Book Title: Armageddon of Love
Author: Hassan Idris
Pub. Date: 2020
Publishers: League of Writers’ Organization
ISBN: 9781005223854
Reviewer: Adepoju Isaiah Gbenga
“A book is not known by its cover,” so goes the quote. Armageddon of Love is not only inviting in the exquisite taste of its cover but also by the rich contents and imaginary journey the reader inevitably embarks on while reading it. Poetry, they say, is the most complex genre in art. It now becomes a palatable feeling if one’s emotion is roused up by a ‘love-political-betrayal-death’ kind of poetry. Hassan Idris’ poetry book – Armageddon of Love – not only prove beyond unreasonable doubt the Armageddonness of love but also relates it with the prospective aspect of our political, social, and emotional life.
The word ‘Armageddon’ has its own dark-light theme in the history of theology. Armageddon is derived from the last battle to be fought between Archangel Michael and Lucifer (Satan); this actually is accounted to be the bloodiest war, which is to happen in the history of humans and its spiritual counterparts – Lucifer and God. It is regarded as the Doomsday. Now borrowing that horrible and tragic term – Armageddon – into our modern third-world Nation, all engulfed in the cloak of ‘Love’, not only threatens to explain the indefinable brilliance of the poet but, also attests to the poet’s mastery of the art of poetry.
The book is in three dichotomies: Chapter one making up of six poems; chapter two, of seven poems and chapter three, of twenty poems; making a total of thirty-four poems. The journey the poet takes us through is in three compartments: one of infanthood – where the poet’s topic of interest is introduced and fed to the reader like toddlers (the first chapter); of maturation – it is now introduced in part, almost like the poet is afraid to feed the child (reader) at once; in some poem you see his topics of interest being carefully but vaguely experimented on, in another you see a tribute or acknowledgement of a people or organization, digressing the reader’s attention from the poet’s topic of interest (chapter two); and of the exploration of different terms, situations of localities (mostly the North), the revelation of ‘godfatherism’ and their idiosyncrasies in the Nigerian politics and the diagnosis of the world at large, judging from his sociological perspective whilst playing with metaphors in his love poems. The poem that mostly ridiculed politick-skulduggery without the use of abstraction and/or any other cloaking devices in a literary work is: “Far Away Nigeria,” where the corrupt politicians and their Yes-Sir men are likened to ‘birds’ and said thus about: “These birds…feed only on money and sentiments; they’ll beat their chest and shake their feathers.”
The poem which opened the reader into the sumptuous but peeling words of the book – “Sulty: Hear Me” – invites the reader into the struggle of the suitor in getting a ‘Yes’ from his crush. The long promises. The wordy hocus-pocus. The willingness to relinquish one’s ego to please one’s dear lover. The poet is subtly feeding the reader with a gaseous substance which can be caught in the air and caged in one’s palms: Cupid. The second poem – “Love Trip” – is a continuation of the first poem. In the former, the persona is portraying how much he could offer to give to his love, but in the latter, he directly confessed his feelings.
In “The Phobia of Losing Thee,” the persona expresses his grief if he were to lose his newly found yonder lover to the misplacement of fate and/or historical mis-deductions or reconstruction. In “Armageddon of Love”: it was the dark days of these two lovers; at first, the lover was angry at the betrayal of his lover but as the verse proceeds and stanzas are swept upon another, beaten, pressed down, and munched, the persona’s anger metamorphoses into pity, sorrow and hatred for his necessary foolishness. It ends with the persona recounting of how much of (her) responsibility he had taken upon his own shoulders:
…like your father here
your brother here,
Like your mother here,
Like your sister here…
Let your heart not walk scared around me
In the preceding two poems, the persona is enveloped in two different but mutually inclusive things: one, his regret of past angers and his indulgence for getting back together. Two: his inability to sustain himself free from the electrocution of her love. The persona finally confesses: “Let you be my Layla, cleansing all those neutrons of sorrows enslaving my heart”. Mr. Hassan did a really good work misting the reader’s mind from the real issues that the coming poems tackle. He has done, what the Yoruba people describe as the act of “using one stone to kill two birds”.
In this poetry collection, even though love is reflected in its title; yet, it is not subjected to the expatiation of the concept alone: in Hill Top; it portrays a home where the poet is groomed on his literary journey and how he “… cook(s) food with intellectualism…”. In “Borno,” he talked about the Borno of present, the Borno whose citizens “…live in the forest, leaving behind our homes homeless…” in perpetual subjugation from the economy of the country and the government’s partial (or even absolute) negligence of its welfare. In “Angel from the North,” the poet expresses his wishes over the North to protect her goodness by the sheathing of his sword. In “Dear American Lover,” the persona likens her lover’s heart to America; a place and people he admires and makes similarities with.
The poet’s personality is revealed in the lines of his words as the sociologist, the Wordsworth and the human-right activist; all woven into the very fabrics of his poems. The book epitomizes the power of love, the problem of our political lives, and a tribute to all we’ve loved, to all we’ve lost, and to all who made us a better person. It aims to pick the crumbs of Armageddon and to turn it into a beautiful substance called Love.
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ADEPOJU Isaiah Gbenga, a teen writer from Osun State, was longlisted for Africa Writers’ Award, 2020. He’s an editor. A content creator at Scooper news. And a coordinator at Praxis Hangouts.
