Love from a perspective: advice to a friend

I am a very private person, a very reserved one who hardly jumps into people’s affairs even if they are my friends. A friend of mine is at a crossroad with a very important life decision.  He had decided to marry his girlfriend. He sent me her picture and accompanying text in sympathetic tone: I will accept her.

Knowing what I know, this came as a surprise, that the economy is doing like this, doing like this… Beside the economic side, marriage is not all the roses that we think it is. In my own judgement he is making a very bad move.

I read the message and congratulated him. Since it is in reference to her mother’s death, I condoled him one more time and told him that I did so already at the time of her death. What he said kept ringing in my head. He had now settled. He made up his mind. But is that a sober decision?  Is that a choice from an independent point? What informed this final decision? I couldn’t shake off the questions swirling in my head.

Since he is my personal person, an ashratul-mubashshirina fil-jannat who cannot be ignored, I went back to WhatsApp two hours later to find answers to these questions. I can’t change anything, but I needed to be sure he is aware of what he is doing.

“Are you sure this is what you want or are you taking decision based on emotions? I have been doing a lot of thinking and decided to talk to you one more time on this.”

The rational me kicked in. I calculate everything. I do a quick cost-benefit analysis even in choosing a road to follow. I am so rational my life is boring and monotonous. No major risk takings nor huge outcome. Often, I look at myself and look at others: holy shit! No bizarre coincidences or unpredictable zigzagging.

Rational people are not being pessimists or doomsayers when they tend to look at the worst case scenario. They are just practical. I want him to be like me in a positive way and believe in cause and effect and human agency. That’s why God created Laws of the Universe aka Laws of Physics. 9 out of 10, human actions play significant role in the outcome of things. Miracle works only in few occasions. When you go to sleep and wake up, it is God in charge because there is nothing that you can do about.

So, I believe that we shouldn’t make important life decisions based on emotions. Well, I know. I know we will be denuded of our humanity if we remove emotions from human spaces. We will be robotic, calculating, transactional, and cold, lacking in sense of community. Which is bad, granted, but in trying to preserve our humanity we shouldn’t be irrational to a fault.

 “Do you really love her or are you pitying her because her mother died? Remember, if you are pitying her note that you are not guilty nor responsible for her mother’s death. Even if you truly love her and want to marry her, are things happening in the natural course of things or are you altering and rushing things for her own sake?”

I am not trying to stop him from doing a charitable work but he sounds like a martyr than a genuine love. I am considering his mental health and material well-being in the long term. You make one jump into the ditch, it takes several to get out of. But time heals everything. You shouldn’t embark on this guilt tripping and harm yourself in the process. She has a boyfriend with financial capabilities. If you are thinking about her love for you, time will heal everything. She will get married and everything will be alright. You may get what Allah plans for you. Allah’s plan, in this case, is to allow things take their natural course. If Allah wishes you to marry her, then he will eventually give you something better soonest.

“I suggest you leave things take their natural course even if you truly love her. If you go with this decision believing you are righteously doing a good work, that you can be patient, that you can bear the pain, then there will be time when all of these feelings will fade. By then you are already neck-deep in hole.”

I want him to see things from this perspective.

Book review: Fatima Salihu's Sketches

With mathematical imprecision, Fatima Salihu’s debut collection of poems touches issues on death, love, nature and illogicality of life. The collection offers a middle ground of gentle read and rough ride, supple and tough, coded and open, sadness and joy. You feel powerless and helpless reading these poems very aware of the reality of the world we live in.

The first poem sets the tone. It is about lost love, violence and danger. Closely followed is a poem on sins and injustices, where, ironically, those who are to protect destroy.  The powerful rule and the downtrodden are crushed beneath the jackboots.

We struggle through life, fighting many battles, winning some and losing others. In the middle of this we pause and turn to nature for its healing power.

Poems in the collection recognize the humanity in us as being fallible and imperfect even as we are urged to not to lose sight to the next nasty experience. There is a sense of resignation as we come face to face with the reality of existence. We can never be perfect since there is no time for that in life. 

For he who still breathes, is never complete

We all wait to become perfect

When we dissolve (p.6).

Man should claim his place in the Cosmo as fluid and flexible in a positive way. You are more than just an element in the scheme of things. “You can be happy and More…” in fact, “You are happiness itself” (p.9).

Fatima’s poems are not open confessional; they are a bit coded to appear like a secret in plain view. We can only follow the sketches and piece up the dots. Even as she tries to make a cover under metaphor we can detect how the poet/persona was once duped in love. She had toiled through building a relationship only for the love to be stolen away.

I was once the chief

happy with all I built

but a lucky thief

stole the tree (p.21).

Duped II is a continuation poem that shows a grown persona who no longer acts on emotion. She seems cold and wary and learns to trust her instinct. The place that was once fertile is now barren.

Death theme has appeared several times in the collection. We are presented with the vivid picture of how the inevitable steals the attention of a mother and takes away the child. And therefore, as the poet experiences deaths, she affirms to the reader that poets also grieve in their own way:

Who say poets do not grieve

When they knit pains into words

And spread them on the sentience of vision…Without paying homage to tears (p.12)

The anguish of death comes up in Tayaza poems, tender feeling and emotions on the brink of death.

Our Devils is about duality of self, the inner struggle we experience from our different personalities and competing voices. What is more, after the grind and the hassle of day the night offers the moment needed for the interrogation of self. You take a journey into this abyss where you touch base with the real you “Until you either become dark with silence/Or silently dark” (p.49).

Salihu depicts the world inside out, where we ignore some signs and dismiss them erroneously. We have got to learn to interrogate, to ransack our inherited values and our everyday life. When it is too normal and things are not breaking, it’s not normal. “Normalcy is a travesty/in their normal sense and/in an abnormal sense.” It is not all the time that we must make sense out of things. As a mathematician Fatima discards her scientific and logical self.

A feminist, Salihu walks the world in fluidity that allows the freedom of the individual. Many think feminist ideology is in head-on collision with motherhood. This is not the case with Fatima. She shows herself, in a series of questions, asking if she could ever be a good mother that she wishes, imagining herself through childrearing of her kid from infanthood to when a boy becomes a man. At this point she expresses doubt, nay misgivings, as to whether the child can pay back.

She closes the work asserting the place of women, depicting them as, not weaklings, but nation builders which, ultimately, requires more than just a muscle. Mathematician and poet Fatima exemplifies that women are not merely reducible to the kitchen and the other room.

I have a mixed feeling for this book. I love the content but hate the design and what appears to me a shoddy editing as in page 5, 14, 19, 32, 38, 39 & 55. It oozes garish vulgarity and lacks the artistic social graces and tastes. I pray the publishers will bump up their publishing standards and eliminate avoidable errors next time.