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

Nigerian poetry from the last ten years has mostly used religion as a topic to look at closely. Romeo Oriogun uses the language of the church in Sacrament of Bodies to talk about the institution that owns that language, and Logan February does a similar thing in In the Nude. Esther Owolabi is doing something that’s not so popular. The Miracle is a poem that’s full of devotion, written from the inside and without any joking or sarcasm, and when it says forgive me father for I have sinned, the line is a true confession and nothing more. Owolabi, an artist who draws as well as writes, mentions Maya Angelou and Warsan Shire, and ends the book with a group of her own pictures.

The faith that is shown is not easy. The title poem is thirteen lines long. It is made like an exchange: “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. The poems keep looking at what belief costs the person who believes.

“God Opens the Heaven and Calls me a Mother” is the strongest part here, and it survives a weak beginning. The first lines move forward with a series of changes where energy’s more important than pictures, and then the child comes 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; the size of the yawn shows it.

“The Stories are all the same” does not take comfort like 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 made to stop that.

The collection spends 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 not named, and the empire is praised for its beauty. In a book where the strongest idea’s that giving a name is an action with effects, not saying which queen and which empire is not a small way to avoid the issue, and finding the crown beautiful on the last page takes away from the work that 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. Four or five poems here will last longer than the book they were in. One watches this artist. Hopes that next time she believes in the sesame seed more than the diamond.