Of love, life and healing in Amife Sabatina’s Little Words

A Review of Amife Sabatina’s Book, Little Words

Little Words, a collection of poetry and prose, dwells on the mind and phases of the life of the author. In the opening section addressed ‘To My Reader’, Amife highlights her love for reading, specifically acknowledging the myriad of books her sister bought her on every trip back home and how it inspired her love for storytelling. Going by this, it was only a matter of time before Amife would finally achieve the feat of publishing her first work, Little Words.

The 11-chapter book is an approachable literary collection with easily understood subject matter. It focuses on various periods of the author’s life and offers a clear voice of understanding to readers in a medium that typically seems complex or involved.

The first chapter, Childhood, opens with a philosophical rendition of the art of being ‘Born’:

A quick opening for a quick life. Hurry and make a story. Hurry! A quick moment and it’ll be time to die.

The author further depicts being born with the drawing of an open door, reflecting the idea of entering a new realm. An interesting addition to an already powerful literary work, line drawings accompany poems and prose in many other parts of the book, giving a spry effect to the story being told.

This combination of a written and abstract form of storytelling is bound to give the reader a raw and authentic experience rarely found in similar books.

In the first chapter, the author also addresses ‘A Letter to my 10-Year-Old Self,’ where she travels back in time to tell her 10-year-old self what she has seen in the world; simultaneously comparing her current realities to the imaginations she had of the future at a much younger age. In many ways, she shares with the younger generation the things to expect as they journey through life.

In chapter two, Clay Body, Amife writes on ‘The Broken Mirror,’ where she draws the reader’s attention to the human instinct to ‘fix’ things about our bodies based on society’s standards.

This bare and harsh truth is touched on again in chapter nine, when Amife writes about ‘The Broken Mirror Shards’, and ‘putting them back together’.

She talks about how she has learnt to love her body despite a tiresome history of trying to change it.

In chapter three, Hard Things, Amife introduces us to the impacts that colonialism and a history of slavery have had on her and her ancestry—an ongoing struggle of misplaced identity and internalised pain.

In chapters four, A Person In A World and five, Sweet Words, we find a range of highly engaging poems and prose as the author covers topics from ‘Solitude’ to ‘Love’ to ‘Idling’.

In one of the proses under chapter five, titled ‘The Way I Enjoy Today’, she writes:

Here is how I enjoy my days now. I pretend I have come down from some distant future to savor it one last time.

Like many other titles in this collection, these core phrases have a timeless sense.

And in the following chapters, many of the poems and prose equally stand out for that reason. Like in ‘Youth, A Drying Stream’, where we are presented with the all too familiar feeling of a fading youth:

I wish to be a sparrow or an okapi. I wish to count time only from sun to moon and nothing more.

I wish society wasn’t constantly in my ears about what should happen and when. Perhaps then I wouldn’t be aware of how fickle time is.

Or in ‘Tears’, where a distinct perspective on tears—a common measure of softness or toughness—challenges the outlook on why we cry:

Tears are no weakness of mine

They are top shelf on my rack of strength

Salty cathartic raindrops of vigor

In the final chapters, The Flight of A Bird and Dear Now, Amife shares many bottom-line truths. There are several descriptions of the learning curve of life and the tenderness of time, that the book is bound to leave the reader pulsed with good energy by the time they are flipping through its last pages.

Expressing herself through fluidity and simplicity, Amife’s Little Words carries a classical form of thinking, expression and world view.

Getting close to the poetry and prose and understanding its nuances reveals its significant purpose—to be unafraid of raw expression and to love and feel deeply.

Little Words is timeless and recommended for book lovers of all ages. It is one of many works that convey a picture of poetry’s future engagement with modern audiences.

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