By Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera
Poets perform an alchemy of emotions, transform raw feelings into words, and make language a window into the human experience. Wendy Okeke, who exemplifies this, has been writing poetry since she was 8. 22 years into her journey as a poet, she presents her debut chapbook, Grief’s First Kiss is an Avalanche.
Her poetry is born almost wholly from experience and its attendant emotions. There are tributes, grieving, longing, meditation, sandwiched between the metaphors and imageries of her poetry. Grief’s First Kiss is an Avalanche is a cathartic expression after her father’s death. In the first poem, one gets the sense that grief was a force going against not just her, but the family’s resolve to celebrate their patriarch and move on from it. Life favours progress, but grief is the force which forces us to settle in the past in an ungracious way: “Sometimes, I settle/ into the orange feeling that/ my father is my deepest loss./ this, and the knowing/ that I am mostly red,/ swelling with rage—just knowing this absence.”
What follows in the same poem is a deconstruction of how Okeke perceives grief in the interaction of architecture and being. What happens to the poet often alters their worldview, and becomes for him or her a new way of seeing things: “We gather ourselves/ from the grey dry walls of our rooms on some mornings,/ and lately, with the tiny laughter that leaves my niece’s/ tender mouth./ Our mouths, still sullied from yesterday’s heaviness./ we collect ourselves.”
Wendy Okeke captures the resultant grief from her father’s loss from different perspectives, and in “I Am a Place,” she writes of a moment burdened by the reality of the loss; the burial scene in poetry that is starkly evocative and storied: “mother’s scream/ shatters the air./ the bullets let loose./ here they come, dragging/ a white coffin bright against the dusk—” The poem even gets better towards the end: “who are we today?/ the ones earth has betrayed./ I am a place/ that has taken/ another piece of me/ to a grave…” The poem is an almost perfect picturesque dirge. Economical with words, yet very vivid and clear, reminiscent of the lamentations at the Stations of the Cross.
It is easy to get intimate with Wendy’s poems. Her choice of words draw you in, her imageries painted in palpable hues, leave a picture that evokes lingering emotions; also, like an abode that you walk into and experience: “When you walk into a room/ where grief is the hanging painting on every wall,/ memories of loss unfold into the emptiness./ when you walk into a room/ and grief is custard paint splattered on the doors,/ making mockery of warmth,/ of laughter.”
In Wendy Okeke’s poetry, love and grief are a braided cord, woven together to form an artistic diametric. Grief is the pain that comes with the transience of love; and love is overcoming that pain: “And when they ask again where it began,/ tell them it was born in the gap,/ between breaking/ and becoming.”
The people in Okeke’s poetry are those with whom she is intimate; her mother, her siblings, her niece, her lover; the places which surround her are intimate places as well. Grief and love can only materialise from intimacy, with people and with places, because love comes from the joy of knowing things and seeing the beauty in them.
There is also this sense, evident in her poems, in which Okeke sees herself as a painter. Colour takes a centre stage in her poems and their architecture; in the painting of images as well as the naming of her poems. Colours for her are like markers for her in the cartography of human emotions. In “Yellow for My Warmth,” she writes, “My bruises form a map on my skin./ each night, I trace their edges,/ separating grey coasts from blue seas,/ seeking comfort in their borders.” In the same poem she writes in a different stanza, “He buys me yellow roses—/ yellow, because my heart is warm like the sun./” Here, the colour yellow is the milieu in which the poet reflects on herself, and of her lover’s action as well, in getting her roses. If the poems in this chapbook are the result of self-realisation, the colours are markers of the landmarks in the journey. In continuing this journey, Okeke uses the poems in this chapbook as a medium to make tangible, her human experience; to relive love and make more sense of loss.
Okeke shows in Grief’s First Kiss is an Avalanche that poetry is not a straightforward narration as in the case of a novelist, or a use of palette physically on the canvas; but that a poet highlights the pivotal moments of events. To tell us of the whole, they know which part of the events affect them and is universal; they know the right words to evoke the right feelings.
Wendy Okeke’s Grief’s First Kiss is an Avalanche belongs in the wave of contemporary Nigerian poetry which continues to create bodies of work from humane experiences, especially grief. A generation of poets more in touch with their feelings. The chapbook is ultimately an exercise in vulnerability and humanity. Just as the poet writes to feel more human, we are invited via empathy to partake in our own humanity as we read.
Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera is a writer and community builder. His works have appeared in Open Country Magazine, Republic, Afapinen, Jalada, Havik, and elsewhere. He is the author of Loss is an Aftertaste of Memories, and the director of Umuofia Arts and Books Festival.
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