Comments on Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s poetry collection, Where the Road Turns Where the Road Turns.

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Comments on Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s poetry collection, Where the Road Turns
Where the Road Turns.

By Patricia Jabbeh Wesley. Pittsburg: Autumn House Press, 2010, pp. 115.

“…the heart cannot become steel unless it is broken over and over.” Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

Introduction

Liberian poet, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s ability to physically and psychologically survive war has given birth to four books of poems. In her fourth book, Where the Roads Turns, she “wanders” from a past still clinging but not choking. We journey with her and feel that she has come through the fire and is confidently going “where the road turns.”

In Where the Roads Turns, her stories about the Liberian civil war are less dominant and hard-hitting, but their psychological effects are still present. The poet allows herself “waking moments.” She accepts that she cannot change the past but is able to shape her own future. Her poems make clear that age alone is not an indicator of wisdom but that experience is much more powerful. The book is divided into four sections. I: Love Songs, II: Taboos, III: Wanderings and IV: Tomorrow.

Love, as a theme, sometimes tinged with humor, courses through the collection. Jabbeh-Wesley examines all facets of love: prohibited love, love and war and its consequences, failed relationships, divorce, enduring love, a parent’s love and love of cultural. Her conversational style and use of repetition makes it easier to delve into the complexity of the theme.

In the section Taboo, the poem “Last Night in My Dream,” probes prohibited love in the fantasy of a married adult and concludes that, though fleetingly enjoyable, it ends in a nightmare:


When you came to me last night in my dreams
I found myself floating like a leaf...
Such a desirable moment of lust and love
and forbidden fruits, something my mother
would have died to rid me of.
Meeting a strange man even if this is a dream
is forbidden ground and taboo, but your eyes
oh, those sleepy eyes of yours... (p 35).


A snoring husband invades her fantasy and “saves the speaker from the cliff in her dreams.” The tale, told with much humor, is philosophical and realistic in its conclusion:


Everyone of us carries/
in our heart an unattainable dream, a far cliff
that is far too unreachable for the real world.

But I also know how a man may carry
other women between small spaces in his heart
while I meet my own lovers at night,
in my dreams, always, in a nightmare ( p.36).


Another poem from the Taboo section, “My Auntie’s Woman-Lappa Husband,” further explore the subject. It delves into the psychological effect of straying husbands on family, on powerless partners and it acceptability in African society. A female relative, prepared to combat on the wife’s behalf, speaks:


...Red, red lipstick, red cheeks
my uncle’s man-stealing Monrovia woman.
She lives in my uncle’s office, under his desk
in his office closet. She lives in my eyes
under my pupils. My uncle says I should mind
my own business. But I’m the married woman
who comes with dagger, ready to run my uncle’s
concubine down the riverbanks and out of town (46).


The gullible wife states “...Maybe he will settle down (46).” But the speaker humorously responds “....”Maybe something will settle him/a lightning bolt/ an earthquake, a jail sentence...(46).” Futility then set in with the lines...”Isn’t he African (p. 47).”

During war, parents agonize about children sent to the war front. Sometimes children are sent to fight wars which family do not support. Then, there are those, who live within the perimeters of battle fields and whose existence is threatened by annihilation.

The poems “Love Song Before the War Ends” and “Love Song When Musu Answers Her Lover,” present both male and female viewpoints about starting families during war. Both viewpoints are motivated by self-preservation and are influenced by their psychological states. The husband, concerned about his posterity, tells his wife:


Let us make long-haired babies, babies
with feet that do not stray far from home.
Let us no longer listen to the wind,
and let us no longer be the hen
that scratches endlessly until one day
it discovers its mothers bones (p.13).


The wife, who must bear the children and face the possibility of their immediate death, is unable to see beyond the violence and replies:


“Let us just listen to the drowning of the guns
that is coming, my yellow-skinned lover.
I do not want to make babies for the war to eat
I do not want to wastes my babies on this war, my lover.
I do not want to cry for my own babies
the way other women have lost not just themselves.
Let me just sit here below this roof of our leaking hut,
and let me sing for the babies that have been
dashed along the roadside for dead (p.14).


This marriage is clearly being tested. It is a conflict that threatens their union unless reason comes into play. The question of their survival remains. Will she live to have the babies she wanted to wait for and will he live to have the babies he dreamed of?

Failed relationships and failed marriages are summed up in “So This Is Where the Roads Merge.” It examines the sacrifices made by women to support husbands who later abandon them for fresher, greener pastures. Words like “sinkhole,” “descend”,” fall down her own cliff,” “empty,” and “broken calabash,” make the poem overpoweringly melancholic:


So this is where the water must go—gravel, silt and all?
Where the sinkhole sinks, where the ground goes,
underground, where love descends under the goalkeeper
of dreams , where dreams must finally evolve?

So this is the flooding ground, the protector now staring
wide-eyed at love in its final hour, where a woman
may fall down her own cliff...

“So this is where a woman empties her years
into a sinkhole...where the road must end/ end and the calabash broken.
So this is what our mother didn’t tell us (16-17).


The subject of “One Day,” is divorce. It is does not, however, focus on divorce as an end, but emphasizes that it is time for beginnings, empowerment, healing and hope.

One day you will awake from your covering
and that heart of yours will be totally mended,
And there will be no more burning within.

.... And there will be no more need for love
or lovers or fears of losing lovers.

... and the sun will beckon homeward,
hiding behind your one tree that was not felled (27).


“If I Could Write a Poem About Love,” examines second chances for mothers and those who have loved and lost. One can also extend the concept of second chances to dying cities which are offered new opportunities. Cities, whose industries have shut down (“...steel town out of steel,”) or, whose industries have been outsourced, is an underlying theme.


If I could write a poem about love,
I’d write a slender one...
about love that makes a bird rise
out of dry branches....
the kind of love that gives wings
to a woman at the brink of middle age...
as if the woman were herself
a steel town, out of its steel.


Maybe I’d write a poem
About the coming and going
Of the bird, the coming and going
Of the mother in search of new life
After the old has died (p. 21).


There are times when second chances arrive too late, when inflicted wounds, though forgivable, remain unforgettable. The psychological scars are indelible and trustworthiness remains in the foreground. “It’s Too Late Now,” probes this state of marriage. Its slate is forever tarnished.


The subtlety of creepers, the subtlety of a river
after the crest, after the drowning years,
that calm after the lover returns to the old love,
after the lover discovers we can only love once
in this life; after the lover returns
to discover this old lover still waiting at
the window where stars have refused to
come out of hiding since December...


again, but somehow the lover returns
to the one abandoned, but it is too late,
they say, it is too late now.
She is now a wounded weapon upon which
A man may fall, upon which a man may
drown himself (98).


All is not lost, however. Marriage can be frayed around the edges yet enduring. “For My Husband After So Many Year” is a testament to marriage that has survived numerous trials. Lust is may be a thing of the past and long lasting companionship is the center of love’s universe.


Someone is watching us.
This journey has been long...
Come, sit beside me like a new lover.
Like a lover, seeking to make the new years
we’ve held together between so many wars
and so many teardrops, so many laughs and lives.
It is as if we are other people from other lives.
as if we lived and lived for others...
....I was made just for this time and you, for me.
We grow old. We grow old.
Can you put the fire out now (10)?


“To My Infant Daughter After Birth,” examines the importance of teaching our children, about the significance of tradition. It empowers them for the future. It is an act of love based on instinct and our desire for self preservation.

You came from a womb of people who came
down a long way the coast of West Africa.
If you know that in Wah the girls are taught
to work hard, to be proud of who they are no matter
what, and that all those girls are like you, then
Where is the error in being you (p. 63).


“Some Things You Never Stop Looking for,” contemplate the importance of living life and surviving it. Mothers should teach their children how to bear life’s harshness. Of course, some lessons, they tell us, are better learned from experience, but most know where to draw the line.


Your mother’s last words before she was ready to go
those moments of lost days, your last image...
All the cherished spaces you gave up at adolescence
just so you would become...

How your own heart was broken over and over
until you grew up to discover that the heart cannot
become steel unless it is broken over and over again.
So you seek out steel, and with a slice of steel
from your heart, you mend your own heart (99-102).


Finally, one can see parallels between a parent’s love and the ancestors’ love. Parents and ancestors, through the elders, teach culture and tradition and empowerment-all survival skills. Each one has its distinct method and role but the end result is self-preservation.

In “Ghost Don’t Go Away Just Like That,” the spirits call to mind that they were once part of our world. They come:


“...to see if we will build a stone to honor the fact that they
were here, with us, walking and talking, like us, to see
if we will remember that they lost so much blood
in the shooting, that they broke a leg or two
and that so many of them were not counted in that sad numb (39).


“These Are the Ways of Our People,” explains the importance Grebo customs. It emphasizes that it is the responsibility of the younger generation to preserve vital traditions. Like our parents, ancestors wish to set rules down. They teach respect for the departed and respect for the elders.


“Bai says, remember the ancestors who must eat
from the food on your dish. Do not pick up the meat that
falls from your hand; do not deprive the spirits
of their food. Let the ancestors live, my child. (p.50)


“We Departed Our Homelands and We Came,” quotes a Grebo proverb. It is the instinct of mankind to move to new lands which sustain them and prevent extinction.


“We departed our homelands and we came,
so the Grebo say, we came with our hands
and we came with our machetes/so we too, could carve
up the new land......So let it be known among the people,
we left all the beauty of our homelands, not so
we sit on The Mat to wail (.55).”


Many of Jabbeh Wesley’s poems, at first glance, seem long and intimidating but her conversational style, repetition of lines and the intertwining of words within lines make them easy to follow. Her style is influenced by a cultural tradition where story-telling and singing are part of daily existence. Her poems come from a place where people tell stories and sing for the living and the dead. Even fieldwork is accompanied by song. Rhythm, movement, song are embedded in their spirit. As a result, her use of repetition reinforces the messages. In “So this is where the Roads Merge,” the first stanza presents a series of repetition.


So this is where the water must go—gravel, silt and all?
Where sink holes sinks, where ground goes
Underground, where love descends under the goalkeeper
Of dream, where the dream must finally evolve (16)?


“Been wandering Too Long: A Song,” shows how she knits repetitious words within a sentence. The string of phrases serve as a bridge that takes the reader to the end of the verse.


What if someone should one day tell the tale
of a lost singer of the lost dirge of the lost land
of the lost people, in search of a place
where feet can find rest again (57)?


Conclusion


Jabbeh-Wesley’s love poems reveal her understanding of a very complex subject. She examines love in the context of its failures--diminished desire for one’s partner or betrayal. She explores the success of enduring love and companionship. She investigates love’s fantasy world where love remains unrequited. She examines love during war which explains the need for self-preservation--physical and psychological. And she conveys messages heard from ancestors who, out of love for their children, demand that they preserve their cultural treasures and continue tradition. The poems display earned experience and she dispenses knowledge like an old sage. It is shared with doses of love, practicality and humor.


© 2010 Althea Romeo-Mark


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Bibliography

Wesley Jabbeh, Patricia. Where the Road Turns. Pittsburg, Penn. Autumn House Press. USA, 2