Obioji’s ‘Mother, Did You Call My name?’ as testament to female self-awareness, affirmation
By Anote Ajeluorou
AMAKA Felly Obioji makes her poetic manifesto in these sublime lines in the 20th poem: ‘I think my heart is breaking,/ and poetry is the only stitch/ that can hold it together’, and amplifies her ‘dedication’ of the collection Mother, Did You Call My Name? (Sevhage, Karu; 2024) to the women who came before her and those yet to come. Obioji stands as a bridge between the ‘foremothers’, as a concept diametrically opposed to the prevalent ‘forefathers’ that reek of patriarchy that subjugates women. Foremothers is not a concept commonly used, but Obioji gives it agency as her work amplifies the past, present and future of women and all that they continue to go through and seeking a new deal.
Mother, Did You Call My Name? is divided into four parts – ‘Uproots’, ‘Goddess’, ‘Homecoming’ and ‘Mother, Did You Call My Name?’ that speak to the lived experiences of the poet persona, of things past, present and yet-to-come. In this journey of self-rediscovery, the poet recounts the past and its unsettling demons that she must fight to regain a foothold on herself. That struggle takes a long spell that she must overcome. This she boldly proclaims, ‘I write from the future, to remind you:/ everything good/ will come/ Good things are here waiting for you.’ The ‘you’ here refers to the poet persona who’s shedding her past struggles and emerging into a bright future, promising herself ‘good things’ that she’d been denied on account of her sex. In other words, her ‘uprootedness’ has come to an end.
The collection starts from a place of sadness for the poet persona for whom sadness steals all that is good and nice, a beast stalking her every waking moment and denying her happiness. Sadness is a negative emotion she does not want and the only way to deal with it is to ‘not water it!’, starve it by not succumbing to whatever feeds it. The poet persona is so used to the disruptive emotion of sadness that she’s suspicious of happiness any time there’s a hint of it, ‘wondering how long it (happiness) will last’, because she is not used to it. However, she is conscious of the fact that the happiness that eludes her and the sadness that lurks in her bones have roots in patriarchy. She explains this in the seventh poem, one of the very few Obioji gives a title, ‘A Woman Unbecoming’. In order for her to become the woman she’s destined to be, she must ‘wash off the ugly smell of patriarchy/ and the way it taught me to behave/ I am a woman unbecoming of everything society has/ forced me to accept about myself’.
In the 36th (XXXVI) poem, also untitled, there’s a reprieve. The poet persona’s mouth is full of gratitude for how far she has come in spite of life’s struggles that threatened to drown her. Yet she has survived it all, the sadness, the unhappiness, the failures. She has emerged from them all a better person. One raw, disruptive emotion that has been her constant companion is self-loathing, never forgiving herself for all that supposedly went wrong with her, all the missteps. But she comes to sudden realisation that she has achieved much in spite of everything else. It’s a common human error to keep hunting after elusive dreams while neglecting or overlooking the much or little at hand:
Today, take time to apologise to yourself.
You have passed through turbulent oceans,
Achieved dreams that have posed as impossible,
Drove yourself out of darkness,
But never have you paused to breathe
To appreciate how far you have come,
And how well you’re doing.
Each day you keep scavenging for something new,
But never take the time to be grateful.
In the second part ‘Goddess’, Obioji is worshipful of her mother and ‘ancestor’ mothers, the ‘foremothers’, who trod this path the poet persona finds herself. She finds herself a proud inheritor of the love of mothers, past and present. The first poem in the section simply proclaims, ‘My god is a woman/ in the image of my mother.’ For the poet persona, no sister concept is greater that what she finds in her mother, her best friend who cheers her on to do exploits. ‘There is no sisterhood greater/ than a mother’s friendship, /see how she cheers for me./ My best friend even before I could talk.’ She is here because ‘My mother’s mouth weaves prayers/ every morning, knees bent, hands clasped/ Queueing at heaven’s gate,…’
It is here also that the poet finds juxtaposition between forefathers and foremothers, mothers past who struggled to break free from the suffocating grip of patriarchy. ‘Our mothers walked on fire,/ they drank from patriarchy,/ to fend for entitled men,/ who claimed women’s bodies, /bound them with chains, saying:/ “Quiet, you are but a woman.” But those were women before the poet persona and her likes arrived the patriarchy scene to turn the tables, as she affirms, ‘But we are here now, /daughters that won’t sip from that cup/ We/ are/ daring/ women./ Ready, free, about to fly.’
The poet persona is the sum total of all mothers that had gone before; she has learnt from their mistakes and has become wiser and is ready to take on the world of patriarchy and determined to come triumphant, carrying with her a strident voice denied her foremothers. What’s more, she has poetry as her ally in dismantling patriarchy and affirming her own. In poem XLIX, she sings of this imminent triumph, ‘My foremothers watch me from the other end./ The daughter who must walk this path/ who would carry a voice they had buried deep/ down their throat. / Deep. Dark. Muffled./ I sprout out from this depth./ I am here, heavy with words/ My foremothers cheer me on this journey./ I came bearing words.’
The ‘Homecoming’ section deals with migration and its bitter-sweet taste in the tongue, the nostalgia it evokes, how the present isn’t quite as exotic as it initially promised, how one should hold firm to one’s roots in spite of the pull of the uncertain present. ‘Home calls me everyday,…/ The glory I left behind, mocking my taste in/ places where I chose to settle/ Home calls me in my mother’s tongue saying,/ do not settle for less.’
The last section ‘Mother, Did You Call My Name?’ affirms the stubborn hope that undergirds all human affairs, why we shouldn’t give up because hope is reborn after the sadness and disillusionment that attend life’s journey. It’s for this reason that the mother calls the poet persona’s name to hold on still. This is evident in XCII poem ‘Finding lost joys’ where the mother is counselling the daughter, ‘You do not have to hide your tears,/ there is no sadness that will never know joy,/ no darkness that won’t see light.’
Amaka’s poetic lines are deceptively simply but packed with poignantly alluring images woven around the stories of sad women, happy women, betrayed women, abused women but, most importantly, stories of brave women who got empowered after searching through their soul for strengths to live the lives that ordinarily would have been denied them but which they reclaim with a will stronger than steel. Obioji’s Mother, Did You Call My Name? is spiced with telling illustrations; it holds so much promise. Obioji takes on society and its skewed relationship with women and declares her stand to be herself no matter what. Her poetry is a manifesto of self-discovery and self-awareness and that stubborn hope of coming unto her own in spite of obstacles on her path. It’s poetry of feminine freedom.
