Mama, I made it
out of your home
alive, raised by
the voices
in my head.
Where to start?
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head is a brutal onslaught on the reader’s senses. Given how heart-wrenching it is in more sections than most, I struggled to make it to the end during my first two reads of the collection but was compelled by the in-your-face, dare-you-to-look-away style the writer deftly employs. Only on a third read am I able to slow down the pace and finally catch the musicality of the sentences before me and the precision of the words within. The poems, forty-nine altogether, are gut-wrenching, alarming, mesmerising, appalling, and thrilling all at once. How else would they be as the author speaks of contained worlds in poem after poem, with most coming across as barely restrained entities? This is a beautifully told story of the human condition.
The collection reflects the complexity of mother-daughter relationships that is heightened ever so in communities that don’t esteem their sex. In these poems, Hooyo, mother, remains a distant figure that the daughter yearns to connect with seen here in her repeatedly imitating and gravitating to her mother. Can the one sustained by little comprehend the yearning of a child/young woman looking to find herself? Is being devoured the only hope for the daughter as described in Filial cannibalism? It seems unlikely that the two can live harmoniously in a world fraught with disdain for their existence. No less surprising that the daughter is raised not by hooyo but by the voices in her head, alone and lonely.
In Extreme Girlhood, Warsan speaks of one born as a girl to a family in a community that holds them in low esteem. Her birth is quickly shrouded in dissatisfaction which she carries about with the persisting awareness of not being good enough. If only the anxieties this triggers ended with girlhood or that her attempts to protect herself were less futile as she grows into womanhood, but neither Bless the Qumayo nor Bless your Ugly Daughter offer any respite as one reads on. She is faced with the complexities of womanhood, living in and navigating spaces, personal and broader, within the context of its confines even though she might grow up to “wear the world well.”
In Bless the Real Housewives she juxtaposes Hooyo’s decision to stay despite the risks this carries, against the hopes of peace for her country, Somalia. Where its peaceful state is seen in the rearview mirror as Hooyo drives along in her dreams. That peace is held in the rearview and it appears in her dreams is striking. The yearning is clear as day in the question, What if you die while you are waiting?
These poems strike particularly close pricking at my consciousness as I think about the different refugee communities in Uganda. For various reasons, more commonly resource conflicts, the number of refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea has grown astronomically in the last three decades in Uganda. While a number have been resettled, several more are still stuck in camps, waiting, hoping, enduring, and surviving. Forced out of their homes and into inhabiting spaces that remain foreign.
Driving the narration in each poem is the voice of a young woman struggling, like her peers, with her body, skin, identity, and desire to belong, navigating the pressures of societal expectations vis-a-vis her personal well-being. In this, the author reminds the reader the daughter is a human being and not the labels she and others like her are defined by. This is further reiterated by the use of pop culture and news items from current affairs to situate a number of her subjects, which is quite interesting, as she emphasises that the life of a refugee is no less engaged in the happenings of the wider society in which they live nor any less affected by the same. And she uses these snapshots to speak to broader conditions that the wider communities face.
In some poems, the voice seems to speak in a shorthand that’s only familiar to her, almost like she begins to disappear into her head. That voice feels inaccessible and hard to decipher in some places, but no less present, urgent, or determined to be heard. This subtle shift in tone lends to the title, which frames the poems. This after all is a daughter raised by a voice in her head.
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head is a must-read. We bless Grace Jones for teaching us to put ourselves first.