The Miracle review: Esther Owolabi Holds Faith Without Asking for Proof

Nigerian poetry from the last ten years has mostly has mostly treated religion as material to be examined. Romeo Oriogun uses the language of the church in Sacrament of Bodies to prosecute the institution that owns that language, and Logan February does a similar thing in In the Nude. Esther Owolabi is doing something that is arguably not as popular. Her debut collection, The Miracle is full of devotion, written from the inside without any form on sarcasm, and when it says forgive me father for I have sinned, the line is a true confession and nothing more. In the book, Owolabi, an artist who draws as well as writes, cites Maya Angelou and Warsan Shire, and then invites the reader to her canvas with a group of her own art showcased at the end.

The faith on offer is not comfortable. The title poem is thirteen lines long and it is written like an exchange rate: “For I to make water become wine / The skin of my hand must become wound.” What comes next is a list of orders given to her body and history, telling her blood to protect her from herself, her pain to go away, her anger to disappear. God is never questioned anywhere in the book but the poems keep looking at what belief costs the person who believes.

“God Opens the Heaven and Calls me a Mother” is the strongest piece here, albeit barely surving a weak start. The first lines move forward with a series of changes where momemtum is more important than image, and then the child arrives and the writing becomes clear with “her soft yawn, the size of / Sesame seeds yet my cheek is full fledged / With laughter.” The happiness is not said out loud but the size of the yawn shows it.

“The Stories are all the same” does not try to be comforting the same way the rest of the book does. Generation after generation, women whose voices are lost under the ground where a man’s body is buried, women who saved the world and were called witches, and then the end lines: “my daughter will likely / Inherit the same sad tale.” No prayer is offered against that.

The collection spends many of its fifty-seven pages on women buried by men, by borders and by empires, then ends with “The Lost Poem of Rome”, a song about a queen who is never named, in a poem that praises the beauty of her empire. In a book whose strongest idea is that naming a thing is an action with effects, leaving out which queen and which empire is a serious evasion, and closing the book in admiration of a monarch weakens what the earlier poems did well.

What is left is a poet who shows different things at once, most convincing when the Bible calls something a miracle and her mother calls it a curse and the poem does not pick between the two. That refusal is the real faith in the book, held without any promise that it will be rewarded, and four or five poems carry it well enough to outlive the collection they arrived in.