For the World’s Loneliest Historian review: Emmanuel Sanusi Keeps Vigil Over What a Country Refuses to Record

Thirty poems, and by page eleven Marcus Aurelius has agreed to sit for an interview. Ryan Holiday supplies an epigraph and William Walker Atkinson supplies another, while one poem gathers the maxim, the Confucian bond, the Taoist flow, Ma’at and Ubuntu into sixteen lines and asks them all to shake hands. Emmanuel Sanusi is a poet with a performance record across Benue, Abuja, SLAMeroun and Nottingham, published in Lolwe, JAY Lit and Kalahari Review, and he names T.S. Eliot, Wole Soyinka and J.P. Clark as his presiding spirits. His debut, the opening title in Witsprouts Books’ Continuity Poetry Book Series, argues that memory is fragile and the record dissolves, and it makes that argument by quoting the thoroughly preserved men of Western thought.

The word forgotten turns up more often in these seventy pages than any image does, and the obsession has a real object underneath it. This is a book about a country that does not keep its records, which Sanusi states once in “The future is:”: “We belong to a country that isn’t / Accountable so we hold our hopes /. We hide it well because our / Country is a storm that can flood / A dream.” Then he drops the thread and returns to the Greeks.

Two poems earn the book. Neither one mentions a philosopher. “Last days at [location]” is the finest thing here, and its bracketed title is a quiet joke about how many houses a Nigerian childhood contains. The only memory the broken sewing machine holds is of his father’s feet as they sync into it to weave his mother’s yarn, the dwarf guava tree withers with nobody sweeping the exiled leaves, and when his mother asks what he needs before they leave, he steals the entire house and hides it behind a brain pathway in his head. None of the loss is announced; the furniture is left to do the work.

“Retelling A Stoic Tale” works because the reading finally meets a road. He sleeps in Lagos traffic because he cannot move it forward, and lets a driver almost run him over “because I could not control / His driving.” Aurelius on the Third Mainland is the one place in the book where the philosophy is tested against something that could kill you.

The title poem is thirteen lines long. It is the weakest piece in the book. A collection named for the world’s historian owes that historian a face and a grievance, and the figure never arrives. Three poems are called haiku without observing the form, and the archaic register breaks the moment any weight is put on it (“Thee is given the best of our warmth”).

Underneath the reading list Sanusi has a subject and an ear that works whenever he stops performing. One watches this poet on the condition that he burns the bibliography and goes back, to the house.