Voidness and Other Things That Were in the Beginning and Beyond: A Review of Isaura Ren’s Interlucent
interlucent adj in·ter·lu·cent | \ ¦intə(r)¦lüsənt also -)l¦yü- \
Definition: shining or glowing between or in the midst of other things
The relationship between a body and a poem is that each is an entity capable of movement, having the ability to love, protest, plead, begin, and end. The difference, however, is that a poem does not die. Each sentence, enjambed or not, stacked upon each other in a poem like towers of babel, is a movement towards being—the making of the body. In its fullness or half-light, a poem is always in motion, chording a form of creation.
Let us reimagine creation here: “The earth [page] was formless and void or a waste and emptiness, and darkness was upon the face of the deep [primaeval ocean [or stillness/the lack of motion] that covered the unformed earth]. The spirit of the poet was moving (hovering, brooding) over the face of the waters/the formless page/earth.”—Revamped Genesis 1:2.
The creator created everything out of the need for companionship. All that was created before man was created to be man’s companion—the trees, the fishes, the birds, the moon (the poet’s favourite companion). Man, however, was created to be the creator’s companion. In the same light, it is important to understand that everything assumes this state of nothingness until there is a need to create/speak/spark/shine. As in the creation story, the still waters, the silence, the overwhelming darkness. Juxtaposing this with birth (of any kind), we’d realize that everything was still until it was no longer still.
The popular philosophy of birth is that the mind was a clean slate until knowledge was impressed. I didn’t know anything in 1995. I was still crawling and being a toddler, putting everything I found into my mouth when I crawled into a naked wire. Twenty-five years later, I still carry the scars from that single event on my almost dysfunctional left palm. If I had known that it would hurt me if I walked myself into an electric panel, I might have chosen to tear down my father’s TV for not paying attention to me. Most of the time, the poet is in a state of rest—as in Physics—until they are acted upon by force, of which, in creativity, could be an inside well, gushing from its root. The poet writes from happenstance or the absence of it. Everyone creates poetry out of a need for expression, out of the need to question the existence of things. Some write in search of answers. But whatever makes you write creates a shift from a state of rest, into the deep place of metaphors.
This philosophy of a resting human metamorphosed into a writer begs to answer one of the most asked questions in the literary community: Why do you write?
Throughout Isaura’s Interlucent, the reader would see the urgency to document running between the lines. In this book, what they have done is what Frankie Edozien did in Lives of Great Men: Living and Loving as an African Gay Man, in which he offered a highly personal series of contemporary snapshots of same-gender-loving African men, living their lives, thudding their past and creating memories. In Interlucent, they document grief, love, anxiety, travel, and sojourns in life as a queer human. I would argue that what shifted them out of their resting place into a chapbook of postcards to these tender and fierce fires is compassion. But it would not matter why a poet writes when their writing is serving the purpose it should.
Interlucent opens with an “aubade/alba”—a tribute to the emergence of light. In the low light, the poem is the beginning of an unravelling. A good poem is one in which each line is a movement towards an unsettling, into a kind of prayer muttered in silence:
make me a body worthy
of flight. i’ll draw my wings
against the coup of dawn, a shield
for you and me.
As written by Ocean Vuong, the poetry of desire gathers at the intersection of the body, an essence that cannot be taken away from both the body and the poem. It is as if both entities—the poem and the body—hold each other in space. In this case, Isaura pours light into that straightforward narrative, giving flight to the body through desire. In this book, Interlucent, everything is a juxtaposition between happiness and a shattering; an unknowing and knowledge.
In Ocean’s “Threshold,” they said:
In the body, where everything has a price,
I was a beggar.
Isaura turned out of “aubade/alba” by saying:
you could stay
forever if we time this right.
In both cases, nothing is handed to the body. The same way Ocean is a beggar in the threshold of time, in the queerity of their body, Isaura is a beggar of time, handing the possibility of an everlasting into the unforetold hands of time. The grace from which Isaura writes their poetry, the high throne from which their imagery falls like rain, through their body harvesting rejected fruits, through abysmal songs, through the essence of time, through the kindness of breath—the poet began this book by journaling their desire—the need to be allowed to see eastern light from a sinking ship.
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“What’s true of labyrinths is true, of course, of love and memory. When we start remembering.”— Jack Spicer
A poet tends towards memory more than they do towards what is to come. And that is just a primitive portion of the truth. My grandfather died the year after I was born. My grandmother, about 22 years later. I was 4, and bleeding on a stitched hand when I first felt a sharp pain cut through my body. I was 5 when the lady pushed my head into her bowels and made me taste her. I was 7 when a group of boys blocked me on the way back from school, beat me, took the bandage off my hand, stole the ruler set to align my fingers. I was eight the year my first friend died. When I was 11, another boy died. When I was 12, we left the house where I had all these memories. I packed the memory with me. I still have it. The body archives everything. It is even magical how the body invents its version of the tale, through scars, through dreams. In “Saudade,” Isaura remembers, builds a house and then unbuilds it; within the lines, they shatter us by merely pivoting us through memory. They twist the yacht by the neck and turn us towards a storm. However far away you must have tilted into change, out of the past, you might not be able to outdo memory. This reminds me that Rasaq Malik once wrote in 2014 that “memories are rags that always come begging to be washed.” What comes first are the little things like emptiness, the absence of things like in the beginning:
where once there
were no cars to speak of, roads now snake
like concrete deltas, the list of what is still
unchanged slim and waning slimmer.
In “flameland,” they said:
i’ve spent my whole life scared
of things that grow when left alone.
Their poetry is one that is engulfing, one that regurgitates the past and turns it into something shiny, something glorious. I am thrilled by their poetry because of how much it tells of their heritage and culture. The truest poem comes from home, one that gathers the mushrooms beside an old barn, one that yells from childhood playgrounds.
This book, Interlucent, is a collection of 20 poems that ache and ache. The book reminds me of Calum Scott’s Only Human album in which Scott highlighted the struggles of coming out, the loss that comes with love, of shrilling loneliness, of rejection. The rhythm vegetated in Scott’s album is in sync with the grace that blossoms in Interlucent—the searchlight poured over the surface of a city’s night.
Poetry is as sacred as a god, and it is as distinct as an empty mouth praying for rain. And it is in the poetry of truth that both the reader and the poet find themselves wading through a poem. You’d imagine that the lamb slaughtered in Genesis is also the Son nailed in the accounts of John, Matthew, Luke and Mark. Grief, irrespective of the barriers of time, the barricade of distance, is a shared virtue. In “flameland,” Isaura’s poetry reminds me that I come from a country where the bullet finds you even under the shadow of the almighty. This reminds me that poetry mirrors reality. I am of the school of thought that however fictitious a poem is, it is someone’s inside story. Your poetry stops being yours alone once you let it fly into the world. What I see the poet do in “flameland” is that they turned my grief, our grief, toward us.
again
our town turns ashtray overnight, oceaned
in cinders. again we’re set adrift
down rivers coursing taillight red.
In 2017, it came to light that the Nigerian Police Force, Anambra Chapter, masterminded custodial killings, unlicensed butcheries and facility killings that took place outside the law. This institution set up to protect citizens shapeshifted right before us into an institution of fear and horror. In 2020, I heard a viral story of how a father spent his fortune attempting to bail his child from the sticky web of men of the police force. After a failed attempt at extraction, he was made to search for the dead body of his son in a river full of dead boys. The boy was illegally arrested, he wasn’t tried; he was killed because his family could not afford the bail. In Isaura’s work, they turned the tangent towards grief. In Warshan Shire’s popular, award-winning poem “Home,” she said:
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
In every conversation about home, the body often repels movement unless the body is inches away from the throat of a blade. For every grief, the body archives the hands that perpetuated it. One afternoon, I was arrested or kidnapped on my way to Ile-Ife for a shoot and a literary event and locked up. My parents weren’t in the country and my sister was miles away from Ibadan. There was no one to call. For my freedom, they asked me to pay N80,000. I had to. They didn’t find anything on me, I wasn’t an internet fraudster or an African Prince. I am just a writer and photographer carrying a camera and had multiple emails with my father’s PayPal notifications.
“We aren’t even safe in the wake” said Isaura in “flameland.”
Interlucent flickers a carnival of bokeh. The book, I think, leads the reader into the narrative of self. It helps you see yourself; lets you mirror a past. The 20-paged chapbook by Isaura Ren is a gatherer of compassion, an archive of hives. The book leaks the reader and then sets fire to what is left of you. But the grief is subtle, the grief is mild, you are on fire, but you do not burn. You are made ash but you are still whole, at home.
Adedayo Agarau is the third-place winner of the Frontier Industry Prize, 2020. His chapbook, Origin of Names, was selected by Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes for New Generation African Poet (African Poetry Book Fund), 2020. He is the author of The Arrival of Rain, a chapbook. His works have appeared in Agbowo, Frontier Poetry, Glass, Perhappenned, and elsewhere. Adedayo curated and edited Memento: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigerian Poetry. He is an Editor at IceFloe and Assistant Editor at Animal Heart Press. Adedayo is a member of the Unserious Collective. You can find him on Twitter @adedayo_agarau or agarauadedayo.com
