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Reading Forest Imaginaries

“In African fiction, the forests I encountered tended to be less about the trees and more about the lives and bodies of creatures, spirits, and plants. Forests in these narratives embody something liminal or inchoate, a site that resists mapping and boundaries, where beings meet and interact in ways that are unpredictable, chaotic, but also generative.” 

— Ainehi Edoro

 

I’ve just finished reading Ainehi Edoro’s Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think published last month by Columbia University Press. Edoro, the publisher of Brittle Paper — an important platform for African literature conversations — takes a deep look at the role of forests in African literature, and the reader on a wild ride in this her debut scholarly work. 

African novels have set whole revelatory scenes, important plot events and sometimes whole stories in the forest. But in Ainehi’s reading, the forest has played a still more fundamental role in African storytelling. Conventional criticism has reckoned the African forest “merely as setting, a stage where characters play out fantasies of magic and transformation,” fossilized and imagined “as a relic of a premodern, primordial, prelogical world, forever fixed in the past.” Edoro proposes instead a reading of the forests in these works as “spaces for the creative imagination” that “exert influence on the fictional worlds to the extent of being co-architects of the lives of the characters.”

And in about 284 pages, she makes this case quite convincingly. 

Ṣóyínká’s 1967 poem Ìdanrè and his translation of Fágúnwà into Forest of a Thousand Daemons, Amos Tutuọlá’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Thomas Mafolo’s Chaka and Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon are all considered here. In each work, Edoro establishes associative connections between what is happening in the story and the role of the forest itself — as if a character of its own.

“Forest Imaginaries argues” the introduction says, “that the forest is a conceptual tool for rethinking the forms, histories, aesthetics, and critical methods of African literature… The book introduces the forest as a unit of spatial analysis in AFrican fiction based on the observation that the forest marks a distinct category of space in fiction. When characters enter forests in African fiction, something happens to their ability to imagine. There is something about the forest that suspends law, lets imagination run wild, transforms bodies, and collapeses time as well as distinction between the human and the nonhuman. The forest’s mythic and imaginative dimensions offer a different scale and context for analyzing a fictional world…” 

In The Tragedy of the Forest, the book’s first section, Edoro explores the myth of Chaka, and Ṣóyínká’s mythification of Ògún in Ìdànrè; lso the role of the “evil forest” in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart — which I found quite compelling. In Things Fall Apart, the “evil forest” where rejects and the sick were buried and cast away from society was to eventually become the site of the first school in the village, when the systems of power changed hands from the local custom to the invading British army. Edoro teases out how the transition from that space of punishment and horror to one of communal progress impacted on many of the scenes in the book from Okonkwo’s relationship with his father and his society to other man-made tragedies that befell them, including his own eventual suicide.

“The failure of the evil forest to dispel the threat of the white man should have signaled that something much more sinister was afoot” she wrote in chapter two… Allocating land to the missionaries in the evil forest amounts to political death. By losing the evil forest and, by extension, the battle over death, teh clan loses the capacity to decide what is within or outside the law, what is threatening or nonthreatening violence, what is legitimate or illegitimate violence, who is a spirit of the wild and who is not, where the wild ends and where it begins.” — page 145.

 

In the latter section, The Love of the Forest, she explores Amos Tútùọ́lá’s joyful exploration in The Palm-Wine Drinkard as well as Nnedi Okorafor’s wild and futuristic storytelling through corals and aliens. I found this less compelling than the first part, but delightful anyway.

The bibliography is eleven pages long, while the end notes a little more than twice that, a testament to the depth of the author’s plumbing of these new meanings and significations

Edoro, a lecturer of African literature at the University of Wisconsin, founded BrittlePaper in August of 2010 as an African literary blog, an outlet for her postgraduate work at Duke University. It has since then established itself as a prime location for news and reviews of new writings. I myself have published reviews, interviews, and views on the platform, and found it a rich source of conversation in African literature. I find the subject of the book even more compelling since I’ve been working on a biographical nonfiction on Nobel Laureate Wọlé Ṣóyínka which uses the forest — and the writer’s relationship with it — as a springboard to understanding his work and his life. It is rewarding to find some congruence of one’s work in others’ delightful research explorations.

The rather predictable future of such an important book as Edoro’s, alas, is the likely prescriptive uses to which it will henceforth be put as a template of understanding all of the forests in African literature. I noted quite early in the book that its richest examples came from early African works in print, by authors who have now almost all ascended into ancestorhood. Does Edoro’s understanding of African forest roles in literature extend into modern works, written by writers who may never have inhabited the world of mystery, superstition, and regimented rules that characterized early pre-Western-contact African societies? This is, perhaps, where the mention of Okorafor would have been some consolation. The coral reefs that dominated the plot of Lagoon, Edoro argues, “invite us to reconsider the very nature of worldbuilding (as) an ongoing, collective process… not as a graveyard, but a living archive of creativity and survival.” 

More derivative readings would layer Edoro’s work on new literatures like Akwaeke Emezi’s, Romeo Oríogun, Jide Salawu, Remi Ngamije, etc to see if the forest — even in the concrete jungles of modern living — continues to speak to us in much the same way as in these older cited works. My guess is that this will result in a radically-different book — maybe Edoro’s sequel — but would not be any less compelling.

Read an interview with the Ainehi Edoro here.

 

[This essay was first published on FlamingHydra on 24 February, 2026]

Reading Forest Imaginaries was published on October 9th, 2026, with the tags , , , , under the Literature, Opinion, Review category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

On “The Heresiad” by Ikeogu Oke

The Heresiad (KraftGriots, 2017) by Ikeogu Oke is, in my opinion, the most ambitious of the books on the prize shortlist this year. It is a book of what the author called “operatic poetry” (another way to put this would be “poetry in drama and song”) featuring one poem extended over a hundred pages. Yes, one poem. It is epic in its scale, ambition, and character (and even in the words of one of the blurbs. See it:

“It is powerful, and brilliantly composed – a true epic!” – Lyn Innes (Professor Emerita, School of English. University of Kent, Canterbury))

But seriously, the work packs within it a lot of history, philosophy, narrative, culture, allegory, politics, and tradition, rather unapologetically. Without the author’s name, one might confuse it for a work by Shakespeare of any of the writers of the old traditions defined by form, rhyme, and musicality. Only slightly, of course. References intrude from Nigerian (and African) socio-political issues enough to define the work as one addressed to a specific, even if global, audience. And to that idea of musicality, the author graciously provided musical notes with which the poem can be sung.

The name Heresiad, is derived from “heresy” just as the Iliad was derived from “Ilium” or Aeneid from “Aeneas”, as the author explains in the preface. But what needed defending, even more, was the style, operatic poetry, which Oke described as being deliberately crafted as “an art form that transcends verse and goes on to embrace song, music, and drama.” Previous works of this nature which have misled readers into expecting musicality through the use of “Songs of–” in their titles were singled out, from Turold’s The Song of Roland to Vyasa’s The Lord Song to Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino. (He couldn’t have called out Tanure Ojaide’s Songs of Myself, the other book on the shortlist, because this serendipity of both their presence on the shortlist couldn’t have been predicted. But the juxtaposition of this factor in defining Heresiad as unique and better realized as practical literature does appear significant). By discounting the need for a titular nod to musicality and instead embracing it in true form, Oke admits to pursuing a grander ambition: to make written words sing, a homage to Ngugi wa Thiong’o, whose words to that effect was quoted as an epigraph.

Of the thematic preoccupation of the book, Oke says it is written “to make a case for unhindered intellectual and creative freedom… and for mutual respect and harmony between faith and thought, otherwise religion and intellectualism.” In my interview with him, he admitted that the idea of the book, and the first verses in the book, came in 1989 when “a famous writer” was condemned to death for the crime of heresy. He didn’t need to – nor wanted to – mention Salman Rushdie by name, but that connection became immediately apparent. In this book, the condemned author and narrator is Zumba, who was so censured for having writing a “bad” book. To enforce this sentence, and to save him from it, a few other characters, in the person of Reason, Doom, Anger, Sword, Machete, Axe, Stone, Panther, Care, Bluff, Smithy, etc, were introduced with fully-realized characters, compelling presence, and voice. In their thought processes and the unfurling of the curious plot, the poem realizes itself in full glory.

One of the limitations of traditional poetry, which can also become its most enchanting feature, is rhyming. It is a feature that I happen to love. But it is a feature fraught with a lot of risks one of which is the occasional trading of meaning for the benefit of a properly rhyming word, or the use of the immediately available rhyme instead of striving to find the perfect one. In Heresiad, some of these limitations show up, like when “bypass” is made rhyme with “pass”, “reproof” with “proof”, or “unwise” with “wise” (and in one unintentionally hilarious instance, when the native language interference pushes “blade” to rhyme with “head” (page 57). For a book of this type of ambition, it might be that those kinds of lapses are to be expected and tolerated. But for an unlucky book, they can become the flaws by which they are defined.

But when it works, though, it works quite beautifully.

I’m part of this misnomer, I confess,

And so are all you Faithfuls, nonetheless.

Or who among us Faithfuls can have read

The book for which we seek the author’s head?

Rhyming might seem like a trivial issue on which to spend critical time until one realizes that each couplet throughout the work sticks to this rhyming pattern on top of what Oke describes as “lyrical pentameter” (adaptability to lyrical utility). The realization that the author had spent countless man hours crossing all his Ts to achieve this kind of ambitious and thoroughly satisfying theatrical result is most impressive of all.

Now, the author’s plea had reached his ears,

A plea that dripped with anguish and with tears;

And Reason, yes, had pondered through a plan

To take help to the joy-forsaken man.

(page 36)

Equally as impressive is the realization that the book took twenty-seven years to write, over different iterations.

Now lift your voice; lift your voice and say;

Your voice, not mine, must rise and lead the way:

What now transpired among the rising five

Who wished our author more dead than alive?

What – the thought – that, of its own accord,

Changed their common tilt towards discord?

A love as yet profound inspires my choice

To be the human echo of your voice.

(page 52)

Speaking of theatre, when was the last time you read a book of poetry with accompanying musical notations? I certainly haven’t seen any. But here, on page 106-112, the author, with the help of Adéogun Adébọ̀wálé, helpfully guides the future theatre and/or musical director on what is the appropriate way to translate the texts into music.

During my interview with him, I asked whether he would be willing to sing some of the lines to me, and he graciously obliged. It was not as impressive as I’d expected it, but who expects an author of a work to always be its most competent performer? Not me. It is ironic, of course, that this musical characteristic of the work once became a point of risibility when a restless Facebook critic dismissed it as a gimmicky invention to win the $100,000 prize money. On the contrary, I think it is one of the book’s distinctive features, showing it as different as possible from the others on the shortlist in terms of ambition, inventiveness, interdisciplinary scope, and resolve. Now, to see it on the stage!

The author’s habit of including footnotes and references at the bottom of relevant pages irked me at first. They had appeared as an unnecessary usurpation of the critic’s role. But this wasn’t the case. They add a lot of value to the work in illustrating, where necessary, the writer’s influence, allusion, or research. Not one was superfluous.

From what I have observed of the pattern of choice by the NLNG judges, who have typically favoured works of formal and traditional forms in style and ambition (See: The Sahara Testament), I will predict that The Heresiad might take home this year’s prize. There is something about the work that speaks to an intense commitment to innovation, tenacity, joyful experimentation and social commentary in a way that provokes delight and engagement. It is doubly worthy, of course, for its successful bridging of the genres of poetry, drama, and music, while making a strong point, through allegory and an enchanting imagination, about the role of free speech and the responsibility of the writer in a modern society.

I’ll be surprised if the judges disagree, but such surprises are welcome when it’s not one’s work on the shortlist.

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Find a link to the previous reviews here.

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Update: October 9, 2017: Ikeogu Oke’s The Heresiad is the 2017 Nigeria Prize for Literature winner. Watch my interview with him here. Congrats to him.

On “The Heresiad” by Ikeogu Oke was published on October 1st, 2017, with the tags , , , , , , , under the Literature, Observations, Poetry, Review, Uncategorized category. There are currently 5 comments on this article so far.

On “Songs of Myself” by Tanure Ojaide

Songs of Myself (KraftGriots, 2016) is a collection of poems by Tanure Ojaide. It is the most personal of the three on the shortlist of this year’s Nigeria Prize, the most introspective, and also the one most (even if inadvertently) expressive of the melancholic aspiration I had prematurely expected from Ogaga Ifowodo’s A Good Mourning because of its ominous title.

Ojaide has published poetry since 1973 and has published twenty collections of poems many of which have won prizes, local and international, like the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (1987), All Africa Okigbo Poetry Prize (1988, 1997), the BBC Arts and Poetry Award (1988), and poetry awards of the Association of Nigerian Authors (1988, 1994, 2003, 2011).  The new work is approachable and deceptively simple, like thin ice over a frozen lake. More on this style later.

The title of the book invites us to approach the collection as work about the author to varying degrees: songs of myself. But in the foreword (which I had personally considered superfluous in a poetry collection, except in a notable instance like in The Heresiad, an exception which I’ll explain in my review of the book), the author explains his approach as incorporating “some of…aspects of oral poetic genre”, particularly of the great Udje poets of Urhoboland, which “deals with self-examination and the minstrel’s alter-ego” in the work as a way of attempting to know oneself with “self-mockery that justifies mocking others.”

This intention changes how I eventually approach the work, not as Ojaide himself recounting his thoughts and opinion on a number of relevant political and social issues alone, but as the voice of an invented poet-persona using a traditional poetic form to interrogate himself and thus the society. The Udje, as he explained it to me in our YouTube interview, are traditional Urhobo griot-poets who work carry social and political significance, and are present as conduits for commentary on the public condition.

So what is this condition? In the book, it is both personal and societal. The poet is both an old man (Gently; page 14) and a young adult (We Have Grown: 155). He’s both the country (Self-Defense; 91) and an individual (On My Birthday; 26). He is a happy observer of the passing of time (For The Muse of Peace) as a cynical record keeper of slights and injuries (Masika; 47). He’s a parent (They Say My Child is Ugly Like a Goat; 107), and a son (Family Counselor; 85); a hopeful lover (Secret Love 147) and a self-critical poet (Wayo Man; 87). The issues addressed are as disparate as they are familiar. Nigeria, the country and the government, is an ever-present villain in most, as are other social issues which the author addresses with sardonic candour.

If I were to ask my people

what they wanted the most,

they would definitely choose money over every other thing,

iincluding good health and peace

that I know there’s a dearth of

because of oil and gas everywhere

that by right should bring us wealth.

(Page 132)

From afar, especially with a misconstrued intention of the writer’s narrative angle, most of the poems appear conditioned into a tried-and-tested style of political and social protest poetry through this staid and resigned voice. But on close contact, especially against the background of its traditional dimension of style, they reveal themselves as both original and intentional, carrying an unflappable tone couched in the simplicity of cynicism. Who is a poet – I ask myself a few times – and what makes a good poem or poetry collection? Is it a successful deployment of inventive gymnastics of modern conventions that appeal to sophisticated palates, or is it an honest recounting of home-grown truths directed at a selected audience even if in a least colourful, or less popularly accessible voice?

So many questions I can’t answer.

 

After all the birds fall silent in the delta,

how can there be Rex Lawson

with the polyrhythm of weaverbird, sunbird,

carpenter-bird, solos and ensembles?

(page 134)

The question is important in judging the language choice that Ojaide deploys in this work which many times doesn’t read as elevated as one typically expects of offerings of this kind of ambition. Against the background of his stated intention, however, possibilities can be suggested of this character of theirs being defined both by the limitation of translating the cultural and linguistic cadence of Urhobo poetry into English and, less charitably, the author’s helplessness in the face of this challenge. The answer will be resolved by the judges of the Nigeria Prize in a couple of weeks.

When I asked him about his use of language and the idea that the use of English as a conduit for African poetic traditions can be a limiting factor at best and a catalyst for the extinction of those languages, he was less acquiescent. “You must know that there are many Englishes,” he said, to which I say yes, as long as each different variant is able to successfully carry to fruition the stated intentions behind its use, and reach new audiences. In this case, I am not as sold as I should have been, not about the homage to traditional oral poetry, which other authors (and perhaps this one in previous works) have done to great success; but about its seamless and effective deployment. Maybe I have been spoilt.

In many of the poems, the writer includes footnotes, like in the first poem on page 15 where he explains that Dede-e dede-e is an “onomatopoeic expression of ‘gently’ in the Urhobo language.” Of this incursion, there are strong arguments to be made, especially in this work, for doing away with them totally. Footnotes are often distracting, and – to return to contemporary arguments about the audience of our literature – needless. Those who value the work enough to engage with it will do the work needed to unlock much of its secrets. The counter-argument, of course, is that a reader like me who is approaching the work on short notice for the purpose of a review would not have figured out that Aridon is a “god of memory and song/poetry among the Urhobo people” (page 17). That same argument, though, fails in the face of less justifiable ones like “NDDC” on page 133, or “ICU”  on page 24. If I did not know that ICU meant “Intensive Care Unit” either from the context of the work, or from having lived in modern society, then the writer hasn’t done his work or I need to return to school.

These kinds of conflicts show up in other places too, springing up the question of who exactly is the poet’s audience in this case. Since his last five books, Ojaide has started publishing his work first in Nigeria before re-issuing them with foreign publishers, a reversal he said was conditioned by his renewed sensitivity to his role as a poet primarily addressing an African (nay, Nigerian) audience. The justification for this almost “reclusive accessibility” of his literary voice will depend on those to whom the work is addressed or the successful domestication of the reader’s mind to the traditions from which the experiment emerged. It could be that the author isn’t “speaking English” at all, but Urhobo, just barely accessible to us through a shared common lexicon.

They mock me because of my child

whom they say is ugly like a goat.

 

Don’t mind them who see nothing good.

My pickin fine pass goat.

 

Where are the mockers when my child

fetches water and runs errads for me?

(page 107)

 

There are about 91 poems in this collection, making it the bulkiest of the three on the shortlist. In four different sections, the poet bares himself to the world like a local minstrel, under different guises and situations, in an outlook that is mostly dark, self-critical and confrontational in equal parts. The subject matter, a look at the world through a personal self-reflection, is certainly an important addition to current social and political conversations. The language is simple, accessible, and direct. It is a collection that anyone can pick up and enjoy. The prolific nature of the writer’s career and the breadth of this work’s take on Nigeria and Africa’s social and political issues makes it an important presence in the shortlist. And even if I will quibble with the inclusion of some of the poems there for not being strong enough to represent such an accomplished poet on such an important list, I’ll still rate Songs of Myself as an important peek into Ojaide’s poetics, experimentation, and voice. The potential for impact of this type of language and style direction, however, will be subject to practical, and more verifiable, manifestation.

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My interview with Tanure Ojaide can be found here. Find a link to the previous reviews here.

On “Songs of Myself” by Tanure Ojaide was published on September 28th, 2017, with the tags , , , , , , under the Literature, Opinion, Poetry, Poetry, Review category. There are currently 3 comments on this article so far.

On “A Good Mourning” by Ogaga Ifowodo

As promised, here is my take on the first book on the shortlist of the NLNG-sponsored Nigerian Prize for literature 2017. The book is A Good Mourning (Paressia, 2016) by Ogaga Ifowodo. Ifowodo is a poet and writer, who taught poetry and literature in English at Texas State University, San Marcos, USA. He holds the Master of Fine Art (MFA) in poetry and Ph.D from Cornell University, New York. He studied law at the University of Benin and worked for eight years as a rights activist with Nigeria’s premier non-governmental rights group, the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO). Between 1997 and 1998, he was held in preventive detention for six months under the military dictatorship of General Sani Abacha.

I’m ashamed to admit that, until now, I hadn’t read anything by that poet with a striking physical resemblance to James Baldwin. But no matter where I have turned, his name had shown up there, from conversations on social media to arguments in closed listservs. Until recently, I also didn’t know that he had served in government in some capacity and that he once contested for (and failed to win) a House seat from his home constituency.

So, I approached his work with an open mind. The title of the book A Good Mourning carried a curious double-edged sword of meaning that intrigued anyone from afar. The cover conveyed darkness as does the paradox of the title itself. If it is “mourning”, how is it also “good”? And how does it contrast with what we have grown to expect when we hear the phrase, devoid of the physical surprise of the spelling difference?

The work does not disappoint. The copy I got was loaned to me by Doctor-Poet Dami Àjàyí to whom the writer had autographed it in 2016: “Good morning & poetry”. I hadn’t found a copy anywhere else that I had looked, inviting conversations to the recurring topic of accessibility of books to the general public before they are selected for the Nigerian Prize. (It is a ridiculous argument, to be clear. The prize is set up to reward excellence, not distribution savvy. But it does raise valid questions about why publishers in 2017 haven’t yet heard of the Kindle, eBooks, and an authentically Nigerian electronic book distribution system called OkadaBooks which can put the books at the literal fingertips of millions of people via their mobile phones).

A Good Mourning is an impressive book that is marked by competence, style, grace, and a distinct authentic voice. It is that competence that I intend to dwell on a bit more because some of the snide remarks about the shortlist had focused on what they regarded as substandard work on the shortlist. Thankfully none had mentioned Ogaga’s name in the diatribes. He is a competent voice whose work leaves no one in doubt of his facility with words, dexterity with decades of African and modern poetic traditions, and sincerity in the pursuit of his numerous truths and points of view.

The poems delight, inspire, provoke, entertain, and intrigue. They cover a range of themes that, contrary to the expectation that the poems in the collection will all be morose and depressing, excite and titillate. In one poem Ten Hours (page 8), the poet describes an appendectomy in a German hospital with such mischief and lexical dexterity that what one feels isn’t just breathless anxiety of a man hanging between life and death but a playful appreciation of the affectation of the doctors’ efficiency and their terrible grasp of English (one confuses “rupture” for “rapture”). He asks for the piece of his gut back, on regaining consciousness, and was told that it had been cut up, and it will no longer, as he had hoped, become

pickled in a beaker,

displayed in bookcase at eye-level

for breaking barren moments,

getting guests to know me inside out.

These kinds of unexpected levity litter the book in random places, turning what was billed as a melancholic take on national life into a delightful, thorough, and serious look at different issues in one citizen’s life.

In the following poem, a serious religious ceremony is gently mocked.

Once an alter boy, he pined for wine

and wafer, not communion with the Lord

Too young for the mysteries of eating God’s

 

flesh and drinking his blood, he prayed only:

Lord, let this cup pass to me!

The priest sent him out of the holy sanctuary.

You get the idea.

Actually, you don’t.

Ifowodo does this effortlessly throughout the work, especially in places where seriousness is expected. It almost seems like the whole book is an attempt at shattering gloomy expectations. Or else a practical interrogation of life as comprising of both gloom and levity, mixed in the right dosage, waiting to be teased out by the right inquisitor.

The title poem was dedicated to Chief Moshood Káṣìmawò Abíọ́lá. It reads like a recap of history, with snide barbs reserved for players and villains, living or dead.

The false-star general

was first to flee his stolen throne

seeking refuge in a hilltop mansion

built with stolen money.

Since the book was published in 2016, there will be questions about why the author chose now as a good time to write about the June 12 crises, and why the title poem takes about ten pages (37-46) to tell us what we already know about an event whose significance has now almost paled against the background of even more pressing matters. (I asked him about this in our interview. More on this later)

What won’t be asked is whether the work was well written – because it was. In four different sections, Ifowodo explores what it means to be human, with a diverse range of fascinating experiences over many decades and many geographical spaces. The poems are as experimental as they are traditional (though he notably avoids any attempt at rhyming). The book is described as the author’s “reflections on the intimacy of evil anchored in the brazen military annulment in 1993 of the will of the Nigerian people to self-representation…”. I will not argue here with his choice of description of his own work and aspiration, but the work appeared to me more like a nuanced mosaic of a yet unfolding, if rich and fascinating, life of the author himself.

The outward-facing and ambiguous appearance of the title and its however belated tribute to the memory of June 12 will be important in inviting in a curious reader, but won’t be what keeps them. That will be the delightful competence, playfulness, and dexterity of the writer’s voice. I will mark A Good Mourning down as a very strong contender for this year’s prize, but that’s not saying anything since it is already on the shortlist of three. A more specific compliment will be that it is certainly one of the stronger two on the list.

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The video of my interview with the author can be found here. The prize announcement will be made on October 9, 2017.

On “A Good Mourning” by Ogaga Ifowodo was published on September 25th, 2017, with the tags , , , , , , under the Literature, Observations, Poetry, Review category. There are currently 6 comments on this article so far.

“I Wrote This For You”: Mapping Triumph in the Midst of Pain

Samira Sanusi’s new poetry collection is a map of pain. Line after line, in her book I Wrote This For You (WRR/Authorpedia; 2017), the author traces a tough path through difficult memories like a hot iron through wax. It appears like an uncomfortable experience at first, one with a rebound of traumatic recollection. But what emerges, for sure, is triumph. Survival.

I first met Sanusi in Kaduna at the maiden edition of the Kaduna Book and Arts Festival (KABAFEST) where she was a guest on a panel discussing the issue of sickle cell anemia (full panel video here).  She had written a book called S is for Survivor detailing the path of her healing from a sufferer and victim to a survivor and warrior. After many years of suffering through medical trials, twenty-eight surgeries, and other travails, she was finally healed when a bone marrow transplant turned her blood from a sickle cell blood to AA. She is now the President of the Samira Sanusi Sickle Cell Foundation (SSSCF), an Abuja based NGO.

Until then, I’d never heard of the idea of a blood transplant changing one’s genotype. But I haven’t followed the advances in medical science in this regard. So the revelation, as well as the heartbreaking tale of her survival, was both thrilling and heartwarming. I wanted to read her book. In this collection, Samira opens up in the best way she knows how: in words, mostly written to self, documenting the painful process of this journey to survival and all the attendant doubts, setbacks, despair, joy, and hope.

I finished reading this book a couple of weeks ago but I didn’t have the time to put down my thoughts about it, many of which I wrote down in a notebook I’ve now had to dig out from under a pile of other books. Here, a few of my favourite and memorable lines.

“That you have seen worse, doesn’t

mean the hell I’m seeing is a second-hand fire.

My worse is valid, even

when your bad is worse than mine.”

This came at the beginning of the book which – to my embarrassment – I’d initially assumed to be another prose work from the author. Nothing on the cover prepared the reader for poetry, so the words that came at me from the opening pages seemed, at first, like the preface to something else until they led one into each other throughout the book. It would appear that she had been documenting her thoughts and feelings about her pain and process throughout her encounter with the sickle cell trauma.

“Keep your truth away from me.

You don’t know what lies I have to tell myself

to sleep at night.”

But don’t expect a clean arrangement either. The words flow into each other sometimes like aphorisms, separated by asterisks or other special characters. At other times, they appear as chapters carefully grouped together in a specified theme. But there were no chapters. Only verses. We walk through the lines as though experiencing the process and pain of the writer’s lived experiences.

Who she was addressing wasn’t always obvious, but that was never a prerequisite to understanding or enjoying what was offered in the most private of words. In baring herself this way, the author invites us to see her not as a perfect survivor but one who had only persistently endured, with her head held up high, but with a few notable scars to show.

“She was so beautiful, the way

She kept people from falling into

Pieces as she broke apart.”

In the book are several themes which sometimes morph into each other, even in contrast. There is self-loving sometimes with self-loathing. There is gratitude as much as bewilderment, there is surrender and sometimes defiance.

“If you ask me about my dreams,

I would tell you to watch me,

for I am living them.”

Sometimes, she talks to herself, either in pity or in a berating tone.

“Looking into your eyes

I can tell you went to war

And did not come back with yourself.”

And sometimes with a challenge:

“You must come back to yourself

to find you waiting on the couch,

hoping to kiss and make up. Begging

for another chance at self-love.”

In other matters, she hints at love, lust, rejection, and romance:

“The first time he touched me

I yelled ‘Don’t hold my hand and don’t touch my heart!’

He asked, ‘Who happened to you?’

‘Your access pass to come in and save me so they can call you

Hero is rejected!”

Feminism? It sure seems so. Yet a certain religious conservatism also present underneath the soft and vulnerable persona the author presents in this book seems to sometimes intrude to confuse us as to whether the narrator is a helpless character in a patriarchal space or a defiant voice against it. Evidence of both can sometimes be found.

“Whose idea was it to look

at a boy’s eyes, filled with tears

and tell them men don’t cry?”

And on another…

“Dear Arewa woman
You’re not just somebody with a body
You’re body, mind, heart and soul
They’re all yours to share, as you please.”

I enjoyed reading the work in all its rollercoaster of emotions, aspirations, reflections, and ruminations.

Parts of the book do sometimes let go of its aspirations to poetry and spread out in plain prose, towards the end. But even in them are relevant nuggets of inspiration directed at an imagined audience of readers, and sometimes at the writer herself. The result is a book that both defies categorization as much as it defines it, expanding the possibilities for artistic self-reflection. I have not read many books of poetry from Northern Nigeria. But if Samira’s offering is any indication of what to expect when vulnerability and a questing mind meet at the junction of a page of poetry, then we are in for a good time.

The irony of enjoying work written in pain isn’t lost on the reader of course. But the writer never intended it as an invitation to pity. Rather, it is a celebration of triumph, survival. Each verse in the collection, whether intended to please, to stimulate, or to instruct, comes across in a form that also delights in soluble bites. I look forward to reading more from this author, this warrior, in whose survival we have also come to discover beauty, grace, and strength.

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Masa Depan Platform Slot Digital

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Seiring industri terus bergerak maju, aksesibilitas dan inovasi akan tetap menjadi dua tema penting https://www.ktravula.com/2017/09/literature-is-like-hot-amala-interview-with-the-saturday-sun/. Namun, peningkatan teknologi tidak menghapus risiko finansial dan tidak dapat menjamin hasil tertentu. Pemahaman yang jelas mengenai mekanisme permainan, kebijakan platform, probabilitas, serta prinsip bermain secara bertanggung jawab tetap menjadi hal penting bagi siapa pun yang ingin mengenal hiburan digital bergaya slot di tengah perkembangan lingkungan online yang semakin dinamis.

“I Wrote This For You”: Mapping Triumph in the Midst of Pain was published on September 23rd, 2017, with the tags , , , , under the Art, Literature, Opinion, Poetry, Poetry, Review category. There are currently 2 comments on this article so far.