Autobiomythography of

Ayokunle Falomo

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781949944655
• eBook ISBN:
  9781949944372
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Autobiomythography of sifts through Nigerian stories and mythologies, both inherited and invented, to explore the self, family, and nationhood.

In an attempt at decolonization, it is an exploration of what it means to be a subject—a person, yes, but also a literary subject—in the wake and afterlife of colonization. Intimate and personal, it is interested in figuring out how to wrest subjectivity—one’s notion of self—from this failed project of modernity.

As the title suggests, the book spans and swirls together autobiography, mythology, biography, history (shared and personal), and geography. Amidst myriad speakers in the collection, there is a prominent speaker who, in search of his self/voice, tries on multiple voices—including Frederick Lugard’s—and other personas: some closer to who/what he is, whatever that is, and others diametrically opposite. 

Tangentially, this is a book about a son's relationship with his father. Poem after poem, the speakers interrogate the perceptions of identity, reality, and ownership, and in the pursuit of Truth they erode the boundaries between fact and fiction to show us the fragility of the lines we draw in service to these abstractions, of the beliefs we hold about them, of the acts we perform in service to them.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Ode to a Boy’s Missing (& Unnamed) Tooth
• Autobiomythography
• Toward an Apophatic Genealogy
• Country as Khaos
• Two Truths & a Lie
• Family as Country
• On Fire (Or, Last Wishes)
• In Which I Erase [& Add to] “ERROR ON MY MAY/JUNE 2007 SSCE CERTIFICATE” & “SWORN AFFIDAVIT CORRECTION OF ERROR ON DATE OF BIRTH” & Find My Birth an Error
• Fable
• A New Country at the Hand of the Colonizer Is Both
• To You in Your Dark Lake Moving Darkly Now
• Farther
• Intro to Semantics
• Notes toward a Conjugated Theory of the Self
• Fugitive Fugue
• Lugard & I (Ars Poetica)
• Self-Portrait without Beard
• Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird
• Lugard & I (Aspirations)
• Lugard & I (Dear Heart,)
• Lugard & I (Dear,)
• Lugard & I (Behind the Grove)
• Lugard & I (Meditation)
• Self-Portrait with Two Circles
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self
• Künstlerroman
• Notes on Archaeology
• Nigeria Speaks
• Ode to Space City
• If Found,
• Horror Vacui
• Father, God, Lugard
• Self-Portrait with Truth at the Bottom of a Well
• Honeysuckle
• Lugard & I (Slice of Life)
• Lugard & I (Yesterday Was a Very Hard Day)
• Lugard & I (Invoice)
• Autobiography of
• Autobiomythography (Reprise)
• Farther
• Self-Portrait as a Fountain
• Self-Portrait as Kurt Cobain, as Andy Warhol, as Myra Hindley, as Marilyn Monroe
• Litany
• Motherland Cento
• Thank You the Ancestors Who Loved Me
• Notes
• Debts & Gratitude