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…