‘to us you return’
Hasti and Oluwaseun Olayiwola review a poignant and illuminating debut, navigating its explorations of community and hope in the face of loss
Hasti, Oluwaseun Olayiwola
Hasti: Where should we start? Adam is bookended with biblical references: the first poem is called ‘The Garden’ and the final poem, ‘Man’, ends with ‘everybody say amen’. So the entire collection is a prayer, but it’s also working through the Genesis myth. And then, in ‘Rewilding’ Odubanjo writes: ‘people mistook this for a riddle’. I feel like these poems mean what they say; they’re clever, they’re witty, but they’re not tricking you.
Oluwaseun Olayiwola: It’s interesting you say that, because it reminds me of how Nigerian culture really values its proverbs. A proverb isn’t a riddle, because a riddle tries to hide what it means, and then the engagement is the work of trying to unpack it – whereas a proverb is meant, in a beautifully earnest way. So, if we look at that first line, ‘it was the rainy season so it rained’ (‘The Garden’), there’s a comforting wisdom that makes its way through a lot of these poems. I think of it especially in poems like ‘Bronze Adam of Benin’, which is a series of commands: ‘if walking through your home as the day becomes itself / you find the bed of your only son empty do not panic.’
H: There’s a generosity in the urge to create these proverbs – these directions, these commandments – to at least try to make life easier for people. To write into something that doesn’t really have an answer.
OO: I guess one way of thinking about religion is as a set of instructions on how to live. And London has its own kind of manual as a place, a way in which Black boys grow up here.
H: Also, musically, the collection offers a kind of cultural education. An initiation into a community that he didn’t get a chance to be in.
OO: Yes. All the many Adams. I think ‘London Is the Place for Me’ is where we really get that sense of what could have been:
cruising and reclining in old albion trafficating through the big city […] every ting na double double everything london […]
H: ‘London Is The Place For Me’, that’s a Windrush song by Lord Kitchener, capturing that tension between the dreams of what could be and the reality. In ‘Reload’, Odubanjo writes: ‘re / membering him’. It’s like the collection is a way of putting Adam back together, back to life. In the sequence ‘You: the Many Adams of Adam’, the first poem starts: ‘you were a boy. i was a boy’. You can almost hear the shock in its directness. You were only a boy. I was a boy too, once.
OO: Yes, because Adam isn’t just a persona, right? It’s an avatar. ‘you were a boy. i was a boy’. The poem is almost split. There’s a lot of bifurcation, binary, symmetry across the book.
H: In a recent piece in The Poetry Review, Zakia Carpenter-Hall speaks about this symmetry, which shows up in the division of the contents page: the poem titles and page numbers are formatted into two columns, with the empty space between them resembling a river. Because rivers can be quite magical things: crossing them can be a moment of transformation.
I love this line near the end of this sequence: ‘for us you are / to us you return’. Obviously, there’s an echo of the biblical phrase, ‘for dust you are, and to dust you shall return’, but it also reminds me of something that I heard John Ashbery did in his poems, which is to replace a familiar word in a phrase with one that sounds similar, so you think of both at the same time. It feels like this book is written with love for Adam, and all the Adams: young Black boys, African boys, migrant boys growing up in London. Welcoming, bringing them into a community, a brotherhood, a family, a friendship. Because the speaker is addressing what could be different people: ‘it’s been a hot minute since we’ve seen you’; ‘you call and i’m there’. ‘Adam’ and the speaker feel like old friends.
OO: The word ‘Eve’ never comes up, which is interesting because we’re used to that pairing: Adam and Eve. Of course, Adam was the name given to this boy whose body was found in the Thames, wearing a pair of orange girls’ shorts. And I think that’s one of the harrowing things. Adam and Eve aren’t symbols of gender bifurcation in this collection. ‘Adam’ isn’t represented as a prime progenitor whose counterpoint would be Eve, a spawned original sinner. Rather, gender is stitched more obliquely through the vulnerability of ‘Adam’ as child, deceased, and wearing girls’ shorts.
It is significant that these were orange girls’ shorts on a Black boy, because the mind starts to make its own inferences. How did that boy get into the water? Who put him there? Who dressed him in girls’ shorts? Did he dress himself? I wouldn’t say that gender is the biggest aspect of this book, but it is there.
H: I actually don’t know if this is relevant or not, but I did read one of these poems quite queerly: ‘Shorts Weather’. It’s got so much love in it. Of course, it could just be that the weather’s hot, and so the poem is hot.
OO: Yes. I mean, we don’t know the gender of the addressee. And again, I think it’s deliberate. Because it could have been a ‘she’ if he’d wanted it to be. One of the few women in the book is ‘Mama Adam’, in a poem of the same name, which also ends with ‘the boy they called mother’.
I want to go back to ‘You: The Many Adams of Adam’ and how Odubanjo continually faces the atrocity of the act. Because sometimes it feels like the registers don’t vary enough, and I asked myself: why is that an issue for me? Then I realised that maybe it’s not that simple. Because my instinct would be to consider ‘Adam’ from every angle, and to imagine myself as him, imagine the family that lost him, imagine him as the person who put him in there. But then I thought: what if the mind of the poet trying to process the atrocious act is enough? How does a human, as spectator, as artist, as creator, deal with that?
I don’t think the speaker is in disbelief, but just because you can comprehend something happening doesn’t mean there isn’t shock over the fact that it happened. And for me, that’s why so many of the titles have Adams, why so many of them have a similar tone.
H: Like the collection is trying to process it?
OO: Yes, trying to process it. As opposed to saying, okay, I understand this. Now, I’m gonna come at it, from point A, B, C, D, and at the end of it, it’s been completely excavated, and now we ‘get it’. One of the things I find interesting about the book as a whole is that the word ‘boy’ comes up a lot, but as you’ve pointed out, it ends with the poem ‘Man’. So there’s this kind of movement from boyhood to manhood; or from innocence to jadedness, clarity; or maybe naivety to understanding. A coming of age.
H: Yes, because ‘Man’ stands by itself at the end as well. It’s like the fruit of knowledge that you can’t go back from, you can’t unknow.
OO: What kind of influences do you see? Because sometimes it’s helpful to locate the work, and I found it very difficult to know what kind of poets to compare this work to.
H: There were definitely more musical references that I picked up on: some explicit, like the ‘Migraine Skank’ lyrics in the poem ‘Genesis’, and elsewhere in the more rhythmic, songlike quality of the poems.
OO: I remember hearing Gboyega read, which was always a very transcendent experience. He had a huge knowledge of British music. And so there is a sonic quality to these poems that maybe isn’t natural to my ear, being an American, but I loved it. I think that is one level on which to consider this collection: as an album. There doesn’t have to be a typical narrative arc.
H: Like a concept album.
OO: Yes, rather than a particular kind of poetry collection which might take us from A to B to C. It keeps re-articulating what feels like a musical recapitulation, a kind of motif that keeps coming back into the different tracks, rather than finished and closed chapters of a book.
H: That’s exactly how I feel about it. You can hear a voice in the poems. You can hear someone speaking, or singing. And I know you said you thought that the register doesn’t shift a lot, but I really think it does: it leaps between codes and registers, especially in poems like ‘Arrangements’. You can hear the music.
OO: I thought a lot about Lucille Clifton, because the shorter poems are stronger for me, and remind me of her work. Clifton was known for writing her poems between moments: she had children, she had to write when she had the time, on napkins or scraps of paper. That’s why a lot of her poems are tightened. What she was able to do in those short poems was say something very plainly, in a way that you could reread over and over and still get different interpretations each time. Her lines tend to be short. She was also known for not using capital letters and having very little punctuation. In a parallel way, there are only periods in Adam; there aren’t any commas in the whole book.
H: It makes me think of the impact of a poet’s life in and between their poems as well. The only collection I’ve read of Clifton’s is How to Carry Water, the selected poems, with the foreword by Aracelis Girmay. I want to pull out this short section from the foreword:
So then what is water? What can it be? The element. Daily, ordinary, enduring. Extraordinary, shiftful, expansive. A word for what one is thirsty for. Desire. What can quench. What can be swum and what cannot be swum. The Atlantic. Middle Passages. The distance between this and that. That which cannot be held for long in bare hands but can be carried. The sky, the river, the rain. Knowing and unknowing. Ancestral. Elder, our singular and plural and going on.
Girmay goes on to describe a short conversation she has with a young man who says he loves Clifton’s work: she finds out afterwards that his name is River.
The language in this collection is very liquid as well. It keeps running over: a kind of syntax play. So often you think the statement is ending, but it keeps going, like water falling. These themes run through Adam, too. The rain, the river, ancestry, the proverbial knowing and unknowing, trauma around the history of the Middle Passage, the violence of colonialism, trade routes, borders, forced migration. It makes me think of M NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! as well. I keep coming back to ‘Genesis’: ‘give man sea and sky and trees / and zones one to six on the oyster so man can see it’.
Extraordinary, shiftful, expansive. There’s still so much more to say.
Hasti is a poet and writer living in South East London. They won the 2023 White Review Poet’s Prize and the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry.
Oluwaseun Olayiwola is a poet, critic, and choreographer based in London. His debut collection Strange Beach was published in January 2025 by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and Soft Skull Press (US).
The Gboyega Odubanjo Foundation has been set up in memory of Gboyega, to support low-income black writers and honour him.
