Steven Lovatt reviews Ceremony for the Nameless by Theresa Lola (Penguin, 2024)
Our Appellations: Orúko Àbíso
General generous! We welcome you.
You were the first to arrive bearing gifts:
new honour, a victory sign, ordained wealth.
Your next of kin are here to festoon you
with names in response.
The first name presented is Olufunmilola.
Generosity is the signature of Theresa Lola’s second poetry collection, Ceremony for the Nameless. All fifty-one poems offer something worth having and sharing round, but it’s not just a matter of quantity and individual quality: the interest compounds as certain patterns and figures recur, all under the controlling theme of the poet’s identity.
I don’t always have an easy relationship with poetry on this theme, since it often seems to leave no room for me. I tend to find it either emotionally overdetermined or else introverted in a way that makes me feel like a press-ganged voyeur. When I read a poem, I do not like to feel that the range of my possible responses has been measured in advance by the poet’s self-appraisal or politics, no matter my own opinion. In this context it’s a pleasure to come across Ceremony for the Nameless, partly because it is so open to life’s illimitable mess and also because the identity Theresa Lola explores is socially embedded rather than isolated and abject, and interested in its own growth rather than its static existential situation.
The ceremony of the title refers to a Yoruba tradition whereby, a week after a birth, family and friends of the newborn gather to bestow appellations. This isn’t an empty convention, but can itself be thought of as a living form of praise poetry
Lola is British of Yoruba heritage, and the ceremony of the title refers to a Yoruba tradition whereby, a week after a birth, family and friends of the newborn gather to bestow appellations. This isn’t an empty convention, but can itself be thought of as a living form of praise poetry. The names intoned may signal appreciation of the child’s ancestry or possess a more future-oriented character as epithets that he or she will hopefully live up to. Like the ritual praise-language of all cultures, that of the Yoruba naming ceremony can be abstracted into two purposes corresponding to two addressees. When oriented towards the individual, it gifts the solidarity and shelter of a loving collective that is also the repository of historical and mythic memory and a dependable source of future strength. The secular Western reader, perhaps hungry for connection in our spirit-lite age, might respond to Lola’s poems about the ceremony with a pang of envy for this unwritten guarantee. But there is also a sense in which the act of praising circulates through the individual and finds its larger purpose in renewing the collective itself, in an act of cultural self-affirmation. From whichever of these complementary aspects it is viewed, one practical effect of the naming ceremony is to embed the individual within a pattern of relationships that stretches far across space and time, including between the living and the deceased. Many of the poems in Ceremony for the Nameless celebrate these intergenerational relationships, being addressed to Lola’s ancestors, grandparents and former teachers. In ‘Oríkì for the Migrant’ she reminds herself:
You are the great-great-granddaughter
of one who stirred the fibres of the forest
into a ceremonial garment
while in ‘The Dream in Which There Is Dancing’, Lola writes:
I am painting my father’s father’s house
with my own fragrance.
It’s important to notice that the claim here goes beyond (passive) connection to the collective, but instead implies an active extension of it by the fact and achievements of Lola’s own life. To the list of familial addressees, since her first collection Lola can now add her husband, and he is drawn into the collection with the same desire for togetherness and celebration of the strength to be found beyond the self, all by way of a commonplace metaphor that Lola renders fresh:
By sharing one surname,
we declare we have combined
our individual lights.
We call it concentrated radiance.
(‘Measuring Light’)
Yet, as every young person knows, the expectations of one’s extended family are not always experienced as a support but sometimes as a burden, and this must be even more the case when one has literally been given names to live up to. ‘Discernment’, in lines delicately poised between assertion and contrition, sees Lola confess to her mother:
I have submitted to the restlessness of youth,
which means I am frustrated
by the walls you urge me to observe
A name is nonetheless something you have to live with, even to live in, and this awareness accounts for the recurrent image, throughout Ceremony for the Nameless, of a name as a physical shelter. In ‘My Name Is My Home’, the constant mispronunciation of Lola’s first name, Olofunmilola (‘God has given me wealth’), forces her back on the defensive:
Now, I’m left with no choice but to build spiked gates,
position armed guards. I must shield my name.
But a name is, after all, something that cannot be finally ruined, any more than a gift can be ungiven, and it is not only a site of vulnerability but also somewhere to return for nourishment and from which to set out again, bravely, despite things. With the protection of a name one may face up to ‘the divisions of the flesh and spirit’ – the pains and separations of growth, of failures of comprehension and sympathy, and of diaspora. One may face down incivilities with well-directed irony:
Dear highly skilled migrant,
according to our Home Office you have
enough points to proceed with your life.
(‘Citizenship Ceremony, 2012’)
A standout poem stages an awkward encounter between Olufunmilola and the poet’s middle (and ‘public’) name, Theresa:
After removing her work shoes,
I advise my middle name to take tomorrow off.
I invite her & my first name to the dining room
to sit, eat & laugh like a family with no favourites.
While we wait
I rub my first name’s back,
massage the notes on her flat spine.
Her smile languishing by the minute.
My middle name hesitates, then joins us.
We try . . . but conversations falter.
There has been too much distance.
We no longer know what makes the other laugh.
(‘My Middle Name Returns from Work’).
The emotional balance is perfect here, sorrow and wry humour delightfully weighed.
Lola grounds her devices in acute ground-level observations
I enjoyed the poems in Ceremony for the Nameless for their quiet technical skill. Many very able poets mishandle the final line, but Lola’s poems have all their toes nicely tucked in. She is also creative with form, experimenting successfully with a ghazal, poems in dialogue, an erasure based on a music lyric, and a specular poem. Mirroring, doubling and the transgression of borders are recurring themes, and Lola refreshes these conventional tropes of the Romantic and Gothic by how, and where, she applies them. Setting the specular poem in a hairdressing salon is not only faithful to those terrifyingly mirror-dominated rooms but also serves to resituate (and resuscitate) a potentially precious or hackneyed trope in an utterly unpretentious urban setting, amid all that movement, noise, and colour, and the potent fumes of hair gunk. And all the while, Lola grounds her devices in acute ground-level observations. Of the hairdresser she notes:
A phone was sandwiched between her ear and shoulder,
I eavesdropped on her chats –
her words flowed like therapy pulp.
(‘Carousel of Oil Sheen’)
Other poems are set in the supermarket, at a party and in likewise communal, often domestic spaces, and we get the strong sense that this is because these are the places where Lola likes best to be and that poetry, for her, is not something that should be sectioned off from the rest of life. On another – one might say metaphysical – level, this is also apparent in her abhorrence of separation and absence, abstractions and emptiness. She can grow ‘frustrated with […] reality’s blandness’, and if a space is too large and impersonal, she has an urge to humanise it with ‘family albums and quirky trays’. Temporally, too, she is a poet who knows her history and uses it to infill dangerous voids of ignorance. The history is treated very seriously but never piously, and sometimes an utterly delightful change of voice and perspective will pull you up short:
In the thirteenth century Saint Clare of Assisi refused
to marry the men who were lined up for her.
She gave herself to God instead.
Goodness, what did she see in their eyes?
(‘Discernment’)
Theresa Lola’s poems come from a different place to most of her peers’, and it shows. In the acknowledgements, her first thanks are to Jesus Christ, and whatever your first reaction to that, Ceremony for the Nameless seems a good advertisement for the best of what religion can do for the arguably ‘freer’ but more exposed and anxious self. The collection everywhere expresses Lola’s love of the world and a desire to understand and be among its people and their stuff, while in execution its youthful élan (she is still only 30) is artfully tempered by the restraint of her imagery and lines. It is a pleasure to read, and by its example it may well make you reflect on your own life with critical benevolence. There’s nothing more fitting to give it than praise.
Steven Lovatt is an editor and tutor living in Swansea. He is a member of the International Literature Showcase, run by the British Council and the UK National Writing Centre, and his book Birdsong in a Time of Silence was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize.
‘Our Appellations: Orúko Àbíso’ is from Ceremony for the Nameless by Theresa Lola (Penguin, 2024) – thanks to Theresa Lola and Penguin for letting us publish it.
