Tolu Oloruntoba's Each One a Furnace draws on the flight of birds to explore the struggles of modern migration
Tolu Oloruntoba is a Nigerian Canadian writer currently based in Surrey, B.C.
Oloruntoba, who lived in Nigeria and the U.S. before settling in Canada, spent his early career as a primary care physician and currently manages virtual health projects with organizations in B.C.
His new collection of poetry, Each One a Furnace, explores immigration and transience through the imagery of migratory birds, which typify the unrest of billions of humans in the modern world. Oloruntoba's poems explore the struggles of diasporic peoples around the globe as they traverse both land and cultures.
Oloruntoba is one of three finalists for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize, which will be awarded on June 15, for his first full-length poetry collection, The Junta of Happenstance. The book also won the 2021 Governor General's Literary Award for English-Language Poetry and was longlisted for the 2022 League of Canadian Poets book awards. His poetry has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, while his debut chapbook, Manubrium, was a bpNichol Chapbook Award finalist.
Oloruntoba spoke with Shelagh Rogers about writing Each One a Furnace and the inspirations behind his work.
Congratulations on the 2021 Governor General's Award for poetry. It's not often that a poet wins for a debut collection. How did that make you feel?
Tolu Oloruntoba: It made me feel intimidated. You know, there's that thing they say about imposter syndrome. When you see the people who have been nominated for this award and who have won it, I don't consider myself to be their peer. So I'm really, really honoured. And it's hard to believe sometimes — there's this surreal quality to it, but I'm grateful.
The idea of using migratory birds to mirror the experience of refugees and immigration and global movement is so powerful — how did it come to you?
Tolu Oloruntoba: I've been in a transitory phase of my life as well. I'd been working in a software sales job, and I'd gotten laid off in early April 2019. Incidentally, around the same time I'd been reading Dionne Brand's Ossuaries, and there had been a fragment that caught my eye about finches that got stranded in winter.
The ideas just associated in my mind, especially after I started to write the poems — it was easy for my subconscious anxiety about my precarious condition to seep through. I'd also just recently immigrated to Canada, so I had spent less than a year in the country at that time, having lived for three years in the States just before that. And so all those experiences just swirling around there in my head must have drawn those poems out of me.
And while I was writing these poems, the wildest hope I had at that time was that it would be nice if Dionne Brand got to read this, since it was inspired by her book. And here we are — she edited the book, and polished it in such a way that I'm really just lost for words.
The first two lines of the poem from which the book's title is taken are: "Each one a furnace / Each chest a coral of embers." What did you want to convey with those two lines?
Tolu Oloruntoba: I have lived in discomfort for a lot of my life. I grew up in somewhat hard circumstances, had some early traumas and so forth. That sense of internal turmoil and anxiety is a very intimate feeling for me. And I imagine that there are a lot of people worldwide who are similarly unstable in many ways, either in their living circumstances, or maybe their country is literally falling apart. It's a very common phenomenon, I'd say.
You manage virtual health projects in British Columbia — if we stick with the metaphor of flight as representing mental health, how have you kept aloft at this time that's been so stressful for health-care workers?
Tolu Oloruntoba: Some people find it very hard to engage their creative practice while they're actively suffering. But for me, it has been one of my grounding techniques. For people that have panic attacks and so forth, we're counselled to try to ground ourselves. You try to situate yourself in the real world and outside of your head. Writing is sometimes the only way that I can push through anxiety, and I've been very grateful for it.
One of the phases of healing is recognition as well as mourning for what happened — it's part of the way you integrate the trauma into your memory and you become able to move on.
Writing is also a way that I have processed trauma. One of the phases of healing is recognition as well as mourning for what happened — it's part of the way you integrate the trauma into your memory and you become able to move on. And so writing has been very, very useful for me in trying to integrate traumatic memories and experiences.
For me, writing is not therapy. I want to be very clear about that. But then there are many therapies that do advise clients and patients to journal or to write about their experiences to track their thinking and how they're processing events. Writing has been a very vital part of that sort of practice for me.
I love the fact you call on poetry to lift your spirits. How does poetry help you?
Tolu Oloruntoba: Poetry is a refuge for people like me that cannot write fiction or construct a credible plot. It enables me to put down fragments at a time. I don't necessarily need to have a grand vision of what I want to achieve. I can just let the truth lead me.
Sometimes in the fuzziness of poetry, we can come close to describing the indescribable.
It has been easy, especially in times of mental turmoil when my thoughts are racing and colliding into each other, to try to transcribe the way I'm feeling or my mental state. Poetry lends itself very well to indirect language, conflated ideas, unusual turns of phrase and strange juxtapositions. You put two disparate things together and you try to make sense of them.
There's a lot about life that I feel is not very linear or very simple to explain away. And sometimes in the fuzziness of poetry, we can come close to describing the indescribable. It doesn't always give us answers, but being able to frame the scene is itself very powerful for me.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
