If I Gather Here and Shout (Nightboat, 2024), the debut poetry collection by Nigerian-American writer and artist Funto Omojola, is by turns an incantation, a fable, a series of essays, and a set of divinations. Emerging through a period of illness and survivance of medical and systemic violence, the book asks: how can a body be undone by other people, by various systems of knowing and language, and how can a body be re-made? How does one summon language with people and places you have been displaced from and yet are fundamentally constituted by? What modalities allow one to live in between here and there?

The collection summons and redirects ancestral knowledge, ideas of health and the body, colonial logic, illness, Yoruba culture, and the land. The word “ceremony” appears on the first page of the book. Its placement reads to me both as proclamation and direction. In the essay Another Side of Me, Stó:lō author Lee Maracle, writes that “anything that brings people closer to themselves is a ceremony. The search for the truth of one’s spirit is a private one, rich in ceremony. The manner in which a person seeks the self is always based on the sacred right of choice.” I found this passage from Maracle to be somewhat instructive in reading Omojola’s work. As this book processes rupture and displacement from breakage, it reclaims the break as a method of repair. Confronting the English language itself as a site of breaking, the poet creates each break in this text, the text becomes punctuated by choice and this recreates the language into a place of agency and dwelling.

Omojola has an astute understanding of the relationship between language and matter and how language reconstitutes the land and body. A primary word, sound, and figure that we are introduced to in this book is “pa.” “Pa” might be the most frequently produced sound throughout the book. “Pa” is father, “pa’s pa,” could be a grandfather, but “pa’s pa’s” when spoken aloud is pause pause. “Pa” also recalls the sound a palm makes when it hits the head of a drum. It’s a sound that incites music, and marks the beginning of a song.

“Pa” both tethers and opens, a repetition and a difference. The word’s patterning creates a canopy of sound where inheritance and music are inseparable. The palm that hits the hand that writes, the body that wails and sings, all signal that the body itself is the drum. The repetitions untether the sound of pa from its position as a noun and in doing so reanimates what was rendered an object by colonial structures of language. Language both hurts and heals and sound is the remedy for rupture.“pa of poultice pa of figs put your house in order”: sound re-constitutes the body. “Decolonization is a reorganization of matter,” writes Lou Cornum. Omojola follows: “who told them I am politics of recitation?” In this line recitation is at once an act of remembering but also one of locating sites, recitation is geographic, recitation is a re-citation, a re-site-ation, and admittance of knowledge and place. They are rejoined.

Anthropological essays occupy two sections of the book. These are the only parts of the book written in prose, set in italics and filling the whole page. The tone is friendly, inviting, and the text unfolds into a series of notes and observations. These fully realized sentences are voiced by an unnamed observer, who points and names in a manner that suggests someone from outside the culture. While they watch, they are also watched. “I remember a particular research trip in Ibadan where a drummer saw me and began to use the drum to praise my protruding belly, which he interpreted as a sign of wealth.”

But to be seen is not the same as being apart. In other moments in these essays, the narrator possesses an almost unnerving confidence: “if you are afraid of or odious towards these people, it may be easier for you to embattle them in the spiritual world. Nobody can kill me because I’m so good-willed to them.” The tone reminds me of a clown in a certain sense. A clown, in some instances, can be a voice on the periphery of a social structure that through mocking provokes truth. There are places in these anthropological essays that seem to "provide insight,” but I am wary of these claims.

The form of the essays is set in contrast to Omojola’s decisive and poignant verse. The poems often end on the left page at the top, and begin anew on the right page at the bottom. This arrangement acts like a stitch: the words hook, a space opens, and the words catch again on the next page, binding the book across the seam. Again, we find the repetition of nouns can break the language back into verbs. “a worm a home, homed.” The doubling becomes a process of becoming. Every repetition is a rhyme, not necessarily in a lyrical sense, but that each repetition with difference opens up a terrain for each word (re)sounding. In these sections we find that grammar is not just a mark of breath but taken formally, materially, as an instrument. The way that grammar organizes the body and organizes the text are layered upon each other. Between a home and homed the mark of a coma. “the butcher says wake up from the coma: mining. no, wake up from the mining: soil.” The body is the land. Grammar interrupts the body, sound sutures it. As figurations the poems use language to create a geography and sign; emblems of a sort that correlate to space as both material and imaginary.

There is a tonal shift that begins and ends the book. “for a while, it’s only me: i put on mourning jacket wherever i can fit it, peel skin, shave, meet the girl of my dreams.” The poet places themselves at an opening. The voice moves into the belly with the voices of the ancestors, the land, and the drum. The voice returns with a wail and open hands, “say the food collects in my arms also, say this my whole hole whole hole this still little me me me.” It's a subtle tone but I hear it. The book comes back to where it starts, but like a spiral, returns to the same point from a different perspective; this happens personally and generationally. What has been together will be together, forever and ever, but the shape of these relations is in continual movement. The mark of a return to oneself doesn’t happen through resolution or reconciliation, but rather through the opening of possibility. There are things that have happened that were forced upon us, but choice can and must be reclaimed.

Omojola offers us a lucid and sculptural song. Through it we enter a commune of sounds. We experience a language that forsakes the placeless ecstasy of colonial tongues. This book ends with an open mouth; it is a song that doesn’t end as it breaks, but spreads.