Circumtrauma is a book that explores the Nigeria-Biafra War, specifically the leftover trauma and (un)spoken history of that war. Verissimo tracks this using found poems. The book is composed of four sections: OGBE: 2°, OYEKU: IIII, 1001: IWORI, and 0110: ODI. In the method note of the book, Verissimo says that the poems mined language from “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, Flora Nwapa’s Never Again, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy, and Kole Omotosho’s The Combat.” On top of using these four novels as language for these poems, Verissimo “turned to the Ifá divination system to deepen the meaning of these stories, written and oral, that [she] collected.” The reason Verissimo turned toward found poems and the Ifá divination system is because “[her] initial poems felt too much like [her] own echo.”
I read Circumtrauma as an exploration of gaps. The “circum” in Circumtrauma suggests a circle—something with a gap in the middle. Indeed, one of the many ways trauma reveals itself is through dissociation and repression. These methods perhaps create a gap in memory. “i said nothing,” says (or, rather, doesn’t say) the speaker of Circumtrauma. But “circum” also suggests recurrence, circularity—how trauma attaches itself to the body. “Circum”—a constantly repeating event or affect that is also hollow in the centre—is a prefix that attaches itself to “trauma.”
Thus, two things occur with this idea of “circum:” one being space, gap, hollow centres; the other being recursion, circularity. Verissimo evokes these ideas simultaneously. She writes:
the war may have
ended
but every life is
still riddled with bullet holes,
some large,
others small some missing
Consider, here, how the “bullet holes” are hollow in the centre, leaving “every life” with this space that trauma lives in. The space between “small” and “some” reflects this hollow centre with the form that the lines take. But, as well as these hollow centres, there is also the idea of recursion; “the war may have ended / but every life is still riddled with bullet holes” reveals that, although the war might be over, it has left holes, real or “missing,” holes that remain in generations forward, beyond the war. This gap has moved beyond form and entered into the arena of history. The “circum” in Circumtrauma once again attaches itself to word and body, remaining circular through time.
But on top of the gaps that trauma leaves, Verissimo questions how they are left in the first place, especially to those who did not fight or live through the war. This is why her use of found poetry is important: Through found poetry, she re/de/constructs the narratives found in novels “because the war is remembered in fractured and diverse ways,” she says. Verissimo is trying to track the gaps in both how war creates these “bullet holes” in the body in the first place and how the leftover trauma of war leaves these gaps in narratives and stories. She says, in the beginning of 0110: ODI,
#define words
do {
words
–({“squish”,
“hope into fragile pulps”,
“of misery”});
[...]
#define words
Stories
before_we_utter_them, before_we_collect;
us(before_we_utter_them,
before_we_collect)
This is a capacious book. For one, the use of code as form, here, reflects “[...] the first four main Odu [of the Ifá divination system [...] this binary structure, much like computer code, served as a way to ‘read’ the meeting of emotions as I cut up novels [...]” The tension between gaps (what’s between the 1s and 0s of code) and circularity (the repetition of 1s and 0s as information) is one of the major ideas that this book explores. When looking at (intergenerational) trauma through stories and narratives, Verissimo says that “words / –({‘squish’/ ‘hope into fragile pulps’, / ‘of misery’});” “Hope” becomes tangled with “misery,” and both of these affects become the 1s and 0s of code. Verissimo is exploring how things fall between these gaps—hope and misery, stories and bodies, sound and silence.
These poems-in-code, too, repeat: “Stories before_we_utter_them, before_we_collect; / us(before_we_utter_them, before_we_collect);” I want to look at these two lines closely. Not only do they use repetition and circularity, as “circum” suggests, but they also isolate two words, “Stories” and “us,” as the two words not repeated. These two words here might reflect the ones and zeros of binary code: it might have something to do with how these stories become, or hollow “us” out, when these narratives are told. But if I am to draw parallels between these two words and binary code, then one of these things must be hollow, as zero is. I might suggest that these stories are the zeros of binary, seeing as Verissimo writes: “fire razed down books / [...] opening a / history of silence.” The gaps in war narratives are formed through stories, leaving “a / history of silence.”
However, Verissimo writes, in the same poem, as the code’s output:
is
this about/what words mean inside us
before
we utter them/before we collect
them
into stories/instructions in survival
handed down
to the generation
next
to
their fate/
[...]
I suggested earlier that it is worth examining the two words—“Stories” and “us”—as binary code, and “Stories” being what is hollow, what is left empty, as the 0 of binary. The found poems reflect this, as Verissimo is trying to fill in the gaps stories leave. But this quote might counter my reading, as “what words mean inside us” makes me think of bodies as hollow vessels for these narratives, as “instructions in survival.” What is critical might be the preposition: “in” rather than “for:” not instructions for survival but “in survival.” I might go as far as to say that this word “in” is the way that these “instructions,” these “Stories” get absorbed inside of a body, as nutrients or ideologies do.
So there’s this contradiction in the reading of this book. Either the stories are hollow or the body is. But this contradiction is part of the game. The circles that Verissimo explores are contradictory. These circles are both recursive and empty. The hollow body: “our body is: a lonely home” but also the body filled: “our body is a lake.” To read Circumtrauma is to read into the ways that the body gets filled with war, trauma, and history, but it is also to read into the ways that the body gets hollowed out by these same things, leaving a gap. I mentioned earlier that this book is capacious. This means that even my own reading might be contradictory and, more than that, hollow, as I have merely glanced over the history of the war and the divination system. But, in the end, to read Circumtrauma is to read “astretchofsilence astretchofsilence astretchofsilence” and the way these stretches of silence are filled.
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Alex Deng is a writer based in Toronto. He has appeared or is forthcoming in The Temz Review, Ricepaper Magazine, Pinhole Poetry, La Piccioletta Barca and Reverie. Find him on instagram @allexdeng.
