Sometimes the work of an artist is a function of an event or an experience that has stayed with for a long time.
And they sometimes spend a lifetime trying to make sense or expunge it from their consciousness when it haunts them. In the case of the poet, Adedayo Agarau, what has agitated his mind is the destructive violence he experienced growing up in Oyo state, some of which have begun to recur.
In his debut collection of poems, The Years of Blood, he seeks to explore in a conceptual framework, a period marked by the violence and killings to which vulnerable women and children have been victims in his home state. He also attempts to examine the effects of the trauma on a personal and interpersonal level in the lives of those affected by the violence in these communities.
Through language we are shown the travesty in its full goriness (the collection opens with the overtones of a city haunted with violence, and the following poem is about children being slaughtered on account of religious fanaticism).
Adedayo Agarau’s language in The Years of Blood, is cathartic and in his lamentations, we see a poet in despair, and when the poems assume a personal tenor, we see him in confrontation with history. Sometimes the poems are deeply affecting and enmeshed in the engine of their emotions.
The Years of Blood approaches the topic of violence with lamentation. It bemoans violence, bemoans death, tries to see the world from the vantage of the ghost of a dead child as it paints images of children singing behind walls filled with grief. And the tragedy of the violence continuing even against the rituals made to stop it.
It is a collection which explores communal grief, and collective trauma. But the collection’s exploration of the communal, does not deny the place of the individual. Agarau represents himself and his anxieties in poems like “A Boy Writes a Poem About Anxiety,” and “Doomsday.” The alter ego is a sort of outlet for the poet for the kind of emotions which accompany the painful experiences which The Years of Blood embodies.
Those familiar with Agarau’s poetry will not find this collection surprising. The themes and emotions are as familiar as those expressed in an earlier chapbook like The Boys Who Went. Even the tendency of the poems to sometimes delve into the personal and familial, can be found in another collection, The Arrival of Rain. And it is in these personal and familial poems that the collection has its most unique images. It is where the collection often strives the most to have its own drift in language. Human emotion is best portrayed through the lens of empathy, a function of kinship, an article very present In Agarau’s works.
The importance of this work is in how it shows the unique way in which language meditates on violence. However, it does so in a romanticist way that could be said to be lacking in revolutionary character. The collection could do with some witticism as seen in the poems of poets like Niyi Osundare, Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali, or even in the way poets like Warsan Shire have explored violence in their works.
Perhaps that is not the artistic direction of this collection which seems to aim more for documentation.
What The Years of Blood does offer as an antithesis to the mindless violence that has plagued its setting is a semblance of the return of sanity. A community of women preparing for Christmas; the poetry of anticipation just before a family departs for a festive holiday, a father who returns to his family. What this serves to provide as a form of consolation is the melancholic poetry of the remains of lives that remain, a quiet assurance that the continuation of life is the continuance of hope.
Adedayo Agarau’s The Years of Blood has been longlisted for the Nigeria prize for Literature 2026.
***Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera is a writer and immunity builder. He is the author of the novel, Loss is an Aftertaste of Memories.