Between Tides: A Review of Strange Beach by Oluwaseun Olayiwola

Strange Beach by Oluwaseun Olayiwola

Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s debut collection Strange Beach is a strange book. Its poems flow liquid over flesh and fragments of history; eddy around identity, relationships, and family; and swirl in the vagaries of race, gender, and sexuality. Drawing on an epigraph by Camile Rankine, for Olayiwola, “each body is a strange beach,” and each encounter with another body, particularly the lover’s body, maps anew the landscapes and distances to survey the boundaries and to recall the emotional history embedded within:

         Do not touch me now
              —unless you
         mean me
         to open, open farther than
              this beach and what
         we endured here, has
         already
              opened me—

Like the tide, these poems ebb and flow. Here rushing the shore with vital encounters and imagery, there pulling back into the endless undulation of the undifferentiated sea. Olayiwola studied choreography and lectures on dance in the Kingston School of the Arts, and that commitment to movement and kinetics also drives his poetry. In poems that contact and repel like bodies in space, such as “Crustacean,” “Chlorine,” and “There is nothing like that black voice!,” Olayiwola positions the reader inside intimate (and volatile) encounters, often charged with the complexities of race (Olayiwola is Nigerian-American). In the last, for example, the speaker wins an imagined singing contest against an acquaintance with a voice “very beautiful very / Italian, operatic.” As the speaker “eat[s] his friends’ / applause,” the combatant complains:

              There is nothing like that
         black voice! he said
              not knowing there is
         nothing like that
              I could voice back
         that wouldn’t change the temperature

In “Crustacean,” “a little crustacean attaches / itself to your fingertip,” and the speaker guides us through a reflection on the encounter, its violence and possibility: “In its vibration, we, ourselves, are seen. To love what you cannot / see or to see what you cannot love? Which is your problem?” These are Olayiwola’s moments, when the slightest touch might send the mind and body reeling in a different direction or into the dark of interiority. Direct and personal, their vivid imagery embodies both the reader and the poems’ characters on the shifting sands of a strange beach.

Other poems, particularly the poems focused on queer love and sex, pull back from the shore and wallow in the distance between bodies. “Greek Lesson after Anal,” for example, explores the postcoital moment when a lover “described me as a siren / luring him out to the ocean” and how the “sirens’ beauty was to charm / consciousness out from Odysseus” to conclude:

          Then again, however much fucking
          can seem to intimate
          returning home inside another man,
          we were not men.

Fulfilling lust, seeking love, solace, and self-understanding in the other, Olayiwola navigates “the fraternal space between play and fight” and often concludes that “All my beloveds. Somehow, it is like they were never there—.” But they remain in the marks made on the body: the “colon’s ring hammering,” “arm-ropes lassoing our neck flesh with push-and-pull,” and the “stacked lesions in his back,” “every dark orifice [turns] / into mirrors for worship.” Taking off from the body, that worship is often an abstract meditation adrift on a sea of wonder and curiosity, yes, but guilt and regret as well.

Like many meditations on the self’s inner landscape, Strange Beach sometimes sinks under the weight of abstraction and personal vocabulary. This is particularly prevalent in the three poems titled “Strange Beach” that mark the beginning of each of the collection’s sections. In the third, for example, appears

          On the forever-curling horizon, dark
          becomes light-blue serrations, inferring time,
          had we control of it, could submit, its fissures
          subdividing the beach into its discrete
          fecund elements.

Here the welding of fecundity and inferred time to the sea and the beach creates a disjunction of muddled reflection more concerned with the motion of its thinking than the sense, and not necessarily bolstered by the artistry of its language. There are hints, for example, of the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade, spurred by the Rankine quotation, but only gestured at elsewhere, never quite developed into a coherent theme. Although other poems tread the same waters, they do not characterize the collection.

On the whole, evocative and daring, an uneasy dance between the sand and the sea, Strange Beach is an ever-transforming shore, a space of encounter between bodies and meaning, between history and the new. As Olayiwola writes, “We are not fools. We do not get / to be free. What we get / is to be here.”