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Rewriting the Gbolohun by Iyanu Adebiyi

2/2/2020

10 Comments

 
Click HERE to Read Iyanu's Biography on the Nigerian Writers Database.
Picture
Gbolohun is a Yoruba term for sentence, also incantation. We have all been sentenced to death.

“… six men came from the direction of the Upper Gate, which faces north, every man with his battle-ax in his hand; and one man among them was clothed in linen, with a writer’s ink bottle at his side....” – Ezekiel 9:2

I write because the man who held the death-letter, boasting about all the people he would kill if only he could find the lost half of the letter, is the first man in my ancestry – Erukwu, the slave of death. I have his genes and the second half of the death-letter.

In every poem I write, I re-write gbolohun, from death to life, and life to death. I am an offspring of the one who received the handwriting of god and smashed it with indignation. So, I write to rewrite the battered word of god, re-tell the true story of him who formed me, and repair the broken metaphor of divinity.

I am writing to etch god’s name in small letters, feel his/her/its hand hover over my own trembling hands, and dare to create a new earth, new heaven, and also a new hell

I write to rewrite the death sentence, as a witness to a life observed, as minister at the temple of justice, as an advocate of the victim, and as a victim. I write to point a finger at the guilty and have the other four-point back at me, to implicate myself, to mirror the mess and the journey of becoming.

In this aching world, I gather blood, consult tears, interrogate fear, communicate lament, acknowledge the mystery of what is lost and what is found with poetry as medicine, as a mirror, as ascendency to the summit of the self. I strip naked and dance uninhibited to the song of my soul. I embrace the redeeming truth and prophecy of light.

I am always surrounded by weeping women. Women whose weeping enshrine in the way they laugh, dress, and edit selfies. The way they keep sorrows tucked in their marrows until there is a quaking, the slow cortege of wrinkling, bones crackling under. These women live like a burial procession, and everyone ignores their grief. I pay homage to their grief.

When I write, I am holding space for my mother’s emotions. All the things she refused to mourn, tears she gulped instead of shedding. All the dead bodies she had to re-womb or risk shame. I am a testament to my mother’s trauma, my grandmother’s anger, and the injustice my great grandmother suffered. I write to help my mother weep.

And my dying brothers in the face of war; those who behead themselves because of a headache, those who mistake themselves for the mental illness, call their sickness a sin, a curse, those whose warrior-souls have brought them face to face with the impulse to die. I am writing to tell them, “we are all dying. It is how the star of life twinkles.”

I write to inch towards a divine resurrection, but resurrection implies first, a death, and daily, I am crucified. In writing, I may create a dazzling miracle and be forced to wear a crown that does not fit, I may offend the rules and rulers, and be flogged with an iron whip to Calvary, but I write still, for I believe in the resurrection. I believe in the desert’s ocean. I believe in a smile and a tear, in the sound of my heart beating, in the hot breath barreling out of my nostrils. I believe in the truth.

I am a slave of death, but I gain the right to live when I am writing.

Click HERE to read the download and read the full SprinNG 2019 Mentees Anthology.
10 Comments
Roseline Mgbodichinma Anya okorie link
3/2/2020 12:12:51 am

I don't know how describe the divinity of this piece but I know I felt the vulnerability and strength of the letters, how it reaffirmed, shook and calmed. I have never seen death used in a more comforting and soothing way. There is empathy here, a sort of intercession , a lending of mouth to tell the scars of people in a story. This piece has shown that writing is selfless and that you must give yourself and yes something in you must die so that you can birth life into sentences

Reply
Olivia link
11/2/2020 09:51:29 pm

You said my whole mind..yes to the intercessory part!
And yes writing is selfless

Reply
Esther Opone link
12/2/2020 11:43:29 am

This is one daring and vulnerable piece and this part, "...to mirror the mess and the journey of becoming." stood out to me the most.

The biblical allusions too, dying in order to live, being flogged to Calvary and bearing a crown that doesn't fit is, I daresay, every writer's reality. I see that as embodying the experiences of others and telling these stories, maybe retelling the narrative, even if you don't feel worthy of being the one to tell it, or bearing the "writer" tag.

Thanks for this!

Reply
Betty
19/2/2020 10:44:27 pm

I'm still in awe! it's like watching a process of exorcism and impartation at the same time. This is beautiful!

Reply
Esther Eze
20/2/2020 03:05:40 pm

"I am a slave to death, but I gain the right to live when I'm writing "

I love the allusory thread that ran through the entirety of this work. The writer took from other writers even the Bible thereby reiterating the fact that a work of art may never die. The writer represented birth, life, death and the afterlife. Although we are sentenced upon incarnation writing gives us immortality. Thank you.

Reply
Adenike Akande
23/2/2020 11:54:35 am

Gbolohun is the autobiography of this writer and every writer. She compares herself with Erukwu, Moses and Jesus and the message is clear: a writer is priest and prophet. A prophet, connected to a ‘a higher power’ and charged with a duty to speak to us on its behalf. A priest, bearing the burden of everyone and seeking comfort to offer us. The prophetic gift comes with creative capacity, the writer looks into the void and speaks light into existence, illustrating and giving meaning to life as if for the first time. As priest, they must pay the price and taste death for all humanity and because they form a part of humanity, for themself as well. It is this process of death that qualifies them to bring to life with their art: having felt, they can tell what it is to feel.
The writer’s work is also the telling of a message, the writer stands mediator between humanity and consciousness, retrieving from this seeming divine the truth of our existence. The writer imparts life to those who need it and decrees death on whoever is deserving.
Gbolohun is a profound commentary on what it means to write, perhaps in a way that only a writer, in the fellowship of suffering, would understand. Writing pays homage to suffering but it also offers the hope of a new life.

Reply
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