Title: Oceans in Your Lungs – A collection of poems
Author: Zainab Omotayo Raji
Reviewer: Marita Banda
Year of Publication: 2022
The 50 poems in the debut collection, Oceans in Your Lungs, by Zainab Omotayo Raji, have been subtitled under four themes: Love as Flowers, Chaos in the Soil, Pain in Our Roots and Hope as Sun Rays.
Each chapter is introduced with a visual art illustration. The cover features a pleasant and calm medley of sunset sky hues over a body of water that reflects back some of that pastel.
In this work, readers are invited to journey complex emotional seasons through the lenses of a feminine soul. Most of the poems are modern and organic in style making them appeal to varied audiences.
Love as Flowers contains 10 dreamy and colourful pieces showcasing different shades, forms and expressions of love. In Genesis, one senses the pouring of the divine love of the creator for its creations.
Melodies on Sheets is a beautifully crafted romantic rendition of the expression, Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Its lonesome sweetness is unpretentious in its delivery. Childrens efforts to express love for a mother are presented in A Beautiful Mess that is a perfect picture of Mothers Day or perhaps a mothers birthday celebration.
It is a simple yet profound expression of untainted love. The last piece in this summer season is a psalm, Prayer for Our Daughters.
The second and third seasons, autumn and winter, feature poems about emotional turbulence. Anxiety is a roller coaster of convoluted loops of despair expressed in daily mental states of panic.
The poems in Chaos in the Soil and the subsequent chapter, Pain in Our Roots, speak to the suffering and anguish that the soul endures when individuals experience loss, pain and sorrow.
The speaker in most of these is an abused and victimised female who is mostly invisible in a patriarchal society that barely honours womanhood.
Letters to My Bleached Skin articulates the ultimate health consequences on the individual suffering from low self-esteem as a result of efforts to seek visibility.
The poem highlights the problem of colourism as a real issue among people of darker shades of brown. Without pre-empting too much, What Emptiness Feels Like is an interesting and unexpected twist of a visual piece.
The collection title is taken from this section exploring dynamics of emotional distress in the masculine psyche.
The horrors and conspiracy theories of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic are not left out.
Raji explores this topic from a mental health perspective as a collective trauma borne by society. Endless Circles confirms the condition or state of anger as a form of madness.
Interesting images are used to demonstrate this idea.
The final and spring season chapter of the collection brings everything together under the theme of hope. Hope as Sun Rays is spiritually uplifting. Beautiful Goodbyes and Forgiveness stand out. Throughout the collection, the power of the maternal instinct is a constant thread that seams the poems together.
For a debut book of poems, Raji has asserted herself as an artist whose work explores psychological states of being human. Her poems are impregnated with vivid, palpable imagery using metaphors from nature. The illustrations add visual poetic aesthetics. In this collection she has established her distinct voice and style. Her happy poems are playful and coloured with rainbows, butterflies, music and dance. Perhaps, it is the themes that were specifically selected and deliberately so, that limited the topics; but I was hoping for the work to be more versatile in terms of the subjects. The influence of the positive masculine voice is subdued. The number of poems with this tone can be counted on one hand.
It remains, however, that poetry as with many other art forms, is subjective and hits differently depending on time, space and mood. One reads it through the filters of their personal histories and life experiences that pervade ones interpretation. This collection fits well among the titles that, from time to time, one comes back to dip into, to feed particular psychological needs, moods and cravings.
• Banda is a multilingual published poet (Telling It Like It is, 2017) and author (Traditional Zambian Etiquette for Modern Living, 2019). She is a member of the Zambian chapter of PEN International and co-founder of Sotrane Publishers.
