Our Collective Body Remembers: A Dialogue with Jumoke Verissimo
OUR COLLECTIVE BODY REMEMBERS
A DIALOGUE WITH JUMOKE VERISSIMO
Jumoke Verissimo is a poet and novelist living in Toronto. She is the author of two well-recognised collections: i am memory and The Birth of Illusion, both published in Nigeria and nominated for different awards, including the Nigerian Prize for Literature. Her most recent novel, A Small Silence, received critical acclaim and was nominated for several awards, including the Edinburgh Festival First Book Award and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. It won the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize. Her writing explores traumatic re/constructions of everyday life and its intersection with gender, focusing on themes of love, loss, and hope. She currently teaches Creative Writing at Toronto Metropolitan University.
BY NKATEKO MASINGA
This conversation took place between Canada and South Africa, via email.
Nkateko: Hi, Jumoke. I am honoured to be having this conversation with you. Two years ago, I presented a proposal for a paper titled “The Italicisation of the Mother Tongue as Self-Betrayal” at Samespraak, an online seminar on translingual and multilingual poetics. One of the texts that influenced my thinking about this topic was your Literary Hub essay, titled “On the Politics of Italics”. My research question was whether or not a bilingual writer who writes in English (or for an English audience) commits an act of self-betrayal by italicising words in their mother tongue. I enjoyed your conceptualisation of the term “bifocal monolingualism” using the analogy of a person with double vision.
As yours was one of the first few texts that I consulted on the topic, what you wrote about “the promiscuous yet suspicious nature of the English language for foreignness” encouraged me to find and highlight the perspectives of bi- and multilingual African writers who have turned down publishing opportunities that would have required them to perform the reverential bow of italicising words in their indigenous languages and mother tongues, while also holding space for the view that using italics is a demonstration of lingual hybridity as an existential state and an assertion of personhood, as you do in your piece. Has your stance on italicisation remained unchanged since the publication of that essay?
Jumoke: Okay, I think I should first thank you for engaging with my work, and reading it with so much care. Honestly, I have thought about it quite deeply and still retain my stance on the use of italics in my writing. I understand that many writers who insist on blending their indigenous words/language with English are doing so from the perspective of performing identity on the page. The idea that italics emphasise foreignness. I think it is, in a sense, like a dismantling of language.
Actually, I came across this poem by Alice Te Punga Somerville, titled “how to write while colonised” and it is all about this argument of italicising or not italicising that we are talking about, but she inverts the idea, of the language that is considered foreign. So she writes about this advice she got, a well-meaning one, as she writes, that asks her to italicise foreign words. She took the advice, and italicised the English language. I found it quite humorous in her poetry, as she makes the argument about power clear, and quite loud too. I want to think that arguments like the one she makes through her poem have validity, and I recognise how italicising indigenous languages in English feels like performing identity and all what not. I also hear, clearly, the argument that italicising reads like othering, but I want to first establish why I think many people resist not italicising to make the argument for why I continue to do so.
I want to say that my first response to why I continue to italicise Yorùbá words is that, in the first instance, the idea of speaking, learning and reading in English, is in itself a form of disruption, and control. To speak and be taught in English, is itself an “othering,” which is the argument made with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s decision to write only in indigenous languages, like Gĩkũyũ, to break free from colonial subjugation that is embedded in colonial languages.
But honestly, I admire the desire to sustain our indigenous languages, but we also all understand the complexities of that, when our own nations have the colonial language as the official language. It is in the same vein that I would say that I am not sure that simply blending indigenous words into the English language, decolonises it. The idea of removing the italics to create discomfort, feels quite artificial in my opinion. It is pretending that the tension does not exist, and I see that in itself as a form of erasure, that should highlight what needs to be felt. The discomfort is in the gesturing, rather than the blending in, in my opinion.
The other thing is that when I write in English, I write as someone who is bilingual. When I do not italicise my indigenous language in English, does it make Yorùbá less foreign? To write in the English language is to already exert power, because I make it lean and stoop to my worldview, I re-construct, I reinvent the language, I introduce my seeing into it, I am not writing English English. I am writing in an English that is beaten into shape, and by this I mean, the shape of my worldview and my own indigenous experiences. It can follow the rules of the language, but you should be able to hear my indigenous language in it. I am writing one that recognises the many shades of me. I am not writing to blend in, I am writing to be seen, not to be tokenised. I am not a stain on anyone’s white shirt. I am there to jar your lobes into acknowledging that I exist, that I am present. I am saying, see me in this world that I occupy, different from yours.
I mean, we acknowledge differences, like we do when we speak, we enunciate differences in our accent. In the first instance, to introduce my language is itself resistance. I am not employing a linguistic polemic performance at the risk of my own evolving understanding of my own identity, and blending my language does not highlight all the world I carry. I mean, the French are as colonialist as they come, but in the English language their words are also italicised. If French is not diminished when it is italicised, why should the idea that using italics for Yorùbá, my own indigenous language, diminish it?
I mean, many of us have encountered comments like, “you speak English so well” from people who expect us not to. I really usually do not know what to do with that statement. But, I get that the expectation is to disappear, we are not meant to be seen in the room, to lower our voice. In the first instance, we are not expected to be seen at all. When I use Italics it is to own the tools–which is what writing creatively is about–and make it completely mine. What I resist doing is explaining those words in a way that settles its meaning for the Western gaze.
If Italics recognises and centres and signifyin(g) my difference (to borrow the theoretical thinking of Louis Henry Gates) in the text then it is fine, because I in essence also make it uncontainable. But when I begin to do in-text explanations, glossaries or there’s a request to do so, even when the words are blended into English, then, there is a problem. When I italicise and refuse to explain, I am already achieving the cultural displacement that I want, and the reader is left to grapple with the idea of how even with the rules of language, I have ensured it remains a site of political struggle. And if the argument for italicising them remains about creating discomfort and not coddling the reader, or even displacing them culturally, the story I tell already does that.
I don’t know if I have answered the question. But, the short answer is, I am still using Italics for Yorùbá words in my writing.
“Our collective body remembers so many things, but lives like it does not remember or it is meant to forget, because that is what it means to survive.”
Nkateko: Oh, absolutely. The authority with which you asserted your stance, both in the LitHub essay and in your response to my question, is precisely what I feel the world is losing in this era of artificial intelligence. We need thinkers; writers like you, who hold firmly to a stance, defending it with clarity and conviction. Even the statement, “When I italicise and refuse to explain”, arrives four paragraphs into a masterclass. This is the knowledge that I am in pursuit of. I will take the long answers any day. I live for them.
In your What Sparks Poetry feature, “Language as Form”, you wrote about the inadequacies of Western poetic form in attempting to articulate a non-Western trauma. I reflected on that, and on the Kamau Brathwaite quote that you shared, “the hurricane does not roar in pentameter”, as I read your response above. Your literary corpus embodies the essence of craft as rupture and form as reinvention. What does it mean to be an artist, committed to experimentation and honouring the creative process, in a world that glorifies fast consumption?
Jumoke: I am thinking, yes, craft as rupture and form as invention–I like that very much. Actually, form and structure are quite important to me, and when I write the question I ask is, is this the best genre to capture this subject, is this the best way, and by way I am thinking of structure, of form, of process. And as I have mentioned, process, I want to lean into the “craft as rupture” that you have mentioned. I think of craft as process, which is essentially about the choices you are making, the techniques you decide to use for the idea, how you want to write a story, what structure or form works for a poem, which is why I always ask myself those questions I have mentioned when I write.
I teach a writing class, “Creativity, Writing and Everyday life,” and like every teacher today, I know my students are tempted to depend on AI, but I love to think that I find a way to convince them to look inwards, at least first. To develop their craft using their own personal experiences. So we excavate the personal and the everyday, from creativity as a fundamental need, the chaos of the everyday life and how it plays into the writing, and of course play, memory and walking along other things that they do not think about deeply. My point is, I try to bring them to the idea of process as something they already encounter in their everyday life and how that can be redirected to how they explore traditional forms and invention of form in their own writing.
I teach my process, along with other writers I study to my students, who also I think explore the idea of bricolage, as a concept, and the combinatorial knowledge, the ways in which knowledge is a network that stacks up. The importance of reading, listening and paying attention to things. To be an artist therefore, is all of these things. It is about the process of the work and my own becoming. Every writing changes me, and my greatest fear is to write a work that would take me away totally from what I envision myself to be in the future. I hope, always hope it is going to be for the better.
Writing is as much a process and if I therefore arrive at experimentation in the course of the work, then so be it. But as my idea changes, as I am “inspired”—and I say inspired with a small voice—I know that I may have to do the work in ways that are totally alien to the things I have learnt in the past. I do see that as a strength though, I think it means I keep learning new things, or understanding things better. There’s wisdom, there’s knowledge, but understanding and clarity is what matters the most. My writing, and the decisions or choices I made in my writing aims to do this, and if I have learnt anything, it takes time to be understood and to understand things, but when it happens, it deconstructs and it demystifies.
Regarding consumption, the world is all about itself, sadly. It is essentially why as a writer the process is important, because as you learn about craft and improve on it, you also reshape your mind as a writer, and your whole self as someone who can be a better human. Beyond mastery, beyond competency, if you are in the arts, if you are a writer, you decided long ago to enter into the realms of those who see beyond the obvious. Why, in the first instance, would anyone want to throw the process away and lean only on a finished work, which essentially without process, is nothing but product?
The process of finding the right form that would evolve the thinking, the genre, the right word, of deleting and encountering and re-encountering, is in fact the most important part of writing. The horror of writing a work and rewriting it all over again, to fall in love with it again is an emotion that no machine can invent. I have to say that without process, we will be thrown, slowly and increasingly into a world without thinking. The actual writing is the process, I have to emphasise, honestly. Nothing is new, yes, but whatever comes across as new is from the process of reinventing what is available. It is how we reinvent what we read, and even ourselves. It is what makes the humanities, the humanities. Process is everything in writing, it is what we live for, it is how I, as a writer, arrive at my answers.
Nkateko: “Whatever comes across as new is from the process of reinventing what is available.” That is profound. When I began reading your latest poetry collection, Circumtrauma, I was taken back to my own version of “what is available”, in the form of a memory from my final year of high school: My cousin-sister, who is a year older than myself, was in her first year of university pursuing a qualification in IT. She was living with us for the duration of her studies, so I got to see what she was working on as all of her schoolwork was on the home computer. There was a folder on the desktop named Dev C++.
When I read “From Source to Scar”, I remembered my cousin explaining the code from that folder to me. The ‘include’ directive for ‘past country’ made me emotional. Line by line, I was retrieving memories of how to interpret what was written while another part of my brain was accepting each command. This poem made me think of how our brains are the original computers, and that our brains write the code. I fell in love with code all over again, similar to how I felt the first time I read a poem titled “Map Home”, by Fatimah Asghar, which is in the form of a crossword puzzle.
Do you remember when you fell in love with code, and with form?
Jumoke: Thank you again. At a festival I attended, the host mentioned the same thing, and said he even imputed the code into the computer to see the outcome. I am not going to claim to have fallen in love with coding, but rather, I would say, I fell in love with it as a syntax that conveys the shape of the writing I imagined to carry the emotions of a poem that needed more than the language I was writing in.
And, on how it came to be. I had written a draft of the original work while completing my PhD. I then started teaching and editing the work with my editor, Jordan Abel, who also explores experimental poetry in his works. I was exploring and trying to make sense of coding, but honestly didn’t understand it. Anyway, one of my undergraduate students who is a computer student doing a minor in English was in my poetry class. He wrote a poem that used this repetitive device, not exactly coding, but employing the blocks and backlash in a loop using the Visual Studio Code. We got talking and I told him about the poetry collection I was working on and how I was struggling with employing the right code, and asked if he would be interested in being a part of the process.
So, since Peter was already interested in blending his computer knowledge with his love for poetry, he was enthusiastic about it. He suggested materials I could explore and I tried my hands on a few, and eventually landed where the poem that was published landed. I asked him if he would like to work as my Research Assistant, and he was quite instrumental in providing clarity and a deeper understanding of what I was “coding” in the sense that I envisioned. He also expressed a deepened knowledge in how the aesthetics of his work can be blended into his poetry.
I introduced him to a few poets who employed computerisation and invented forms in their writing, which returns to the idea of the combinatorial creativity I always tell them about. Together, we explored different apps, but eventually settled for the same application, the Visual Code I mentioned, which allows us to explore different programming languages, (C++, Java or Python). In some instances, we had to break the rules of the languages, because coding is like learning a new language and it has strict rules, but I am a writer, and I know that to make my “message” come through, I need to break some rule. We worked on that poem using Google Drive and documents.
So I began with the words, with the intent to capture the device and struggle of the digital struggle of the war. How does one capture the ongoing war that has extended into the digital space, if not in the language of the digital space? It also was a good blend with the cut-up poetry approach that I was working with in the other poems, which speaks to the fragmentation of memory, along with the use of the indigenous framework of the Ifa Corpus, which encourages the infinity and space that we can make for traumatic narratives that are yet to be heard.
I consider working on those poems with Peter as a teaching moment for me, even beyond the writing of the book, as I have evolved into viewing teaching, like writing, a collaborative and symbiotic relationship that does not diminish the student’s own ability to see beyond themselves, but helps what is hidden to emerge into its full form. Anyway, the teacher became a student on that poem, and vice versa.
Nkateko: Thank you for sharing the intricacy of your process with me. I am also interested in finding out about the emotions that this journey brought up for you. You speak of the Nigeria-Biafra war as ongoing, and I know that is a sentiment shared by survivors and their children alike. I feel the same way about Apartheid in the context of my own home country, South Africa. The rest of the world moves on but we carry the trauma, the recollections and the pain to our graves and beyond. During the Q&A segment at a seminar on Apartheid, Colonialism and Slavery at the University of South Africa earlier this year, I was asked about Black rest; whether it exists or not, and if it does, how and when we can claim it. My response was that Black people do not rest, even in the afterlife. This notion of no rest came back to me when I read the preface of Circumtrauma, in which you write that “the conflict has stayed on the bodies of even the unborn”.
When the narrators in your poems speak of “our body”, “our blood” and “our brothers”, I can relate to that expression of collective trauma and grief. The ache is eternal, it seems. We are born into it and it persists beyond our deaths. Is there a way out? Do you believe that writing about the Nigeria-Biafra war, particularly in the way in which you have done it, can provide a code for the unborn and those who are here, still too young to understand but raised in the digital age, to someday understand and quantify the devastating impact on the lives of their parents and grandparents?
Jumoke: Yes, I look at the war from the traumatic event it is, but first to answer your question I honestly do not know if there’s a way out, in the sense of wiping out that memory. We can’t unmake the past. Also, I think that would be devastating to forget. Forgetting is its own kind of sorrow. But, what I am wondering, in line with your question, is how we can remember in a way that prises open the emotions in our stories and allows our vulnerability to become our strength, and a place from which we can make meanings that matter as it should, for us. Like, what do we encode in the stories we share about these traumatic events? We also have to come with the understanding that not all stories get an opportunity to be shared, which is one of the problems here. There are so many sides to an event and every story is important, and for the survivor, that itself is horrible to know. In what ways can knowing become a light for our dark places, the one we do not even know we hold, the inherited stories in the silences of parents who have lost the world to share their past?
Unfortunately, there are more suppressed stories of survivors, and these survivors are layered, because what they have transferred to the generation unborn is the silence that their grievance inhabits. I think the question you ask is about figuring out how to make stories of what is left unsaid and handed down to the generations unborn. There are complexities to these things, and in the case of the war, I am not Biafra (by this I mean the Igbo, the larger ethnic group in the region, along with the smaller ethnic groups in that region), neither was I born during the war, but the war is significant to Nigerians. It comes with understanding or trying to make sense of the double sorrow of those from minority ethnic groups, caught in the middle, between the federal side and the dominant Igbo. It comes with the sense of betrayal by the Igbo, who were the largest ethnic groups on the Biafran side. A sense of betrayal becomes valid in the transmission of stories, the anger of the smaller ethnic groups who still do not recognise how they should see themselves in the war, some will say they were pulled into, is also valid.
It comes into how what was experienced was transmitted, stories or silences or actionable emotions that construct how we relate with one another. It comes with the feeling of confusion by other ethnic groups that became a part of the war, because if they are not seceding then then they belong to the ethnic group. The war has been fought, but the idea of how and what we are meant to do with all we hold with our emotions and do not have a way to narrate into stories, the names of how we can deal with ourselves is perhaps why the war lingers, and I honestly do not know if there’s an end to that, but to ask that we remember, we share stories, and we also remember to listen to even the difficult ones. Especially, as you say, “the rest of the world look on,” and label our struggle to make sense of all of our dysfunction, or whatever we choose to call it. But we carry all of these handed-down negative emotions because we have not told the stories handed down to us, stories that evolve further and encounter other postcolonial problems, such that it even becomes so complex to read what the problems are even as we have more platforms and tools to speak about them.
I guess it is at this point that I can connect the idea of the Black rest, and why it is problematic. We are always in a state of survival, how then can we rest? The idea of assuming that it is conceivable is unimaginable, considering the superficial complexity I have established with that just one war, along with the other problems we have inherited as Black people. In the case of South Africa, the legacy of apartheid is written on the bodies and there’s an unending state of distrust and paranoia. Think about the different spaces in the West, the Black body is surveilled, at the airport is material and symbolic suspicion of the immoral. The battle is to continue the battle of a body that does not recognise that word, rest. Again, I ask, how can we rest? Perhaps, there’s an aspiration towards rest, and a continuous expression of holding that space as accountable to a future we envision. I do not know if the rest is near us, though. But then again, I should first say that, maybe it is not that the idea of rest is not possible, it is the idea of a collective rest, because our collective body remembers so many things, but lives like it does not remember or it is meant to forget, because that is what it means to survive.
Nkateko: The notion of “our collective body” is particularly beautiful in the context of all the people who have been instrumental in the creation of Circumtrauma, whether directly or indirectly. The body of work that resulted from the process you described is deeply personal but also collective. It resonates with me, and I am certain that other Africa in Dialogue readers will feel the same way when they read the book. There is something incredibly sacred about the poems, that every time I want to extract a line to quote it I feel as if I am disturbing a protected plant. Lines such as “blood like plastic flowers decorates the front of our house/s”; lines that stay with me, that haunt me long after I have closed the book, have been a gift to me as I have conversed with the person behind the masterpieces. It has been an honour. Thank you for this book. For the years that you dedicated to it, for the people you trusted with its early and later drafts, and for sharing it with the world. Thank you for making time to have this conversation with me. It has been wonderful to learn from you.
Jumoke: Thank you for your generosity, Nkateko. Thank you for this interview and paying attention to the reading of the poems. My thanks and appreciation for this, and for the work you are doing for literature, for poets, for readers. For the world.
Photo credit for featured image of Jumoke Verissimo: © Cornelia Faith Photography.
Nkateko Masinga is an award-winning South African writer whose poetry has been translated into French, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada and Romanian. Her latest book, Daughter Wound, was published by UK publisher Hazel Press in April 2024 and was named Book of the Week at the London Review Bookshop in the first week of its release.
