- Lindsey Anderson
- May 2
- 6 min read
‘Dreaming of the Possibilities’: A Review of Ajibola Tolase’s 2000 Blacks
by Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé
Ajibola Tolase’s 2000 Blacks invites readers into a travelogue of Black history—that is slavery, precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial. The poems are carefully woven together to create a dynamic synergy of Tolase’s own experience. The poems also explore the Black experience, and the experience of people who have left their homes and are living as immigrants in a new country, and are navigating through the various experiences of being strangers are explored in the poems. The poems in this collection, 2000 Blacks, connect Black people from every facet of life and the uniqueness of their blackness. The poems are sometimes funny, sometimes sad, and sometimes anger is crowned in a subtle or mild way. The poems also teach readers African history in such a profound, witty, and unequivocal way. The cover picture of the book, which is from the collection of pictures by Omotayo Tajudeen on Unsplash, is indicative of the Black child looking at the world from a hill, dreaming of the possibilities ahead of him. Though the child may be lost in that dreamy atmospheric hill in the Niger, he is focused and the clouds around him give him a sense of hope and the world is his oyster.
The debut poetry collection, 2000 Blacks by Ajibola Tolase, which won the 2024 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, is divided into two parts. Structurally, the entire collection has a narrative arc, and the poems are mostly lyrical in tone; sonnet and abecedarian poems are also prominent in the collection, adding to the allure of the book. The sonnets follow the threads of Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, Rita Dove’s Mother Love, and Diane Suess’s Frank: Sonnets, focusing on the personal and collective history of Black people. In six poetic sequences of sonnets, titled “Refuge Sonnets,” Tolase starts the next sonnet with the words from the last line of the previous sonnet. This inventive technique adds to the rhythmic cadence of the whole collection.
In the fifth sonnet of “Refuge Sonnets,” Tolase’s keen attention to his own condition as an alien is quite striking and it shows the intensity of the pain, both the familial and intense emotional love for his lover, which he carries across the Atlantic Ocean, and he becomes the symbolic “horse” for his parents. In the poem, even lovemaking becomes an imaginary enterprise, and masturbating across the Atlantic is the silent “making love” he couldn’t explicitly say. I perceive that masturbating across the Atlantic is the coping mechanism for many diasporas to connect with the images of the lovers they have left behind, and perhaps, reconnect with the homes they have left. He states:
He spends his leisure hours making love over videocall to his lover
a thousand miles across the sea. She often asks him to come home
because there’s violence against people seeking refuge everywhere
in the world.
(12)
In the title of the collection, 2000 Blacks, Tolase invokes Fela Anikulapo Kuti song, “2000 Blacks Got To Be Free,” to appeal to the turn of the century, the millennium, as the age of enlightenment and knowledge and a call for unity and strength among the Blacks around the world, though the world’s problems of war, poverty, diseases are still prevalent. The poem “New Year Problem” succinctly describes the condition of the world and the loss of empathy for children who are living in poverty and insecurity. He says:
Everyone wrote Y2K to mean the year two thousand. //
As we transition into this new year grieving our dead
from the virus, an army is positioned for a takeover
somewhere in the world. I am uninterested in armies,
bombing, and medals but the soldiers who will die before
he fires his rifles; and the athlete rendered invalid before
the Olympic games. . .Everyone was busy
watching fireworks, they failed to notice my sister had no shoes.
(47)
In the poem “Boy,” Tolase’s narrative voice is delicate and speaks with intense clarity, sometimes funny but with so much dexterity and precision. The childhood experience in the poem “Boy” is juxtaposed with the lived experience of being an alien and strengthens his description of his growing up familial home, which pervades the whole collection. He describes his relationship with his sister:
. . .It is the same house/
where my sister gave me housekeeping
lessons when we ran out of water
until she figured she could scoop some
if she climbed into the tank.
(25)
The family poems sequence in this collection holds the fabric of the entire book together, giving it a personal cutting-edge narrative. “Dolls,” “Breakout,” and “High Water” are examples of poems that describe the persona’s relationship with their family and how they navigate through the torrent of family issues that confront them. In “Break Out” for instance, Tolase writes:
My sister was the first to hate
our father who lied to us
before he left. Hating him
was a tough job she couldn’t get
away from. . .
(48)
In “Transatlantic,” which is the opening poem of the collection, Tolase invokes the entire experience of Black immigrants, with shattering historical references, such as the “Igbo Landing,” “slave ships,” and the language question. The poem is one of the two abecedarian poems in the collection, and from letters A-Z, Tolase masterfully moves like a train through the conditions of the immigrants through the transatlantic. “Nomad,” the second abecedarian poem in the collection, focuses on the condition of the persona’s family because of the nomad-like situation of their father. The persona navigates through the emotional tension of the nomadic life that have characterized the Black people and its consequences on the family, especially the issue of an absent father. Tolase describes it perfectly:
. . .My father who can’t farm or bring water to a boil but
Fought my mother over food and gossip. A tear for all the years I spent
Gathering news of his whereabouts. He left on Sunday. His leaving made our
House like a barren field over which a hawk caws. I saw him in the market.
I saw him by the lake where I lacked the courage to stop him on the
Jetty. I could have asked why he hurt me so, but I went on not
Knowing how to reconcile a father and a son.
(63)
The two abecedarian poems, “Transatlantic” and “Nomad” carry the weight of the persona’s experiences that pervade the whole collection. Both poems marry the collective experiences of Black people with the family issue of an absent father to describe the loss of homeland and its consequences.
Finally, Tolase’s 2000 Blacks is a refrain for the continual situation of Black people, and how hope is triggered through what Toni Morrison describes as “rememory” and a recollection of who they are—as Africans and the conditions that are peculiar to Africans around the world. These are reflected in the Pidgin English used in two poems in the collection, the prominent names that are mentioned in the poem, “Badagry,” and their significance to Nigerian history, and even black history. As I read through the poems, I can hear Afrobeat and Jazz through the lines of each poem, and I would recommend that readers attend whenever Tolase is giving a reading from this book to hear the smooth cadence and brilliance of his voice.
AJIBOLA TOLASE is a Nigerian poet and essayist. He is the author of 2000 Blacks, winner of the 2024 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and 2024 Florida Book Award Gold Medal in poetry. He is a former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Poetry at Colgate University, and has received a creative writing grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. He lives in Florida.
ÌFÉOLÚWA ÀYÀNDÉLÉ is from Tede, Nigeria. He is a third-year M.F.A. candidate at Florida State University and has received an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Lagos, Nigeria. His poetry manuscript is a finalist for the Acre Books Poetry series, the 2025 Glass Chapbook Series, and a semi-finalist for the 2024 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Poetry, the Wisconsin Poetry Series’ Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes, and the 2023 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. His recent work has been published or forthcoming in Transition Magazine, Poetry Wales, Jacar One, Beloit Poetry Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Texas Review, The Los Angeles Review, and others. He reads for the Southeast Review.