Birth,death,and re-birth: The trope of eternal rejuvenation in Isidore Diala’s The Lure of Ash

Introduction

Isidore Diala’s sustained devotion to oral African literature, and his fascinating insight into the cyclic kinesis of human existence, which is rooted in African cosmologies, culminates in the trope of eternal rejuvenation in The Lure of Ash (1993). In his conception of death as a glorious becoming in this poetry collection, Diala acknowledges his indebtedness to his mother, from whose oral tales he draws extensively (2014: 31). His mother, Bernadette Nma Diala, was a teller of folktales from whom he learnt his first poems and through whom he learnt so early to associate good poetry with musicality and the memorability of phrases. Thus his earliest attempts on literary creation were mere responses to his mother’s exhortations to appropriate her stories as models for his own original tales. This accounts for the echoes of her tales and songs in his poetry, much of which dwells on death and the afterlife. Upholding the immortality of those whose cadences and intuitions are replicated and endorsed in the resonant routines of daily existence, Diala notes:

Literature is surely a medium through which we can lay claims to immortality as it is the embodiment of collective memory; but it is also a source of immortality as the discerning listener or reader can recognise the spectres of our beloved dead flitting through the columns of the verbal artefact. (2014: 28)

Poet, playwright, critic, and professor of African literature at Imo State University, Owerri, Nigeria, Diala hails from Okwu in Ikeduru Local Government Area of Imo State, Nigeria. He attended the then Imo State University, Etiti (now Abia State University, Uturu) before proceeding to the University of Ibadan for his MA and PhD in English. In 1998, The Lure of Ash (1993), his only poetry collection to date, won the Association of Nigerian Writers’/Cadbury Poetry Prize. This was six years after his play, The Pyre, emerged as joint winner of the Association of Nigerian Authors’ Drama Prize in 1992. Sixteen years after the Cadbury Poetry Prize, in 2014, Diala emerged the first winner of the NLNG Literary Criticism Award.

Diala once described himself as a supplicant at the altar of literature (2014: 31), a self-reflective assertion revealing of a man who has spent much of his time in the smithy of African literary exploration. Beyond his mother’s influence, which he acknowledges, his cultural background as an Igbo privileges him to understand the cyclic movement of life, death, and rebirth in Igbo cosmology. If he seeks to illuminate the Igbo worldview in which reincarnation is central in the conception of life and death, he equally presents a supra-rational African mode of knowing that recognizes the aureole of death. Thus, assuming the mode of a positive kind of negation in The Lure of Ash, death — the conceived final destination of all flesh and the abyss to which all human strivings must return — is represented as an element that could truly satisfy the soul’s implacable yearning for eternal rejuvenation. In a way, The Lure of Ash seeks to comprehend and admit the cyclic journey from life to death to rebirth as a fundamental part of humanity’s complex rites of passage. Seeking to examine that moment in recognition by which human existence gestures ultimately towards death and renewal, an affirmation that “to exist is to be disfigured” (Eagleton, 2005: 119), this article attempts to show that death initiates life that never dies. Juxtaposing Heideggerian existentialist ideation with the Igbo worldview of the afterlife and reincarnation, it seeks to revalidate the conception that death is that point where life begins.

Death and eternal rejuvenation

The incarnate credo of death which proclaims the omnipresence of tragedy and human mortality pervades the entire “Hues of Ash” sequence in Diala’s The Lure of Ash. In the introductory note to the poetry collection, Diala, drawing attention to the tragedy and finger-marking process that characterizes human existence, identifies three stages in the development of the poems: the invocation of the eternal regenerative cycle; the exaltation of death as creative rebirth; and the eternal trappings of grief. Significantly, these concepts and their proverbial ideation are embedded in the Igbo worldview into which Diala taps.

Igbo proverbial lore consistently draws attention to the caveat that life, salvaged and preserved, will be surrendered inevitably to death and that death is a debt which every human being owes to Mother Earth (Ivenso, 1999: 13). Although life brings a large measure of suffering, death is considered the greatest suffering of all; yet this apprehension of death in the Igbo worldview has given way to a new idiom in which death is reconstituted as a glorious becoming. The awareness of its ontological significance has partly led to the radical change in its perception as finality. Most Igbo dirges demonstrate how death is veiled in endearing metaphors in order to sublimate its terrors and reconfigure its exaltation. As Diala has argued elsewhere,

Death and bereavement often compel the most sober confrontation with life and interrogate the inordinacy of humans’ inward delusions of immortality. Dirges are exorcisms meant to rein in the terrors of death and enlarge the scope of the human spirit. The sublimation of the grief of bereavement into music is a conquest, a translation of the fear and pain of death into an artistic triumph. (2015: 93)

Quite apart from Adiele Afigbo’s observation of the yearning for decent burial in Igbo cosmology, in order to achieve accomplished earthly existence and transition to dignified ancestorhood (2005: 214), Diala also observes that

beyond the practical arrangements for the burial of the deceased, a traditional Igbo burial ceremony, inspired by and rooted in the belief in reincarnation, typically constitutes a cosmic drama engaged in a sober reappraisal of life as a worthwhile experience even in the face and in defiance of death. (2015: 86)

Affirming death as a mere transitional experience, Afigbo and Diala note that the Igbo purgatory is the liminality of souls requiring proper burial to achieve full happiness, whereby those who had a fulfilled earthly existence but were yet to be given befitting burial are stranded between the beatified and the damned. According to Afigbo,

From this part emanated from time to time, cries by souls whose throats were dried from lack of water and whose stomach rumbled from lack of food. It was by and large a zone of transition but for souls whose earthly descendants were shiftless, it could be a zone of extended residence till the next opportunity for reincarnating here on earth. (2005: 214)

Among those stranded in this liminal space are those whom J. A. Umeh describes as the Akalogeli, “evil spirits and malevolent ghosts of dead ones who for one reason or the other are still hanging around in the dimension of consciousness, wreaking havoc, causing illness, disasters and other misfortunes on living people and or their possessions” (1999: 200). Obi Oguejiofor affirms this, noting that Ögbunuke is another group similar to the Akalogeli. Ögbunuke is the spirit of a dead member of an age grade who did not attain the goal of life before death. Such a spirit “goes about creating misfortunes among the living age-mates who are striving to advance their worldly fortune” (qtd. in Umeh, 1999: 85).

For the Yoruba, like the Igbo, death is a respite from the harsh and restless mortal condition. From this perspective, there is on occasion a secret desire to embrace death or what Alain Badiou (2003: 66) calls “nostalgia” for death. The Ifa priest in Yoruba traditional wisdom proffers gratitude to God in time of death because it is he, Olodumare, who is calling the sick to come home for renewal of life (Ivenso, 1999: 28–29). Arguing that death is the beginning of the process of all birth, Ivenso (1999: 13) notes that across cultures and religious persuasions, death is viewed simply as a change and birth of a new life. It is no longer merely conceived of as a fury of destruction that does not build in its place, but as that which “destroys in order to rebuild life” (Eagleton, 2005: 74). For the Christians, “If a seed does not die and decay, it does not sprout to life (1 Cor. 15: 36); and the “Wheel of Fortune” in Indian culture symbolizes the continual renewal of births and deaths or the cyclic conception of life, death, and rebirth (Ivenso, 1999: 25). In Lacan, there is a truly radical and perpetual gesture of death which escapes the dialectic of law and desire: “What Death stands for at its most radical is not merely the passing of earthly life, but the ‘night of the word’, the self-withdrawal, the absolute contraction of subjectivity, the severing of its links with ‘reality’ — This is the wiping the slate clean” (qtd. in Holsclaw, 2010: 164), a wiping that opens a space beyond the law and order of being, but comes before the foundation of truth. These affirmations attempt to revalidate the conception of death as a process that gives birth to new life.

Diala’s debt to Christopher Okigbo in his fascination with the notion of death is enormous. But if Okigbo is obsessed with “the twilight moment between sleep and waking” (Okigbo, 1971: 25), Diala is preoccupied with the journey from the womb to the tomb which symbolizes home going and homecoming, strong motifs in The Lure of Ash. And while Okigbo’s poetry seems to privilege the Romantics’ belief in “the necessity of the tragic vision and the barrenness of attempting to evade it” (Draper, 1985: 19), the vision in The Lure of Ash transcends death and its abiding terror, revealing the strange beauty and eternal rejuvenation which death engenders. For Diala, therefore, death itself is an experience to be secretly sought after rather than a completely mournful experience. In his own words:

Ash epitomises the paradox of the human condition. It signifies primarily the modest element from which humankind was created and inevitably returns. Ash is therefore, for that reason, evocative of the modesty, especially of our unregenerate nature […] The great challenge of the human situation is to transform mere ash into the element in which the spirit affirms its immortality. It is, therefore, the role of the poet to sing that the life that prevails, the life of the spirit, is the life triumphant over the lure of ash. (2014: 31)

These conceptions lie at the heart of Diala’s poetic imagination in The Lure of Ash generally and in “The Hues of Ash” in particular. “The Hues of Ash” re-envisions the void no longer as a vacuum full of woes but as a mythic space that engages with terror and forbidden desires behind which there are illuminating hopes. And like language, desire for eternity is a medium into which we fall at birth. For Eagleton (2005: 10), this is a “desire from which there appears to be no hope or rescue”. And even when the individual steps aside for a time from this beleaguered earth, there is no transcendence of the mortal condition but a confrontation of the same incarnate and metaphysical challenges of this earth. Beyond this Eagletonian tragic murkiness, however, Diala envisages a space with an endless cycle of existence in which death and birth beget each other through the process of rejuvenation.

In “Ululation”, the poet sets in motion the conception of life from the womb and its inevitable pilgrimage to the tomb. The sword is forged through the rites of fire, and through these rites, a new life is born. Thus pregnancy, symbolized by the enlarged breasts and womb, answers to the inevitable procreative process:

The sword flames in the blazing forge

Seeking rebirth in the orgasm of fire;

The supple swell of breasts and womb

Dances to Earth’s regenerative chants. (Diala, 1993: 3) ¹

If songs of birth gesture towards human desire for eternity, Earth, like a woman, is impregnated by the sperm of mystery through which the child, like an arched bow, is flung into eternity. And as earth gives birth to the seed yam, so does fire give birth to the sword, and woman to the child. In Tapta Marga tradition, it is believed that “in the heat of sexual production, the heated cauldron erupts into an orgasm of creative fecundity in which the heated milk is further equated with semen and sap; natural milk yields biological birth” (Kaelber, 1989: 4). In this regenerative process, “the blazing forge merging with the orgasm of fire in its incubating heat, gives birth to the sword” (qtd. in Kaelber, 1989: 4). The orgasm is a convulsion which ends in the complete withdrawal of the man from the woman’s body. If the first stage of coitus can be regarded symbolically as an attempt on the part of the man to return to the womb, the second stage must be considered an emergence from the womb. Albert Ellis and Albert Abarbanel (2013: 743) observe that in the birth process, man is reborn through orgasm: “The whole act of sexual intercourse can be understood for the man as a symbolic return to the womb and rebirth […] Where the man is reborn, the woman has given birth to him”.

The sexual poetics and erotic gestures of “Ululation” suggest that the orgasmic pulse soars from the earth below to the heavens above, and from the heavens above to the earth below, setting ablaze their holy desire for each other. In the occult tradition of the Maga and Magos — modern Western magic in which individuals acquire a distinctive mode of consciousness that can produce a transition from the ordinary to the magical — fire is symbolic of regenerative consciousness. As the seductive and scorching flame of the sun sets ablaze in ecstasy the holy perfume of frankincense, the echo of the voice of creation in the beginning merges with the echo of the voice of union in the end. Then the Maga receives the Magos deep inside her silver womb, lost within an abyss of eros and mania undergoing the sensation of life, death, and rebirth through the orgasm of the Sun and Moon (Lycourinos, 2010: 267). These mysteries are realized by the reality of death since birth becomes perfect only through death. The poet in “Ululations” seems to articulate this magical necessity of fire in the processes of creation (birth) and recreation (rebirth) that existence involves. To be sure, the kinetic movement of existence appears unfathomable such that between life, death, and rebirth, we do not know which precedes the other: “Our home-going spirals into our home-coming” and “life like a dance swings in circles”. Yet we do not need to be afraid, but cheerful, with the enigmatic rhythm of the song and dance of existence:

Begotten we die, dying we are reborn

We weave our way through the dance of life. (3)

While this poem, with its rich verbal touch typical of Diala’s poetry, establishes the abstruse equilibrium between ripeness and rottenness, the poet in “Invocations”, prays for renewal after death, beyond the “season of fire”.

Although it has political undertones, referring to the era of governmental dictatorship in Nigeria, the poem’s persona symbolically attempts to explore the ash that shades all human vocations: the world of arts, in the “painter’s brush” and “dyer’s groomed palms”; the commercial world’s “burnt markets”; divination, in both “dibia’s visionary brows” and the “courtesan’s mirror”; in politics, the “tyrant’s burnt statue”; and in religion, both the “sacred image gnawed by termites” and the “Catholics’ Ash-Wednesday”. These images underline how religion is appropriated merely as a “consolatory illusion, protecting man from the desolating knowledge of his true state” (Draper, 1985: 26). The bitter-sweet experience which death signifies and which is embodied in the orgasm of fire is re-enacted in the simultaneous presence of beauty and decay, refreshment and gloom. While the destructive fire is here depicted as a positive energy which burns out mortal impurities, providing room for penance, and yielding atonement for specific transgressions, the atoning heat of penance consumes humanity’s evil crafts as fire turns human and material possessions to ash. The destructive and creative energies of fire are therefore kindred elements that consume the victim of the sacrifice as well as the sacrificer, but this consumption delivers humanity to rebirth. Considering the possibility of life beyond the ceasing of life, and “beyond the season of fire”, the persona prays for protection from all human deceptions and for the attainment of enduring knowledge:

Beyond this season of fire

Season of Fire, season of fire,

Beyond this season of fire

Sombre harvests of ash

 May we learn …

The faith of the grave

Seeing beyond the pomp of majesty (4)

The mythic song of fire is exalted to the splendour of great traditional ritual, a ritual which is tragic in its association of our desperate desires with nothingness as we plod through one woeful generation to another. But the invocation itself possesses the poetic assurance of a glimmer beyond the season of fire. Diala, in a way, articulates how tragedy “creates an aesthetic object from the material associated with sorrow and distress, so that what is painful becomes a source of pleasure” (Hume, 1875/1757: 260).

In his journey from the womb to the tomb, man’s quest for immortality remains futile. Alluding to the Igbo proverbial lore, that the kite’s search for its mother in the burning bush is as futile as the vulture’s quest after beauty or the snake’s attempt to kill the tortoise, the poet declares:

But the kite swoops on the burning bush

 Seeking its mother in vain;

The vulture takes the legendary birth

 That deepens its ugliness;

The Snake rears and strikes the fabulous tortoise,

 Cracks its fangs on the carapace. (7)

For the Igbo, the kite would forever hover around the burning bush in search of his mother whom he pushed into the fire. And the vulture cannot transcend its ugliness nor can the snake kill the tortoise which is naturally protected by its carapace. These proverbial expressions are employed to explain the idea of man’s confrontation with “the more than man” which death typifies.

It is in “Earth’s Lament” that we come face to face with the measure of Diala’s poetic insight, as he reformulates local laments into an experience of artistic grandeur. The negation that lies in the heart of truth acknowledges the “existence of that which it annuls” (Eagleton, 2005: 102). The poem is a mournful pilgrimage of a disenchanted individual who breaks off at different moments to meditate on his past, present, and future representing the three stages of the cyclic movement. The poem’s persona is a tragic individual mired in grief and desolation, a grief that is a mixture of blood, tears, and sweat:

Blood sculpts deep tattoes [sic] on my ancient face

And mingling with tears and sweat recreates

The primordial mire that formed the chameleon’s proud thighs. (8)

For Friedrich Nietzsche, the doctrine of the mysteries extols pain as a holy experience. According to him, “the woes of a woman in labour satisfy pain in general all-becoming and growth […] there has to be eternal agony of the woman in labour so that there can be an eternal joy of creation, so that the will to life can eternally affirm itself” (1968: 4). The poet indicates that whether as the womb where the individual is formed, or in the tomb to which everyone’s expired body returns, or in the joyful pains of the woman in labour, or even in humanity’s inescapable confrontation with death, tearful grief is every woman’s companion:

Primal womb and final tomb; all earth is my earth,

The ecstasy of labour’s pangs and the fierce throes of death.

Grief is incarnate as a bereaved mother’s tears. (8)

Every rebirth then involves trampling on the earth. The paradox of the creation myth is that it involves destruction just as every joy comes with pain. The poet likens the woman’s tears to the raindrops from the sky: as the sky drops rains to fertilize the earth, so must the woman shed tears in the production of life. For the earth and the sky always kiss each other through the exuding of night-dews as both merge in a violent orgy of renewal:

Raindrops are the sky’s delight,

The dew marks Earth-Sky nocturnal touch:

Earth wails in fierce shudders of rebirth. (8)

Humanity is connected to the energies of the universe at that moment when the universal engages in a cosmic dance of life and death, generation and regeneration, birth and rebirth. According to Shanddaramon (2010: 9), “the energies of the universe are vibrations flowing to and fro — in and out”. In the pagan chants, we hear: “We are a cir-cle, the circle of life. With-in us flows the spi-rit of all | With no be-gin-ing and with no end. All that which ends be-gins a-gain” (Shanddaramon, 2010: 17). It is fascinating, therefore, that the divine light is endlessly and terribly opaque in its simultaneously enrapturing and annihilating image. Words like blood, tears, mire, tomb, pangs, death, grief, bereavement, and wails bring out the poem’s mournful temper. The whole landscape is permeated by the anguish that emanates from the inner recesses of the persona’s soul.

“Okigbo’s Quarter Century Sleep” mourns the death of Okigbo in a way which affirms that death marks the end of all heroic struggles. The poet sees Okigbo’s self-immolation during the Nigeria–Biafra war as “a heroic drive through the fire towards transcendence” (Diala, 2015: 86). But beyond the inevitable abyss glows an immortal light and hope:

Dust is the curve where the flesh reclines eternal

But beyond the moss and grass and a quarter century sleep

Beyond the arch of time’s rusty reach

Ascends immortally fragrance of sacrifice and song (9)

The poem celebrates Okigbo’s physical involvement as well as his poetic engagement with the Nigeria–Biafra war which took place between 1967 and 1970. Okigbo, whose poetry prophesied the war, had later dropped his poetic vocation and joined the war to fight on the Biafran side. Unfortunately, he died three months into the war. Assessing what he considers Okigbo’s achievements as a poet, Robert Fraser discerns in Okigbo

the ability to transcend the superficial and assertive palliatives for human suffering by the power of undiluted creative will, which Okigbo sees as the mainstay of the tragic sense, and which simultaneously appealed to that side of his nature which, at least in 1964 was so deeply suspicious of the ideological stances associated with cultural nationalism, negritude, and opportunistic Marxism. (1986: 98)

Diala’s “Okigbo’s Quarter Century Sleep” correspondingly laments the passing of this “Towncrier, whose eyes glazed with holy chalk | Glimpsed the unborn truth wrapped in the folds of mystery” (9). Foreseeing the impending doom, Okigbo, for whom poetry is a weapon of many sharp edges, validates through his art the Igbo adage that elders are annihilated for refusing to utter truths that have been planted on their lips, while children are doomed for refusing to abide by revealed truths. This truth, Badiou (2003: 66) notes, is the coming-to-be of that which is not yet, and this truth is the same for all who bear witness to it: “Someone who bears witness to an event of truth can be seized and bewildered by a burst of theatrical fire and thus enter into the complex configuration of a moment of art” (Badiou, 2003: 66). The dread that lurks in the inner sanctum of truth is that while piercing a given order of knowledge, this truth also pierces those who are faithful to it. Embracing this truth, Okigbo passes through a pilgrimage of fire and attains immortality:

Touched lips, luring to light from tomorrow’s marbled night

Truth whose clangour beat upon our wooden whorls.

I sing you Okigbo of the Ogene voice

That trod the path of thunder on the night of steel

And like the flaming god himself, to blaze the truth,

Burned too intensely and merged with the undying light. (9)

The “path of thunder” in the second line of the last stanza is a reference to Okigbo’s poetic sequence, which apart from prophesying the Nigerian–Biafran war, also laments the dwindling of human spirituality in the face of ruthless and prejudicial forces.

If the poet in “Okigbo’s Quarter Century Sleep” yearns for the eschatological prospect of an afterlife that gives meaning and promises happy renewal at the end of worldly worries, in “On a Tombstone” he also imagines that the unborn child desires to escape even from the same womb that has provided it with warmth. According to Adekoya (2006: 3), “the urge to escape to where there is ease, happiness and pleasure is a desire, a longing to be free from labour, misery and strife, and to be safe from the salvos of war which life is”. In its meditation on the birth–death–rebirth primal cycle and the paradox of human nature, Diala’s poetics shares with the oracular wisdom in Wole Soyinka’s “Idanre”. While terror is the manifestation of the malevolence of death, renewal is the benevolence that is inscribed in its soul. Like every creative act, death “breeds and destroys fear, contains within itself both the salvation and the damnation” (Soyinka, 1978: 60). This ambivalent attitude to death is widespread in the existential imagination. The affirmation of the void and the paradox of cyclic continuity show the affinity between divinity and humanity, and the gods, like men, are sometimes trapped in the paradox of the void. In Soyinka’s “Ogun Abibiman”, for instance, Ogun fashions a weapon with which he clears a path for the reunion of divinity and humanity long after their primordial separation, but with the same weapon, he kills his own followers in a moment of drunken blindness and blood possession on the battlefield (Adekoya, 2006: 8). This symbolic destruction is a movement towards incarnate void. Death in Diala’s poetry is therefore partly about the same element which destroys life but without which there is no life. That is to say, an “angel and demon, beauty and terror” (Eagleton, 2005: 69).

It seems apparent then that if the womb signals arrival, the tomb is emblematic of departure. “On a Tombstone” both eulogizes the incredible measure of Christopher Okigbo’s life and mourns his sad exit, leading us to the tragic metaphor and the overall trope that holds the sequence together: “Bound as we are to mere dust | Laying our lives, | A light and a signpost to the living | We hope to make an ally of eternity” (8). The symbolic ideation in the above lines demonstrates that the paradox of the soul’s demonstrable yearning for regeneration is born from an awareness of the irresolvable conflict that existence signifies, and the irreproachable supplication to life’s sublime promises. Yet the poet seeks to call up the spirit of optimism in a disjointed world, and consequently summons belief in humanity’s ability to transcend its worse impulses. In the matrix of his thoughts, he accepts that the otherness of the universe, the evil, consists of human weakness, which can be remedied (Eagleton, 2005: 33–34). It is a vision of tragedy found in Nietzsche, for whom “eternity is the bridge from pessimism to optimism because life triumphs upwards” (Horvath, 2008: 2). In the same way, Diala, envisioning redemption as a possibility at the end of human suffering, locates the cyclic kinesis as a luminous signpost which binds “The Hues of Ash” sequence together.

Okigbo, in the poet’s imagination, is a “poet, prophet, patriot, | Martyred that the letting of his blood | May hasten the birth of the ideal nation” (10). Okigbo’s self-immolation may well find its further affirmation in Diala’s assertion that “the fallibility of the human condition, as well as the necessity of communal expiation, expresses itself in varying concepts of the messianic myth” (2014: 31). Hence Diala locates society’s routine need of heroic sacrifices or even self-crucifixion to renew itself in the tropes of myth, religion, literature, and history.

In “Nzeogwu’s Epitaph”, the poet mourns another of his heroes, Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, who planned and executed the first military coup d’état of 15 January 1966 in Nigeria. Arguing with an implicit voice of reason, the poem’s persona insists that mere epitaph is inadequate for a patriot who gave his life in ridding society of evil: “Salvation stalks the fires of self-immolation | For monuments are frail memorials | For a hand that sought to extract the ash in the fl-ash of lightning | And sow it with thunder” (11).

While the enlarged womb signals birth and elicits a sense of joy, the tombstone is always a site of terror and pity. In “Every Mourner’s Cry”, too, the poet faces the irrevocable fact of implacable mortality. Like the preceding poems, which are generally suffused by the obsession with death, the circumstances of Ursula’s death in this poem push the poet beyond the compensations of reason. The scar left behind by Ursula’s death is so indelible that he hears the echoes of her voice each time any other mourner cries around him. The love which both had shared before she died is for him more “than the fragrance of life” (11). The poem remains largely one of affirmation, since in it we see poetry itself — as an operation of the human mind — serving as a vehicle for transcending certain mortal limitations:

But in the hollow of your palm,

A soft wind stirred a gathering of ash;

And in your smiling eyes danced

The glint of a triumphant skull (12)

The poet acknowledges the existential gulf that exists between one phase of existence and the other. In “The River”, the poet transforms to a tragic supplicant at the river bank, where he discovers that he cannot cross to the other side of the river to meet his beloved because the link across the river is gone: “the river has swept off the log, the log across the river”. Here death is symbolized by the river that breaks the connection between people, between cultures, leading to tragic solitude. He cries for help because their feet would be stuck in the clay if they attempt to cross. They stand, stranded:

Here, I alone; there, you alone

And our voices are lost in the tumult of the waves. (13)

This view of death as a transitional gulf between the living and the dead can also be found in the Romantic conception of tragedy. Romantic poets like Byron and Shelley denounce a supreme force for its complicity in human suffering. But many of the poems in the “Hues of Ash” sequence suggest that even in austere situations, there seems to be an unfailing hope rather than angst. It is fascinating then that the tragic elements informing the sequence, including those where death and mortality are starkly confronted, often turn in the other direction, celebrating human triumph and the capacity to bear contradictions with cheerfulness.

An aura of tragic hopefulness pervades the atmosphere of “Waiting”. On the surface, this appears to be a poem of unfulfilled expectation, like the absurd experience in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1954/1952), where the hope for redemption turns into the colour of ash. And the lover’s eternal absence seems to represent the impossibility of attaining fulfilment in a world full of woes:

The moments of a lover’s absence

Are not counted by the hands of a clock

They are measured by the rhythm of the heart,

And each beat is eternity. (14)

Although the poet acknowledges the futility of waiting for a lover who would never come, he refuses to cave in: “Waiting is of the colour of ash | The heart aches, but I wait”. Even when he reverses the lines in the last stanza, the flame of tragic hope does not wane: “Ash is of the colour of waiting | I wait; but the heart aches” (14). By this transformation in which waiting turns into ash and ash adorns the shade of waiting, the poem suggests that ash, which symbolizes death, also anticipates the moment of renewal. At this point, death is not finality and not only does life beget death, but death also bears the seed of life.

Life itself implies the existence of death since every death is preceded by life and every life must be annihilated, an annihilation that creates room for renewal. Hence ash in “The Beckoning” is the trail of ash that follows all human strivings which suggests the ephemerality of life but beyond which there is another life:

Across the timeless realms of dreams,

Where your paths meet

In the afterlife in lore. (15)

Establishing his veneration for the life of the spirit, the poet envisions the “eternal flow of the spirit” as that which ensures the ultimate transcendence of “the lure of our mortal night”. He notes also, in “Song of the Elect” — a poem dedicated to Richmond, Diala’s younger brother, for his choice of the priestly vocation — that rebirth or ascendance to the sacred glow is a timeless spiritual transformation which is a post-death experience. Hence those who strive to keep in full flame the light of the spirit are already aware of, and are working towards, the beauty and bliss of eternity:

Love begotten in the tender regard of their soul

And their timeless longings whose anchor is eternity,

The bliss of their strides, the perfection of their toils,

Shed a hallowed light on the pilgrim’s lonely path. (16)

Commemorating the dead victims of the riots in the northern part of the country in the early 1990s in “A Voice from Zango-Kataf”, the poet reconfigures death as a redeeming experience:

Do not mourn for me, Nigeria

Spare me your passionate elegies

On my mouth barred by decrees of silence,

Withered by policies of starvation,

At last touched by the bliss of eternity,

Mercifully sealed by the grave silence of death. (17)

He celebrates his own death and the death of other people who now in death are excluded from the troubles of howling for bread.

If “Forbidden Accent” offers hollow condolences for the casualties of the Ejigbo plane crash, “You Met Me” explores the tearful experience of the poet, while he is trapped in tragic aloneness at the udara tree. Although the poet seeks to create a metaphor for a nation which has become a “pyre ever ablaze” and “one vast anxious tomb”, he sees the victims as “elect heirs of martyrdom” who have attained immortality:

[…] like the primal quickening breath

You reached forth for my receding spirit,

Renewing to exaltation my anguished life

Caressing to a tongue of flame mere cold ash. (18)

The images of grief such as “dying tears”, “lonely despair”, “receding spirit”, “anguished life”, and “mere cold ash” give way to a life renewed to adulation. It is this rebirth that transforms the poet’s mournful solitude to hopefulness, suggesting the possibility of a beautiful dawn after a terrible night.

The same political forces that led to the human death in the above two poems are implicated in the death of dreams in “Nigeria at Thirty-eight”. The poet mourns the dreams of people murdered by the wretched political experimentation in a country blessed with vast resources: “My flute wails thirty-eight salutes, | Mourning wilted hopes of beauty; | My flute wails thirty-eight salutes, | Lamenting smothered dreams of grandeur” (20). These dreams differ radically from the self-annihilating dreams in “Campus”. Here the poet alludes to the temptations of campus cult’s nocturnal activities through which many have been led to grief and death. Some university undergraduates join nocturnal campus-based groups who promise protection against all forms of ugly experiences. Unfortunately, many of such students are killed by rival cult groups. He thus identifies the presence of death in the misguided dreams of secret cults on university campuses where it is a common denominator for the tempter and the tempted: “And every man has his dreams | And every dream un-ash- | Amedly its luring temptation” (11). Diala seems to perceive the scent of death in every human experience. And as Marconi notes: “the mystery of life and death is certainly the most persistent problem ever placed before the thought of man, revealing that the death element is attached to every entity that exists in material form” (qtd. in Ivenso, 1999: 15).

The death motif again lingers in “Rites of Flame”. In his delusion, the dying figure in this poem “seeks solace in tales of reincarnation”. The figure functions as a metaphor for the dying nation earlier alluded to in “Nigeria at Thirty-eight”, and later in “I’m Dying, Nigeria, Dying”. But the poet, in his obsession with rebirth, offers prayers for the dying nation to wake from the awful harvest of ash. The first stream of this prayer for rejuvenation is concluded in “The Flow”, which is an invocation for an everlasting link between life, death, and rebirth. Whether it refers to that urge which holds the individual bondage in sexual ecstasy, that overpowering force that surges through the lover’s veins and arteries, or that unstoppable cyclic movement of life–death–rebirth, the poet makes himself available to the tide: “Oh, reclaim me, eternal sea” (23), beseeching that eternal energy which recognizes no clear boundary among the phases of existence, and especially that rebirth which only death engenders.

Conclusion

If Diala’s “The Hues of Ash” (the first sequence that inaugurates The Lure of Ash) proposes that ash is the nothing which every material thing returns to, it equally seeks to indicate that the ash, already written out of existence, grows in stature, transcending its nothingness. From “Ululation” which begins the sequence to “The Flow” which concludes it, the dreadful credo of death is incarnate, announcing the omnipresence of tragedy and human mortality. In Philip Larkin’s preoccupation with the theme of death and the fact of the finger-marking process that underlies all human life, and its inevitable conclusion in death, he presents it stripped of protective illusions, and without the consolation of religious belief — though the widespread human need for that consolation, and the seriousness of mind with which it is traditionally associated, receive their full due. Death, however, is the insufferable bugbear that frightens in the night, and will not be blinked away in the day. It makes cowards of us all, not by “the dread of something after death”, but by remaining pigheadedly unamenable to reason or imagination (Draper, 1985: 33). Heidegger quite firmly affirms that “in his search for the true meaning of existence, humanity ends up in confrontation with the void” (qtd. in Cernuschi, 2012: 112). The truth one must confront is about nakedness before the abyss, a becoming which marks the end of life. The coming to be of life and its eventual expiration is as arbitrary as it challenges rationalist thought. Across cultures, this dread is initiated by the belief that death itself constitutes the site of final becoming. This ideation which is widespread in Diala’s poetry affirms the abiding proximity of life to the death event and establishes a common tie between both elements. But life itself implies the existence of death since there is no death that is not preceded by life and there is no life that cannot be annihilated. However, as “The Hues of Ash” sequence shows, the tomb, the womb, and the yam mound are enduring symbolic gestures towards eternity. Appropriating the interrelationship that exists in the constitution of life–death–rebirth cyclic movement, “The Hues of Ash” demonstrates that death, after all, marks the beginning of a new life, an existential trope that is widespread in the entire sequence. All the poems that make up the sequence demonstrably explore death as both a terrible experience and a glorious becoming. Thus beyond its conception as the final destination of all flesh, and in its unfathomable canvas, death proves to be the only phenomenon that could truly satisfy the soul’s implacable yearning for eternal rejuvenation.