Collective stomach

In the stomach of this nation,
all the butterflies are dead;

not the beautiful, pinned death
of a collector’s box,
but the wet, black rot
that feeds nothing.

We have swallowed
too many pesticides.
Now, the air in our guts is stagnant.
The flutter we once knew
was just the last tremor
in a wingspan turning back to pulp.

— Majekodunmi O. Ebhohon
sankara101010@gmail.com

A National Autopsy: On Majekodunmi O. Ebhohon’s “The Collective Stomach”

By Amahle Lethabo

In an era defined by political disillusionment and ecological anxiety, poetry that dares to diagnose the national mood often risks cliché. Majekodunmi O. Ebhohon’s “The Collective Stomach” avoids this pitfall with devastating precision. The poem operates as a stark anatomical report, dissecting the death of collective hope with a clarity that is both metaphorical and brutally literal.

The opening salvo,

“In the stomach of this nation,
all the butterflies are dead,”

immediately establishes a clinical scale. The “stomach” is not merely a repository for feeling; it is the core organ of digestion, the place where a body processes sustenance and converts it into energy. To locate the poem here is to suggest that the nation’s capacity to process its own reality has been terminally compromised. The “butterflies,” a universal shorthand for the nervous anticipation of something new, are not sleeping. They are deceased. This is not a temporary malaise but a state of finality.

Ebhohon then specifies the nature of this death, and in doing so, delivers the poem’s central critique:

“Not the beautiful, pinned death
of a collector’s box,
but the wet, black rot
that feeds nothing.”

This is the poem’s pivotal image. “Wet, black rot” is active decomposition, a biological process that is messy, foul, and inevitable. The clause “that feeds nothing” is its most damning quality. In the natural world, decay is a form of recycling, a nutrient return to the soil. Here, the decay of hope is so toxic, so absolute, that it yields no generative potential. It is a nihilistic entropy.

The poem then identifies the causative agent with chilling accuracy:

“We have swallowed
too many pesticides.”

The metaphor is brilliantly chosen. Pesticides are not accidental poisons; they are deliberate, industrial formulations designed to eliminate specific life forms deemed undesirable. On one level, these pesticides are the immediate toxins of local corruption, misgovernance and empty political rhetoric. On another level, considering the poet emerges from Nigeria—a nation rich in resources yet perennially grappling with the “resource curse”—this metaphor invites a broader, more systemic reading beyond local governance.

These pesticides are not merely domestic failures; they are the legacy of a neocolonial economic order, the residual chemicals of imperialism that linger in the soil and the water table. They are the logics of extractive capitalism, which treat a populace not as a body to nourish but as a resource to manage—a system that must be sprayed free of the “pests” of collective bargaining, dissent, and the expectation of a common good. The pesticides are the systemic, often external, pressures that ensure the national body is conditioned to consume what weakens it, poisoning the very possibility of organic, sovereign growth.

The consequence is an internal environmental collapse:

“Now, the air in our guts is stagnant.”

A functioning gut is an ecosystem in motion; stagnation signifies a shutdown, a buildup of toxic byproducts, a paralysis that precedes death.

The final movement of the poem offers a brutal revision of recent history:

“The flutter we once knew
was just the last tremor
in a wingspan turning back to pulp.”

This is where Ebhohon’s work transcends lament and becomes a profound correction of the record. That flicker of optimism, that protest movement that gained brief traction, that civic life that seemed regenerated, that election that promised change—the poem reframes these not as signs of rebirth, but as terminal neurological flickers. The “wingspan” represents the entire architecture of potential—the capacity for flight, for freedom, for development. Its reduction to “pulp” is the final, physical undoing of form and function. It is not a broken wing, but a wing unmade.

Besides being a masterpiece metaphor for sadness, “The Collective Stomach” is a lucid and unsparing autopsy report on the death of a national dream. It argues that our collective hope has not faded gracefully; it has been systematically poisoned, and what we are witnessing now is not the illness, but the decomposition.

Ebhohon has written a coroner’s report, and we are the collective body on the slab.