Name of Author: Sodiq Alabi
Title of Book: Deaf Birds & Frozen Frames
Genre: Poetry
Name of Publishers: Sevhage
Imprint: WHITELINE
Place of Publication: Makurdi, Benue State, Nigeria
Year of Publication: 2024
ISBN: 978-978-60889-1-4
Period: Modern Day/ Contemporary
Cover Design by: Nikole Stephen Okopi
No. of poems: 35 poems
Reviewer: Salamatu Sule
Do not judge a book by its cover, is usually a reader’s discretion or warnings about book cover designs and the contextual universe of any book. When I picked up Sodiq Alabi’s Dead Birds and Frozen Frames, I quickly got attracted to the turquoise blue which is associated with calmness, tranquillity and balance but a group of avian species in the form of Ravens or Crows in search of their prey and I pause! Right by the side is something that resembles the plumage of the Parrot who can be likened to the Parrot Poet. The title is written in white clouds as the words have tear drops that blur and I think this is deep.
The cover design artist, Nikole Stephen Okopi, did not just create a cover design to draw the reader’s attention but must have immersed himself in the creative world of Alabi’s poems therein. Deaf Birds & Frozen Frames is not just a lyrical poem of a ballad or dirge. It is reflective and recounts the nostalgic moment of what a society ought to be but is not. It is a migration story of paradise lost in the realistic wake of an idealism. To take a desperate flight out of the country and the fright of the new place that’s unknown. There’s desperation, pain anger and the urgent need to go in search of a new home where HOME has failed and hope taken flight and out of sight. Here is a vivid imagery of what it means to take flight from a place breaking its promise.
“All her existence
Fits on the tip of her wrapper
And with that, she flees”- PG. 9, Flight, DB&FF
In the opening poem Life Like British Weather, the storyteller poet narrates this to us as he reflects on places within his home in Nigeria he passed but never visited and his new home in the United Kingdom.
Here he can’t find the hustling and bustling of the roadside market the hawking of snacks and the enduring smiles of his countrymen.
The poet likens his new home as he narrates:
“On our last night, we searched on foot
For where to have dinner
And saw the city through a dark shade
Partly felt like home.
Though exile may hurt like an ingrowing nail”…. (pg,2, DB&FF)
Alabi likens this experience to the little value we place on what we used to have that is free but never allow ourselves to explore a new place where we can no longer enjoy that freedom but are happy to explore. The poet-personae tells us what it means to adapt and grapple with the realities of time, place and the people of his new home. And he says of this place as:
“In this new city with signs
Half written in a language
We couldn’t read”. (pg3, DB&FF)
This collection raises the question of what it means to be a hybrid. Sodiq Alabi’s thematic preoccupation explains to readers that to be a hybrid is to lose a certain sense of belonging about who you truly are in the place of your new environment after you return home, nothing changes. You belong to neither here nor there just misplaced.
The theme of place, whether home or abroad, they’re avian predators preying, devouring without conscience as life becomes ruthless and meaningless. Humans are displaced because a country is at war with itself…
“Home is no longer what it was
And exile is not what it was meant to be
We pay the debt of damaged climate
As capitalists rum makeshift solutions
Down our parched throats”- Purgatory, pg4
There’s a deep sense of reflection on the fading or the near extinction of tradition and the values which we use to uphold. Alabi portrays the problem and challenges which is reflected in this collection as the curse of the priestess who has been chained by the god of modernity. At the altar of modernism and colonialism, we lost our tradition and our civilization.
“The dairy priestess
Who once cared for your sisters
And gifted children to all
Smashed her calabash in pain
With that, the dangling souls
Of the few survivors
Seeped into the ground.
The council of elders fumed
Orunmila slushed,
Ordered the priestess into a cell
Is a chained god not a pathetic sight?” –PG, 43, Abandoned Gods, DB&FF
Recollection and memories adumbrate the verses of this collection, whether for good or bad. Sodiq achieves this using the diction of home-Yoruba language to show the richness of culture, preservation or documentation, and anthropological effect. This is captured in the poems What the Hunter Said, The Splitting, Song of Akanke, and Hilltop Declaration.
There’s the symbolism of place which is the United Kingdom and Nigeria and of places of Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire in poetics describing all the Shires as reminiscent of symbolic places like Abaji, Obajana, Osogbo, Abuja and Iwo- pg, 1 DB&FF
The eponymous title is critical to this review as Dead Birds symbolises Capitalism and all forms of capitalist tendencies on those who take flights from home, migrating to places that are supposed to fix their future. The poet in this collection says, it is usually not a glorified exile experience as avian predators are everywhere lurking around and so, therefore, it is necessary to capture all of the experience and recollection of memories of past, present and possibly of the future in Frozen Frames.
When Alabi’s Texture of Air was published in 2015, I thought I had read one of his finest collections, but Deaf Birds & Frozen Frames has proved that Sodiq Alabi is a voice that has emerged in African Literature worth celebrating for his simple lyrical and social advocacy for the reclaiming of individuality, identity, and purpose.
