BOOK REVIEW: A book for the love of Chibok girls

By Prisca Sam-Duru

Professor James Tar Tsaaior’s I Am Chibok: #BringBackOurGirls is a collection of poems that encapsulates the wicked incidence of April 2014 that saw the abduction of over 200 school girls from Chibok Secondary School, in Borno State.

The book not only documents the ensuing vigorous campaigns that erupted from advocacy groups as well as individuals both within and outside the shores of Nigeria, it’s also an outcry for authorities to see to the freedom of the remaining Chibok students and many others still held captive by the terrorists.

Beyond the Chibok narrative, some poems in Tsaaior’s collection are clear indictment on politicians who seem relentless in their efforts to finally bury the country which is already comatose.

The poet’s Poetic Exodium which follows the acknowledgment page offers readers an excellent peep into the heart-aching poetic excursion chronicling one of the worst incidences in Nigeria’s history which of course, can only occur in a failed state.

I Am Chibok, published by Zuma Harvest, Ejigbo, Lagos, contains about 61 poems spread across 124 pages. The poems are presented in three distinctive parts namely; First Movement, Second Movement and Third Movement.

The poet, a Creative Writing, Media Studies and Cultural Communication lecturer at the Pan Atlantic University, Lagos, in this fascinating, though heart-breaking and compelling collection, lends his poetic voice to campaigns against global terrorism and bad governance.

The poems are torn between deep dirges and songs of hope while few others are eye-opening pieces on how the bombers have been brainwashed to unleash evil on humanity.

First Movement entitled Intimations: The Voice of the Poet, written as a song to the accompaniment of the Girinya dance, is segmented into four parts. It opens with a lamentation on the country which the poet describes as an “accursed land, home of my birth which needs to be rescued from the tyranny of perennial pestilential carnivals”…Piously staged in the comfort of praetorian villas…” These and more lines in this segment, vividly indicts the unrepentant politicians who have left nothing but footprints of severe hardships for the masses.

#BringBackOurGirls, being the opening poem on the Second Movement, critically sets readers on the painful journey into the Chibok narrative, which constitutes one of the darkest chapters in Nigeria’s history.

And saving the best for last, the collection ends on a promising note with On the Sudden Return of Our Girls Someday and The Sudden Return of Chibok Children. Although lines such as “…not knowing whether or not they are dead…, Or they are simply thrown to Sambisa’s army of hyenas…”, depict state of uncertainty, there is an element of hope as the poet in the last lines, “And the lonely shadows of My distressed heartscape Will spring to life with the Heaving steps of our long gone girls as they execute their long awaited homecoming”, is hopeful that soonest, the remaining girls will be home.

 

 

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