A review of Titilope Adefunke Laniran’s Illusion or Reality? by Moshood Abolore.
Illusion and reality are two phenomena that psychologists have been trying to analyse side by side for more than a century. Illusion has been described as a misrepresentation or fallacy of a “real” sensory stimulus, which is an interpretation that contradicts objective “reality” as defined by conventional wisdom. For example, a child who perceives a dangling white garment in the dark as if it is a ghost may be said to be having an illusion. For an illusion to take place, there must be real external stimuli that leads to an incorrect perception. Reality, on the other hand, is the sum or aggregate of all that is real or existent within a system, as opposed to that which is only imaginary. Using the example of the child above, three things are real, and they are the dangling white garment, the dark and the child. Ghost, which is the wrong thing that the child perceives, is an illusion.
Moreover, in the arts, illusion is a literary device, a false belief that authors often use to trick the reader into believing something untrue. It is the state of being deceived. Reality, on the other hand, is when the author is portraying mundane, everyday experiences as they are in real life – literary realism. When a poet fictionalises both phenomena in a collection of poems, the reader is bound to be transported into the realm of absolute creativity because fiction is connected to illusion and reality.
Illusion or Reality? is a collection of 40 highly expository poems written by Titilope Adefunke Laniran and published in 2022 by OAK Initiative, a publishing arm of OAK Foundation, a charity organisation aimed at supporting indigent students, widows and the fatherless in Africa.
The poet, through this collection of poems, invents or imagines the state of being deceived or misled and, at the same time, portrays some experiences as they are in real life.
The 40 poems in this collection are Illusion, A Cosy Place, Intimacy, Affection, Imagination, Fantasy, Longing, Ruins, Changing Reality, Gone Are the Days, Awake, Vision, Surviving, Thoughts and Dreams, Cosmos, Who am I ?, Universe, I Want it All, God’s Face, Innocence, Applause, Ignorance, Grow Up, I and You, Friendship, Hidden, Depression, Justice, Hope, Where the Mind, Ideas, A Poet, Wisdom, Eyes Closed, The Actor’s Author, Beauty Within, Missing Identity, Deceptors, Me and Reality. It is nether an act of serendipity nor sheer coincidence that this alluring collection of poems opens with ‘Illusion’ and ends with ‘Reality’.
Like her previous collection of poems, entitled, ‘Lines of Wisdom,’ Titilope is very brief with words but speaks volume. Brevity is the hallmark of poetry. It makes poetry to be juicy, delicious and alluring. And if a poet uses the right combination of words, the poems will be so lyrical. Thus, every poem in this collection is very easy to commit to memory and recite off-hand.
‘Illusion,’ the opening poem says everything about illusion with just nine lines, deals with realism of illusion, ‘The abstraction in its reality’and its deceptive nature, ‘The falsehood in its truth.’
The second poem, ‘A Cosy Place,’ expresses illusory reality because a place like that exists only in actions – ‘By the warmth of a smile / And the kindness of family’.
The next five poems, ‘Intimacy,’ ‘Affection,’ ‘Imagination,’ ‘Fantasy’ and ‘Longing,’ follow the same pattern, there is always something in them to see, feel, touch and perceive that gives either illusory reality or realism of illusion. For example, the poet describes ‘Intimacy’ as neither a word or an emotion, neither an act nor a feeling, and not an item on the checklist but it is everything and nothing. In ‘Imagination,’ realism of illusion screams at the reader, ‘Plucking stars from the sky thereby poking holes in the canvas of my imagination, so that I can see glimpses of reality through the holes’. ‘Longing’ is a beautiful poem that derives its beauty from repetition, ‘I read of.’
The poet connects perfectly with the reader using the first-person narrative style. “I read of ‘crystal spires and magic kingdoms’, ‘sunlight dancing off the water’ and ‘joy and glory everlasting.”
‘Ruins’ symbolises a war-torn country – the reality staring everyone in the face. Reading this poem, the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war that started at the twilight of February 2022 readily comes to mind.
War leaves nothing behind except pains, anguish and ruins. It is a poem of eight lines full of metaphors. The last two lines of the poem show that war can never end: ‘The evil did not die when it was defeated / It lived on in the hearts of men.’
The poet, fantasizing with words, describes ‘Reality’ the last poem in four layers. The first two layers depict illusory reality while the last two layers are simply on realism of illusion – the reason the poet uses the repetition, ‘…is below that’ to explain the scenarios.
The longest poem, ‘Beauty within’ is a poem that adequately covers the two devices of realism of illusion and illusory reality since the poet says, ‘Beauty lives in all things: …Real or imagined’. The poet quickly introduces the shortest poem, ‘Missing Identity’ to describe a pure illusion of someone who allowed herself to be deceived by unnatural beauty. This poem applies to ladies who have lost their natural beauty to make-ups.
There are other juicy poems in this collection that explore the themes of reality and illusion. The poet uses the question mark at the end of the title to question the reader’s mind about the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of the two phenomena and hopes that they will serve as lenses of reflection to the reader towards living a peaceful and enjoyable life. It is a must read for all and sundry, especially poetry lovers and poets.
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