Aisha A. Bolaji Tends to the Wounds of Girls in Full Bloom in Flowers at the City of Dreams

When you pick up Aishat A. Bolaji’s Flowers at the City of Dreams, you should read the dedication first. “Dedicated to the courage it took to begin.” And just like that, these four words say it all. This is a debut poetry collection and it does not pretend to be something else. Aisha A. Bolaji did not wait until she was ready to write it. She just started.

The book, published by Witsprouts Zintle, an imprint of Witsprouts Global Ltd, has sixty poems. Most of the poems are short. They move quickly. The author writes succintly about things that matter to her: being a woman, being a mother, love, her country, her body and what happens when a girl is left alone long enough to figure things out. The writing is warm and real. It is not the kind of warmth that some writers try to create to make people like them. It is the warmth of someone who is sharing her feelings because she needs to put them somewhere safer than memory.

The Mothers We Carry

The mother figure is in many of the poems in the book. But she is not the same person in every poem. In the opening poem, “Who We Are For The Sake Of Our Mothers,” she is sitting with her sisters in a warm room. The speaker is not with them. She is standing apart, trying to remember who she is. In “Love Is A Miracle” the mother is telling stories about how she met the speaker’s father, her eyes glimmering in gentle light. In “The Stories” she is talking about borders being the only things that hold us together. In “To Write About Girls” she is the ground on which a whole argument about prayer and womanhood rests. Bolaji is not only trying to create a character. She is also drawing a picture of a woman that the speaker keeps orbiting but can never quite reach.

The gap between the speaker and her mother is where most of the poems live. The opening poem is special because it sets the tone for the rest of the book. A woman whose words come out as brightly coloured carnations charging into quiet fields. Bolaji does not even bother to explain what this means. She just writes it and lets the reader sit with it.

Girls Who Know Themselves

The poems in Flowers at the City of Dreams are feminist. They do not flinch. “A Woman Has Many Names I” opens on men who think they know what women should be, their opinions hardened into communal facts. But the poem does not waste time arguing with them. It just goes ahead to show a woman who is so light that when she walks, music reaches for someone’s dark bones. That pivot from anger to power happens without warning.

“A Woman Has Many Names II” goes further. A woman who is mother in the first crow of morning, sister in the sharp strike of afternoon, wife in the evening meadows. She is also herself. A country without maps. Only I can find myself. The poem says “I am” so many times it stops being a statement and starts being like a wall that the woman is building around herself. Reclamation dressed as repetition.

Some of the poems are quiet and more powerful for being quiet. “My Girls My Girls” talks about girls with dark mascara gathered under their eyes, lip gloss reaching for a chin, girls at the door of nirvana who know themselves the way water knows its course. The poem recognises the beauty of these girls. “Walking The Streets Of Cities” is even shorter. Boys gathering periwinkles at a river mouth. The city light before its fear. Girls described as soft glories. Three stanzas and not one of them wasted.

Where the Poems Come Down to Earth

The author is at her best when she writes about specific things in this book. In “Nostalgia with Alternation in Reality” she puts us in a car park in Nyanya. A bad car carrying a small girl and a bigger one. A roof back in Minna that might not survive the rain. The speaker is worried about everything she cannot change. Her heart is spinning out of breath. “The city is a standing aesthetics of things built for the purpose of perishing.” That line carries the exhaustion of someone who grew up watching a country fail its people in small daily ways.

“Cadaver” is the most controlled poem in the book. The speaker pulls language toward the cadaver of forgotten things. Like leaving, everything is forgotten before it is remembered. Like living. No vowels here, only music. Only music. By the time the speaker repeats that closing phrase the poem has stopped describing music and become it.

“Confessional” does something different. The speaker is in a small room with a student-sized bed sinking into the ground, a ceiling holding a burnt lamp holder, a gas cylinder nestled by fear near the door. The Quran her mother gave her placed close to the pillow. Forty-five sticky notes on the wall, each one a step she needed to take to keep moving. And then on the forty-sixth: “but even those things are luxury.” That is a poet learning that the smallest statement can be the strongest.

The ghazal for her friends mostly works. The pact the speaker makes with her friends, to stand before fire together, to repeat the memories of life if caught in a time loop, to be there if death reaches one of them first, is one of the most emotionally honest moments in the collection.

What the Collection Is Still Learning

Aishat sometimes writes in abstractions that swallow the poem she is writing. “How It All Ends Happy,” “Times Without Number,” “Thank You For Kindness” hover at a distance. The language is lovely. Sparkles of stardust scattered across fields of daffodils. But lovely is not the same as specific. The best poems in this book talk about a specific car, a specific room, a specific mother’s specific eyes. The weaker poems describe feelings from above instead of creating the conditions for feeling them.

There is also a tendency to announce conclusions instead of arriving at them. “Nothing is a memory unless it is memorable” is stated where it should be shown. “Love is a miracle” is declared where it should be discovered. When Bolaji shows you something the page lights up. When she explains, the page goes quiet.

A few poems feel like they are still being written. “Maps” turns on a simple inversion, the body of boys, the touch of women, and runs the idea three times without the fourth turn that would have made it land somewhere unexpected. “Towards Home, Towards Home” has the instincts of a very good poem but does not quite get there. These are not failures. They are the sound of a writer who is still learning which of her instincts to follow all the way down.

The City Gate

The title poem is placed near the end of the collection and it is surprisingly quiet for something that bears the book’s name. Women standing at the city gate. Singing the names of men the wars swallowed. Women who won something in the process of surviving, not despite their vulnerability but because of it. Petals in the glory of sunflowers. Women with names after everything they ever touched and loved well.

By the time you reach this poem you have travelled through grief and tenderness and anger and a lot of mothers. The poem does not try to be big or loud. It settles. Which turns out to be exactly right. This collection was never building toward triumph. It was building toward the city gate. Toward arriving, finally, and being allowed to stand there.

Flowers at the City of Dreams earns its dedication. Bolaji is not performing bravery. She is just present. When she is specific and grounded the poems produce something worth carrying around. When the abstraction takes over you sense a writer reaching for something she has not quite named yet. She will get better. You can tell from the poems where she already has. This is a writer who knows she is not finished. Who chose to begin anyway. That is its own kind of grace and it is enough.

Aisha A. Bolaji’s Flowers at the City of Dreams is published by Witsprouts Zintle, an imprint of Witsprouts Global Ltd.