Vanessa
Onwuemezi

“[A]nd you, created, uncreated, one manifestation of a constant vibration from which you were formed and to which you would return. You were never really born and won’t ever die.”

Vanessa Onwuemezi, Bright Spaces

In the title story from Vanessa Onwuemezi’s exceptional debut collection, Dark Neighbourhood (2021), the narrator observes, “[t]o live in a world filled with light is like being slowly erased,” shortly followed by the gnomic pronouncement: “Light upon light is darkness.” There is a blindness in what we think we see, whereas, in the truths that evade sight or obscure its clarity, Onwuemezi finds—and articulates—a deeper and more intuitive vision.  

This really is visionary writing—an originality of prose that understands human experience to be a muddled negotiation of physicality and the immaterial, not in any reductive binary but as an eloquent and uneasy mystery. It is writing as flesh and the breath, moving into the hidden core of the experiential, with “[e]yes wide open into dark and no sense.”  

Onwuemezi conjures the roving consciousness of Virginia Woolf, the chilling allegories of Kafka, the metaphysics of Iris Murdoch, and the convulsing realities of Julio Cortázar, all jolted into the strange grip of a new phenomenology. Meanwhile, threading in and out of these tales are more esoteric coordinates: E.E. Evans Pritchard’s 1937 study, Witchcraft,  Oracles, and Magic among the Azande; the elemental mythos and modernism of Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo; and the underwater chronicles of Jacques Cousteau (The Silent World, 1953).

In Dark Neighbourhood, each narrative spills far beyond its apparent surface to reanimate the possibility of prose as a haunted poetics. Spaces in the text open like hungry pores, a syncopation of the eye’s attention and a living score for its orality. Stories become prophetic poems: floodlit crowds of dystopian faith, desperate markets where the makeshift currency of objects becomes the mumbled language of a never-ending end; or long drives and border crossings, the labor of life and death and work, of resilience and its dull ache; warped geography, lust, delusion, and the howling dust of trying to survive it all; grief and family, the “bright spaces” that become institutions of disappearance; grass budding from fingertips; bereavement and murder in a looping voice against the conspiracy of forgetting; and the oceanic descent that waits “at the heart of things.” We begin the book staring into our own eyes and end with darkness; Onwuemezi’s magic lies in finding the hidden illumination between both—a vast and unknowable continuity.  

To ever experience such radical continuity is, ironically, to encounter what feels like a rupturing of continuity. It is a bewilderment that threads throughout Onwuemezi’s book, announcing itself in variations of the refrain: “You don’t know down or up inside those places, day or night, yes or no.” It is an experience without recourse to divisions of the rational, the fixed orderings of language, or other efforts to intellectualize time and space.  

If we stop to question the origins of our logic and, subsequently, how it is we’ve come to know or see our existence, as with the narrator in the “Dark Neighbourhood,” our brittle understanding cracks open to a greater flow: “The question pierces the skin of sense I’ve wrapped over this whole endless duration, all duration, waiting here.” What emerges is a time and space of motion that resists bordering, and an existence within that continuity that is profoundly sensory but without, or beyond, sense.  

The human becomes both animal and vegetable, death speaks within life, and life in death, and what it is to exist is to exist in relation: “I didn’t have feet before they had something to stand on.” Onwuemezi sculpts prose into the bodily significance of what is felt and not thought. To find flesh for breath (the unseen continuity), language must remain open to what cannot be said and incorporate that space (gaps that stammer between lines) as the pulse behind the act of saying: the unseen on which seeing relies.  

David Spittle,
a British poet, filmmaker, and essayist, has published five poetry collections and a volume of interviews with filmmakers and poets.