Title: How I Killed Suicide
Author: Umar Yogiza Jr
Reviewer: Suraj Attahiru Attahiru
“Memories talks aloud mindless of the moment, mindless of the mental state of mind” Umar Yogiza Jr’s book— ‘How I Killed Suicide’, is an exploration into the being of depression, the power of its pondering noises and silences, and a step by step into workable resistance; a tool of molding a safeway out of this odd, hostile world’s endless demands.
Ingrained in Marxism school of thoughts, the poet’s mixed interrogation in prose and poetry has a penetrating elegance, stewed with uncontrolled thunderstorm that bare the damage done by chronic depression, suicidal thoughts– its ineffable silent symptoms and how it keeps on killing the young talents: “The first day I almost took my life was when rambling voices in my head became too loud to bear, reaching a crescendo that shot me off into isolation – talking and counter talking to myself – receiving all manner of commands to kill myself or disappear more. I became helpless when one of the voices bombarded me with questions I had no answers to, viz; am I a success? How can one define my life in a single word in my absence? What will I be remembered for? How will I be less regarded as a poet when I am no more? Will the lid covering my ‘fraudster status’ be upturned? Would people see the worthless personality that’s ‘the me’ I see every day in the mirror? It was the most terrifying moment of my life, and restlessness was the word. My ability to focus on a thought for just a second disappeared. Every thought dies at its birth. My existence was summarized as a huge mistake. Terrible voices wishing me dead never relented -one repeatedly reminded that, people who know me as a failure, only pretended not to have a knowledge of it. Whenever I was meant to carry out a task or progress on an idea, I would be overwhelmed by another –like, wanting to sleep, read, write, watch a movie, etc. Somehow, thoughts of wanting to be the richest man on earth dawned. If I was thinking of going to a construction site where I used to work, other issues will fight for attention. How can I possibly do all things, be everything, and be everywhere at the same time? I must be a fool –another voice from the void chides me. I was totally broken down and gripped by the cruel embrace of death, found everywhere I stepped my toot, posing as a sweet home to a better living.”p.13-14
Umar Yogiza Jr, a young poet, damaged by early fame, expectations, and trapped in the self web of piercing reality and dark assuring imagination achieves a mastery of delicate tone, on the second part of the book, the poet struggle to narrate the beginning: “penetrating with moments that shocks and bites one’s attention: “the shrill voice in my head, trained me/in the art of dying, I only failed as an artist/on the verge of dying…/overlaid by chronic despair/throat-gripped by rope, ready to give up/the one on the stage happened to be me/traduced by sordid expectations/brightened by erratic hopelessness.”p.20
“/the remote control of suicide is not/in what one lost or gained from life/but on many things crumbling fast as packs of cards/”p.21
The conceit that pillared this book is of Danteism. Yogiza presents a plausible symptoms of chronic depression that every creative is trying hard to either hides or denies into our consciousness. The quieter state of depression and suicidal thoughts and dangers, especially when young writers and poet are busy dying as genre of art: “there is a time in my mind when/the road into sanity is unclear, I run/I run, to destroy the scale/of balanced madness and creativity/door into my heart besieged/by fresh images of horror and darkness/running from confirmation of lies/claiming to prefigure my mortality”p.27
Umar Yogiza Jr honed his dark decisions making in his lowest moment till they glint with fearful facts and unsayable insight. Fate has no balance in its scale, no right moment! We often forget that everything about us vanishes! The world will outlive us and we come from nothing! Bring nothing, and are going into nothing out of this world: “I have watched real people run run/and run with neither map nor/reposing destination/only to forget pieces of themselves behind/I dont want to run anymore/ I met a traveling physician in my sanity/a trained schizophrenia/every step taken leads to bitterness my dream/wanes-sickened and exhausted”p28
Umar Yogiza, gives us a wrenching tale of sordid mental war, and of the struggle of living under the threats of mind imperial unseen bullets. In this book, the translated the metaphors languages of lust, lost, fears, grief the roots of conflict that supply them nutrient: “Finding this world unsafe, I took up arms in my mind to defend my journey through to other sides of life, I wrestled in boiling pains without a mapped-out plan. I began an aggressive search for a spiritual fate to hold on to but giving up my life mattered most -feeling that only death would give me a kind of peace my mind was imagining so it seemed. In a flashback, my past failures, pains and tragedies returned to my head ata swoop, my sanity would gasp, searching for mythical clues amidst the whistles, drums and darkness clattering in my ears. I saw my failures and that of others, mistakes and losses, grand mysteries- I lost the courage to ask questions. I heard the usual last payers said to the dead before being lowered to mother carth, I saw a decorative casket raised shoulder-high, I wished it should be me”p14
Underneath the soul of every young creative, in Nigeria, Africa or anywhere else in the world, there is a hungry innocent tired curiosity, thirsty for success and urgent understanding of so many things. If all the young poets in Nigeria who embraces suicide as the only option could have the opportunity of reading this book, I believed their lives could have been spared. This is a story and short short poems motored by the confrontation of suppressed-dark-unasked, anxiety, lost, and grief in the emotional landscape of the mind.