Adedayo Agarau’s debut poetry collection, The Years of Blood (Fordham University Press, 2025), is an elegy to the lost boys of his hometown of Ìbàdàn, Nigeria. The collection is situated amidst an epidemic of kidnappings in a location described eerily as “everywhere weed grows is a wild mouth eating children.” Agarau was kidnapped when he was a child. As a survivor, he empathizes with the terror of victims and their families. These are poems of witness, of events that nobody should have to witness. I imagine it must have taken a great deal of courage to write them.
“Ghost of a Dead Boy Writes from Sọ́kà” gives voice to a boy who did not survive the “Sọ́kà forest of horror,” a house where dismembered bodies, bones, and evidence of ritual killings were found.
Yellow chrysanthemums wilt as wind flares
the embers of this cataclysm—I can see
my mother’s hands, the way they break groundnuts open. (13)
Often the poems speak in a communal voice, for this is a collective trauma faced by the people of Nigeria. In the poem “In which the morning after, a boy’s body had been dismembered,” scenes from a childhood game parallel a chilling sequence of events.
At the count of three, we go into hiding, he commands. We begin the search of our lives,
running from corridor to corridor, searching. Little boys of this world tending
to desire the way god tended the garden. Because I want to be found, I sneeze.
The boy carrying the wood shaped like a gun has so much compassion
& he can’t shoot at me. He smiles and keeps running. Later, it becomes fully dark
& the moon stands by watching our performance of escape. Our mothers,
who have finished cooking dinner, bring their benches & sit outside, watching (11)
Unlike the game, in real life the gun was not wooden, and the person wielding the gun had no compassion.
Night, wind, and darkness stand in as metaphors for evil. It is an ill wind that blows through these poems and carries the sobs and screams of grieving parents: “she is running mad,” we hear about a bereaved mother, in a whisper.
The love of the poet for his homeland is evident in multi-lingual poems with phrases and proverbs spoken in the Yoruba language by the grandparents, parents, and aunties in the community. What could be more natural than reaching for one’s mother tongue in moments of grief?
One of the most moving poems in the collection is “Boys who never die,” a long poem that reminds me of Aracelis Girmay’s “You Are Who I Love.” As an act of resurrection, the poet calls each boy by name. The poem conjures lost boys back to life by recalling their individual quirks and mischief, holding each with great tenderness:
Boys who love their mothers and
run after cows on Ogunleye Street.
...
Boys who show us new shoes their father got them.
Joyous boys, laughing like the sea.
Boys who call me friend.
Boys who buy me sweet, goodie-goodie. (25)
In her introduction to Against Forgetting, an anthology of twentieth century poetry of witness, poet and essayist Carolyn Forché writes, “Fragmentation is a standard feature of literary modernism. But the fragment gains urgency in the aftermath of extremity. ... It evokes the story but leaves it unfinished, omits the details and the denouement. ... the reader is strangely aware of what has been left out, what cannot or has not been said. The French call this procedure recit éclaté—shattered, exploded, or splintered narrative. The story cannot travel over the chasm of time and space. Violence has rendered it unspeakable.” Agarau’s poems of surreal dreams, and fragmented form convey the trauma of losing family members, friends, and neighbors. Even through the horrific images and pain, his language is supple and musical, his images gleaming and alive. “Sonnet with Blood Everywhere” consists of a series of broken images in a nightmare that leave the reader breathless and pleading:
burning in the cathedral half rented by memory—still ceramic walls in the bath
room—still the menstrual blood in the tub i’m still deep inside—still i sink
still i sing till i surface—still i stink—still the
breathless boy still longing, still waking on the street
of still desires borrowed—still the pleas in the nightmare—
still please take the apology & burn memory (30)
Sound echoes haunt the poems, and repetition is another means to voice anxiety and trauma.
Forché writes of “...the peculiar paradox, the insistence on God’s existence in the face of his apparent disappearance.” As readers, we are privy to the speaker’s ongoing conversations with his God running through the collection. In “Salt Water,” he knocks on God’s door begging for reassurance that Michael, a kidnapped boy will make it home safe. In “Night, Prayer,” two weeks after Michael’s disappearance, the speaker waits in despair for God’s response, while breathing in the stench of burning tires in the streets.
I ask God to find the edge
and trim out fire.
As an answered prayer
wind arrives,
blows the candle out (21)
Despite rage at God who lets terrible things happen, the speaker never doubts His presence, never stops speaking to Him, even thanking Him in “Fine Boy Writes a Poem about Anxiety.”
I thank my God who puts sunlight on my table
who wakes me in the morning & offers me to trembling. (33)
While much of the book has a heaviness, it leaves the reader with notes of hope towards the end.
In “Ileya,” there is music in the home again and a celebration of Eid. The child speaker imagines a safe world when he declares:
Today, we will arrive at Oke-Agbo safely, and I will run to the arena to watch goats fight. They will come to look for me and find me. I will not be missing. (80)
This collection was not an easy read for me, especially as a parent. However, it is one where poetic craft comes together in every line, image, and form. Most imperatively, it insists on acting as a record of a community’s grief beyond sterile news items. In The Years of Blood, the poet stands as witness. As readers we stand with him.