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Book: Pickled Moments

Name: Nasiba Babale

Genre: Poetry

Year of Publication: 2024

ISBN: 978- 978-766-750-7

Poetry is a language of the human mind that emanates from transcendence, never failing to carry along the echoes of love, loss, nature, grief, pain, longing, and most importantly for some artists, the mundane. This is the journey Naseeba Babale’s debut collection Pickled Moments, takes the reader on from the very first page.

Structured in six sections and having an average of eight-ten poems per section, it is a collection that addresses socio -political- cultural issues as close as the writer’s home country, Nigeria, and as far as Palestine in the Middle East. These issues range from romantic love to war to dysfunction, identity stereotypes, loss, and celebrating the mundane in art—all told with a poetic touch that is tender to the touch, feathery on the tongue and heavy on the heart. In her poems, Nasiba Babale has a way of making the free verse— the African poet’s most used poetic form, to tell a rhythmic story that keeps your breath to the last line.

To begin with, Why Not Love— the first section in the collection sees us through the poetic perception of love as dangerously exciting and worth the jolly ride. In many ways, the poet persona juggles in between a relationship coach and a hopeless romantic as seen in the poems ‘Do Not Say I Love You.’ and ‘I Love Us.’ In the poems, We see love in a coyless, loud and uninhibted way— as it should be. Coming from a cultural background where the echoes of love are made in hush tones in zaures and street bends, Nasiba lends a bold poetic voice to love and its expression. It made for a great, heartwarming start into the collection.

Nothing prepares the reader what’s coming next.

The next poem in the collection catapults the poet persona from her lover’s arms to the raging ruins of Palestine in the midst of a brutal genocide. Through Nasiba’s poems in this section, smoke, bullets, rubble, and the gritty sound of grief all come alive in the readers mind. For enhanced poetic effect, she uses the poetic persona of a child, as children are often known as the highest casualties in  war torn zones. Experimenting with poetic forms like the abedecerian in the poem ‘This is How We Teach the English Alphabet.’  she showcases the horrors of war and it’s aftermath, such as displacement, grief, collosal ruin and loss.

The poet persona moves on to show that close to home is what she dreads— the crippling grip of social instability.  In the section This is Not a Home, This is Not a Country, there is the poetic scathing of Nigeria’s social security landscape which has left many Nigerians— especially in the North dead, terrorized, displaced and demoralized as a people. Close to home, the loss is painful like a fshbone in the neck. This section appears to been the most emotionally downcast for the persona. In the first stanza in the first poem in the section, she says:

I can’t be present here

Where home is a synonym for chaos

Where gunshots are the lullabies that lull

Children to a sleep they never wake up from (pp55)

Thia reveals a huge level of hurt and disappointment at the status quo and the desire to flee. In reality the victims of insurgency have nowhere to flee neither, so they have the luxury to be present or absent from their pain, it hits them squarely like well packed blows in a wrestling bout. The desire to flee is for the poet an irony oof the real situation of things in the country.  In this section, poetry is the mirror of society that blinds with reflections of pain and anguish, and it is one of the sections a reader has to pause and ask the rhetoric question: When e go better? When will our motherland truly become home?

As one of the core thematic preoccupations of the collection, the poet moves into identity and how it shapes social and racial stereotypes. As a native speaker of Hausa with English as her lingua franca, This is seen in poems like “How I Wear My Accent.” and “When We Were in Primary School.” . The poet persona also moves to examine how social stereotype polices people in certain demographics like unmarried women in poems like How To Survive Being Single.”

The next part of the collection is purely poetry celebrating the representation of the mundane in art. As an artist who has always been on the art for art sake side of the artistic utility debate, Nasiba in this section demonstrates artistic commitment to the little things— Pickled Moments as she calls it. Particularly intriguing to the observer’s senses are the poems ‘Eavesdropping.’ and ‘Somewhere on a Road in Kano.’  These poems showcase the beauty in the mundane and how they are portrayed in art—a glow up to the entire collection.

Poetry will always prove itself a circle within love and loss as the poet takes us back to loss in the last part of  Pickled Moments.  We see the shape of loss and grief in the most naked forms, poems that draw into the depths of the human soul. In poems like ‘Every Day Someone Dies’ the reader is drawn into the collective amnesia that is the aftermath of death. It is an admonition to people not to let go of loved ones in death but hold on to their memories, to pray for their souls. It is also an admonition to the self to remember that all will answer the call of death. In other poems like  ‘The Rain is Like You.’ the poet persona is a grieving  a lover who might be the living — or dead one as they liken them to nature’s warmth. The poems in this section are melancholic and deepest in the themes of grief and loss and it is this taste the poet leaves in our mouths at the last page. A breathtaking, exhilarating, yet deeply touching read.

In Pickled Moments, Nasiba weaves different poetic elements to reveal an authentic voice that has shaped itself over the years. In the collection, we see skillful depiction of metaphors, similes, symbolism, sarcasm and irony, and a skillful use of poetic forms like the abedecerian — all in fast rolling free verse.  We see a hybrid of different poetic personas— from the hopeless romantic to the curious child and one pauses to wonder the level of artistic fluency it takes to wander in between imaginative realms with such dexterity. 

Pickled Moments is a collection recommended for poetry lovers, especially for spoken word artistes. Some of the poems are fast flowing free verse that also come alive outside the pages, some are for nap time reading, some are to be read with your eyes wide open and mouth tightly shut.  It is one of the best poetry collections to have been published by Konya Shamsrumi this year.

~

PS: When I first heard about the famed Poet of Light from the North, it was from my friend Mujahid Ameen Lilo. “She’s a mentor and badass poet.” He had said to me on one of the after -workshop banters of the Creative Writers’ Club, Ahmadu Bello University in our freshman year, while we scrolled over the #PoeticWednesdays posts on Facebook.

Three years later, I hold  in my palms an autographed copy of poetry of Nasiba Babale during a reading. The cover page read: For Amuda Abbas Oluwadamilola, for the love of words. May you never run out of inspiration.” As the cameras flashed into my face I smiled. I smiled again. I wish Mujahid was here.