Jamila Abbas’ Between the Lines of a Photograph: An Ode to Memory and Loss

 

By Paul Liam

Jamila Abbas’ Between the Lines of a Photograph explores the intricate intersection between memory and loss. It x-rays the subliminal emotions of love, pain, and loss symbolically represented by the metaphor of a photograph. A photograph is a mirror into the past, present, and future, it is a representation of our happy and sad moments as we journey through life in search of meaning and purpose. The collection forges an evocative metaphor of nostalgic narratives embodying its subject's memories through a photograph's prism. Thus, between the lines of a photograph lies a rich repertoire of memories discernible only through a careful examination and recollection of past experiences. Abbas presupposes that poetry is akin to a photograph with multiple layers of meaning and interpretation.

Consequently, it suffices to posit that, nostalgia, love, and loss constitute the larger leitmotif of the collection, in each poem, we encounter a strand of one of these themes throughout the collection. Published by Transconventional Publishers, Abuja, the sixty-three-page collection contains 48 poems divided into three sections with subthemes including “A Legacy of Silence”, “Inquisition” and “Freedom”. In the opening poem “Requiem” (p.10) the foregrounding assertion of this review comes to life as the persona reminisces in mournful nostalgia of bygone years of innocence when life’s meaning was premised on the simplest things like playing under the shade of an acacia and life was filled with beautiful moments. The opening stanza buttresses this point more succinctly;

Beneath the acacia's shade, 

In the stillness where shadows settle, 

I found a letter, reading itself in the tree's bark, 

Written in the language of forgotten things. 

It spoke of a time when the sun was kinder 

When laughter spilled like honey from our lips 

Nights, a blanket of whispered secrets.

The persona in the above stanza highlights a perfect time when life was replete with kinder and happier times before the reality of adulthood stole those blissful moments away. This experience is represented in the following lines “It spoke of a time when the sun was kinder” and “When laughter spilled like honey from our lips”, symbolizing the peace and joy that was once before adulthood came with its many burdens and pains. This notion is corroborated by the stanza where the persona enthuses; “I remember the taste of those evenings,/Warm and full, we danced barefoot on dusty ground,/Our steps tracing stories only the stars could read./But time, relentless thief Stole the rhythm from our feet.” In the third stanza, the persona reveals the disintegration that has taken over the years of childhood innocence. The persona states; “Now the acacia stands alone,/Its branches reaching for a sky that has forgotten how to weep./As the letter turns to dust in my hands.”

Abbas, through the deployment of anthropomorphism, uses the condition of abandonment of the acacia to illustrate how times have changed and how the conviviality she was accustomed to as a child has been forsaken as the world increasingly becomes desolate. This evocative message is accentuated by the second line of the stanza in which she describes the vulnerability of the “branches”. The branches represent the children who once enjoyed the warmth of the acacia tree, but who have been abandoned to a hopeless fate. The last line of the stanza describes the letter turning into dust in her hands, signifying the dysfunctional state of society. Abbas’ clever employment of images in constructing representative meaning is a remarkable display of deep poetic artistry. She tells a powerful story in a witty non-prosaic manner that catches the imagination of the reader.

In the poem “Legacy of Silence” (14), the subject of nostalgia once again preoccupies the subconsciousness of the persona who broods about the uncertainty of life and the crises of living. The persona reminisces about her times with her father symbolically represented by his silence which she carries like a “heirloom”. It is a reflective poem centered on the persona’s recollection of somber moments with her father who was possibly on the verge of dying as suggested by the opening stanza which reads; 

 I carry my father's silence like an heirloom, 

 Its weight on me like an unspoken truth. 

Bound by absence, by the language  

of unfinished sentences and restless nights, 

Every pause a prayer trapped in our throats.

The poem is reminiscent of moments of trauma watching a father die and the inability to express the emotions and pains suffered by the victim and his loved ones. We deduce this from the choice of words and the picture painted by the persona. That moment of silence, of speechlessness, becomes a burden that the surviving child has to deal with for the rest of her life. The persona compares the weight of the silence she carries to an heirloom. Heirloom in the context of the poem signifies a legacy bequeathed to the persona by her father. The lines, “of unfinished sentences and restless nights,/Every pause a prayer trapped in our throats.” This signifies the anxiety and hope of the family of the deceased yearning for his recovery from the clutches of death. The following lines from the second to the last and the last stanzas of the poem echo the underlying motif of nostalgia; “I want to say that we are more than the sum of our losses, but the math fails.” “So we carry on, holding tight to what remains:/a touch, a whispered name, the soft echo/of footsteps on the kitchen floor.”

In “My Body Bends to Gravity” (p.16), the persona takes a reflective journey into past the recounting how the lessons she learned from her mother. It is a tribute to her late mother as well as an examination of life in general. The poem begins with the persona’s recollection of the glorious past where fathers were present in their children’s lives and mothers were the pillars of life. The opening stanza reads;

I am counting the grains of an hourglass thinking of the past 

where mothers walked the earth  

and fathers were home for Father's Day

Abbas’ fascination with memory and the forgone years when life was more peaceful and devoid of the chaos bedeviling the world today suggests that the persona suffers from a perpetual state of psychological trauma inflicted by loss and bereavement as suggested in the immediate poems already highlighted. The loss of one’s parents can leave a permanent scar that may take a lifetime to heal from. The tone of the poems betrays a deep-seated pain that runs the collection. This inference comes to life in the second stanza of the poem in which the persona asserts; “Whatever my mother didn't tell me/Is now a relic where she lay/And the relic she left behind/Is a museum in Gwagwalada./I must build my own dam/From the flood that shattered irises/That drowned a whale in the ocean of my grief.” In the third stanza, the persona explicates the attempts to explain her fascination with memory when she posits; “Memories are born from too many yesterdays/Tomorrow's an illusion/I am a child of the Milky Way/Where neither sun nor moon shapes my fate.” The stanza affirms the assertion that the fulcrum of the collection is the thematization of memory and loss and all the lived experiences that continue to haunt the life journey of the persona. 

The poems, “Farin Ruwa” (p.19), “Saudade” (p.20), and “What the Air Remembers” (p.22) are all struck with the afflictions of loss and memory. They are poems of remembrance.  Whether it is the remembrance of love, pain, loss, childhood, heartbreaks, and fond family moments, each poem requires a journey into the past in search of connections and meanings that have given way to new realities. This depiction fosters the maxim about embracing the past as a pathway to understanding the present and defining the future. Abbas appears to be telling her readers to reflect on what life used to be in the past and the many important lessons taught by our forebears in other to build a more functional present and future. This perhaps, is the only explication for the overwhelming reliance on the metaphors of memory.

In conclusion, it is worth noting that, although, a debut collection, Between the Lines of a Photograph, displays a sense of artistic refinement peculiar to more seasoned poets. Her knowledge of the application of metaphor and linguistic creativity in furthering the messages in her poem especially, the problematization of memory and loss as the grand norm for the exploration of grief and life is instructive. However, the collection would have benefited from tighter editing to do away with some of the extra words in some of the poems. Also, because of the overindulgence in the contextualization of memory and loss, the poems sound very much alike. Regardless, it is a remarkable debut that deserves to be read by lovers of poetry.

Paul Liam is a poet, critic, and author of two poetry collections. He is also an ISDEVCOM scholar and development communication specialist based in Abuja.