Being in the Continuous Green: On Yewande Adebowale’s “A Tale of Being, of Green and of Ing”

Yewande Adebowale’s A Tale of Being, of Green and of Ing is a triptych of metaphysical inquiry, civic lament and ecological-political prophecy that attempts to braid ontology, nationhood and time into one long continuous tense. It is an ambitious, radiant and at times unruly work that insists on hope even while standing in the rubble of war, corruption and environmental precarity.

The collection is explicitly organised into three movements: “Of being,” “Of green” and “Of ing,” a structure that mirrors its philosophical arc from essence, to place, to temporality. The first section interrogates existence, soul and self, the second turns outward to Nigeria and Africa as wounded yet fertile “green,” and the third shifts into the language of process, recurrence and the present continuous. This architecture is one of the book’s strongest conceptual achievements: the opening “Proem: Be(ing)” announces the governing questions about “the meaning of life” and the “repeated ing / replete in each day,” while the closing benedictions treat life itself as an unending present tense. The same tripartite scheme, however, sometimes breeds repetition, as the motifs of being, green and ing return so insistently that they risk dulling their own edge.

In the opening movement Adebowale works with elemental questions: what is a soul, what does it mean to be, how do body, spirit and soul coexist. The poems on birth and death, on motion and change, and on the tripartite composite form a metaphysical suite that treats mortality as passage rather than terminus, returning often to the creed-like assertion that “spirits never die / despite bodily decay.” Her most compelling ontological poems are those that tether abstraction to an intimate I: in “I am” the self is “the helix of generations gone before / the tale for generations yet unborn,” at once lineage and legacy, body and history. There, metaphysics becomes tactile, as the body appears as “the tender stem of greening foliage” and the soul is “rooted in love / grounded in the way of truth.” At other moments the section leans too heavily on assertion; pieces like “Back to basics” repeat doctrinal formulations about an “omni-potent” Father with sermonic cadence but scant imagistic complication, offering devotional clarity that some readers will embrace and others may find insufficiently puzzled by doubt.

In the central movement the green of the title saturates the pages with time’s wounds. Green is Nigeria’s flag, Africa’s land and the dream of a nation that keeps bleeding in spite of its lush abundance. “How long will the sane remain” personifies political decay as a predatory force that “hunts sanity / like a crazed pride of desperately starved lions,” its refrain asking how long sanity can survive in such conditions. “Colour of hope” stages an almost hallucinatory encounter with the national flag under a “dangerously high” sun, where the green and white become, through exhaustion and persistence, “a rainbow out of green and white,” a vision born of “sun scorched tears” and sweat, not of naïveté. War and insurgency haunt this section: “The year the war began” revisits 1967 and the Nigerian Civil War through images of “lost limbs / lost eyes / and lost lives” and burial grounds scattered across the land, while “Numb-nimby” traces a geography of terror across Izge, Chibok, Biu, Shani and Borno, its title phrase “Not in my backyard, / yet” quietly indicting complacency at a distance. In “Dear Mother Africa” the continent is a violated matriarch whose sons are “lost at sea / in search of greener ground” and whose daughters wander “as destitute in our own land / amidst plenty,” the rhetoric direct and morally indignant. Yet this middle panel is not merely a catalogue of injury: poems like “The green spirit” and “Green (r)evolution” insist on a disciplined, even defiant hope that one day streets will be clean, power stable and green and white worn with unembarrassed pride. The risk here is a slide into slogan, but because the hope is voiced after so much testimony of loss, it feels more like stubborn practice than easy optimism.

The final movement is the most conceptually daring, converting a grammatical suffix into a metaphysical key. Adebowale treats “ing” as “independent / self-revolving force / like the unmoved mover,” a name for “everlasting existence” and for beings and things that are “present and continuous.” Existence becomes verb rather than noun. Poems such as “Inging since the beginning,” “Phased cycles,” “Re ing” and “Continuum” elaborate a theology of recurrence in which life is “creeping continuum clocking / forward,” a sequence where “suckling ends someday / adulting too / thereafter unveiling the hereinafter.” The grammar of the present continuous becomes a way to think about human life, historical cycles and ecological processes. This section is at its best when it fuses the cosmic with the domestic: “Little beginnings” moves from “Seed to sequoia” and mustard seeds to “baby steps” that become “giant strides,” arguing for incremental change that echoes the political patience of the green section, while “Times and seasons” compresses an Ecclesiastes-like sense of cyclical time into brisk rhymes about “seed time and harvest / in circular constant.” Yet not every poem fully earns the conceit: pieces like “Nine ninety-nine,” with its “currently recurring decimal / solar, lunar, empyreal,” risk becoming more enamoured of incantatory sound than of clarity, demonstrating the danger of a concept that can be repeated more easily than deepened.

Stylistically, Adebowale’s work is overtly lyrical, with short lines, frequent enjambment, sparse punctuation and a reliance on anaphora and refrain. She favours parallelism and accumulation, as in the cascading imperatives of “Save the earth,” “Save earths children” and “Save the sea,” which build toward a chanted urgency. Her metaphors are rooted in nature, the body and everyday experience: time appears “as slippery as the catfish / wriggling away from each loose catch,” a vivid image that grounds abstraction in the wet, writhing particular. In “Of time, of age and other fleeting things” she imagines herself as an elderly storyteller whose laughter reveals “gaping holes and gaps of loss / of teeth that were once numbered but are now gone,” letting humour and mortality coexist. There is a strong oratorical streak throughout; poems like “The Freedom chant” and “The green spirit” sound written for public squares and vigils, their repetitions designed for communal echo, situating the collection in a lineage of African oral tradition, protest verse and faith-inflected exhortation. The cost of this abundance is a tendency toward excess: triads and lists recur, favourite adjectives reappear, and certain abstractions (“love,” “hope,” “truth”) are named directly rather than embodied, which can blunt the impact of otherwise powerful pieces and suggests the book might have been even stronger with more rigorous pruning.

A notable feature of the collection is its consistent address to a “you” – lover, dancer, future child, nation, reader. “Dance with me,” “Shine on,” the Valentine poems and the closing blessing “For the ones on the way and the ones now here” all reach toward the reader or an imagined other, transforming the poems from solitary meditations into relational gestures. The ethic is communal rather than solitary: the speaker is less concerned with the isolated lyric self than with communities, bloodlines and successors. “The young shall grow and surpass” is not simply observational; it is a plea to honour rather than squander the next generation, while “Of things that will never fade” locates durable value not in institutions but in “a caring heart,” a hug and “helping hands.” The political poems are similarly grounded in embodied agency: “Cliques and clusters” refuses to mystify power, insisting that it “resides in the thumb / in him, in her,” and that hope resides in “thumb / in voice and in stand,” a civics lesson rendered as revelation. Some readers may wish for a more conflicted or ambivalent ethical stance, but the refusal of irony is itself a decision; in a cultural moment enamoured of distance, Adebowale chooses nearness and belief.

What remains after the last lines is less any single poem than the cumulative sense of a consciousness that insists on reading the world in continuous tense. Being is not a completed act; it is an ongoing ing: breathing, grieving, marching, loving, voting, planting, remembering. The collection’s finest moments persuade us that to live is to enter that grammar of hope, to be at once noun and verb, both a “tree planted by rivers of water” and the water that keeps it green.