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

Thirty poems. On page eleven, Marcus Aurelius agrees to be interviewed. An epigraph is provided by Ryan Holiday, and another by William Walker Atkinson. There is a poem which brings the Greek maxim, the Confucian relationship, the Taoist stream, Ma’at and Ubuntu into sixteen lines, asking all of them to shake hands. Emmanuel Sanusi is a Nigerian poet who has performed in Benue, Abuja, Nottingham and at SLAMeroun, and his poems have been published in Lolwe, JAY Lit and Kalahari Review. T.S. Eliot, Wole Soyinka and J.P. Clark are listed as the poets he looks up to. His debut, the first book in Witsprouts Books’ Continuity Poetry Book Series, makes the point that memory is weak and the record vanishes, and it makes that point by quoting the best-preserved thinkers in the West.

The word forgotten appears more times than any visual image in these seventy pages. There is a reason for the preoccupation: the writer is speaking about a country that does not keep proper records. Sanusi says it in “The future is:”: “We belong to a country that isn’t / Accountable, so we hold our hopes / And we hide it well, because our / Country is a storm that can flood / A dream.” He then abandons the idea and goes back to the Greeks.

The best work in the book is “Last days at [insert location]”, its bracketed title a joke about how many houses a Nigerian childhood has. All that the broken sewing machine remembers is his father’s feet as they work it to weave his mother’s yarn. The dwarf guava tree wilts and the fallen leaves are left unswept, and when his mother asks what he needs as they depart, he takes the whole house and its memories with him, hidden somewhere in his head. The loss is never stated out loud. The furniture carries it.

“Retelling A Stoic Tale” succeeds because the reading finally meets a real road. He sleeps while stuck in Lagos traffic because he cannot progress, and he allows himself to be nearly run over by a driver “because I could not control / His driving.” Aurelius on the Third Mainland is the only place in the collection where the philosophy is tested against something that could kill you.

The title poem consists of thirteen lines. And it is the weakest poem in the collection. A collection named for the world’s loneliest historian should at least give us that historian, and the figure is nowhere to be found. There are three poems that call themselves haiku but do not adhere to the traditional structure, and the antiquated language ruins the atmosphere immediately (“Thee is given the best of our warmth”).

Underneath the reading list, Sanusi has a real subject and an ear that works whenever he stops performing. The historian his title goes looking for is already there in the sewing machine poem, keeping his record in a room nobody else thought of cataloguing. It does not appear to have dawned on Sanusi that he already wrote him. When it does, he will produce a much better book than this one.