Silence, Tremors Beyond the Surface is the first volume in a poetry series by Olanrewaju Olajumoke Akinla. Across 15 poems, she confronts gendered violence, each piece unravelling a different form of harm and its systemic roots. Step by step, Olanrewaju exposes how violence is sustained—through cultural traditions, family values, faith, and society itself.

The chapbook opens with an epigraph that establishes its central metaphor: “Unspoken words are memories that linger in the body’s airspace.”

Silence and memory emerge as living forces. They inhabit victims’ bodies, terrifying them into speechlessness. In the opening poem, Akinla insists that silence is not passive but predatory:

Memory is a predator.

It leaves the mind

and finds the sore.

Bite.

Suck.

Lick…

Here, silence is not quiet. It is alive, haunting, and relentless. It lingers in the body’s airspace, grows in the subconscious, and finds its own language. Trauma becomes its voice.

The long-term consequences of this violence are explored powerfully in Poem 9, where Akinla turns to isolation and withdrawal. The closing lines read:

…I stand by the window watching

watching

Staring at the years passing by.

Aside from the repeated word “Watching,” pulling the reader deeper into the text, it also captures the weight of time. At the same time, the one-word line gives emotional gravity. Akinla’s mastery of line breaks and spacing regulates pacing, forcing pauses that echo silence itself

The chapbook’s structure is equally striking. The poems form a sequence that traces the narrator’s life from conception to adulthood. This progression situates violence not as isolated incidents but as a continuum across stages of growth. Independent poems with shared themes are woven into this lifecycle, enriching the work’s emotional and thematic resonance.

Yet Silence, Tremors Beyond the Surface does not end in despair. Akinla offers hope as she introduces the image of the queen bee,

I dream of termites.

I dream of queen bees.

I dream of insects that socialise with the soil…

The poem closes with the line: Recruitment starts now. This awakening reframes victims as agents of resistance, ready to build their own colony, replacing silence with stings—defensive, collective, and transformative. The ending resists closure, pointing the reader forward, embodying the idea that a poem never truly ends.

The chapbook also invites reflection on the place of silence in a changing world. As global awareness of gendered violence grows, laws are enacted, and traditions once revered are increasingly questioned. In Poem 7, Akinla captures this tension through a striking metaphor:

Traditions are like antiques.

Both suffer from an identity crisis.

They are ugly and crude in modern eyes.

Yet, revered and sacred in native eyes.

Here, tradition is neither dismissed nor romanticised. Instead, it is examined critically, caught between cultural continuity and ethical reckoning. The chapbook becomes both a testimony and a measure—documenting trauma while reflecting shifts in global discourse.

Ultimately, Silence, Tremors Beyond the Surface is a brilliant, engaging, and necessary work. It cuts across cultures and genders, weaving art with activism. Olanrewaju redefines silence not as absence but as presence, not as weakness but as a force to be confronted, and, finally, transformed.