A Glimpse through a Particular Blackness: A Review of Ajibola Tolase’s Poetry Collection ‘2000 Blacks’

2000 Blacks by Ajibola Tolase is a debut collection of poetry that won the 2024 Cave Canem Prize for Poetry awarded annually to a Black poet. The collection delicately segmented into two parts, Tolase mends his poems with multiple themes: religion, spirituality, Nigerian tradition(s), immigration, history, new territories (on land and within oneself), home, family, love, loss, and the overarching themes of Black boyhood morphed into a man in a polar world.

Tolase is a Poet of form, weaving the poems into forms like acrostic, sonnets, ekphrastic etc. His usage of form throughout creates an open space for readers. We enter into this journey with an acrostic poem, gaining a first look into Tolase’s world: “Never about their black // fetish or feigned interest in my culinary skills and my nostalgia for…” (ix) Out the gate, he addresses the ignorance of those who only sees the poet for his proficient English language and questions why he is never asked about what home is to him; for him, how the place he is now – whether metaphorically, mentally, literally– is not home: “I struggle to shut my mouth full of wounds.” (xi)

What is masterful about this poem and conjointly, the rest of Tolase’s poetry, is the descriptive imagery.  The poet reminisces his feelings; his experiences are living, breathing on the page. The audience is placed in the solace being described, built inside this book. The reader from the first poem alone is pitted into the poet’s world. This continues in part Ⅰ, most notably, each sonnet married to the preceding poem and the one after, the last line leading into the first on the next page. “This might be // why they drown me, even if they don’t, I’ll still avoid water.” (6) We get this poignant line that weaves into the following sonnet: “I was shrouding the dead by the water where they drowned him.” (7) What else will the poet yield to his audience? What else must we learn through his poetry?

Part Ⅱ is Tolase combining his native language and experiences to the poetry in an intentional manner, who he is quite literally on the page for examination, beginning with definitions linked to the personal experiences that can be still viewed as a poem. Part Ⅱ is set up in a way that seamlessly makes it possible for the poet to successfully complete the smooth transition of continuing his stories while also sewing his native language within the white space. This is clearly evident in the Brotherman poems: “Police say make we no waka for late hour. // Say dem go kill us finish. Remember say all die na die.” (50)

Also,

“No be say we no try make dem office oath

takers no spoil show. But wetin go be go still be.

The matter for ground big, e no fit enter boat.” (54)

Bridging the gap between his native language and the personal, where language is not enough for some and where some poets might struggle, Tolase surpasses beyond expectation. Lines that hit hard in the best ways can be found throughout this selection of poems: ”Glory to the days I don’t die.” (7) “I carry home in my pocket or in the accent that rolls off my tongue.” (12) “To reject is to resist what exactly, if you’ve lost all ties to home?” (40) “This is not to say I am a groundskeeper, or my poems are graveyards.” (42) “I wanted him to smell the earth of the city that made us.” (53) The imagery Tolase creates allows both his language and personal experience to not only coincide but intertwine beautifully in his collection while simultaneously enlightening the reader. He readily puts forth not only the African American, Black, and international persons experience so many of us live and can relate too, but his own soul in between these lines, these stories, these proactive poems.

Each poem in parts Ⅰ and Ⅱ,  are inextricably linked through repeated images of home, customs, and memory to the poet, among many other things. Person/people of color or not, all of us humanly know what it is like to hurt, to love, to lose, and to choose to ultimately keep living. To get a glimpse of not only the Black experience but of this particular Black experience; it makes 2000 Blacks by Ajibola Tolase a much needed read.