Reading Romeo Oriogun

I am reading Romeo Oriogun’s Sacrament of Bodies, a book where the sweetness of flirtation is always interrupted by the threat of anti-gay violence. Sacrament insists on naming and claiming home: “May I find love in whatever body that gives me home” (“Before your Mama”). 

One day when we will come into the morning
and claim our land,
we will say, this is where we died, this is where we bled
this is where we were homeless.
We have paid with everything we owned to be alive,
we will say, this is our city, this is our home. ("A Viral Picture")

Let me start again.

I was trying to write about a book of poetry as though I had read a book of poetry. To map—as I have been taught—the worlds the book draws on and moves through: east, sky, mirror, Agadez, exile, prayer, Garki, semen-soaked sheets, ghost. I linger and return, repeat and undo, become undone by the tenderness; saddened—beyond rage—by the quotidian violence. I learn, from Romeo, how to write sweetness during catastrophe, to dream freedom beyond exile.

The tide is going out,
your head on my shoulder
I know you must leave
because home has become a place
that eats the bones of young boys. ("Before You Leave")

I do not want to think of sweetness as a tool or strategy or reward. I do not want to imagine sweetness as an occasional, forbidden treat, an occasion to flavor pleasure with guilt. I want to linger—there’s that word again—on, “In the dark, my lover with a halo / offered his skin to me and said eat” (“Denial”). I want to relish, “Just step into the wet sky / open your mouth, sing” (“Kumbaya”).

Sweetness can be a world, can build worlds, can make worlds inhabitable. “I have learnt to love every broken thing” (“On the 23rd Death Anniversary.”) I am thinking of how you chew on sugarcane to extract the sweetness and once the sweetness is done, the flavorless fibre irritates your tongue and throat and you spit it out with as much force as possible, not simply once, but multiple times to remove stray fibres that no longer provide pleasure. I am thinking of the short life of sweetness, the desire for more. You chew the sugarcane, swallow the sweetness, spit out the fibre, take another bite of sugarcane. (There is no sugarcane in Romeo’s book.)

Repeat the words. Bathrooms are sacred places
to know the inside of a lover.
Give the body what it deserves.
This is what it means to know God,
even if every God demands our death. ("Sacrament")

Sacrament weaves across the sacred and the profane, the holiness of lust, the anointing of semen-soaked sheets, the transfiguration of love, or is that transubstantiation. Snatching—or is it stealing—holiness against the prayers and sermons and denunciations that strip relation and diminish love.

I keep returning to “A Viral Picture”: a scene of anti-queer violence is captured, and spreads. The persona is invited to join the ranks of those who witness it: “What escaped my throat was a sigh / and then silence.” Worlds are formed against such witnessing. Friendships are made and unmade. What does one say?

My friend said, let’s pray for their souls to be saved.
Lord, if my desire will stop me from coming into you,
I want to die in my truth.

One is grateful: “I am happy that they are alive.” Such happiness extracted from tough fibres.

I am saying, we were broken,
our blood was spilled on sand
still we rejoice that we are alive.

How does one write poetry about quotidian violence? The violence of the viral picture. The violence of the friend who shares it. The violence of the friend who cannot extend compassion or will life for the violated, but can only imagine saving their souls, the cruelty of saving souls by destroying intimacies, the cruelty that leaves us silent, until, later, perhaps, we might write a poem or a sentence, and wonder about the cruelties we endure as friendship.

If I insist on sweetness—to repeat is to insist—rather than violence, it is because I want to mark the world-building in Romeo’s book, the one that writes through and with and against the violence, to insist on something else. On the otherwise Ashon writes about so consistently and beautifully, a difficult thing to imagine, a difficult thing to pursue, a difficult thing to practice.

Ephemeral moments build and sustain worlds: “man dancing into another man / is a beautiful song humming deep within my veins” (“Pink Club”).

The bar sings of freedom, we keep wrecking it
because for once you are a butterfly
fluttering on the tongue of a boy
who called you beautiful
I'm lying on a sofa because I'm dreaming
of cities filled with freedom ("Pink Club")

In Sacraments, exile names a dream that elsewhere is otherwise, that one flees to pursue ordinary intimacies.

I started writing about Romeo’s book before the terrible news about a gunman attacking a queer space somewhere in the U.S. My breath caught as I read poem after poem describing scenes of impossibility, of the random and ordinary violence that describe queer experience in some places. (Queer: a relation to practices of institutional and ordinary violence; Queer, a desperate attempt to name the sweetness we make with each other despite the violence.) I smiled, sadly, at the description of exile as refuge. We run to pursue impossible dreams, to find the anonymity that makes sweetness possible. Sweetness is never guaranteed.

And so I’ve been finding it difficult to reread this vital book. With its dreams of intimate freedom. And its practices of ordinary intimacies. And the invitation of its semen-soaked sheets. Difficult because I know that for every spectacular event of violence, many ordinary acts of violence go unnoticed or are framed as good (“we are praying for you.”)

For now, I hold on to the sweetness Romeo maps, impossibly, brilliantly. It is enough. And more than enough.