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.

 

In book review: the secret can now be told

Tragic stories naturally end up being very interesting. The story of Maimunatu Dadasare Abdullahi aka Mama, It Can Now Be Told, is an addition to this. A very sad story indeed! When the blub describes the text as tragic, I couldn’t make the connection until at the end of the book.

First dai Dadasare is what you can describe as an accomplished woman. She has had many firsts under her belt: first woman educator in northern Nigeria, first female nurse, first female journalist and columnist, first female writer, first woman to receive the national honour (MON).

So, what is so sad about her life? What is so interesting in her autobiography that moved me to write a review at the moment I finished the book?

Secrete, intimate personal secret.

I am always fascinated by the ethereal, nay tragic, power of secrets. Dadasare has had some of them in her life that she couldn’t die with them untold. She revealed them, but when she did so the woman who took hold of them died before revealing them to anybody.

As a young girl, Dadasare was kidnapped by some locals under the instruction of a British colonial officer and kept her as a sex slave in his house. She tried to run away but was captured and returned to him. She became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy who had died of malaria on the way to her hometown after the colonial officer took leave to England.

On his return the officer was transferred to Zaria. News reached her that her husband was back to Zaria. Being cut off from her kinsfolk and her fond, rural surrounding, her life fell into limbo. She couldn’t start afresh. She went against her family wishes and reunited with her man. They lived together as a husband and wife, pretending to be married meanwhile everyone was aware they were not. It was impossible then under British Common Law for a legal marriage to exist between them as it’s the same in Islam for a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim man. The colonial administrators and the Emirs unlooked this affair and Dadasare continued to live with Jaumusare, Dr Rupert Moultrie East.

Dadasare became Lady East, mingling with Europeans and adopting the Western culture: entertaining evening guests, going out on weekends and climbing Kufena hills, drinking tea and baking cakes, knitting sweaters and reading Jane Austen in her free time. Soon, opportunities came her way, going to England for a course and taking up job in the colonial administration and commanding respect in her community. (Mama was markedly absent in Abubakar Imam’s Memoirs, where she should have at least merited a mention in consideration of her connection with the Dr East the Editor-in-Chief of Gaskiya Ta Fi Kwabo, and her contribution to the paper. This tells a volume of how the society saw her. So, I think all the nice regards she received publicly was replaced with a dark view privately).

In the book, there are hilarious passages and the tales of things that are unthinkable for our age, especially on basic hygiene. You will wonder how the simple work Mama and her team did was taken by the UN to other developing nations in the Americas with similar conditions, like the posters we see in the hospitals and health centers with basic hygiene illustrations, like the invention of pot, the baby latrine that we call po.

On women education, one hilarious passage goes like this: One day, a husband who was negotiating taking a second wife wrote a letter pertaining to the matter and left it on his table. His wife was one of the Mama’s literacy students. Anxious to practice her new skills, she picked the letter and read. The house was rocky for a while. One man argued against the education of women. “Educate women,” he said, “what man would be idiot enough to sharpen the knife that would cut his throat.” I laughed really hard, neither in support or against his view. Fencism.

Reading books on colonial northern Nigeria gives a great insights of the region and the country at large that you think you have understood, especially the dichotomy between the north and south. Reading some of these books now makes me at peace with some things and offers me a window into their origin and working mind. You will no longer need to engage in pointless argument because, the way you speak and talk, exposes your ignorance and shallow thinking. The status of Hausa language, for instance, and the Islamic values in the northern region. I don’t know of the other regions, but in the Northern Protectorate colonial officers had to pass exams equivalent of IELTS in Hausa language before they could be posted here. Official duties are conducted in Hausa or Fulfulde depending on the province. What kept Dadasare to East was, in addition to Hausa, he could speak Fulfulde language.

The Europeans are greatly respectful of the Islamic values and the culture of the northern people. They avoided anything that had the potential of causing unrest, including, possibly, the delay of Nigeria’s independence till the north was ready. For instance, when Dadasare intended to convert to Christianity Dr Rupert East discouraged her. Likewise, when the Emir of Gwandu in Sokoto Province wanted to open girl’s education centre that required southern women educators in the area the colonial education superintendent vetoed against the move in order not to cause public disfavor.

Mama retired from service and went back to her small town of Gombi in Adamawa. One day, she called her adopted daughter in Daura Aishatu Dikko to come over the next day, telling her if she came and did not find her alive she should check under her pillow for a message. That night, Mama jumped into the well but was rescued and taken to the hospital. She died three days later.

Aishatu Dikko checked beneath the pillow and found two letters, one on how Mama’s wealth would be shared. When she was asked about the content of the second letter by Dr Aliyah Ahmad, she started crying. Dr Aliyah skipped the matter until their next meeting. But Dikko herself died before the next meeting and all of us, like Dr Aliyah, are still thinking what was the content of the second letter…

Theories of her, the colors of her: a review of Mariya Sidi’s Theories of Me

A unique dilemma arises while reading a book of poems. Is poetry a work of fiction?  Should it receive the same handling and treatment as prose and drama? This dilemma hits me when I looked at the blurb of Mariya Sidi’s Theories of Me after finishing the book.  The dilemma, though, mine not as critical, is compounded by the fact that poetry is seen more as a recollection of personal experiences than as fictional creation. Why people like to look at it this way is a question that you, the reader, have to answer. 

Dr Mariya Sidi 

Because I know her, and I don’t want that knowledge to influence my reading in any way, I told my mind to never assume I know Mariya at all. To blur the line further, I read the book backward to defamiliarize and form a bulwark against any possible emergence of linear meaning.  But as poem after poem flew by, each one confirmed my hunches or washed away my doubts.

Theories of Me is a fiction work of non-fiction. With clarity and eloquence, the book came as clean and elegant as possible. This work is not a work inspired by studied reading of poems bearing thee and thou. It is pure outpouring of personal experiences. Halfway through I was grappling with what not to say not what to say.

Divided into four parts, the book contains different but related poems united at the level of texture, theme and mood. It is characterized in entirety by innocence, human isolation, emotional pain and nostalgia.

Sidi’s poems invite the reader into the journey of her growth, from the naïve idealist, trusting and credulous, to where she came full circle as a matured individual.

Theories of Me, published 2019

The first section of the collection named Loving contains poems that depict undying love that was never reciprocated. Throughout the book, there is a constant gap between the poet and her desire, each episode painfully fuelling her affection. You call it pain – and what is true love other than pain?

Trying to stop my heart

From straying to you

Is trying to stop my compass from pointing North

I’m damaging my batteries (p.3)

Lovesick and betrayed, she fawned and drooled for the love. But the object of her affection remains unruffled. She is the martyr of love who enters into martyrdom aware of her own choice; or let’s call it helplessness, because “If I never place my heart in your hands/I’ll never know what you’ll do with it”. What “he” will do with it is to test her or break her and he chose the latter.

In awe of her crush, she is unsure and uncertain. But what she fails to verbalize face-to-face to her lover she scribbles in verse for the world to see.

At this stage, Sidi is not only struggling with love but with the uncertainty of her craft. The early poems are sprinkled with occasional allusions to her doubts.  In the meantime the pain of the unrequited love fueled her creativity. After-all, every cloud has a silver lining.

It’s heartwarming that each section’s title sits well with the emotion of the content. The Crumbling stage is the stage that leads to her break and finally realization. She used to look away at the disappointments her lover caused but here she says it as it is:

I tried to be honest

You saw only tactics

I lowered my defenses,

You saw a wrong move

I was giving up

You smelled defeat (p.36)

She has already lost trust of the world and did a comeback, coming out wiser and stronger. Clarity is the arbiter of sophisticated mind. The clarity of her thoughts is just unbelievable.

In Rebirth, Mariya’s poems deal with self-worth and independence and lost memories. But the overriding theme permeating the book is human vulnerabilities and the duality of self. She is one person in private and another in public domain. She takes us into many private scenes that we never had known, though we are aware of their existence even within us. She takes us to the sanctorum of her bedtime loneliness where we meet a lady curling up into her own anguish.

Sidi’s book tugs at the delicate strings of the heart, gentle pain, uncomfortable pleasure. Pain that could not hurt. Pleasure that couldn’t console. As a bedtime music addict I suggest while reading the book you play Dafin So by Nura M Inuwa, Safe by Westlife, Fall into My Arms by Johan Gloss and Zurfin Ciki by Isa Ayagi.

Mariya comes across as calm and unassuming but who we meet in these pages is a woman of restless spirit, calm demeanor sitting atop raging battles.

She drifts through the walls and doors

Creaking no floors

Squeaking no doors

If she was any more quite

She would fade into silence

She was pain

She was loneliness (p.47)

Loneliness is what happens when the people around you fail to understand you. Sidi is probably one of those people who talk to themselves. She is a free spirit trapped in her own body and circumstances. To realize your own bondage and the attendant helplessness either troubles the mind or sets it free.  

Sidi takes to writing poems as an outlet to relieve her mind. But poetry only approximates her feelings. The anguish of unspoken pain can make you but a walking shadow. Speaking up has a magical healing power. So, you can imagine what would have happened if she did not write these poems.    

Loved/Whole section is the final stage of her self-discovery. After a long journey, she realized she didn’t have enough of herself for everyone. I tried as much as possible not to think of her but I couldn’t help asking “Oh dear Papa God what happens to Mariya” when I read “Self-Love”.

Enough strangers have

Found their way to me

I’m done with this love charity

I’m burning these petals…(p.74)

“Please don’t,” I was about to say this when I realized growth is the fork where you part way with trust and gullibility. Poems at this stage deal with bits and pieces that make up the human body complemented with neuroses that drive the motion.

Through the power of imagery and uncanny revelatory method, the poet shows her resilience and strength and owns up her flaws and vulnerabilities. We feel for her and relate with her experience. Pain is the tapestry of our existence.  But despite this pain there is lightness in Mariya’s work. You read the poems and feel refreshed and light. I tried to hate even one poem. It is heartwarming I failed. Not a single poem is punctuated. Which suggests unending possibilities… Mariya the medical doctor is different from Mariya the poet. I am pleasantly disappointed she did not allow the work to get choked off with medical jargons. Please greet her for me if you see her, shake her hand for me and buy her drink before we meet.