The radius of love: Bond, emotions and introspections in Esther Eriwayo’s ‘Flower Blooms’
By Henry Akubuiro
LOVE is a universal thematic constant in poetry. Whether it is a sizzling new romance, an intoxicating old wine, familial love or love for nature, the literary world has always been enchanted by the deep affection and kinship communicated through love verses. One of the greatest poets in history, William Shakespeare, rekindled intense feelings in his Sonnets. The literary canon is replete with poets whose love poems have tingled our hearts and made our heads swoon, from Edgar Allan Poe, John Keats, Percy B. Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, Anne Bradstreet, Samuel Coleridge, Lord Bryon, Emily Dickson, E. E. Cummings, Langston Hughes, Andrew Marvell, Pablo Neruda, Maya Angelou, Derek Wallcot, Alexander Pushkins, Walt Whitman to Silva Plath. Perhaps the Nigerian poet, Esther Eriwayo, aspires to be appended to the esteemed cannon spanning time and space, whose love poetry make us smack our lips. Of course, a journey of a thousand kilometers begins with a single step. Eriwayo has taken the first step with Flower Blooms.
The love poems in Flower Blooms do not paint lewd pictures or echo a Juliet infatuated with her Romeo. Eriwayo, in Flower Blooms, deploys love as a string to mend broken hearts and a rocket that fires us to keep moving to the mountaintop of ambition, bearing in mind that love is the greatest of emotions. At the moment of loss and grief, love takes precedence over tears and pangs. Eriwayo’s Flower Blooms is a coming of age poetry collection that traces the growing up of an African girl-child in a family of only girls and how the search for boy-child by the father and homelessness midway threaten the bond that binds the family together. The poetry celebrates the enduring power of the African woman, the love of a mother for her children and the metaphorical turn-around of a withered flower. It reminds us that what a man can do a woman can do better. It also lampoons, indirectly, a society that prioritises a boy-child over a girl-child, one that sees the absence of the former as a vacuum that must be filled by all means.
It must be pointed out, however, that Eriwayo’s poetic synthesis is filtered by her own experiences growing up in Nigeria, depicting both love and pain. The book contains over fifty poems, mostly narratives with a chapterised template. In Eriwayo’s “Self Reflection”, the poet sees the bardic enterprise as a vocation to unveil her soul destiny and a vehicle to create her identity. It is a poetic recollection of life in a flux with many punctuations. It is a fitting apologia of the journey of life replete with different tenors and tremors. A part of the narrative dwells on her heritage, distilled into stanzas.
“Love’s Embrace” shows remarkable love and a strong bond that typifies the African family experience. The voice tells the tale of a family of five sisters with big dreams, supported by an understanding parents – “Our parents’ love, a constant light,/Shining bright, through the darkest night,/ And as we grew, with each passing day,/ Love’s roots only deepened in every way.” Love is an emblem that runs through many poems. The bard reconstructs memories to fit into a delicate present. “Love Expanse” depicts a modest family living in harmony with “A humble space, with a parlor and a room,/ Yet love’s embrace, makes our hearts bloom.” The poem recreates a contented family using unity of purpose and mutual understanding as primal highways. For them, “Love conquers all, with its gentle grace,” and its binding strings, suggests the poet, defines the finest part of our existence.
The permeating love in the family, sadly, gives way to shards of despair with the search for a son. In many African societies, a great importance is attached to the boy-child. He is supposed to inherit the family legacy and pass on the bloodline to future generations. It is this background, the absence of a boy-child and the desire to have one, that informs “A Quest for Legacy”. The riven peace recurs in “A Shattered Dream” as cracks begin to appear in the family, with the father preoccupied with the quest for a son, relegating love for the family to the background.
The poet recalls an incident in “Shattered Homes, Broken Homes” that made the family homeless in Lagos, as the government pulled down houses on the Lagos mainland, leaving them in the cold. The plight of the homeless family is depicted in “A Market Home, A Test of Hope”, where the family is compelled to live in the market yet remain afloat with love. The struggles of the homeless family is very touching in poems following this, with the family refusing to buckle to frustration.
This poetry collection reads like a diary of mixed fortunes, teeming with life lessons. In it, we learn about the ebbs and flows of life, which can elicit love, fear and hope. Eriwayo’s narrative simplicity reminds us of the charm of ancient rancenteurs with her engaging style. She ensures that, despite the gloomy atmosphere, the lyricism of the cantos keep us wedded to the stanzas. In the journey of life, she restates that love guides us through the dark chapters. A good number of poems echoes this, including “Resilience and Growth, Our Path:”
As we look, to the future bright,
Our path ahead, a beacon of light,
We know that love, and hope and grace,
Will guide our steps, in every place.
The strength of the mother persona in the poem, “A Mother’s Undying Hope”, is a testament to a resilient spirit and also one who sees herself as a stake in which shining lights would be nurtured to reach the star “with tireless hands, and a heart of gold”. Here, she doesn’t find it the best thing to do to enlist the support of the man whose trust cannot be counted on any longer. It is a celebration of that distinctive human, which resonates in more poems, for example, in “A Selfless Heart, A Mother’s Touch”, where the heart of the Amazon approximates to valour, kindness and selflessness. Very few poets have advertised the industry of the African mother, love and her enterprise like Ariwayo has done in this collection.
Eriwayo’s poetic voyage conscientises our souls about fleeting happiness and tests of faith. In a moment of adversity, a good mother lends a helping hand, we are told in a “Selfless Heart, A Mother’s Touch”. The poem isn’t just about a particular mother but a good mother anywhere. A good poem should resonate across multiple cultural spaces about the human experience. In “A Selfless Heart, A Mother’s Touch”, the poet depicts a caring mother, whose concern goes beyond her family. We see here a reincarnated Mother Teresa showing love to all and sundry. Hence: “Though our own needs were great and true,/ Her love for others always shone through.” The poet echoes that “a mother’s hope could see us through, /For in her eyes, a world she sees,/ Where love and hope will always be” in the poem, “Love and Hope”, which, once again, reflects the immanence of love.
As the wheel of this poetic voyage spins, the poet continues to delineate strong female personas defying expectations and proving doubters wrong. In this remarkable family, whose travails have defined the trajectory of this poetic project, the women here remain resolute to succeed. To this end, the poem, “Defying Expectations, Proving Doubters Wrong”, recalls succinctly: “Though others doubted, what we could do,/Our perseverance proved them untrue, For with each step, our path we’d take,/ Our dreams are alive, our spirit awake.” And like a Phoenix rising from the ash, this family passes the litmus test of suffocating statis.
The poet also recollects a mother’s leading role in making the dream of higher education of her daughters possible with all the pressures in “A Mother’s Sacrifice, The Path to Higher Education”. The mother in question is aware that education opens a path to enlightenment and a secure future for her children, and sacrifices everything to put smiles on their faces. Eriwayo’s coming of age recollections capture vivid personal experiences at each juncture of her life. Her switch to English Language as a course of study as an undergraduate after her law dream fizzled away finds a place in the collection, but her “spirit soared like a beautiful bird”, and found in the new path a new love. The poet deplores a journey motif from the beginning to the end of the narratives, and we travel along with her to follow its twists and her sense of fulfillment with her graduation. She doesn’t fail to acknowledge the importance of God in her academic journey, “For in His love we find our peace,/Our souls to heal, our hearts release,/ From fear and doubt, and darkest night…”
Eriwayo’s poetry is laden with philosophical thoughts. Though these may appear preachy, which isn’t the overriding concern of any creative writing, she uses it as a direct way to uplift souls marooned in the quagmire of life. For instance, in “Endless Horizons”, the poet tells the reader: “In the journey of life, there’s a thought/ That everything, we seek, is sought,/For at the end of every road,/ Our dreams await a heavy load.” In “Hidden Blessings, A Lesson”, the poet says that disappointments are not the end of life, for blessings are around the corner, and “these blessings come to quench our thirst.”
Other passages of life captured in Eriwayo’s poetic exploration include her metamorphosis as a thespian, her travel to the UK for a master’s degree programme and her success in that regard. She caps it all when she says it is a “testament to how we’ve learned to cope.” Though much of the poems in Flower Blooms are experiential, they have a universal trademark. Through the lows and highs of the Eriwayos, the reader is inspired to fill their sails with a gust of wind to keep moving during the darkest hour.
