Eleven years ago in 2014, the Nigerian poet and psychiatrist Dami Ajayi published his debut poetry collection, Clinical Blues, to an unprecedented critical acclaim. When Ayodele Arigbabu declared it ‘runs the risk of being labelled a classic’, the gamble was prophetic, which in retrospect now reads inevitable. Tade Ipadeola’s informed comparison of Ajayi to Fela Kuti’s musical preeminence further cemented the work’s dual identity: a scalpel for societal dissection and a saxophone for lyrical lament. In his 2024 essay ‘Clinical Blues as a Music of Two Centuries’, Oko Owi Ocho’s declaration is that the book is an invitation into ‘a clinic of an evolving generation’, diagnosing Nigeria’s post-military psyche through postmodern and hyper-capitalist affirmations. Surely a collection for the time of its birth, now, and the future (as long as love, passions pent and oversaturated, and will to purpose are in existential propinquity), Clinical Blues proves one of those debuts whose sojourn towards continuous redoubtability in our national, even continental, literary history and canon is hardly in doubt.

So, of all the powers that are fundamental to a poet’s sense of competence, a finicking, consistent sense of structure is not only august but prerequisite to proper poetic expression. At the forefront of this nonnegotiable quality stands, quite unchallenged, the sense of the beginning: an opening foresight in a poem as well as in a whole book that is capable of illuminating the whole imaginative project. Hence, in Clinical Blues, the twin senses of the structure of a whole book and the beginning of a poem reveal themselves cogently simultaneously in ‘Promenade,’ the poem that opens the book. To begin the reading of the poem from its title, a promenade is as much ‘a leisurely walk’ in the road of romantic complexities as it is ‘a ceremonious opening of a formal ball’ for the proceeding poems in the book—as the dictionaries have those meanings for the word. Thus, the book begins as the poem begins:

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The deviant puppet strives

To detach fate’s pull strings

In a Beckett play.

Good luck!

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Amethystine as any beginning of a poetry book can be, its aspirations, while numerous and equally important, are clear, but two of them even more so. First, by mentioning Samuel Beckett, Ajayi brings to us an initial sense of his poems clawing towards the absurdist elements, existential themes, and characters who often struggle against fate and predetermined paths in the playwright’s oeuvre, particularly in Waiting for Godot and Endgame, both of which feature characters who are trapped in repetitive situations, similar to puppets and marionettes. Second, it suggests the dramatical framework of the book. This theatrical framing hints at the book’s structure as a kind of performance or play, with its three sections—namely ‘Love Poems,’ ‘Hospital Poems,’ and ‘Barroom Reflections’—representing a three-act structure common in dramatic works. This structure especially fits with the themes of performance, identity, and authenticity—each of love, vocational purpose (as a doctor), and the pitiful state of the country—that run through the poems.

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The Poet as Lover

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The great subject matters of Ajayi’s poetry are not hard to divine. One of them is love in all its sophisticated fickleness. Even from his technical pondering of the hospital poems to the sottish dispensation of the barroom reflections, Ajayi’s passions shine through frustrations and Cimmerian muck for both his patients and his troubled country, as well as for his loving but often romantically frustrated speaker. ‘Bon appetit,’ writes Ajayi in the whole of the fifth section of one of the best and most ironic poems in the book called ‘Table for Two.’ Concentrated on the attendant troubles on unrequited love, the poem is an acrid invitation to consume the speaker’s emotional offerings:

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I have prepared a table before you

In the absence of friends, enemies;

I have served my heart in

A fragile casserole, I have made a

Meal of my affections, meat.

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So, the placement of the two-word line after those quoted lines as a standalone section gives it particular weight and ambiguity. Isolate as a spaghetto, its italicization also sets it apart, allowing it to speak both within the poem’s dramatic situation and beyond it to the reader. For one, it is a darkly ironic culmination of the extended metaphor of emotional vulnerability as a ‘meal.’ In addition, it functions as a meta-textual gesture to the reader to prepare himself to eat of the varied courses served by the proceeding poems.

If love is one of the central preoccupations of the book (with three of the seventeen poems in this section featuring the word itself in their titles: ‘Love Songs,’ ‘Love in Bermuda,’ and ‘Love in Alcohol’), then the prize motif of the first section dealing with it is clear. Ajayi’s imagination and executive aperçus acquire a surgical dint in his sustained treatment of the motif holding sexual intimacy as some sort of harbinger of romantic frustration. In the sublimely phrased ‘Love in Bermuda,’ the vivacity and dulcet intensity of sexual gratification is crippled by a mistrustful sense of inadequacy:

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So our lips touch

Across the interface of

The tangible and the surreal.

I look into your reflection

Catching the obvious contagion

Submerged with desire,

Drenched in passion

Drowning,

Drowning in fiery stokes

Of transgression

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No one can save us now.

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Although the last line can be easily notched up to commitment or sex as an herald of romantic emotional bonding, the statement is too pronounced in its lonesome subtlety to have such positive undertones. Moreover, ‘Bermuda’ and the whole of the first stanza suggest something definitive of the whole affair: the sort of unpredictability and tumultuousness that leads to nothing but frustrations. This relation between sexual fulfilment and romantic disappointment is seconded in a poem called ‘Memories, Revisited.’ Not even the speaker’s enunciated awareness of the unmanning effect of sexual intimacy to his love life is strong enough a counteraction to the cold composure of fate:

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Do not let role-play and sex baits

Digest our appetite for ourselves;

Let your tied tongue drop diphthongs

Into my ear, fire up my primal instinct.

.

.

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But the swells of your breasts

Gave themselves to anger instead

I knocked and shut your door

Three times,

Three times before.

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Also central to Ajayi’s sustained engagement of love—and notoriety as a ‘young’ poet of distinction—is an irregular sequence of poems collectively titled ‘Love Songs.’ Irregular because some sections have been omitted and we’ve been told by the poet not to massage our curiosity too much in expectation of the sections so omitted. He says: ‘The missing poems in the sequence will remain so.’ However, the featured poems in the sequence are, according to the poet, ‘the salvageable poems from a juvenile experiment at writing 21st century equivalents of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”’ But ‘juvenile’ carries a note of modesty smoother than it does a just adjudication of the poem; perhaps another instance of how poets are often unreliable gauger of their own work and worth. In the modernist classic, J. Alfred Prufrock is a complex character that is particularly and acutely sensitive to social anxiety, the crushing weight of time, the inability to meaningfully connect with others, and the disparity between his inner emotional life and outward appearance, among other inhibitions to a full modern living. Lost in a morass of self-doubt and overthinking, Prufrock is too paralyzed by self-awareness to profess his lush though private emotions to the woman he presumably loves. Eliot writes in the voice of the now notorious figure:

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And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

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Merely a soi-disant secondary figure, incapable of bold action and meaningful connection, Prufrock provides the substrate for what Ajayi’s character in ‘Love Songs’ chooses not to be. While Prufrock’s sensitivity centers on social paralysis and alienation, Ajayi’s poems are most sensitive to the clinical aspects of loss, longing, and modern relationships. Since the lamentation of loss is a reaction to the ending of a romance he would have loved to prevent, Ajayi’s speaker also differs from Prufrock in the sense that he has experienced, if only momentarily and unsatisfactorily, what Prufrock is too pussyfooting to start: a romantic affair. Even the speaker’s initial reactions to the loss in sections I, III, and VII, are what the physiognomy of bold action would look like if they could manifest in a corporeal form. Nonetheless, the sadness of loss shows no sign of unnerving the speaker from reshooting his shot, as our contemporary tongue would say:

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Your Eliotness,

Royalty is not for appraisal

But pray, let me

Render how you’re

Poised like a gazelle or Proust. 

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I attempt to sound your depth

You are a hybrid of Homer and Plutarch

No echo returns.

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I relive your landscape,

Anthills of Igbara-oke; fresh air

Crisp like mint currency

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You are a cleanser—

Of caries, caution and creed.

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You whip convention with

Bohemian straps; your heels

Unearth me, stepwise, steadfast

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Like your gait

The whole world has become a trap;

And you are bait.

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Evidently, Ajayi’s speaker, throughout the poems, becomes more and more actively engaged with his pain, treating it like a medical condition to be diagnosed, documented, cured: ‘Your Eliotness, / My psychiatrist warns that / Feeding on memories is bad.’ The clinical gaze becomes a way of processing emotional trauma as though the poems are case studies of modern love and loss. Thus, the engagement with Eliot feels less like imitation and more like a dialogue across time. (Even Ajayi’s line on the disinterested fleetingness of time to the human whims, ‘Countless hourglasses gathered dust,’ is an impressive variation on Eliot’s infamous line on the same: ‘I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.’) This conversation creates for Ajayi a fascinating tension between emotional vulnerability that begins his ‘Love Songs’ in the first three sections (I, III, and VII) and clinical detachment that his speaker manages to attain in the remaining two sections that follow (IX and XI).

Were this a literary agon between Eliot’s Prufrock and Ajayi’s nameless speaker, the latter takes the challenge beyond ‘Love Songs’, as he keeps on composing poems of phrasings smarmier and more seductive than the ensorcelling glances and lustful susurrations of the Homeric sirens, something the former in all his notorious complexity and noted knowledge of the urban world could only bring himself to imagine and not do. Even in utter frustration as in ‘New Buka,’ Ajayi’s speaker could still marshall his language to conjure up the most riveting memories:

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You moved clinically, as

Alcohol instructed. You

Peeled off caution like

Flavoured condoms at a brothel

Called Bohemia.

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As hard as love and erotic poetry are wont to get right in our time, it is Ajayi’s evercalculating sonic sense and the right, if sometimes dense (because technical), diction to match that set him above that congenital difficulty. Far from succumbing to the emasculating quiddity of romantic frustrations, in ‘Measuring Resistance,’ the poet flexes on his seemingly limitless ‘capacitance’ for romantic passions:

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If this were a jungle,

I’d need feathers, fins and pheromones

For this lulling dance

In the solemnity of my nudity,

My wheals bare, tanned lesions,

Careening for your affection.

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Throughout this protean section on the complexity and intricacy of love, sexual intimacy, and romantic relationships, each line, each stanza, each poem reveals resilience to be Ajayi’s overriding watchword, as it should be of everyone who holds love to be essential to living. Endlessly tried by each, he never backs from singing the soulful, sometimes lustful songs, humming across his romantic soul.

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The Poet as Doctor

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If Dami Ajayi depends on the great mound of the western poetic tradition to bring the force of his ‘love poems’ alive and on the rich ruck of the Nigerian protest poetics for his satirical bent for the clean, quite memorable delivery of his ‘barroom reflections,’ the section dedicated to his ‘hospital poems’ is a locus classicus of an ambitious reach into the deep, difficult core of originality. It is in this section that Ajayi plunges down, bootstrapped and barebacked, to forge his own path. However, it turns out, not only for himself but also for such postdating poets as Chisom Okafor, Feranmi Ariyo, and Funto Omojola in their own exploration of their experience with hospitals and medicine, if not as practising doctors like Ajayi, then as patients and families of patients, blending medicalese with ordinary speech as a way of reimagining the memories of their experience, a diction employed to inspiring effects by Ajayi in Clinical Blues.

Of all the three sections in the book, this median section is the one whose artistic, even aesthetic, accomplishment is not too hard to forefeel. Convincingly enough, the eponymous poem ‘Clinical Blues,’ which opens the section, cinches that assertion. A sustained, first-hand account of the Nigerian hospital life from the dual perspectives of a medical student and a practising doctor, the poem in its entire nine sections seem to leave nothing of importance, both clinical and emotional, out: from the music-laden revelation of the first through the ‘schizophrenic’ musing of the impressive sixth to the poignant feel of the ninth. However, Ajayi’s poetic afflatus manifests itself most authoritatively in the third section where he proves Aristotle right once again that the command of metaphor—or figurative language, to be more precise in Ajayi’s case—is the ultimate vestige of genius. Writing about the mechanics of being pregnant in as candid and kind a tone as any doctor could aspire, he attains apotheosis in his unification of the figurative and the familiar in which the former somehow explains the latter:

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This too shall pass…

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This hurt that grips and quakes

And swirls your being,

The orgasm of nine moons and

Many lethargic mornings,

Evenings pathognomonic of pica

Shall not go without saying…

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As mother earth unfurls her palms to

Relieve you of your burden

Of joy, this organic almond shall thrash

About reluctant, as always lachrymose.

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Fraught with the kind of paradoxes to be marvelled at owing to their descriptive precision, this section more than touches base with perfection: in the book, it has a monotony on poetic quality. If there is only one part of the book that is worth quoting in full, this is it. However, Ajayi’s brilliance dictates restraints to flesh out his overall range, lest the critic becomes an anthologist.

Indeed, the true marvel of an imagination hard at work and an execution so refined starts from the title: Clinical Blues is rife with illuminating implications for the book. Clinical, as I have mentioned earlier, is as descriptive of Ajayi’s engagement with medicine as it is of his overall attitude as a literary craftsman towards his subjects. Blues, on the other hand, has its first implication on the musical genre’s traditional association with the expression of deep, emotional pain. Definitely an oxymoron, the title has its fourth possible implication from blues because it suggests the disconnect between the clinical suffering of patients and the doctor’s capacity for true, non-perfomative empathy, the existence of which has been nothing short of storied in our time. However, the speaker is anything but detached from the suffering of the patients in his Clinical Blues. Instead his medical purpose is strewn around the betterment of his patients with enough emotional connection and openness to make even the palest tundra warm. With care and sensitivity towards his suffering patients, a suffering that often comes through different shades of  uncertainty, the doctor begins his prognoses with musical softness, appending to it his exordial purpose as a neophyte in the profession of healing:

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Sing me a song

Not from your larynx;

Probe deep,

Deeper into lungs

The recesses of your soul.

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I am a lonesome observer,

The clinical sentinel

Who sits still to wage

Wars against infirmities

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Throughout more than fifty stanzas, the doctor has seen almost every colour of suffering and the poet almost every form of emotion that comes with those sufferings: from the trouble of hard-to-diagnose diseases that keep the doctor far away from sleep, through the joyful ‘hurt [of parturition] that grips and quakes’, to the curt coldness of the hospital ambience enough to daunt the healing aspirations of the place. However, despite developing schizophrenia and experiencing the dour ‘Emotions / Of wailing wives and waiting families,’ the speaker speaks resilience yet, and doubles down on his medical purpose that anchors the first section of these ‘Clinical Blues’:

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A dark year has passed

And I remain the lonesome

Observer who stands still to

Wage wars at the infirmary.

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Meanwhile, also trained as a psychiatrist, Ajayi recognizes the inevitability of contending with issues central to modern medicine, particularly from the mid 20th century and 21th century, which are here treated with equal intensity and subtlety as the love poems. Such issues include mental illness, addiction, and suicide. Engaging these important subjects in a collection with a troika of motivations, Ajayi streamlines their complicated complexity and proneness to generality by bringing the right past into his present evocation with a bagful of appropriate metaphors that mirror Ajayi’s own literary ambition. For example, a poem titled ‘The Séance’ features the heavies of modern American poetry including Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the American novelist David Foster Wallace, each name suggestive of Ajayi’s preoccupation with the trinity of mental illness, addiction, and suicide. The poem that follows ‘The Séance’ is called ‘The Portrait of a Poet’, which features two of the foremost novelists of the last century who wrote prose the way the best of the poets have always written poetry: with a preened sense of the world and a panoramic view of the human situation. Suggestively, in ‘Séance’, Ajayi conducts a haunting séance of literary spirits to examine what he calls ‘The dregs of reality’, particularly the relation between creative genius, mental illness, suicide, and other destructive psychological traits or conditions. But leave it to his section on Foster Wallace to bring the central point of the poem together and to a head:

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Wallace was next,

Brackish enamel from tobacco chews

Grinning with hair swept down

Lost the bandanna, he said

Also the blues, we thought

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Suicide is escape

But please let me have Prozac,

The key to that secret stairwell

That opens into heaven

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Close to the symbolic richness of the personal portrait in the first stanza stands the visceral broader contemplation of escape, both pharmaceutical and suicidal, in the second. If modern psychopharmacology is an alternative path to transcendence—as the appearance of ‘Prozac’, an antidepressant for major depressive disorders, suggests, however problematic that assumption—then that pharmaceutical intervention stands in complex relation to suicide as another form of escaping ‘the dregs of reality.’ At the end of the poem, freedom transforms paradoxically into a kind of trap: something to escape from, something to be free of.

If ‘The Séance’ registers a broader sense that freedom (whether creative, personal, and pharmaceutical, in the sense of having drugs seamlessly available to fuel one’s addiction) can become another form of confinement, the same irony is registered in the awful truth Ajayi expresses in ‘Portrait of a Poet.’ The poem is not just a portrait of a failed poet, insensitively dressed up in venerable comparison with Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway, two of the foremost masters of the novel form of the 20th century, but of the way artistic ambition can become a destructive force when it’s matched neither by talent, character, nor will, only one of which the representative writers in the poem possess in considerable quantity. The poem ends with the substance and consequence of the inability to rise up to the tough demand of living and the creative impulse:

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No second chances for reviewing inactions

And helming ways;

We go to the evening of your life

There is a gun waiting by the typewriter.

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The only necrotic lesion on the body of this sequence of hospital poems is effected by puns, which could only be described as Ajayi himself describes, albeit wrongly, his attempt with ‘Love Songs’: juvenile. Puns undercooked are that lethal because, as Clive James writes in ‘Criticism á la Kermode’, ‘Puns rarely prove anything except an absence of wit.’ In each of these instances in Clinical Blues (from ‘helming ways’ in ‘Portrait of a Poet’; ‘Who need Haloperidol: halos / For pretty dolls’ in ‘Clinical Blues’; to ‘Hippocratical’ in ‘Lagenbeck’s Anatomy’, among others), wit is as far from anything any of the puns can get. These types of pun, playful as they try to be, are not conducive to the ecumenical tone, which is both serious and dour, of the work; and the effect they have on the reader is the same as that of a playboy playing too hard to score a cocky line: the struggle of the ungainly artifice to mimic the genuine article is instinctively manifest. Even for someone as remote to those punning terminologies as some of us are, one could see why resisting them is as hard as a playboy rationing his lustful words, but Clinical Blues is now resistant to the destructive hand of time because it resists sounding like a period piece, and it is the empathic doctor in Ajayi the poet we should thank for that.

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The Poet as Satirist

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From the start of the new millennium till now, there are few books of poetry as well-received as Clinical Blues and even fewer debuts as revered in Nigeria. There is a simple reason for that broad reception and banner reverence: indeed, quality is a self-validating feat. This feat is what recognizes when a poet transcends mere craftsmanship to achieve something urgent and timeless, as Ajayi does in the ‘Barroom Reflections’ section where his satirical scalpel dissects Nigeria’s political gangrene with Fela’s Afrobeat as his antiseptic. In ‘A Libretto for Fela’, the opening poem of this final section, each subtitle borrows from Fela’s discography to perform an autopsy on the Nigerian condition, where destruction and beauty interlace like the ‘golden sun’ witnessing broken china as though gilded by Midas’ touch:  

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Let china fall into pieces 

With the golden sun as witness

And Midas’s glimpse fall on

The smithereens as it turn gold

Like Fela’s vinyl.

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This alchemy of ruin and artistry mirrors Nigeria’s own paradoxes: state violence, for instance, birthed protest music and electoral fraud inspired poetic resistance. Ajayi’s satire thrives in this liminal space between despair and creativity, as seen when he repurposes Fela’s ‘Shuffering and Shmiling’ to diagnose national Stockholm syndrome:  

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Hope is the new heroin,

Smoke it with a rizzler of belief...

It’s a phenomenon called

“Suffer suffer for world”.

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The medicalization of metaphor here (‘heroin’ as both drug and distorted hope) reveals Ajayi’s dual arsenal as doctor and satirist. His clinical training sharpens the poems’ diagnostic precision, whether examining political malaise in ‘Bouazizi’s Ashes’ or cultural amnesia in ‘House of Hunger, Revisited.’ The latter poem, though nodding to Dambudzo Marechera’s Zimbabwean classic House of Hunger, sinks its teeth into Nigeria’s specific malnourishment of the collective psyche:  

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Open a door, any door, and

What squeaks out is a cringe of defiance;

Viral particles of poverty,

Sonic booms of diarrhoea

And a female prostitute, Anopheles.

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Ajayi’s grotesque imagery in poverty as contagion and hunger as sonic weapon eschews easy didacticism for visceral satire. Even his linguistic choices weaponize Nigerian Pidgin and medical jargon to enact resistance, as when ‘Ikoyi Blindness’ skewers elite myopia through the double entendre of ‘If you miss road,/ You no go rich.’ This linguistic dexterity reaches its zenith in ‘New Buka,’ where the barroom becomes a microcosm where concerned citizens keep to analysing the gore of national dysfunction:  

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I kept good nights with you,

The brothel of brew, where ideas

Ricochet from mouths into beer mugs into completion.

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The poem’s setting, which is a watering hole for ‘political activists and fun-seekers’, mirrors Nigeria’s own paralysis, where revolutionary talk drowns in lager. Yet Ajayi avoids cheap cynicism; his satire retains a paradoxical warmth, not drunken glibness, but the intoxicating clarity of truth-telling. This balance crystallizes in the ironic yet no-holds-barred ‘Amnesia’, where Nigerian political gaslighting meets Ajayi’s poetic counterattack:  

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Amnesia is the cure 

To haunting pasts

Administer two milligrams stat

Hit the reset button

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Everything reads well, but reads to sting the status quo—both the perpetrators and the people. The clinical imperative ‘stat’ collides with the absurdity of treating historical erasure with medication, a satire so sharp it draws blood without raising its voice. Such understatement distinguishes Ajayi from more polemical predecessors like Niyi Osundare, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Okot p’Bitek etc. Also, where Fela shouted ‘Zombie!’ at soldiers, Ajayi whispers ‘The Orderly wheels the old gurney / Mortuary-ward, death is his business’ in ‘If Tomorrow Comes’, letting bureaucratic euphemism stress systemic indifference. This restraint amplifies the satire’s longevity. By avoiding dated polemics in favor of timeless mechanisms (the corrupt politician in the brilliantly allusive ‘Golgotha’ could be any decade’s apparatchik), Ajayi future-proofs his critique. When ‘Bouazizi’s Ashes’ links Tunisia’s self-immolating vendor to our constant need for resistance, the poem transcends journalism to become archetype:

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Die, 

Unlike Bouazizi

Who imploded many

Times over...

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The enjambed ‘Die’ hangs like a noose, indicting all who perish silently under tyranny’s ‘toxic fumes.’ Here, the satire turns searingly transnational while remaining rooted in the heat and stench of our local realities. Ultimately, Clinical Blues endures because Ajayi understands satire’s highest function: not just to chastise, but to preserve. Like formaldehyde stabilizing a specimen, his poems pickle Nigeria’s pathologies for posterity. In ‘Look and Laugh’, where the titular refrain ‘Ha Ha Ha Ha’ echoes hollowly, the laughter curdles into something between a jeer and a dirge, which is a fitting epitaph for a nation that still mistakes survival for living. Ten years on, these poems remain alarm clocks set to Nigeria’s recurring nightmare, their satire vibrating with Panglossian pessimism: the grim chuckle of those who see the worst but insist on singing it into gold.

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Coda

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Reading through Clinical Blues eleven years later, we find that Arigbabu, with his brilliant sentence achieving in a bit for itself indeed what it says of its subject, is ever clear-eyed yet time has rendered the statement as less than correct in its  sound evaluation: Clinical Blues did not run the risk of being labelled a classic. No: its author, by the sheer volume of his consistent brilliance, made sure that its being a classic is not merely a potential concomitant but its fate. Now, we can safely say the Blues, both clinical, romantic, and satiric, are canonical simply because rereading them is a test the better poems therein are always too eager to take up in their ‘irrepressible freshness’, to borrow Ezra Pound’s description of a classic in ABC of Reading. Dami Ajayi is a success from the start; so our only hope is that it is the kind of success that stays—in the poet’s capability to change, improvising with style and stretching the bars of the imaginative in order to ultimately improve on his poetic quality: A Woman’s Body is a Country and Love and Other Accidents, his two other collections of poems published in 2017 and 2022 respectively, should be able to answer our questions and, perhaps, further aerate our hope.

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