‘Ignore the Bleeding’: A Review of Okwudili Nebeolisa’s Terminal Maladies 

by Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé

Nebeolisa, in this debut poetry collection, Terminal Maladies, confronts the darkness that engulfs his mother throughout her fight with cancer. Amidst the darkness, Nebeolisa draws a pictorial image of abounding love in his family and this is encapsulated in the clarity of the narrative voice throughout this collection. The choice of the black color in the cover design of the book typifies the emotional warehouse that pervades the whole collection in general, and it signifies the essence of quiet beauty even in the storm in his family. Louise Glück, in “Epithalamium” says: there is “so much pain in the world - the formless grief of the body, whose language is hunger–” and Nebeolisa’s Terminal Maladies responds to Louise Glück’s assertion in the poem by exploring the relationship between pain in the human body and the shapeless grief that characterizes human experiences.

I read Terminal Maladies as a family photo album and each poem is a photograph that documents a family’s journey through the clog of cancer in the mother’s thigh. Nebeolisa, in this collection, is keen on documenting his mother’s strength and resilience in the face of cancer before the memory becomes blurry, and the poem, “The Last Thing” reads like a closure to over a decade of pain that his mother has endured throughout her fight with the cancer, but not a closure to the family’s grief. He describes the last moments of his mother:

The last thing my mother asked for,

before she passed was food. My brother left the room

to obey her request. By the time he came back,

she had left…

(55)

Additionally, Okwudili Nebeolisa, who was the winner of the 2023 CAAPP Book Prize, navigates grief’s inevitability in subtle but simple language in Terminal Maladies, and this is shown in how he bends words to carry the depth of the uncertainty that characterizes his family life. In “Backyard, Morning,” for instance, Nebeolisa says:

The light outside slowly filling the rooms—

what else is there but to fall in love with it,

be bewitched before it tapers off?

In the backyard, your tomatoes and spinach

are unhurriedly dying in the heat…

Even the dogs know when their masters die.

Perhaps it is something in the air,

Something with ethereal teeth, terminal.

The backyard is so bare it mirrors the sky.

  (24)

I am not deceived by the subtlety of the language. Nebeolisa has mastered how simple words can carry the weight of a grieving heart, and in so doing, complicates the impending tragedy. Besides, Nebeolisa traverses through the ocean of the pain that invades the privacy of his mother, and in the end, codifies the grief in concrete images and in the clarity of each line. Hear him codify his grieving heart in “Litany of Remedies” as he describes the futility of the local remedy to the cancer:

Trying to heal herself, my mother had tried

Drinking half a cup of raw quail eggs,

soya bean milk, juice extracts;

chewing moringa leaves, ground moringa seeds;

eating grapefruit; fasting long hours; interpreting

her dreams to see if healing was imminent.

One time, a friend suggested she try drinking urine.

(48)

“The night” in, “Eventually” shows how darkness is synonymous with bad news. The poem, “Eventually” which is the first poem in the collection, also shows the atmospheric condition of the entire book, that is—dark, sad and haunting. The use of couplets in the poem draws me into the poem, and perhaps makes me a participant of the bad news. Every word in the poem contributes to the burden in the heart of the speaker, that is the “bed,” “the pillow” and even “Norman Lewis painting” in the poem are images of the aloneness that is associated with grief, especially if you are a male child in Nigeria, and Nebeolisa describes it thus: “we could keep our masculinities intact.” Men aren’t supposed to show emotion—they aren’t supposed to cry, and every tear makes them weak.  Nebeolisa describes his emotional states on the night that everything changes in these lines:

The night my older brother told me

that our mother had cancer, I cried

for so long then I went to bed.

I dreamed that she had died. I woke up and cried. 

                                                                    (3)

The devotion of the mother to her family despite the cancer growing in her thigh is reflected in the poem, “My Father’s Clothes,” wherein Nebeolisa situates his mother in a natural landscape, using natural phenomena like “rain” “the growl of thunder” “the light green algae” to describe his mother’s affection for his father and it is reflected in how she is “waiting for them (clothes) to dry.” The dialogue between the mother and the child in the poem strengthens the family bond and the closeness between them. This family bond and closeness is also reflected in poems like “Breaking Melon Seeds with My Mother,” “Nomenclature of My Mother’s Pain” and “Telephone Conversation,” and these poems are scattered into the three sections of the collection. Nebeolisa strikes me as a nature poet, because of how he effectively uses the flora to complicate the impending sadness at the end of the poem, “My Father’s Clothes:”

Even with the pain, she hurried outside,

trying to move faster than the rain.

The growing dark swallowed her the way a grave

swallows a slowly lowered coffin. 

(5)

In the face of terminal disease, many Nigerians become believers in God, and every preacher performing healing on the TV is regarded as the solution to terminal diseases. In “Not So Sure,” Nebeolisa narrates how religion and her mother’s belief in the healing power of the prophet on Synagogue TV could be the healing balm for the cancer, and “she wanted to wait to see what God would do.” The rosery in her hands becomes a powerful image of her religious belief and when “asked if she cared that God was not answering she replied, Even no is an answer.” Nebeolisa describes his mother’s act of faith in these lines:

One evening while my mother and I watched

a miracle session on Synagogue TV,

she laid her hand on her swollen thigh,

closed her eyes, and asked God to heal her.

(14)

In this thrilling debut, Nebeolisa invites the readers to participate in the ceremony of pain. The readers should be ready to shed some tears as Nebeolisa shows the heavy weariness of living in a different continent away from your family and the impending uncertainties that surround you, even as you hear your mother’s voice sinking deeper and deeper into the abyss, and you are helpless, and you cannot leave the foreign country you are, and the only thing you can give is the money you send home for the treatment, and you know that isn’t enough. 

This debut collection will ask you the difficult questions of love and distance from home in the face of impeding tragedy, and where to seek solace amidst it. More so, Nebeolisa’s Terminal Maladies will cut your heart, but you will ignore the bleeding and continue to read because of the delicate poetic voice of the persona. At the end of the book, you will go outside your room, and you will see the speaker’s mother among the stars, waving at you.

---

OKWUDILI NEBEOLISA is the author of Terminal Maladies, (Autumn House Press, 2024), selected by Nicole Sealey as the 2023 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Prize winner. He graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he was a Provost Fellow and won the Prairie Lights John Leggett Prize for Fiction. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in The Cincinnati Review, Image, The New England Review, POETRY, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review, and Threepenny Review. His fiction has appeared in Evergreen Review, while his nonfiction has been published in Catapult and Commonwealth Writers. He is an MFA student in fiction at the University of Minnesota where he is the recipient of a Gesell Award for Excellence in Poetry. He is a recipient of support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Granum Foundation, and the Center for the Art Crested Butte. He is currently a poetry editor at Post Road Magazine.

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.

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