremulous note. Where Agarau is at his peak he’s entirely de/realizing. Words like light switches, “Intact bodies” turn happy fatherhood into an anti-morgue; small gestures, the sister surrendering a couch, the mother putting the brother to bed before “they…we all go to bed,” invert the abstraction of fathered “bodies” into the father returning to beings actively becoming a “we.”
Where Agarau stutters, you might imagine, he stutters on the same prowess with language. In “Arrival” he writes that “fireflies eulogize the algorithms of home/in the dream” and in “The Dark” he writes “the aperture, the neck of focus,” but, while sonorous, it’s unclear what about the aperture or firefly eulogies are honed by these adornments. “Algorithms” actually pulls the reader away from what a home appears to be in The Years of Blood. It’s not a ruleset with all its proscriptions, but the absence of absence. In the titular poem we are told to “sit in the water. count your fingers. pick the fish. eat [/ ].” These go beyond mere instructions. By subtracting an ingredient, they point the reader towards the act of eating itself — of being a body. The transfiguration of the grandmother into a dead cat is dispelled through this somatic consciousness in the titular and penultimate poem in the insistence that:
what is broken is only a
mirror, the fragment of years spent dreaming. look now,
the trees blossom in the year of blood. what fruit do you
crave?
Here the inflicting voice is redeemed as a damaged reflection, the reality of the trees’ refusal to stop growing (the only things not “hidden in the light of night” in the final poem), and, given the spotlight as the first word of the next line, craving. These are unruly pleasures. If these aren’t sure signs of presence, they are surely signs that at least one is not lost.
Such is the experience of reading The Years of Blood if you can’t read the Yoruba sutured into the poems. While there is a glossary in the book, muddling through the best you can is more rewarding on the first read. It’s in this confusion that the distance between speculation and “everyday African life” is clarified, which the tidal motions of page-turning embodies. Because if Agarau is sonorous (even if too much so at times) it’s above and below these paper waves washing semantics ashore. It’s a precarious place to be, flush against translatability; it’s classically diasporic (In Ocean Vuong’s “Not Even”: “In my language…the word for love is Yêu/and the word for weakness is Yêu/how you say what you mean changes what you say”) to speak for a “we” and be read as a “they.” It’s the interminable borderland, as the one between dreams and wakefulness, I and we, and the horrors of childhood and “reliving the horrors of childhood.” And so Agarau has entered the no-man’s-land where voices “know the hue things by name. the words held inside incantations,” and tries to form the “we.”
About the reviewer: Justin D Goodman (they/them) is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY and a member of the New Haven Writers’ Group. Their work has been published, among other places, in Cleaver Magazine, Prospectus, and Prairie Schooner. You can find more of their work at JustinDGoodman.com