Poetry Review
Teardrops on the Weser
by Amatoritsero Ede
Winnipeg, MN: Griots Lounge, 2021
64 pp. $20.99
With Teardrops on the Weser, Amatoritsero Ede guides his readers on a transformative journey across landscapes and memories bringing to the surface individual and collective (hi)stories of intergenerational trauma and healing submerged in the underflows of bodies of water. The main section of the book is made of a sequence of twenty-six poems whose titles follow the order of the alphabet. From the very beginning, the German words for “room 350” clarify the perspective from which the poem unfolds. The poet is in fact gazing downward over the Weser River, in Germany, and the nearby foreground, from the window of an apartment room. The poetic stream of thoughts triggered by staring out the window breaks the paradigmatic linearity of (western) historical narrative, thus enabling the emergence of multidimensional temporalities that merge places and events, just like river connectivity creates ecological networks. The symbolic overtones of the window immediately transport us to an imaginary archetype of inside/outside, according to which interiority brackets the landscape in a specific frame. Yet, more than a restraining binary, the window is here meant to represent a threshold to a different world-view. At the same time, the “brown brick/brick-brown apartment block” (9) functions as a reminder of a lack of sense of belonging, enhanced by the heaviness of the alliterative sounds.
As the poet reports with an epic tone his impressions of the outside world, the vividness of the poetic word brings everything to life, starting with the river itself, “snaking / through lower saxony” (5). By building a sort of genealogy of rivers, made of twin tributaries and parent streams, Ede reconstructs the path of watersheds across the land. To further strengthen the liveliness of water, the letters on the page follow the course of a flowing river, “like the letter z or a lazy rope” (42). In addition, the lack of punctuation and the consistent use of lowercase letters contribute on a graphic level to emphasizing the overall sense of fluidity and continuity meant to resemble not only a body of water but also the entanglement of histories and memories. It is precisely this uninterrupted rhythm that makes it impossible to put the book down: it simply draws you in one long breath. In a similar revitalizing spirit, the whole panorama comes to life, from the skyline with teeth (18) to the gothic churches, symbols of Christianity and colonial religion, “standing proud centuries long” (13). Thus, the Weser becomes a stage for personified architecture, merchants, and even lovers, entertained by the sound of horns, cymbals, and “laughing guitars” (16). The poet’s mimetic writing is further enhanced by the vibrancy of synesthetic comparisons: you can hear the river flowing “sudden as cascading coins”, as you can see its bright light “as flashing swords” (8). The frequent use of wordplays also contributes to enriching the text’s texture, such as in the following example, which cleverly takes advantage of the polysemy of the word swallow, simultaneously verb and bird: “i swallow sea water / just as a swallow swoops” (22).
The seemingly serene atmosphere along the river begins to shift with the incursion of historical memories tied to the poet’s native home in Nigeria; it is here that the poem reaches its climax. While the river has now become “indifferent” (18), thus embodying the cultural attitude of the humanity living on its banks, the window of the apartment room turns into a metaphorical lens, “refracting and re-framing” the decolonial gaze (34). Suddenly, in fact, the sight of the “sluggish” German river catapults us to “the nightmares of the brackish tides” (33) of the Niger River Delta. The poet takes a moment here to denounce the military dictatorship of Sani Abacha as well as the complicity of the Royal Dutch Shell in the 1995 execution of the Ogoni Nine, a group of activists, which included the playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa among its members, who opposed the operating practices of the oil corporation. Ede then ties the slave trade into the narrative, “that trafficking of black souls / in rotten ship holds / across the cursed atlantic” (39), adding hints to the history of nazi violence as well as to the now former president of the United States, Donald Trump, once again amplifying the potential of language by playing on the overlapping meanings of the word trump, “the many-splendored love / that Trump hate” (41). Bursting then from the rumbling tides of the rivers is a racial and colonial history inseparable from environmental degradation, a counter-history that dynamically highlights the relations between apparently distant events. As the rivers carry vestiges of trauma, so does the poet record memories with his “eyes flooded” (22). Together, they rewrite History. The teardrops in the title, then, made of salt water and thus reminiscent of the “cursed” sea, represent a bodily trace of the intergenerational trauma caused by colonial violence. Yet, through this ecological eulogy they may become a sign of healing for both the writer and the readers.
