He Didn’t Know What A Sonnet Was. Now He’s Won A Major Poetry Prize.
Sitting in class on his first day at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Ajibola Tolase thought: I don’t stand a chance in this room.
He wanted badly to be a poet, but it was instantly obvious, he said, that “I had no education in poetry.” The other students in his master of fine arts program had gone to Stanford, Harvard, the University of Chicago, studying English or something like it. Tolase had a statistics degree from the Federal University of Agriculture in Abeokuta, Nigeria. The culture shock, he said over a recent Zoom call, was nearly as stark as the cold. (“It’s not even freezing yet!” Midwesterners informed him cheerfully that fall.)
“When they talk, they know things. When we’re reading books, they have terms to describe things,” Tolase, 29, recalled of his classmates. “‘Anaphora.’ I had not heard the word ‘anaphora’ before. Our first assignment was to write in blank verse. At that time, I had not written in any meter. I’m like, ‘First I have to figure out what iambic pentameter is.’”
Five years later, Tolase has been awarded the Cave Canem Prize, putting him in a storied literary lineage. The Cave Canem fellowship, founded in 1996 to nurture Black poetry, boasts a network that includes the winners of six Pulitzers and five National Book Awards. This prize alone has launched the careers of two U.S. poets laureate: Tracy K. Smith and Natasha Trethewey. By winning it, Tolase has also secured publication for his debut collection: The University of Pittsburgh Press will release “2,000 Blacks” in the fall.
Tolase grew up working-class in Ibadan, Nigeria, the son of a teacher and a government accountant. “There was no wealth at all,” he said. “There was barely any income, in fact.” At age 10, he was sent to government boarding school, where room and board were free, but he was bullied for being the shortest kid in class. His parents switched him to a different, wealthier school, where he was spared any bullying but had little in common with his classmates. He took to writing poems, sticking around his literature classroom during lunch breaks.
From there, he jokes, came a string of failures and reinventions. He wanted to be an engineer, but his exam scores were too low. He reluctantly studied statistics and wasn’t much good at it. He started a literary press with some friends, which foundered. Like many young Nigerians, he struggled to find work; nearly a quarter of the country’s population was unemployed. He tried joining the navy — no dice. So he applied for an entry-level position at a bank in Lagos and to two poetry programs in the United States. (He couldn’t afford the application fees for more schools.)
“My parents wanted me out of the house,” said Tolase. So when he did get that banking job, “I just lied to them.”
Luckily, he got into the University of Wisconsin at Madison that spring and landed in the United States in summer 2019. He learned what a sonnet was, and the difference between a Petrarchan one and a Shakespearean one. But as he graduated and headed to a fellowship at Stanford, he also got a parallel education in the forces that had shaped his world.
The Bay Area’s wealth disparity was so stark, he said, that a thought began to sink in: “You are in this room because someone chose that you’re going to be the one that’ll come into this room.”
This led him to exploring ideas about access and its denial, and about the flow of resources between Africa and the West over the centuries, from the transatlantic slave trade to migration patterns today. This theme recurs in the poems that make up “2,000 Blacks,” as in the first part of a sequence titled “Refuge Sonnets”:
I step into the new world and people stare at me. They want
to ask how I arrived here, and if it’s true I brought desert sand
with me, but they are afraid I don’t speak clearly or they are afraid
I’ll ask the same of them. “Who is your father? What did he do?”
So, we avoid each other. I live in their imagination as the wild man
who has crossed the Sahara to take from their bequeathal. This might be
why they drown me, even if they don’t, I’ll still avoid water.
The other current running through the collection is more personal: Several poems sketch out the life story of Tolase’s father, who during tumultuous periods lived outside their family home. These poems were attempts to understand his father’s anger, Tolase said: “Naturally he will read the book. I hope he doesn’t think about it as a judgment.”
Asked whether he’s spending the time, pre-publication, steeling himself for some tough talks, Tolase sounded amused and dismissive: “We are Africans. We don’t have difficult conversations with parents. You want closure with your father? Your father doesn’t want closure with you.”
For now, as a creative-writing fellow at Colgate University, he relishes giving his own students assignments designed to teach them form and meter and how to scan lines of verse: “I have fun watching them suffer through it.”
----------WASHINGTON POST
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