In her 2025 poetry collection, Circumtrauma (Coach House Books), Jumoke Verissimo draws upon memories of a collective trauma shaped by the Nigerian-Biafra War (1967-1970) to narrate a polyvocal account of individual experiences. Bridging historical silences and navigating fragmented narratives of a difficult past, her work stands apart from other poetic manifestations in the methods of its syntheses. Verissimo’s creative technique is informed by Ifá divination. Borrowing splices from four literary sources–Half of a Yellow Sun, Never Again, The Combat, and Sozaboy–she reuses this cut-up language to capture the breaks and silences of their stories.
In these means of writing as survival, Verissimo brings the past into the present as she hosts a new and necessary way of expressing deadly, occluded histories. Throughout, these rituals seek acknowledgment for its dead, in which “nobody should be a stretch of silence” (from “00101000-b”).
Hazel Yott had the pleasure of interviewing Verissimo to learn more about the processes and effects of publishing an embodying work, such as Circumtrauma.
HY: When reading through your poems, this sensation of reanimation–of archival possession, really felt like a haunting. In your afterword you confirm this idea, explaining how themes from divination techniques pulled together your works. What drew you to this form of curation for the purposes of this book? How does divination show up in your own life?
JV: I am happy to hear that the poem resonated with such intensity, or as you aptly described it, “felt like a haunting”. But in regards to the “sensation of reanimation–of archival possession,” that preceded it, I would simply say that I always viewed the poem (and that means any poem I write) as a site of affect, rather than a literary object. What this means is that emotions become brush strokes that I pay attention to in the writing, and when I wrote this poetry collection, the intention was to leave a physical trace on the reader, which would be the sensation of encountering what we may as well call ‘unexplored selves’. You know those fragments of identity, which I believe you have also labelled as “archives,”they are not settled and catalogued like a traditional archive, they are leftovers and restless. They are the thoughts that linger in the stories that are told in halves, sitting between the words that have yet to learn ways to convey our pains. This was what I was looking for when I decided to use the texts of four novels, with different perspectives and writers of different generations, as the framework for reading a civil war that is over 50 years old. I’d simply say that what is being read as haunting was my pursuit toward embodiment. It is sometimes what is left when we have no way to tell the story in full, because the trauma keeps coming, and reinventing itself.
To now return to the question on divination, it isn’t so much a curation, as what Carl Jung describes as ‘synchronicity’. Divination is as much an aesthetic device as it is a tool for handling trauma that is too heavy for a single voice to carry. I lean towards Jung’s idea slightly to explain myself here, because he draws connection between the ways in which two occurrences are not linked by cause and effect, yet have a deeply meaningful relationship to the person experiencing them. So rather than ‘divination themes,’ I borrowed the structure and its capacity to provide room for co-incidence in words from different perspectives on a similar event, colliding to create new meanings. Jung’s synchronicity removes the ego from the center of an event (it becomes something that happens to you, not something you did), so my use of divination allows the poetry to happen through the framework. What would it mean to see this reoccurrence–this event itself–into a pattern of embodied pain on the pages, rather than in the silences that is carried throughout the years? I want to think of my use of divination as the form I use to make the trauma etched on the body as legible in print as it is in inherited memory. But then again, the question isn’t what drew me to this form, but why divination was the only tool capable of bearing witness without forcing the poet-persona to shoulder the entire burden of the speech. When I was writing this book, I was asking myself what the best way was to convert an individual’s trauma into a collective resonance.
The intent was to ensure that I do not become the source of the truth, but the interpreter of the system. The divination method makes the trauma legible in print because the formal structure of divination provides a container. As the poet, I am a witness, not a victim reliving it in isolation. Divination is about patterns. The divination method I have employed, the Ifá Divination method, enunciates how trauma in the context I am writing isn’t a void, but a repeating frequency.
HY: Throughout your collection, there are often large blank spaces across the page while the speaker’s voice comes across as constricted, as if closing in on themselves and their reality, moment-to-moment. I understand there were systems which influenced the words of the poems, but how did you go about choosing the shapes and breaths they inhabited on the page?
JV: That’s a fascinating reading, although I see the voice differently. Rather than constricted, I want to think of them as revelatory. Blank spaces do different things for different poets, but I am drawn to how they operate in Jordan Abel’s Empty Spaces, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, M. Nourbese Phillips’ Zong!–and so many other poets who see that the blank space is not a void, but a field where more can be done with or without the presence of text. The blankness does exactly what the collection seeks to do: it pronounces the silences and all the other manifestations of the emotive trapped between the words. To borrow your word, it deepens the “haunting”. In my case, I won’t think of them as closing in, but as essential apertures through which the words break free and the poems breathe.
But then again, to understand the shape on the page, you also have to understand the ritual. I had this huge bowl filled with shredded pages of the four novels that served as my word bank for the collection. My process began with an attempt to ‘read’ the collision of emotions as I mixed those fragments with words pulled from oral landscapes, and the intentionality wasn’t about ‘choosing’ a shape, but about allowing the gravity of the emotions to dictate where the words landed. So, I don’t want to think of it as composing a layout, but more of witnessing a fallout. I was seeing how words of writers from different backgrounds were making new meanings in real time. This was significant to me because I set out to mirror the complexity of the war itself through the divination method. I was seeing the meaning erupt from the gaps between the fragments, and in all honesty, while there’s the method and our process and our effort, what the poem becomes on the page is as much a revelation to the poet as it is to the reader. I think those wide breaths on the page invites the reader to encounter the poem in the same ‘real time’ that I did, where the silence is just as communicative as the text.
HY: In these narratives, time is both fragmented and permeable, the past and the present blending. How do you think your use of computer language hosts something non-linear into a certain form? What made you choose it as a means of punctuation?
JV: The use of computer language or symbols is essentially doing what you have expressed; being that the nature of inherited and intergenerational trauma is (to use your exact words) inherently “fragmentary and permeable,” it is resistant to linearity. Understandably so, as trauma has little regard for temporality, the past and present exist in a constant blur. I guess this would mean that my choice of digital syntax as a means of punctuation was because the digital space mirrors exactly that: non- linearity. Or, I think a better way to put it is that when trauma remains unhealed, the past and present exist in a constant, blurry ‘now.’ Much like an ongoing transmission of war, war narratives refuse to stay contained within the margins of a page, and in language of the machine, I am invoking a system that understands loops, ricochets, and glitches. You can think of it as a marker of the “circum” nature of the traumatic memory of the war. I am writing about how it refuses to be silenced. I also like to think that the extension of these stories into the digital aesthetic requires a new kind of reading, one where the reader must navigate the ‘code’ of the trauma as much as the words themselves. It allows the work to bear witness to a pain that is both in a distant past and, through technology, perpetually present.
HY: In the creation of these poems, was there one which surprised you? One that maybe sticks with you the most?
JV: I was surprised each time a poem landed on the page, largely because the divination method removed my ability to predict the outcome. Every poem was a revelation that I was witnessing in real time. I also think any decision to pick one would be like trying to isolate a single breath from a conversation; the meaning exists in the ‘whole,’ in the way the fragments of trauma and memory lean on one another across the blank spaces. There’s no way to think of one of the poems ‘sticking,’ I like to think of the collective resonance of the entire ritual.
HY: Sometimes entering a project which takes on a wide and complex history can make it feel much bigger than oneself. What was your perspective or headspace going into this body of work?
JV: The gravity of history has a way of asserting its own necessity. At least, that’s what I have come to terms with, being that I am always taking up difficult subjects in my writing, and I have promised myself I would have to write something about immense and collective and unbreakable joy. But the truth really is, what manual prepares us for collision with the pain of others? I don’t know of any, maybe you do. Emmanuel Levina’s suggestion about how the encounter with the face of the other being is the beginning of all ethics, comes to mind. You simply have to step out and say, “I am here”. Presence–sometimes that is all that’s needed. You know, witnessing is a very thin and fragile line, especially in a war that you did not witness, yet you still live with it through the symptoms of its many hauntings.
I guess one thing I reminded myself of when I began the project was that I wasn’t a chronicler, but a participant in the witnessing of its unfolding. I had to move past the idea of “managing” the history and instead learn to witness it, leave it to reveal its sides to me, or maybe not. I also realized early that the project was indeed much bigger than myself, and that the only way to survive the writing was to allow the divination form and the cut-up pieces of the novels and the oral stories to hold the weight. My perspective became one of submission: I had to let the work tell me how it needed to be held.
HY: What is something from the histories of these poems that stood out to you when you were engaging in research for this collection?
JV: I would say the grievances that are buried in transmitted stories. All of the quiet resentments and unspoken losses that have been carried for so long, they have become part of the way identity is formed. I think there’s so much pain tucked into the margins of trauma stories and silences, and the unbearable weight of the negative emotions has broken the back of too many generations yet unborn. During my research, I saw how a story left untold doesn’t simply vanish, it calcifies. It becomes a structural burden that the next generation inherits without knowing why they are tired. My engagement with these histories was less about learning facts and more about witnessing the gravity of those silences, and trying to find a form that could finally allow that weight to be set down.
HY: When dealing in archives and rituals beyond your own personal voice, how did you find your relationship to these poems was the same or different to other pieces you’ve written in the past?
JV: Honestly, Circumtrauma stands apart from anything I have written, and I suspect it has fundamentally altered whatever I will write in the future. I don’t know if that is a good or bad thing, but that is how affecting it is to me. But then again, there is a common assumption that a poet’s ‘personal voice’ is the anchor of their work, but in this project, that voice is secondary to the encounter. I want to think of my voice as a vessel for encounter, rather than a starting point for confession. I came to the page to ‘witness’—and I say this in a very low voice—how the emotive weight of the materials I was working with can be translated into a language that is usable, rather than just historical. In my other books, I could acknowledge that there may have been more of ‘me’ directing the traffic. In Circumtrauma, I have stepped back to let the complexity of the divination and the fragmented narratives dictate the pace. My voice hasn’t entered these poems as a subject, I want to think it has been repurposed as the frequency through which these diverse, buried stories are finally allowed to be broadcast.
HY: How do you feel divination and “vocalege” narration styles will shape your work going forward?
JV: I don’t know, but if it arrives, it arrives. I have learned not to colonize the future of my writing with too much expectation. Going forward, I want to remain a porous interface, or something close. Whether these specific styles you’ve mentioned stay with me or evolve into something else, the commitment remains the same: to be ready for the encounter and to find the most honest form to host it. If the next project demands a new ritual or a different syntax, I have to trust the process enough to let it happen.