Book Review
Oseloka Obaze*
Wednesday 1 August 2007
Gbanabom Hallowell
My Immigrant Blood
(ISBN:0-941053-95-4 Foothills Publishing, Kanano, NY, 2006, pp.84 – Price $14.00)
Available At: http://www.foothillspublishing.com
Poetry like war, prostitution, and history, has been around almost forever. Frequently, poetry goes well beyond its core role of being a medium for conveying innermost feelings and emotions, to form essays and rendition of political and social musings. Poetry can be deft or raw, depending on the subject. But generally, poetry is the epicenter of the realm where the poet confronts the self or the society. More often than not, the end products are evocative regardless of whether they are approached from a retrospective or introspective tilt and bias. As a sage once observed, “as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines”. This may not always be the case as Gbanabom Hallowell proves in his anthology, My Immigrant Blood an 84 page hand-sewn and tread-bound collection of 36 poems dispersed in three sections.
Mr. Hallowell stays true to his self-styled claim to being the people’s poet. He reports the wars; reverses the clock; cautions the philosopher; reasons with the heart; arms the victim; act the drama; argue, study and pontificate while trying to decipher his core issues. The simplicity of his poems is made complex by the topics he grapples with. Accordingly, appreciating Hollowell’s poetry requires a grasp of the context in which he writes.
Poetry has always been subjective and a passionate undertaking meant to freeze events and relay with evocative cadence, the author’s observations, and innermost feelings. Such feelings are frequently diverse and run the gamut of sensitivities, which range from fondness and happiness to sadness, betrayal, and anger. Unfailingly, somewhere in-between this spectrum, lies the escapism of indifference. In this context, Hallowell’s poems are transcendental, evocative, and exploratory. Some are threnody, while others are suffused with neutered reportage of his dissection of events that are personal, political, historical, and socio-economic. A tinge of nationalism is ever present, as is his enchantment with motherism and matriarchy. His attention to his mother and to mother earth is, therefore, understandably more than perfunctory.
As regards form and style, Hallowell affirms that poems differ from poet to poet and from school to school. Like art, poetry has its share of expressionists, avant-garde, as well as impressionist fops, who wallow in hackneyed, dark, and shocking sinuous contrivances. While like artists, poets seek to impress; they are more concerned that the audience feels through their words, the utmost impact of their subject matter. Unfortunately for those poets fixated on strict stylistic forms, the inspirational aspect of poetry is frequently often sacrificed.
Clearly, Hallowell falls into the category of emerging poets, who scuff at or abhor the conventional rule of poetry that emphasizes rhyme, rhythm, and metered stanzas. But a poet cannot avoid imageries, metaphors, personifications, or the shared egotistical commonality of trying to create a personal niche. Consequently, Hallowell’s work falls well within the broad spectrum of two distinct Afrocentric categories, which poet Molefe Kete Asante has described as “poetic consciousness: “the consciousness of suffering and pain” and ‘the consciousness of power”. Hence, Hallowell the poet might very well be Hallowell the raconteur or Hallowell the activist.
On substance, three issues, death, ravages of war, and the connection between life and motherhood seem to dominate My Immigrant Blood. However, these, along with the attending pain and anger that lace the volume are universal. Whilst, the debilitating impact of war on life can hardly be compacted into this slim volume, which would be akin to writing history on the back of a 41-cent stamp; Hallowell does justice to his effort. He accomplishes a very touching and galvanizing effect, by drawing on raw emotions and his pangs of pain of being exiled from his war-torn country.
Each poem in My Immigrant Blood is a challenge, anguish, and torment. A refrain in this collection is “the sea inside me”. Taken as his emotion, rush, or anger, that meteoric and volcanic passion traverses several of his poems. More importantly, Hallowell underscores the effects of war, with death coming in all forms and shapes.
In The Desert Speaks of Body Bags, he surmises, “I cry for myself, thinking about the thousand Arabian and African nights full of body bags the burden I shall inherit from you”. I Dream of Africa, he laments, “In exile … I go through the eye of the needle.” (p.16). In Night of My Wrath, he states, “The clock in my breast is too noisy and I’m tormented by the way it opens its legs into my soul” (p.53). Then in another poem, the Legacy of the Damned, he writes the following with regards to the vagaries of war; “After the guns have been around for so long…. I feel pain of a slave running deep hooks into my skin… my country leans its many sorrows against the grave of its living… my only hope is the heart beats of the dead.” O Mother and The Beating of Bones are wistful and introspective.
Though modern conformist poets are more inclined to embrace the metered prose rendered in sonnets or stanzas, Hallowell poems are free flowing and he delivers them with flourish, aplomb, and satirical agility. Also, his poems do not lack the classic surrealism, which are pertinent to poems of anguish. He is neither bashful nor contrite about his damnation of Africa’s leadership failings. Entries like “I drank every rain pouring down on my country…while my peasant countrymen suffered under the yoke of the country compradors” and “Country I weep your decennial indignity that hour you yourself choked….in your tears of carcinoma of the fratricidal brother butchering….” makes his poems very political. Of the poems in this volume, Natural Selection and Legacy of the Damned are unquestionably my favorites. Naturally, I can also identify with the title poem, My Immigrant Blood.
Reading Hallowell, seems to confirm that beyond art form, poetry can be a soul-searching vehicle that offers a glimpse into the conscience of mankind, a nation and a poet’s mindset— some form of refractive mirror. Hallowell’s various pronouncements about the wanton calamities and negative impact of war goes beyond figure of speech. He reaffirms the conventional wisdom that there is nothing romantic or sentimental about war and its impact, and that the cruelty of violent death wrought by war, makes immortality a myth. Self-qualifying, Hallowell states, “I’m a poet; I fuse with words to achieve immortality”.
Gbanabom Hallowell is a poet to watch. With My Immigrant Blood, he has met the litmus test of having transcended the threshold that all aspiring poets must accost; which American poet and critic, M. L. Rosenthal, says, “was to practice the art of poetry on as high a level as possible, and with much honesty as possible”.
------------
Mr. Oseloka Obaze, an aspiring writer, is a founding member of the Kwenu.com Book Review Forum, which is dedicated to the promotion of books with Igbo and Afrocentric themes. He is also a supporting Member of the African Writers Endowment (AWE). From 1999 to 2005 he served on the editorial board of INYEAKA, the journal of Songhai Charities, Inc., a New Jersey community-based charity founded and run by Nigerians based in New York Tri-state area in the United States, first as its founding Publisher and later as the Editor-At-Large. He is also on the editorial board of The Amaka Gazette, the journal of the Christ the King College, Onitsha Alumni Association in America. His collection of poems, “Regarscent Past: A Collection of Poems” was among the top three finalists in the poetry category in the African Writers Endowment Publishing Grant Program for 2004. His novel, “Happy Eulogy” will be published in 2007. He reviews books and arts strictly as a hobby. © Copyright 1 August 2007.