Can You See The Invisible?

Reviewed by Kufre Friesenhan, July 2024

In the annals of Niger Delta literature, Nnimmo Bassey is known as a poet and an activist with an uncompromising voice in the criticism of the unsafe practices of oil extraction in the region. Bassey is also known for a polemical stance – leave the oil in the ground – which problematizes neocapitalist schemes of petro-dollars, oil fantasy, hyper-extraction, and consumerism. As an activist, Bassey once chaired Friends of the Earth International and served as the Executive Director of Environmental Rights Action for two decades. As a poet, Bassey has written six poetry collections: Patriots and Cockroaches (1992), Poems On The Run (1995), Intercepted (1998), We Thought It Was Oil But It Was Blood (2002), I Will Not Dance To Your Beat (2011) and the collection under review, I See The Invisible (2023). The poet’s latest collection follows the tradition of witnessing the injustice of extractivism, environmental degradation, pollution, unsafe agricultural practices, and the loss of biodiversity in the era appropriately named the Capitalocene. 

Written in six sections titled Our Soul, Our Inspiration, Our Sight, Our Fight, Our Time and Our Mind, I See The Invisible holds a mirror to us and asks that we interrogate our complicity in the ongoing global ecocide. The poet’s emphatic deployment of the pronoun “Our” highlights our shared belonging and connection with nature as well as our shared responsibility towards the earth. Bassey’s poetic lines are not soaked in esotericism, but accessible with rich metaphors, imagery and allusions. After all, obfuscation in a time of climate emergency might appear contradictory and unsuccessful in attaining a crucial objective. Bassey utilizes free verse with poetic elements like repetition, alliteration, rhythm, enjambments, and anaphora to elevate the flow of the reading experience, arouse the reader’s curiosity and sustain attention. The stanzas and lines of the poems are diversified to represent the chaos and uncertainty of our contemporary time. The preponderance of imagery and symbolism in the collection reflects the author’s desire to evoke emotions and hold the reader’s attention. 

The first section, “Our Soul”, interrogates the entanglement of the land with neocapitalist greed, consumerism, and hyper-extraction. With the Niger Delta petroleumscape as its primary focus, Bassey condemns the broken connection of the human and the nonhuman, oil extraction infrastructures, plastics, and the loss of biodiversity. In the section titled “Our Inspiration”, the poet’s focus is on our nonhuman kins and “sundry relatives” (13) in poetic lines that beckon the reader to stop, observe and listen. Nonhuman kins like trees, sunbirds, “of flocks/of owls of bats” (27), “community of fishes” (30) and “astonished earthworms” (31) are poeticized in celebration of their inspiration and multispecies connection. “Our Sight”, the slimmest section in the collection, houses the eponymous poem and condemns ecocide and injustice.

In the section “Our Fight”, Bassey rejects extraction and calls for change. The fight referenced in the title is the struggle against the forces of petro-capitalism towards a sustainable future. In the poet’s iteration, “the Niger Delta isn’t a ticking ecological time bomb / the bomb has already exploded / shrapnel fly everywhere” (60) to depict the deplorable condition of the Delta and the human and nonhuman kin who are caught in the crossfire. Bassey envisions an end to capitalism in “A Dirge for Fossil Capitalism” (64) where the speaker offers an account of capitalism’s numerous atrocities. For Bassey, fossil capitalism – a system of violence, dispossession, oppression, and accumulation–is on its last leg. In the sections “Our Time” and “Our Mind”, the poet engages with the mundane and everyday occurrences in the tradition of seeing the invisible. 

I see The Invisible is an evocative and inspiring collection of poems with abundant poetry for numerous tastes and desires. Nature lovers will drink richly from this fountain. A timely intervention, the collection is a testament to Bassey’s eco-consciousness, eco-activism, and commitment to stewardship of Mother Earth. With the looming threat of environmental apocalypse, Bassey offers a moving and distressing inventory of our world, the scourge of neo-capitalism and accumulation, our complicity and strive towards a sustainable future. A comprehensive poetic collection, I See the Invisible can be read as a love song to the earth, a reaffirmation of multispecies kinship and the celebration of the unconquerable human spirit. The poet hopes we will surmount the environmental crisis if we take the necessary steps towards a sustainable future. Can we?

Genre – Poetry
Author: Nnimmo Bassey
No of Pages: 133
Publisher: Daraja Press