Forgotten Breaths

Book Description

Forgotten Breaths is an emotional, stunning and funny collection of poetry which swings with a wide smoothness between bleakness and joy, innocence and savagery, love and pain.... it's satirical and earnest, lyrical and despicable.

Review

In Forgotten Breaths, S. Haya recounts his life experiences in verse. It's a collection of poetry and lyrical pieces that focus mainly on lost love, evil, freedom, religion, conservation, death, and taboo subjects, like incest, female genital mutilation, and abortion. As the poet declares in Depression, his sapphic writing gives him grounding as he's lost interest in things that he used to love doing. Moreover, as suggested by the title, some poems point to a bygone era, e.g., There was No Darkness. In this poem set during the Kenyan freedom struggle, his grandmother narrated to him how the colonialists forcefully introduced sugar into the natives' diet, and how the natives' belief systems and identities were vilified as primitive by the white man.

Even though most of Haya's poems are free-form, a few, such as The Dinner Guest, have rhyming lines and meter. By employing dark humor in this piece, Haya forces the reader to contemplate the reality of the devil and his "reward," or lack thereof. On the other hand, the free verse and satirical piece The Nairobian is about a certain religious woman who is oblivious of the harm she's causing to her marriage by leaving her husband's catering needs to her underage housemaid. At the same time, while on her way to church, she ignores the plight of poverty-stricken girls located at a certain Nairobi suburb she passes through frequently, yet she donates lavishly to her pastor's car kitty.

I liked that I could connect emotionally with Haya through his first-person narrative. A poem like the Children of Nairobi River, for example, had a theme that resonated strongly with me. I found myself shocked by the sheer number of aborted babies (fetuses) that found their way into a river that traversed the breadth of the capital city of Kenya, Nairobi. Furthermore, the figurative language that Haya used, where he likened the river to a mother welcoming her children, was as disturbing as it was horrifying. Similarly, in yet another poem-The New Normal-like most city dwellers in developing countries, I found myself disillusioned by the effects of the coronavirus as it meant that I couldn't "travel to the village... to see our (my) grandparents."

Overall, as evidenced above, I thought that the greatest strength in Haya's poems was the diversity of its themes. In one instance, he could be talking about a "Jini" walking "from the sea bottom to the shore" full of "fury for her (whoever this is) in the brick house"; whereas, in another instance, he would be praising the birth of the savior of mankind. Because of this alternating viewpoint, I was held captive by some superstitious beliefs that were featured throughout his writing. A favorite one involved a ritual that was administered to Pokot warriors before they raided a neighboring tribe. I, thus, rated the book 4 out of 4 stars.

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