Racism defines Breasts in Names of Flowers

• Published date: 08 January 2023
• Publication title: Nigeria - The Nation

Title: Breasts are Names of Flowers

Author: Amrah Aliyu

Reviewer: Umar Yogiza Jr.

POETRY unearth the complexities colours of poet's conscience whenever the rainbow is fading away. Amrah's 'Breasts Are Names of Flowers' reads like tales that mirrors everyone's own life. The poems did not interacts like a first collection of poetry, the poems; stanza after stanza unravels innocence, beauty, dark curiosity and the chronic thirst for so many imprisoned truths at the same time.

There are tastes in the young Amrah's poetry that demands all one's senses. The ghastly arrangement of delectable emotions, lost, lust, pains and everyday watching and passing of the uncountable helpless deeds. Poems after poems Amrah cowed you to go back softly, again and again, her multifunctional identity in 'I Was Raised By Rebels 39' commands your reason to pause and understand, in this pondering poem Amrah leads you mildly to how she was raised by warriors rebels who taught her to look the sun in the eye. She paints the poem with common and familiar imagery: ashes, burn, thunder, diamond bearing our faces, tears like a melody of indigo, voices that make rain. She wonders if everyone has a brain and are reasoning

Her mother; A rebel/taught me to pull/Pull the trigger/There's a place within her breast/where flowers do not wither./She wore fire on her tongue/I swear the rhythm of Attah's voice break down

Undisciplined squads of so many abandoned restitutions of so many wounds, scars, lost, cravings and negligence takes the center stage of Breasts are Names of Flowers, like a drunk driver. The recklessness of telling in some of the poems has many doors, faith and age long traditional devotion that serves as many forms of oppression and interrogation has no hidden place. The voice in each in each of poem became a grave of grass The beauty in them become sceneries that refuse to be on canvas, the narrator of these poems sets the tones like a giant untamed lion; knocked mad by elephant hunger, 'I do not forget! 'Their memories rooted deep in my veins, they have risen in me again'. Amrah, to some extent beautified her boiling, colourless rage, at times the poems are a damage bridge; war at both ends as seen in Listen I 49, ' How many more cuts can she take? Butane, propane -and a chunk of dirt', in the Listen II 57:

The poems began with the girl next door/The one who lives in my last poem/Her eyes are wordless stories /Can you hear her/Breaking into the sea?/Listen/She dares to rise again.

Poems...