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“Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground;” this is how Rumi lends his voice to the idea of art and devotion as passionate pursuits that intertwine and demand diversification. And this is much like the crux of Abubakar Sidi’s works where butterflies are poetry of reverence scattered about to appreciate the beauty in and of our existence.

In any collection of poems, I often look for clarity, connection, and coherence; this collection “Like Butterflies Scattered About by Art Rascals” does not disappoint. Surreal and mystical, the book maintains and balances that spirit and experience all through the pages. In “Body or the Metaphysical Investigation of Desire,” we find portent and potent metaphors of “a dog resting under a table in a tavern,/ is a dog resting under the tree of dream” and “a dervish with a bowl begging for truth.”

In “Optical Illusions in the House of Paul Eluard,” where we find the titular lines, metaphors are strung as beads in the chain of similes. He reveals as follows:

“her mind is a beast testifying to reality ~

like a dead bird in leafy columns, like air charged
with erotic delirium
like elements exemplifying the succession of images
like knife splashes, like the scratches of magic nails……..
like butterflies scattered about by art rascals.”

With these lines, Sidi paints a picture of the mind as a complex and untamed entity, using contrasting images to convey its depth and unpredictability. While the “dead bird” symbolizes a stark and brusque confrontation with reality, the “erotic delirium” suggests intense, chaotic emotions. He carefully uses the “succession of images” to reflect the fluid and dynamic nature of human thoughts, and concludes with the whimsical imagery of “butterflies scattered about by art rascals,” to evoke a sense of creativity and the playful, transformative power of artistic expression.

A terrific avant-gardist, Umar Sidi employs anaphora in all the poems I found to be my favourite, and an example is in “Andalusian Blues” where he beautifully put it as follows:

“Her heart is a nectar for bats, for night marauders, for
broken mystics, for wandering dervishes, for deviant girls
adorned with the anklets of emerald”

By way of ars poetica, he points out in “The Meaning of Guernica” that “Art is evident in the image of the Bull.” After advising poets to “write on the tablets of winds and water/write on the hidden pages on the back of the butterfly” in “How to Write a Surrealist Novel,” he went on to make an extensive exegesis of “Poetics” in “The First Manifesto or the Survey of the Eye.”

On the same breath, in “The Bawdy Quatrains of Abu Nawas” he says, or even professes, that:

“Language is an attempt to use a rake to paint a grotesque image of an ostrich floating
on the missing canvas of night”

He then goes on to say, “Poetry is the articulation of lust.”

With the lines “I go down the Valley of Truth. I seek water. I find water,” we
experience a transition from spirituality to sexuality. In that bodily desire, we advance
to “Andalusian Blues,” where

“Body of light walks towards me
unbuttoning her shirt.
Her eyes are a garden of metaphysics
where rascals posing as poets gather

to discover the darkness of truth.”

Umar boldly speaks this truth, which is often less spoken about, especially in some religious or seemingly moral gatherings: regarded as “the forbidden language of poetry,” which is in fact the soul of universe, where reproduction takes place, the Divine desirable stopgap for the continuation of creation. Like Andalusia, this business of pleasure and act of erection & wetness is “balls of light in the Lake of Souls.”

With less focus on the velocity of language and more concerned with the intensity of experience, the poet himself does not know the destination of each poem. Sometimes godly, sometimes heretic, and other times erotic, Sidi simply follows his trancelike muse and takes his readers through mysteries and miseries, displaying their fate before their eyes “like windows of metaphysical skyscrapers/ catching glimpses of ghostly trains.”

Some poems, although relaxed and abstract in their composition, the fluidity of their narratives gives the work a prosaic grace that makes them stay with readers. Thus, in the bathwater of the works, I lift a series of winsome babies and a philosophy that not all liquids are for rinsing, some are syrups for the soul, and some are semen for more souls. In “The Forbidden Sahara Answering the Call of the Veiled Woman,” he reveals, “this is not a poem: it is a treachery of images.”

Quickly, as a Yorùbá poet and language enthusiast, I will like to note that the lines “wakere si nomba” from the poem “The Gangster Poets of Ajegunle” quoted from Fatai Rolling Dollar’s music is properly reproduced as “wọ́n kéré sí nọ́mbà wa.”

Overall, “Like Butterflies Scattered About by Art Rascals” provokes thought, blows minds and roofs with its condensed metaphors and unique structure. It takes us down our origin through flash histories in a way that displays various clans of humanity as branches from a single tree.

Therefore now, as you read through the collection, look out for “a bird trapped in the transparent hand of a painter,” “a couple of oyres making love to language,” “a grief drifting through the magma of death,” “a vessel carrying the liquid carcass of a dying poem,” “deviant girls adorned with the anklets of emerald,” “a model holding a giant phallus,” “the Rastafari Bull painting hanging in the Museo de Surealisme,” “a photographic mise-en-scene,” “a darkened lips muttering: Jeus de mots/Cadaver exquis,” among other artefacts, or babies…

In the end, a community reading of the ugly, good and bad metaphors in this collection, it is right to conclude that the phrases “Ana Rajlun. Ana Sha’ir,” meaning “I am a Man. I am a Poet,” as seen in the poem “I Can’t Be Present” is true of Umar Sidi; just like Neruda, like Ghayath, like Okigbo, like Tade; and unlike them, he is an Art Rascal.