Book: Tears of Desert War
Publisher: Kraftgriots Books Limited
Author: Idris Amali
Year: 2020
Pages: 109
Reviewer: Umar Yogiza Jr.
The anthology of memories and grief that make up Idris Amali’s “Tears of Desert Wa”r, presents one with puzzles that re-establish poetry as the main tool, capable of furnishing a man with deep know-how to confront erupting history, loss, fear and decaying hope. This is because memory and hope are the major ingredients of poetry. In 109 pages, 293 stanzas and 2130 lines, Amali asks us, when you prick a crumbling memory and last hope of the people with needle of grief, what colour do they bleed?
Thomas Bernhard, an Australian poet reminds us that “even if you never destroyed a night with swearing and tears, yet time, nonsensical time will eradicate you with its dry poetry, keen as a knife!” and where Idris Amali takes us to in this collection is an abattoir of grief and violence. It is a place where decorated carcass awaits the lacerated flesh of memory and hopes of ordinary innocents. This is a struggle to establish conscience as a knife between desire and destruction.
In “Tears of Desert War”, Idris Amali’s unrivaled knowledge of violence and trauma that have aggressively ordained the ordinary Nigerians into priests of grief, opens suffering as it changes its masks of violence daily with no stopping activities. As Amali searches with the masses’ unhealed scars instead of his eyes, he re-unveils immense trauma, politicised and open violence disappearing from physical history books as if not happening next door.
Idris Amali in “Tears of Desert” War translates struggles, pains, lost hope, prayers and violence into a simple language, which ordinary people can hear, see and touch with pure poetry questioning the mirror that portrays a paradise with bloody body of hell. If the poet’s job is to translate unspeakable things on page(s) or to whisper them into our ears, then Idris Amali has done a job no African poet has dared. In this collection, he mentions war 122 times besides the abandoned idioms, symbols and imageries. This is done in other to portray the real issues that are suffocating the common helpless people in our country.
In the introductory micro poem “Art of Poetry” (p. 7), poetry becomes a tapestry whirlwind marshaling all hidden powers of evil. We get a glimpse form of cheap chains of death and endless covering of lies and desperation, ingrained as aid in our everyday lives. Amali writes: /I have something to say//Not in tinted mind or language//To pour the venom of the heart//Of angered viper. The poet according to Emmanuel Onum, lays bare the injustice, lack of fair treatment and wanton spread of destruction, chaos and death on the voiceless in Nigeria and beyond.
Amali’s mastery of his art is revealed through his use of expedient imageries and language, fierce examination of grief and sincere concerns for the innocent masses. This establishes him and this collection beyond contemporary revelation. The disinterring of sealed methods of corruption and mask instruments of murder provides real nuance as we school about the political lies in the fight against Boko Haram, and the generals’ imprisonment of truth away from the masses. It is a privilege to be alive, but it is terrible to be alive as a poet, especially when things are falling apart and the masses losing their voices.
In the three parts poems: “Season of Disruption” (p. 11), “The War of the Sun” (p. 49) and “Beguiles and Failed Generals” (p. 65), the cracks widen as the boiling poems erupt like volcano lava with all the hidden truths of how we were drained of peace, suffocated of joy and re-established as the leaders of our backward society. In part one “Season of Disruption” (p. 11), it opens with: When you set at days and nights//To dream heaven high//To take to greater heights//Our great assets begging a push//To eclipse the sufferings of our people// Bringing denied smiles to their faces//The hackers of our dreams//Sterilize and strangulate semen//Awaiting virgin fetus of our dreams …
In the end of the poem, “I breed anger in my womb” (p. 12), Amali writes: …/I breed anger in the chambers of my heart//I breed anger and pains//As I watch my people, innocent they are,//Face unknown firing squads daily//And the generals dine and swim away in wombs//Of voluptuous women in glass houses//As their first war tactics//To extinguish infernos engulfing my land//I breed enduring cancerous anger//A double edged sword leaves its scabbard//Knows not its owner. lines are the taste that distinguish poetry from all other art cooked and Amali knows this and makes his heart a hunter of games.
Amali condemns us to investigate the news coming home from warfront, decorated with fanfares, naked with painful violence and destructing everything, which was once beautiful. He also challenges us to investigate the events bruising our wounds, passed down from government to government. This is because real casualties do not appear in the news. The poet hovers in the poem “I traverse the land” (p.14 : /With forensic lenses//Embedded in the graveyard of my heart//Where the dead rests in my restless abode//I craned and zoomed West, East, North and South //Saw vultures hovering over low and high. …/I see everywhere//The chief thief of vultures//And the lieutenants in vulturing saga if our woes. In this poem, the poet sees how death and mourning gradually transform into intergenerational feast.
“Tears of Desert” War asks not with words but with the real fire burning real the people in the war —the poor, the helpless and the defenseless. Amali investigates how we manage to hide these painful mountain of scars daily and walk silently through these traumatic flame and burning violence without guilt. How long can one hide the scars of a war when the war is endless? How long can one run away from the destroyed history that tails him everywhere? In the poem, “Season of disruption” (p. 18), the poet explores the hard damage of this war: /The hackers of our dreams//Sterilize and strangulate semen//Awaiting virgin foetus of our dreams. /As they invite legions of hired liars trumpeting//To conceal deep wounds to transform. In this in poem, Amali unveils the white masks veiling intergenerational cruelty.
How can one grasp spiking memories? How can one remove the traumas that are eluding his past to intertwine with his future? In the war of the Sun, the second part of this collection p.49, Amali consults our decaying landscapes in his interrogation of man-made atrocities. It starts with: /And the standing silos of huge appropriation//Stand proudly without a seed//In their proud emptiness across the famished land//Where daily prayers to the sun//Yield no dividend for those that resort to praying//As no one has the strength to ask the sun//Nor bring down the rains//To envelope this blazing sun//And dethrone the reign of the sun.
Amali’s intentions of honouring the resilience, helpless despite the blows coming from unknown hands materialises. In “Salute to the maiden rain” (p.50), he converses with the ruined landscapes, scavenging the origin and historical development of Boko Haram wars. He also explores what is left when everyone investigates the roots of violence in haste: /The north east horizon suddenly wore thick clouds//As the cool early dawn downs its toga//The rising morning gave way//To insurgents of hungry storm://Papers, polythene bags and rags litter the streets//And thousands held aloft touching roof of the sky//Sailing windward in parachute dance//As huge red dust in conquering battle//Envelop the eyes of the crowd…
Amali gives profound attention to each line the same way these scavengers of unity and developments – those who hunt freely through the streets, destroying architectural details and structures of peace in uniforms- cover their tracks. In “Dawn of silence” (p. 56). He looks at everything restive minds of the dispossessed: /I pulled myself from one of these cubicles//Of elitist abode of high price//Where public stands remain in dying state//To isolate my thoughts from this enveloping heat//In a sit out to fraternize with living breeze//To look into milky white dawn//Of cloudy ocean above my head//For what message they bear between unforeseen lines…
Each poem in this collection is syntactically constructed to take on multiple meanings. In “The gathering Clouds” (p. 58—61), an exchange poem between Amali and United State based doctorate candidate, Zach Ochoga, one poet is lending his voice and the other is reassuring: Zack Ochega/My Professor//I lent out my voice to some people//I travelled into their minds//And lodged in their emotions//I speak of things they experience//But are numb to//Because of the heat of their debates//And the pollution of the chamber of their minds//As a result of the clash of different interests//And the absence of any means of healthy ventilation…
Amali’s response: /Fear gripped Zach//Father of fear of “what might ensue”//Ochoga, fear for the green white green//Child of a centenary old//Flying perilously in threatening gale//Threatening apart the green white green//Ochoga//Father of fear for the green white green//Why fear for the green white green?//Why pray for the green white and green?//We need no fear//We need no prayers//Our prayers long answered//Our answered prayers of a centenary old//Our Almighty has laid a path of greatness//For lions and leopards to tread//Where the lions and leopards tread//No goats and demi gods dare trespass..
Amali’s evoking of multiple interpretations within his poems extends and deepens the meaning and understanding of the last part of this collection. The poem, “Beguiles of failed general” (p. 65) is the most serious part of the book; Amali evokes the reader to unearth layer after layer, the meaning in a single poem without knowing it. In “’Let the dead bury the dead” (p. 68), morning wakes the remaining fears: /And today morning//Third day from the battle of rage//That shook the earth, this very earth!//And its tremor still lives with us//Another uncertain dawn sound saluted//The fragile air of the city of Maiduguri//Pounded at will now and then//As each pounding left huge holes and debris of pains//As fear grips the land//And corpses litter the battle urban fields//Spilled blood charred on red hot tarmac//And the head thief of State swaggers around//In honeymoon campaign tours//To reposition dreams that drain our dreams and Amali’s weep of words continued…
The tittle poem, “Tears of Desert War” (p. 95) is broken into 8 parts. It interrogates and unearths the landscape of Maiduguri and roots of political history of war, aftermath of violence and casualties. 1 :/They say they are in control//But let me give you on the spot live reports//From the vigilante group that went to war//Faced the war bare handed//Like bees on nectar they never give up//Take their reports//Not those from glass houses//Of urban broken promises//Far from dreadful hands of boko haram//And tears of desert war//Gamboru Ngala noted land of cows//At the fringe bustling in cows//Rich in animal husbandry//That feed the nation//Abandoned by trembling antiquated infantry brigade//Of the most valued army across the seven seas//In trembling flee abandoning Mark 4 obsolete//To be war captives of stiff faced men of our neighbours//Gamboru Ngala where are thy cows//That humiliate cows of the far seas//As our hopes are drowned//In cascading tears of desert war…
In this collection, Idris Amali, a Professor of Oral Literature pushes himself off all limits set in his previous works. “Tears of Desert War” angrily supersedes General Without War (2000), Back Again at the Foothills of Greed (2012) and Efeega: The War of Ant (2014). One is emersed without preparation; one also feels the haunting heat of the cold bend memories. An entire account of grief, violence, mourning, looting, failure, lies, incapacitation, deception etc. cannot possibly be fitted into mere hundreds of pages, but Amali manages to recount unsaid violence and grief with thundering clarity. The only defect of this collection is Amali being too good a poet of old deep imageries for this generation of spoken words to decipher easily.
