A review of Fagbolahan Machado ‘s poem, Fire in Cocoa House

By  Elujoba Yinka

Fagbolahan Machado approaches disaster without surrendering to spectacle. The fire is never enlarged into myth, nor diminished into reportage. Instead, it is rendered through a chain of tactile transformations in which architecture acquires a body and combustion becomes language. The poem understands that catastrophe is most unsettling when described with restraint.

The opening is immediate and exact. “The lift shaft became a chimney” performs an act of terrible simplicity. A mechanism designed for movement is converted into an instrument of suffocation. Machado resists technical description, choosing instead to let function collapse into image. The smoke that “chatters” up the building’s spine grants the fire its own syntax. It does not merely rise; it speaks in a fractured tongue. The building steadily assumes human anatomy. It possesses a spine and a tooth.

These are not farcical substitutions. They suggest that the structure suffers injury alongside the people who built, occupied and depended upon it. Cocoa House ceases to be an object and enters the poem as a wounded organism. One of the poem’s strongest achievements lies in its handling of material.

“The windows popping like hot pods / in a bushfire” fuses industrial architecture with agricultural memory. The simile quietly restores cocoa to the building that bears its name. Glass fractures with the same violence as seedpods exposed to heat, allowing commerce, cultivation and destruction to occupy the same image.

The comparison never announces its intelligence; it simply arrives already carrying historical pressure. Equally striking is the line, “the smell of burnt sugar / and roasted concrete.” Sugar belongs to harvest and sweetness; concrete belongs to permanence. Fire levels both.

The pairing refuses sentiment while producing one of the poem’s richest sensory moments. Smell becomes history’s most persuasive witness. Machado avoids treating Cocoa House as an isolated monument. The phrase “the house that cocoa built” widens the frame beyond engineering. It gestures toward the labour of farmers whose harvests financed modernity in Western Nigeria. The building becomes compressed agricultural history, its foundations extending into plantations and villages far beyond the skyline. The subsequent image of the “hollow tooth / scraping the sky” is devastating precisely because it shrinks civic confidence into exposed enamel.

The closing turn avoids the familiar grammar of triumph. The building survives, but survival is presented as endurance rather than victory.

“The frame held” arrives with almost documentary plainness before giving way to the poem’s finest line: “tempered steel and smallholder bone.” Industry and labour become inseparable. Steel alone did not keep the structure standing; neither did engineering alone produce Cocoa House. Machado welds metallurgy to the bodies whose work financed its existence. In eight words, economic history becomes physical fact. The final image—”waiting for the baseline to kick back in”—introduces rhythm where another poem might have reached for proclamation. Recovery is imagined as music returning after interruption. The metaphor is unexpected because it shifts resilience from architecture to sound. Buildings may be repaired, but a city’s pulse resumes through movement, labour and collective life.

Machado’s finest poems distrust monuments while remaining attentive to what they contain. Cocoa House is neither celebrated as a national icon nor reduced to burnt concrete. It becomes a vessel carrying commerce, colonial inheritance, agricultural labour and urban aspiration through a single moment of combustion. Fire strips away certainty, leaving behind the deeper structure that held long before flames arrived. The poem ends there, in that difficult space where endurance is neither sentimental nor heroic, but simply the stubborn refusal of matter and memory to collapse together.