Forging through the Flame: A Review of Bola Opaleke’s “Skeleton of a Ruined Song”

(Review)

There is no way to best prepare for the creation of the world. And yet, here is a recommendation to do exactly this. Bola Opaleke’s Skeleton of a Ruined Song is another flame in the recreation of what poetry now has to offer.

In Skeleton of a Ruined Song, we are dropped into the action with the title of the first poem, “In This Kingdom of Ash”. Here, we are in the fire and rubble of what has been and what is to come. We are immediately greeted with a loss of self, or the gaining of self, depending on where we fall within the assertion that “[t]here is a name for everything, / but not everything has a name”. In most creation tales, the gods determine the signaling system of language creation, and identity creation. But our gods are absent until several stanzas later, “[s]hall we play this game where darkness kisses the gods in your eyes”? The gods appear after the ghosts of trauma, the abducted groom, wars past and present and future, time, birth, and violence. These gods are late. What is essential in the process of naming? Who gets to bestow a name if not the gods? Who gets to bear a name? The big bang exploding through an ambiguous timeline is a deft and confident stroke which occurs merely in this first page, and then recapitulates throughout. From the onset of this book, Opaleke demands the reader be not just a spectator, but a present element in the process of creation.

In “The Skin is An Island” “[y]ou will find out too late / that words come before language”. The naming we have just experienced is a stepping-stone to the processing of the hierarchical patterns that give organization to the birth of thought. But, in a sudden torrent, the fire and ash is quelled, “[w]ater was the first belief your ancestors embraced.” This elemental obfuscation offers a new bearing in time, and a new marker for creation and subsequently language creation. The “you” of this poem is operating under a different system of communication.

While each piece builds on what appears before it to construct this world, the stand-out to me was “Ghazal for the Undead” which asks “[w]ho will inherit our bones?”

I took out a pen to underline and was too astonished by the stunning imagery to extricate any part from another. This tightly woven plea, in its looping form, reinforces the complicity in creating language when war and famine and migration are an everyday horror. Essentially, you can feel that if there is escape, you must to survive, but you will carry this burden of knowledge deep in the roots and minerals of the self, even as you construct the act of being in another place, another time, another world.

But this is all surface work of the complex and direct interrogations that live throughout the book.

This writing slices to the deep-rooted heart within seconds to reveal, in gorgeous but essential ways, how trauma can bore down inside and live in the viscera of the self, but how despite the changing of our very vital elements, we can still find the way to our named self. It is at once a call to action, and a soothing maneuver that questions how kingdoms can be named, or created. Now go read.