Beltway Editions
ISBN: 978-1-957372-05-1
83 pages
$20.00 /2023
Safia Jama’s debut collection, Crowded House, consists of quiet, softly spoken poems that nevertheless resonate with deeply felt emotions. The book is divided into three sections: “Diasporas”, “My Small Room”, and “A Doll’s House”. The thirteen poems in the first section deal, in one way or another, with exile.
“My father was born to nomadic pastoralists, near
the Somalia-Ethiopian border.”
Eventually, her father fled the military dictatorship in Somalia, married an Irish-American woman and they settled in New York. The poems cover the literal exile of fleeing a military dictatorship in Somalia to the private exile from the self that others are imposing on the poet. In the exquisite poem “Photo,” Safia Jama describes a photo taken of her as a child in a “sailor dress”. She sits outside in a lawn chair…
“Hands folded in my lap…
As if someone has arranged them.”
“I’m looking off.
Elsewhere.”
“Even in the picture,
you can tell.
I’m already long,
long gone.”
Some poems are epigrammatic. In one of these a button salesman in the Garment District offers this advice:
“It is better to make a mistake
than to do nothing, says
the Emperor of Buttons.”
“Do not be afraid
of yourself.”
This is a through-line for most of the book. The ability to face challenges by just being yourself.
One of the most poignant poems in the “Diasporas” section is “Remembering Our Birds”. The poet describes a troubled relationship:
“I left, and you replaced my absence
with caged birds.”
When she returns, the poet notes:
“When we fought, the birds fought.
When we loved, the birds preened and on the afternoon
I packed to go to my mother’s, you picked a newly
Hatched chick off the kitchen floor and placed it
In the palm of my hand.”
When the birds die.
“…the vestiges of our troubles,
we buried tenderly, side by side…”
Jama often juxtaposes concrete images that stand for complex emotions too difficult to speak of directly as in the title poem of the second section, “My Small Room.” She admits that she’s “a convalescent romantic,” but never quite names what she is convalescing from. She gives us only images of her small room and the simple pleasures that allow her to recover. Perhaps it is the poet’s upbringing that makes her so reticent:
“I can still hear my mother saying,
‘Don’t be such a martyr!’
that one time I expressed my feelings,
aged sixteen.”
The final section of the book, “A Doll’s House,” opens with the puzzling poem “The Puzzle.” This five-page poem describes the speaker finding a puzzle inside a Christmas Cracker on her final Christmas in Ireland. Her tenacity in attempting to solve the puzzle is unrewarded and she ends up frustrated and upset. Yet her acceptance of defeat is in fact a kind of victory. Some things are simply not worth struggling over and sometimes there is wisdom in just letting go.
What runs through the three sections of Crowded House is the ennui the poet feels as a result of a broken relationship. This fracture is rarely addressed directly; it is rather like a faint white noise that hums in the background throughout the soundtrack of the book. Finally, the rupture is more directly addressed in the title poem, Crowded House:
“Honey, it’s over
but let’s still dream of the early days.”
Sage advice for anyone suffering from a broken heart.
Safia Jama’s wonderful collection, Crowded House, quietly speaks (almost whispers) truths about the interior world that in our haste and insouciance we often overlook.
Recommended
Jonathan Harrington has published twenty books including poetry, novels, essays and translations. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop he has lived in Mexico for over twenty years. His latest book of poems is The Frozen Sea Within Us: New & Selected Poems (www.beltwayeditions.com). The book covers forty years of a life in poetry.
Safia Jama was born to a Somali father and an Irish American mother in Queens, New York. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, she has published poetry in Ploughshares, Boston Review, World Literature Today, Spoken Black Girl, and Poem-a-Day. Her poetry has also been featured on WNYC’s Morning Edition and CUNY TV’s Shades of US series. Jama was a semi-finalist in the Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry, and she is the author of Notes on Resilience, included in the New-Generation African Poets chapbook box set (Akashic Books, 2020). Her full-length poetry collection, Crowded House, is published with Beltway Editions (2023).