The review, by Nket Godwin, looks at the poetics of utopia in Amife Sabatina’s collection of poems and flash fiction, Little Words. The review shows that not only is the collection brimmed with childhood nostalgia, but also the innocence and escape that comes with such “childhood” recreation of reality, an escape from dystopia into a utopian world in which a boy and a girl “live happily ever after.” Through the mindset of a child, the writer escapes the reality of adult “complaints” and anxieties, which usually compound our perception of reality, culminating in depression and sorrow.
The Human Quest for Happiness and the Poetics of Utopia in Amife Sabatina’s Little Words: A Review
A few collections of poems these days carry such ounces of motivation and philosophical thoughts about life and happiness as Little Words does. While most contemporary collections of poems or flash fictions, which depict the vicissitudes of life, bear ‘confessional tones’ and merely rob the surface of reality, in Little Words (a collection of both poems and flash fictions), Sabatina attempts to inspire the reader to not only lament or confess what she considers the inevitable “sad song” of life, but rather learn how to navigate their ways through these sad songs, especially in a time like this. She aspires towards what Oyin Oludipe once considered the “creative dialecticization of reality.”
According to Oyin Oludipe, “it is not enough for creative writing to ‘describe’ the reality that the reader is already familiar with; rather, it (creative writing) should dialecticise that reality, thereby offering readers philosophical respite.” In Little Words, Sabatina reminds the reader of the inevitability of life’s happenstance and also the solace that could be gained in accepting that which cannot be changed.
In this collection, the reader is made to understand that life is bipolar and that while we easily see and are affected by the negative aspects of it, if we develop a conscious understanding of the ‘inevitable’, then we can learn to accept it and, thus, love the ‘ugly’, thereby aspire for the beautiful. The aspiration towards the beautiful requires a state of mind indifferent to the depressing realities of life.
Little Words is a collection for anyone who’s going through tough times—a manual of escape from gloominess. And considering the times we are in, with traumatic events happening daily, the wars in the Middle East and Europe (between Israel and Palestine, Japan and Russia), and the economic difficulties in Africa (particularly heightened in Nigeria since the ascension of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu), resulting in suicidal thoughts and negative resolutions about life that make survival difficult for most people, it’s only logical to say that the motivations and philosophies evoked in this collection are timely; it is what the world needs.
Little Words reflect a conscious understanding of life and the prevailing conditions of the times and the importance of having a renewed consciousness of the need to dare the trials of survival. For the writer, this can be done by assuming the innocent mindset of children as an escape route, such as captured in one of the flash fictions, “Simplicity,” which reminisces about childhood nostalgia, where the persona recluses herself into the innocent world of childhood to escape the harsh reality of the adult world. She writes, “I wake up, I sell mud as food and collect leaves as money… I escape the complaints of Grandma that I left the living room door open again. I roll out plasticine. I inhale the linseed and ambrarome. I build a house with it. There is a boy and a girl in my house. They will live happily ever after.”
Not only are the above lines brimmed with childhood nostalgia, but also the innocence and escape that comes with such “childhood” recreation of reality, an escape from dystopia into a utopian world in which a boy and a girl “live happily ever after”. Through the mindset of a child, the writer escapes the reality of adult “complaints” and anxieties, which usually compound our perception of reality, culminating in depression and sorrow. In the poem “The Smell of Books,” she also notes that reading books can be an escape from the real world into another realm of soothing experience—“places running off of pages…a temporary life as sweet as honeysuckle,” she writes. For her, it is an attempt to find “few things/which curl up in a corner/and vanish the rest of the world.” Books are, thus, means of escape into a utopian world of happiness, a world away from our daily, sobering reality.
An assemblage of poems and flash fictions, the collection is divided into eleven chapters, comprising 22 poems and 22 flash fictions. These poems and flash fictions reflect the persona’s aspiration towards a deeper grasp of happiness and a life lived based on one’s terms, such as when she declares in the poem “More Alive” that “Again, you can decide one day to do nothing but be.” For her, this resolve to “be” is “a secret to a beautiful life.”
Sabatina writes towards an awakening, knowing that it takes a state of mind, a state of consciousness, to understand and accept, for instance, disappointment, heartbreak, failure in the strive for success, etc., which usually cause depression and unhappiness. The persona in these poems and the “I-voice” in the flash fiction understand that it takes a state of mind to continue to “be” in spite of life’s hurdles. For instance, in the poem “A Letter to My 10-Year Old Self,” the persona notes that to exist is to “learn to adapt to weather, to disappointments, to people, to broken dreams,” for it is s/he who has attained this state of consciousness of the bipolarity of life that can live a fuller life, for when this is done, he or she only learns “to pretend to have come down from some distant future/to savour it one last time.”
“It,” as used in this poem, means existence. In the poem “The Great Outdoors,” she writes that this existence “is an alive world/alive just like me/forests of breathing trees/breathing just like me.” And the reason we hardly “savour” this life is because we are almost easily weighed down by the plans we couldn’t accomplish, the dreams we couldn’t make manifest, the expectations that have not been met, the desired life that is only a misty hope in a far horizon, the anxiety of the future, which usually bars us from enjoying the moment.
When we attain this level of consciousness, then we can attain a state, which Ben Okri, in his collection of poems, Mental Flight, describes as “an illusion by which/we become more real/a moment unremarked by the universe…human moment.” A human moment in the world is that which is made up of all its lineaments, including a dot of default in the canvas of human nature.
The persona in Sabatina’s collection is a lover of life. The persona’s love for (or resolve to love) life is not because it (life) presents her/him with all the beautiful things s/he desires as a human, but because s/he understands that you have to “grow to accept the duality of good and evil and find your safe space in between,” you have to understand that “when aloneness worries your heart, you must remember that it will also help you find yourself” (“A Letter to My 10-Year-Old Self”). In this collection, Sabatina touches on the very core of existence, our inner consciousness of what makes us human, the consciousness that “there are more things to be than being beautiful/like ‘kind’, ‘creative’,’self-aware’, or ‘passionate’” (“A Letter to my 10-year-old self”).
The use of language in this collection is worth commenting on. The language of Little Words wobbles between the poetic and the prosaic and is inundated with such worn-out words as “body,” “broken,” “grief,” “shattered,” “lonely,” “sad,” “doom,” etc., which Sabatina uses to an uncreative measure. For instance, in the poem “My Grandmothers’ Hands,” we find: “My grandmothers’ hands have seen slavery/They’ve broken shackles and pierced through grief.” In “Solitude,” she writes, “…and quiet the part that won’t stop/singing a sad song.” In the poem “Love,” we read, “We forget our doom.”
Although the collection is an assemblage of prose poems as well as prose-poems, the prosaic language often creeps into the poems, thus stifling imaginative depth. It, thus, seems that while the subject is more nuanced, the language still falls within the predictable ground of most confession-trope poems.
However, there are poems, although few, that elevate beyond the debut height of predictability, such as the poem “Time’s Wish,” the last poem in the collection, in which she writes, “At the foot of an elm tree/In the hole two branches had formed/When they got friendly/And ran across each other/There I sat/Twelve long braids sleeping on my rosemary dress.”
Although prosaic, the imagery that the above line evokes is of an extended imaginative depth. Although Little Words is her debut, Sabatina’s existential foray into the quest for happiness is peculiar, especially in the way it inspires self-consciousness, which is a mark of great art. Her emergence on the creative scene is auspicious.
