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.