‘You can’t fight Mother Nature’: A Review of Oluwaseun’s ‘A Constellation of Cravings’

Have you been to a bar beach before? Watching the currents wade confidently, can you be so strong to push them backwards with your hands? Are women witches? Are old men wise? Does loving someone in fear connote respect and love? Do you know that misery is a man? These are pertinent questions Alele’s collection poses.

Quickly, ‘When The Climate Revolution Starts’ treats the payback of mother nature to the world and her inhabitants. It suggests the ill-treatment meted on Earth and the consequence thereafter.

It is in this light that the poet started with the calmness of the trees ‘telling lumbermen/not to harvest them, as/they are not yet in full bloom.’

The second stanza of the poem introduces the possibility of nature’s revolution—suggesting coal and water protesting. Coal and water are two primary items that humans use and misuse to the irritation of Mother Nature.

The succeeding stanza shows a pause in the ‘plague’. Just like the Egyptians, thinking they could cope one more day with no plague, living their lives in neglect of the possibility of another plague. So is likened to us humans. We learn today and unlearn tomorrow, going back to our mistakes; not learning from history. Well, after the pause, we continue and:

By the following week, the temperature flies up….

In the pitch of Mother Nature’s revolution, Alele, in his anger for human’s huge contribution to climate change, mocks humans by creating humour when he puts: ‘Chad Meyers will/announce forecasts in his/underwear. You are laughing, right? Even in this temperate season in Nigeria, many become fishes and others prefer to sleep naked. Potatoe, potato; we are saying the same thing.

The poet ended his message with a change of tone which is serious with conviction that we ‘can’t fight Mother Nature/and get away with it.’

Furthermore, ‘Alterations’ speak the same dialect as the former.

What is more spectacular is that it comes as a sequel. So, listen to part two. After the adverse effect Mother Nature must have wrought, governments would then begin to alter mechanisms and documents to ‘lessen’ the real effect. But we deceive ourselves and ‘the joke is on [us]’. And when the time comes, neither will our deflections nor alterations help us.

Another theme worthy of mention is the adverse effect of abandonment. Many, because of abandonment, see death as friends and welcome her in any form. The infamous form in Nigeria, to be precise, is drinking bleaches. After all, there are ‘one thousand ways to die’.

That aside, this theme is not of a joke like I started off. Oluwaseun Alele is very particular as he introduces in ‘Writing to Sadness’. Here, the persona, so depressed, writes to sadness, complaining about her friends who left her. To the effect, she takes to drinking alcohol. Thank goodness it is not bleach. Also, the poet carries on to his thirty-first poem (‘To Believe Is Madness’) where the suggestion of loneliness is made.

All in all, one good thing about Alele is his ability to defamiliarise his messages, thereby creating aesthetics worthy of commendation.

In his technique, he voices about other subject matters like love, bondage, domestic violence and many more. Many writers write out of coercion, but Oluwaseun chose to write over his supposed career line, as expected by his father. And look at what he has done—BEAUTY! I rest with my salute for poem five and sixteen. My cap remains doffed and I do not know when to bring it down. Look, it’s still up.

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In spite of the huge investment in the water sector by the government and international organisations, water scarcity has grown to become a perennial nightmare for residents of Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital.  ‘You can’t fight Mother Nature’: A Review of Oluwaseun’s ‘A Constellation of Cravings’  ‘You can’t fight Mother Nature’: A Review of Oluwaseun’s ‘A Constellation of Cravings’  ‘You can’t fight Mother Nature’: A Review of Oluwaseun’s ‘A Constellation of Cravings’  ‘You can’t fight Mother Nature’: A Review of Oluwaseun’s ‘A Constellation of Cravings’.