Autobiomythography Of by Ayokunle Falomo
Reviewed by Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton
"There is a child
in me who thinks he can
rewrite the history
of his family, his country"
-From "On Fire (Or, Last Wishes)"
In 1982, Audre Lorde coined the term "Biomythography" to describe her book Zami: A new spelling of my name. She sought to combine history, biography, and myth into a lyrical text that made space to examine personal identity and cultural connections in a new way. This lens that embraces unknown mythology as an impetus for self reflection is the key component to Ayokunle Falomo's newest poetry collection Autobiomythography Of (Alice James Books, 2024).
Falomo, a native Nigerian who resides in Houston, Texas, pulls apart the fabric of what it means to be both Nigerian and American,father and son, real and myth. His fifth poetry collection, following AFRICANAMERICANT (Flowersongpress, 2022), two self-published collections, and the award-winning African, American (New Delta Review, 2019), continues his ruminations on culture, but adds delightful references to Nigerian and self-made myths. In this collection, the emotional and physical worlds meld into one typography traversable by form and freeverse. The poems map an ever-shifting landscape of love, disappointment, life, growth and failure with even pulse and gravitas. The speaker looks to balance multiple identities in the way a map yearns to show accurate scale, but is rarely able to stay current with geological shifts. The speaker is ever changing and learning, arriving to himself as a destination and a fork in the road all at once.
In the opening poem, "Ode to a boy's missing (& unnamed tooth)," we meet the speaker as a young child pining to hold the love of his home country while arriving stateside. He recounts himself through childhood pictures. Starting at what seems to be six years old, the speaker begins:
I was a boy who did not speak
(at least not before the summer of '93)
To be exact
June 3rd.
His delayed speech, at first, seems anchored by permanent time. But by the next few lines the certainty of memory begins to fade. He begins to realize that his memory is subject to change every time he revisits it. And where the naming of his brother once had a date and time, the more he replays it, the more fluid and malleable it becomes.
I am thre… four?
Four -yeah four-
No. three. For-
Give me
This early poem sets into motion the speaker's struggle with the permanence of time and place. He gives himself permission to fill in the gaps of memory for the important truth of a specific moment. At times, this opens into more fantastical elements. Beit personifying The Past into an ex-lover, transforming into a tongue-deceiving lizard, or adopting the persona of an archeologist who seems to dig through history to find his own identity. And where facts are important to some storytelling, the speaker substitutes the dependance on fact for the discovery for emotional truths—unforgettable impressions left on him during his travels to himself.
In another early poem, "Two Truths & a Lie," the speaker plays this childhood game with the reader, offering tidbits about his father for the reader to sift through.
My father loves me. I am my father's
Son. I am my father's first son. My father is
The only son of his father. I do not know
Much about my father.
The list of plausible facts begins to disintegrate quickly, contradicting themselves. The line breaks convey these complications by revealing what he knows and doesn't know about his father.
In the same poem, the speaker explains what he knows about his dad:
My father had a red Volkswagen Jetta. He drove it
Before I was born, until we both left my mother
And siblings for a new country. Sometimes I wish
We didn't. I'm glad we did.
These lines are equally as satisfying as they are disorienting. When read by the line breaks, most assumptions seem to rely on fact. But when read by the punctuation, varied layers of meaning appear. It becomes less clear if the speaker did indeed leave his siblings or merely wish to have left. Either way, this ability to reshape or reinvent one's own story feels like personal revisionism. The speaker takes this as an approach to the journey, using Lorde's approach to myth-making, to fill in the gaps of a memory they seek not to tell or remember. While Lorde imagines a new tribe of women who are lovers and friends in Zami, the speaker in Falomo's work untangles what kind of father he might become based off of a past he curates for his audience, one more hopeful, fantastical, and irreverent than his own father could be via other poems.
Over the course of the collection, some of the most vivid poems are those dedicated to the speaker's daughter. In a poem about his child in utero, the speaker casts a spell for what she may become as she grows larger in her mother's stomach.
Let's say your story
Actually started in the seventeenth
century, inside a monastery… Dear
One, I think the womb must be a country
Too. The whole of you a fist, what law-
Less law did you protest today?
The series of shorter sections begins by marking her size by its resemblance to fruit. In this section, she is the size of an orange. Here, the speaker envisions a future that is rebellious and reckless in ways he only dreamed his youth would allow. Urging her that "if there be anything at all/ that troubles you, give it trouble dear." For the speaker, like so many of us, the future generation becomes a promise of hope and love, untouched by the traumas we have survived. And where the speaker depicts chasing his own father into "The City of Fathers" in other poems to gain closure and insight on his father's bad decisions, his own role as father feels more hopeful and removed from he pending mistakes he sees so clearly for his predecessor. The speaker chooses to plant more in this child. Urging her to fight back and start her own revolution. And while this seems unplugged from consequence, it is the speaker's last line that makes the audience more aware that he may be wary of how this may all turn out.
"Dear child, dear lord, what have we done…"
In this single line, he welcomes the possibility of mistake. His surety seems to temporarily slip away. Time regains its own power. The speaker, who seemed to control the shaping and guiding of his daughter, seems back at the mercy of the world. Realizing that his best made plans still may result in a future he didn't decide. And in this way, the threads between him and his father grow closer. Where the speaker has spent multiple poems critiquing the choices his father made, somehow the certainty of his decision-making is given grace. We come to see that both the speaker and his father were making the best decisions they could make. They were following a divine power to the best of their mortal ability.
The speaker's continued appeal to a higher power is more than just an expression of religiosity or spirituality; it is the cornerstone of creating his own mythology. Artists are seen as channeling god-given inspiration when they create. Therefore, it makes sense that the speaker uses the masters of art, from Rembrant to Frida Kahlo to Kerry James Marshall (among others), to exact poems in the form of self portraits. Artists like Rembrandt became famous for being able to turn the mirror on themselves. Each self-portrait poem reveals a new angle or depth of the speaker. The first of these, entitled "Self-portrait without a beard" is based on the 1889 portrait of Vincent Van Gogh. This poem, placed almost directly in the center of the collection, offers a shift for the speaker: from attempting to reimagine the world around him to focusing more introspectively on the changes he sees within himself. Once a young man who focused on filling in the gaps of his memory, the speaker, now older, uses the form of self portrait to confront pivotal moments of his life like still life. In a poem dedicated to the infidelity of a past love, his shifting facial hair serves as the perfect image for how quickly her love changes shape.
"When I was gone, a thousand miles away from her,
And from myself, she kissed another man, a man
Who did not look like me, who was not me
My forest-face by then a perfect home for moss the hue of soot
I thought, Perhaps I should've never shaved my beard."
In the last line of the poem, the speaker seems almost unrecognizable to himself. Much like looking back and an old photograph, he wrestles with the decision of shaving his beard as if maintaining something so simple would've made him more recognizable to her heart; made her more faithful. Where he was once a forest of a beard and loved he is left clean-shaven and heart-broken. The speaker, staring into this polaroid moment regrets more than missing hair but a semblance of his youth and innocence. It is this method of capturing a static image, frozen in a defining moment, that demonstrates Falomo's vulnerability and power as a writer. This ability to draw from multiple modalities and mediums to spark poems that transcend the physicality of the page, whether by mimicking cubist work or traveling creating fantastical places to chase a version of himself. This is one of the many approaches that makes this collection a unique work of art unto itself.
Autobiography of is a proverbial multiversity of meeting, challenging and reconciling with one's self. Ayokunle Falomo uses brave and inventive form, coupled with fables and mythology, to chart a journey of finding love and joy for oneself. Ending with its own ode to joy, the book makes space to celebrate the failures, the hopes, the dreams, and the decisions that keep us up at night. It builds a bridge between culture, religion, and identity, proving "memory is the greatest myth.".
in me who thinks he can
rewrite the history
of his family, his country"
-From "On Fire (Or, Last Wishes)"
In 1982, Audre Lorde coined the term "Biomythography" to describe her book Zami: A new spelling of my name. She sought to combine history, biography, and myth into a lyrical text that made space to examine personal identity and cultural connections in a new way. This lens that embraces unknown mythology as an impetus for self reflection is the key component to Ayokunle Falomo's newest poetry collection Autobiomythography Of (Alice James Books, 2024).
Falomo, a native Nigerian who resides in Houston, Texas, pulls apart the fabric of what it means to be both Nigerian and American,father and son, real and myth. His fifth poetry collection, following AFRICANAMERICANT (Flowersongpress, 2022), two self-published collections, and the award-winning African, American (New Delta Review, 2019), continues his ruminations on culture, but adds delightful references to Nigerian and self-made myths. In this collection, the emotional and physical worlds meld into one typography traversable by form and freeverse. The poems map an ever-shifting landscape of love, disappointment, life, growth and failure with even pulse and gravitas. The speaker looks to balance multiple identities in the way a map yearns to show accurate scale, but is rarely able to stay current with geological shifts. The speaker is ever changing and learning, arriving to himself as a destination and a fork in the road all at once.
In the opening poem, "Ode to a boy's missing (& unnamed tooth)," we meet the speaker as a young child pining to hold the love of his home country while arriving stateside. He recounts himself through childhood pictures. Starting at what seems to be six years old, the speaker begins:
I was a boy who did not speak
(at least not before the summer of '93)
To be exact
June 3rd.
His delayed speech, at first, seems anchored by permanent time. But by the next few lines the certainty of memory begins to fade. He begins to realize that his memory is subject to change every time he revisits it. And where the naming of his brother once had a date and time, the more he replays it, the more fluid and malleable it becomes.
I am thre… four?
Four -yeah four-
No. three. For-
Give me
This early poem sets into motion the speaker's struggle with the permanence of time and place. He gives himself permission to fill in the gaps of memory for the important truth of a specific moment. At times, this opens into more fantastical elements. Beit personifying The Past into an ex-lover, transforming into a tongue-deceiving lizard, or adopting the persona of an archeologist who seems to dig through history to find his own identity. And where facts are important to some storytelling, the speaker substitutes the dependance on fact for the discovery for emotional truths—unforgettable impressions left on him during his travels to himself.
In another early poem, "Two Truths & a Lie," the speaker plays this childhood game with the reader, offering tidbits about his father for the reader to sift through.
My father loves me. I am my father's
Son. I am my father's first son. My father is
The only son of his father. I do not know
Much about my father.
The list of plausible facts begins to disintegrate quickly, contradicting themselves. The line breaks convey these complications by revealing what he knows and doesn't know about his father.
In the same poem, the speaker explains what he knows about his dad:
My father had a red Volkswagen Jetta. He drove it
Before I was born, until we both left my mother
And siblings for a new country. Sometimes I wish
We didn't. I'm glad we did.
These lines are equally as satisfying as they are disorienting. When read by the line breaks, most assumptions seem to rely on fact. But when read by the punctuation, varied layers of meaning appear. It becomes less clear if the speaker did indeed leave his siblings or merely wish to have left. Either way, this ability to reshape or reinvent one's own story feels like personal revisionism. The speaker takes this as an approach to the journey, using Lorde's approach to myth-making, to fill in the gaps of a memory they seek not to tell or remember. While Lorde imagines a new tribe of women who are lovers and friends in Zami, the speaker in Falomo's work untangles what kind of father he might become based off of a past he curates for his audience, one more hopeful, fantastical, and irreverent than his own father could be via other poems.
Over the course of the collection, some of the most vivid poems are those dedicated to the speaker's daughter. In a poem about his child in utero, the speaker casts a spell for what she may become as she grows larger in her mother's stomach.
Let's say your story
Actually started in the seventeenth
century, inside a monastery… Dear
One, I think the womb must be a country
Too. The whole of you a fist, what law-
Less law did you protest today?
The series of shorter sections begins by marking her size by its resemblance to fruit. In this section, she is the size of an orange. Here, the speaker envisions a future that is rebellious and reckless in ways he only dreamed his youth would allow. Urging her that "if there be anything at all/ that troubles you, give it trouble dear." For the speaker, like so many of us, the future generation becomes a promise of hope and love, untouched by the traumas we have survived. And where the speaker depicts chasing his own father into "The City of Fathers" in other poems to gain closure and insight on his father's bad decisions, his own role as father feels more hopeful and removed from he pending mistakes he sees so clearly for his predecessor. The speaker chooses to plant more in this child. Urging her to fight back and start her own revolution. And while this seems unplugged from consequence, it is the speaker's last line that makes the audience more aware that he may be wary of how this may all turn out.
"Dear child, dear lord, what have we done…"
In this single line, he welcomes the possibility of mistake. His surety seems to temporarily slip away. Time regains its own power. The speaker, who seemed to control the shaping and guiding of his daughter, seems back at the mercy of the world. Realizing that his best made plans still may result in a future he didn't decide. And in this way, the threads between him and his father grow closer. Where the speaker has spent multiple poems critiquing the choices his father made, somehow the certainty of his decision-making is given grace. We come to see that both the speaker and his father were making the best decisions they could make. They were following a divine power to the best of their mortal ability.
The speaker's continued appeal to a higher power is more than just an expression of religiosity or spirituality; it is the cornerstone of creating his own mythology. Artists are seen as channeling god-given inspiration when they create. Therefore, it makes sense that the speaker uses the masters of art, from Rembrant to Frida Kahlo to Kerry James Marshall (among others), to exact poems in the form of self portraits. Artists like Rembrandt became famous for being able to turn the mirror on themselves. Each self-portrait poem reveals a new angle or depth of the speaker. The first of these, entitled "Self-portrait without a beard" is based on the 1889 portrait of Vincent Van Gogh. This poem, placed almost directly in the center of the collection, offers a shift for the speaker: from attempting to reimagine the world around him to focusing more introspectively on the changes he sees within himself. Once a young man who focused on filling in the gaps of his memory, the speaker, now older, uses the form of self portrait to confront pivotal moments of his life like still life. In a poem dedicated to the infidelity of a past love, his shifting facial hair serves as the perfect image for how quickly her love changes shape.
"When I was gone, a thousand miles away from her,
And from myself, she kissed another man, a man
Who did not look like me, who was not me
My forest-face by then a perfect home for moss the hue of soot
I thought, Perhaps I should've never shaved my beard."
In the last line of the poem, the speaker seems almost unrecognizable to himself. Much like looking back and an old photograph, he wrestles with the decision of shaving his beard as if maintaining something so simple would've made him more recognizable to her heart; made her more faithful. Where he was once a forest of a beard and loved he is left clean-shaven and heart-broken. The speaker, staring into this polaroid moment regrets more than missing hair but a semblance of his youth and innocence. It is this method of capturing a static image, frozen in a defining moment, that demonstrates Falomo's vulnerability and power as a writer. This ability to draw from multiple modalities and mediums to spark poems that transcend the physicality of the page, whether by mimicking cubist work or traveling creating fantastical places to chase a version of himself. This is one of the many approaches that makes this collection a unique work of art unto itself.
Autobiography of is a proverbial multiversity of meeting, challenging and reconciling with one's self. Ayokunle Falomo uses brave and inventive form, coupled with fables and mythology, to chart a journey of finding love and joy for oneself. Ending with its own ode to joy, the book makes space to celebrate the failures, the hopes, the dreams, and the decisions that keep us up at night. It builds a bridge between culture, religion, and identity, proving "memory is the greatest myth.".
Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton is an internationally-known writer, educator, activist, performer, and and the first Black Poet Laureate of Houston, Texas. Formerly ranked the #2 Best Female Performance Poet in the World, Her recent poetry collection, Newsworthy, garnered her a Pushcart nomination, was named a finalist for the 2019 Writer’s League of Texas Book Award, and received honorable mention for the Summerlee Book Prize. Its German translation, under the title Berichtenswert, is set to be released in Summer 2021 by Elif Verlag. She lives and creates in Houston, TX. For more information visit www.LiveLifedeep.com