The Griot and His Grit: A review of Olumide Holloway’s Darkness Can Be Very Dark

By Femi Morgan

Olumide Holloway’s Darkness Can Be Very Dark is a poignantly inked collection on hope. A defiant response to existential failures, it borders between anxiety and curiosity to lay claims to the instrumentality of ambition against all odds. It is perhaps the most charming element of the collection that it revitalises the subject. It brings an unequalled, fresh perspective to the poetic description of man’s fate against certain socio-political forces. A brilliant capture of conflict. How viable is the ability to simplify the complex narrative about man’s condition? Definitely, the reader today could not have been prepared for the seamless grace with which the poet persona sharply traverses the terrains of incredulity.

At the forefront of its artistic merit is the poetic force behind the title. It at once riddles one to have a near empty sentence as the summary of the work’s address. It even incidentally corresponds with the author’s last name Holloway, itself sharing a semantic extension with the word hollow. It therefore comes as no surprise that ‘dark’, ‘darkness’ and ‘hollow’ are the fraternal ideas that facilitate the penetrative voice of this volume. It would almost seem that the writer is about exonerating the reader from his helplessness by wanting to say “Darkness can be…” anything comforting and not “very dark”. At this point, it becomes a quantum expression of an inescapable condition. Oh, the heart could skip a beat at such an ‘unconscionable’ telling. But is the title to blame?

Beauty, of course, is the ultimate derivative of any art. Darkness Can Be Very Dark derives its beauty from the visual stylistics of the poems which complements the message thereof. A prominent deployment of this is the lineation appearing in bouyant vertical structures. Significantly, this provides an inkling into the ‘long’ trajectory of life in which one journeys in hope and despair, a twin attribute identified with life. The reader grasps that it is a ‘long’ walk out of the tunnel; a hectic and labourious drift through the ‘hollow’ of man’s predicament and an agonizing stint in the ‘dark’ before light salvages. The literary implication thus apprehended coheres seamlessly with flow of the words, their shape on the page and their emotional appeal altogether. To the end that the reader visualises his own story and experiences, the stylistic form Holloway gives the words makes them come to life; it makes them breathe. This undoubtedly is the cream of any poetic expression: words must breathe or we have a doggerel. It is absolutely a brilliant picture the reader will grasp in the intricate weave of the words from page to page.

Another éclat for poetic merit in this volume is the existence of the diction. Words in poetry are chosen either for sound, meaning, or syllable; or a merger of two. No less than a divine afflatus, Holloway combines the three. Only great poets who belong to a past fascination with meaning and beauty have wielded such a poetic power. But in a fit or renaissance, Holloway morphs his words into that artistsic rigour, achieving a robust meld. The words are raw and urgent, seeking fulfilment in the corridors of our imagination. They transport the reader from their inertia to a sensory world of possibility. Every other content element – especially the themes – builds on this momentous function of the words. The puns, metaphors, consonances, alliterations, refrains, and such techniques enjoy an unparalleled beautification.

The Romantic poet scholar John Keats asserts that “whatever the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth”. Following this claim religiously, Holloway comes across as a post-modernist poet with an urgent message for the time. That is, the poems are as beautiful as their apposite subject matter and themes. No doubt, they have been crafted to project the vicissitudes of life for the one who dreams. The conflict and the complexity of swooping into action, the rigours of trying after failure, the despair of social conditioning, the security of a spiritual force, the indestructibility of hope, the animation of struggles, and a host of idealistic expressions are woven into the intrinsic exposition of life as a journey, a riddle, a tunnel and a mysterious, well, gift (as Maya Angelou posits).

The poems move on a cycle of coordinate rallying points: no one is coming to save you; God is not silent; but do not relent if truly you have your emancipation in sight. However, the poet indirectly puts a thought-provoking question to the reader: is man truly responsible for his fate? This, above all, is the reader’s task: to either unravel any clue that provides an answer or make a resolve within his or herself. The resolve will be predicated on their disposition to the existentialist definition of man’s actions (see the poem FIGHT TO WIN); whether they are motivated by sheer search for meaning or a resort to God. Thus, it is a form of ‘poetic justice’ to leave that idea dangling between secularism and spiritualism. Again, it is the reader’s onus to search it out.

True, life is hostile (see the poem NEVER BRING A KNIFE). We fall back to the same unresolved mystery that has shrouded it from creation. But a gripping statement from the entire anthology that brings this to the fore is the enjambed lines from the poem IT IS HARD: “But red is the account / When the accountant comes to count the account”. This sums up the anxious state of the struggle to live, breathe, and have ambitions. However true that is, the poet is indefatigably fascinated with the opportunity of life itself, which is the every day chance we have got.

Finally, the volume achieves a striking balance between the chaos theory about life and the intrapersonal approach to solution. Olumide Holloway has established himself as a passionate philosopher whose poems justify the assertions that a good poem is unfinished, any more than life is an infinite quest for light out of its profound darkness.