All That Refuses to Die

I had the pleasure of reading All That Refuses to Die, a powerful poetry collection by Michael Imossan. In the collection, he details his journey to safety from a home filled with graves. Fortunately for readers, it evokes a sense of duty towards victims of violence. Unfortunately, readers will also see tragedies that are reinforced by lingering pride and hatred.

The Biafra War, or the Nigerian Civil War, was a brutal period following the attempted succession of the Republic of Biafra. Major conflicts centered around pogroms that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Igbos, an ethnic tribe located in southern Nigeria. The United Kingdom backed the Nigerian government and fueled hostility between it and the Igbos. Ultimately, to force the Republic into submission, Nigeria surrounded Biafra with a blockade that resulted in millions of civilians starving to death. It was a conflict perpetuated by fractures between different cultures and social classes, which culminated in an eventual genocide.

Imossan does not shy away from the neglect the world has shown his community. NGOs from Western nations will come and film the tragedies that the Biafra War has caused. They look down on the victims, all the while delivering aid that fosters codependence. They contribute to corruption, and expect someone to praise them. In fact, in Lexis and Suffering, Imossan points out that “before they leave, they’ll take pictures that have them smiling, stretching some few packets of noodles to the kids, enough to quell a day’s hunger. There’s a word for this. Charity?”

My husband and his family, as well as the generations before, understand Imossan’s lessons all too well. They may not have had an up-close seat to the violence, but from Imossan’s Arise news, they’ve seen “a peaceful protest that’s gone straight to violence.” Their ancestors sang songs “about freedom, though “a cage grows in [their] throat[s].” My husband mourns for the broken promises that perpetuate the United States. And though my mother-in-law tries to move forward, even she knows the life she lives is precarious. Imossan illustrates this well in Going Home to Mother. After all, she doesn’t want us to cry, “I want to go home to my mother,” and when we’re there, she is already dead. What is there left?

I remember a discussion between my husband and his mother. They talked about the nuances between being African American and being American. I remembered their voices growing louder as my mother attempted to defend her position of identifying as American. My husband, meanwhile, refused to abandon his role as a Black American man. My mother says America perpetuates racial identities to separate us, create division that the ruling class can later use to conquer us. But my husband saw his skin color as an important part of his identity. It harkened to a conflict I had with my own parents, about how I was too American to be Vietnamese. In the same token, once Imossan found refuge in another country, he felt strange, unfamiliar. His native tongue has no place there. Yet if he goes back, will his own community recognize him? He wants to know if his children will have a place in this world. I don’t know. If he asked my husband, or my mother-in-law, or even my parents, they wouldn’t know either.

All That Refuses to Die shows why the horror genre is so popular. The casual cruelty of pigs ruling over empathetic people is hard to ignore. Colonization gave way to strategies that reinforced the misery of the author himself and his community. While the book isn’t traditionally terrifying, Imossan reminds us that they need not look any farther for ghost stories and a sea of bodies than the history the world has forgotten.