Althea Romeo-Mark

Book Review

A Quest of the Heart and Mind: A Review of Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s The River Is Rising

The River Is Rising. By Patricia Jabbeh Wesley. Pittsburgh: Autumn House Press, 2007, pp. 126.

The River Is Rising is Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s third collection of poems, the first two being, Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa (1999) and Becoming Ebony (2003).

Leonardo da Vinci believed that water is the driving force of all nature. Marcel Conche, a philosopher, believed that water is not only a metaphor for change, it is also the source. Water, significant in all cultures and civilization, is one of the central themes in The River Is Rising. The power of and the reverence for the ocean, rivers and streams, felt by the coastal tribes in Liberia, is dominant. The writer, a child of the Liberian coast, sees the ocean as a powerful entity competing with land and air for space and place. It has a voice, it speaks to us. Also prominent is this book is the theme of survival in particular reference to the destructive Liberian Civil War, which raged for fourteen years. Secondary themes include the vulnerability of planes and flying, roots and the meaning of home, and what it means to become a woman.

In the title poem, “The River Is Rising” (11), found in Part I of the book, entitled “Those Who Survived”, the river is seen as a symbol of renewal and strength. The poem begins with a line that is repeated throughout the poem. “The river is rising, and this is not a flood.” The message here is: “After years of drought, the ground (is) hardened and caked in blood”, but the river is not coming to destroy and overwhelm those who depend on it; it is coming to cleanse, heal, feed and give the inhabitants strength. The poem, “In Case of Water Landing” (13), which is also a plane poem, tells us “something water is forever/seeking to know.” The ocean or the river is personified in its lapping against the shore and can be compared to a curious child reaching out to land in search of knowledge. The poem “At Point Loma” (29), informs us that “At Point Loma, a student may dip a toe or two in/ the ocean, in between classrooms and teachers.” This point of view is contrasted to “Altoona, where/ some will never understand how a student can learn/ anything sitting on the beach.”  And to San Diego where, “there are so many boats/the water has not air to breathe; the air has no water to drink/there is so much to live for/and yet my boat neighbors have chosen to live on/ the water, not on the shoreline, on the sand, or on the bare cliffs where Point Loma University, so/blessed, sits along the peaceful shoreline as if  waiting for God . . . /This sort of place makes my soul cry/ for that other shoreline so far away, where home sits/ by the sea, waiting, too, where the ocean is wild and hot.”

In the poem, “In the Ruined City: A Poem for Monrovia” (34), the author laments the plight of the capital city, Monrovia, and what Liberia has become. “In the Ruined City, the water flaps lightly/ against the beach at night/ It is August, after too many years/the rain still pours down like stones/The Atlantic always knows when to go to sleep/but all the girls roam dark nights/ and men have forgotten they are still men . . . The ocean roars like wild fire/It roars like a hungry lion at dawn.” And further down in the same poem, rain becomes a symbol of the misery for the country’s inhabitants. “Liberia will drown in this rain . . . Only the rain knows how to cry.” Finally, the series of poems about the ocean, rivers and streams, end with a tragic drowning and inconsolable loss reflected in “Searching for Margaret” (35). It reflects the hard reality and complexity of nature. “Waves aren’t all that merciful . . . ”

The ocean, rivers and streams are a part of nature that can be alluring as well as destructive. Nature unleashes a force beyond the control of man.  War, however, is orchestrated by the will of man. The next prominent theme in this collection is the Liberian war and its effect on Liberians at home and abroad. The first poem which introduces us to this theme is “Lamentation After Fourteen Years” (5). The author makes reference to the virtue of patience borne by every Liberian who survived. “If you can sit beside the river long enough,/ the tide will come in.” But the memory of the horrors of war remains with survivors. “We sit here/my family and I, reliving the war-Charles Taylor’s/cruel warfare haunts us like weeds left so long/they eat up the yard”. The poem “In the Ruined City: A poem for Monrovia” (34), makes reference to the Dorklor dancer who lost his legs and sits by the wayside waiting, the girls who have legs made from plastic weapons, and the boys who pretend it is okay for beautiful girls to walk around on plastic legs. In a final lament, the poem protests:  ”it is something to lose your legs . . . to Charles Taylor’s ugly war”. The inhumanity of the war is brought to focus in the poem “All Dirges Have Ceased” (43). The last four lines of the third stanza are clear and cruel: “Our warlord tells us we cannot wail or mourn/or sing a dirge and wear black lappas or bury/the dead or send a letter abroad to tell those/who do not know about our dead.”

Here it is evident that the war interfered with traditions that people held to for centuries as well as natural civil rights.  Another example of this can be found in the poem “Ceasefire Christmas-1990″ (48). Past Christmases are contrasted with Christmas 1990: “It is Christmas/but no cars coming, no family talking loud, /no street carolers, no Santa Claus and his troupe/to dance up dust for a quarter, a dime/or some dollar notes that won’t buy a fish.” Life during the war takes a turn for the worse in the poem, “An Elegy for the St. Peter’s Church Massacred” (44), when a tradition is further eroded.  In this case, the sanctity of the church is disrespected when people who go there to seek shelter and safety are butchered by soldiers. Guns rained upon sleeping people “as if this were not already July . . . It is a sad story when we survive the massacre/of hundreds who were only sleeping before God.” This incident is so horrifying that the writer mentions it in another poem. “The Morning After: An Elegy” (46-47). It asks the question “Where was God at two o’clock in the morning? /How did those soldiers push aside doors, / reason, God?”

The war led to the displacement of many people, some who escaped across the borders and ended up in refugee camps, and others who fled to distant countries. So “home” becomes another theme and its meaning expands into new dimensions. The poem, “Something Death Cannot Know” (54), tells us how the author and her husband stole away “from the camp one day/to see if it was now safe to come back home, from the war.” It proceeds to tells us that although you could count the rocket holes in the wall, the splinters, the leaks in the roof, although she saw windows blown apart, her Sunday dresses trashed on the floor, she “was home again.” Her reaction was to laugh until she “began to weep. /Glad to be alive, to be here, /to know a town that had become ghost, to get acquainted/ with the birds and the flowers and the river.” Home for the poet is not just a house, a physical place; it is the surroundings, the sights, the sounds and the smells the poet holds in her memory.  In reunion with the familiar, she finds those things that tie her to that place.

Another view of home is presented in the poem “Coming Home: For Besie-Nyesuah” (61). Here she welcomes her daughter to their new home in Pittsburgh, to where they had moved from Michigan with the words, “We are all trying to find home”, like many Liberians who had fled the war. The poem continues,

But Michigan is that ghost that stands at the outskirts

of your new town, where your memory refuses to shut out

so many years, and that year when you arrived with

nothing and looking to find home among strangers,

where the cold, cold winds became a new friend.

Your second chance at finding home, now becoming

memory too. Michigan haunts the holidays, another

ghost to carry around among all the other ghosts we are

seeking to undo.  In Monrovia, families will gather

and discuss the many years we have been away from

home. Monrovia is the true ghost story of lost peoples

in the Diaspora.

The writer ends on a sad note, one which many share.  She states that “…one by one, our children . . . will never know/ where we really come from.” And she ends the poem with a sentiment that many Liberians or anyone who has fled their home with their young in search of safety must feel.  “We are becoming new people.” One cannot help but ask the question:

What is home to our children? What is home to people who have become nomads? In the poem, “Leaving: A Poem for Gee” (75), Gee and the family leaving home causes the writer to acknowledge that this leaving is voluntary. It is not an action forced upon them. But in this town, there are many who left their homes involuntarily: “In Byron Center, where we used to live-that/ small Michigan Dutch town of small houses . . . kind people with old stories of having/ arrived on ships in the World War. A town where no one/ever went anywhere because now, they all belonged  . . . War is such a mystery, /such an unexplained phenomenon, an unexplained/grassland, the indefensible stories of seekers.”  Her feeling about this home that she is leaving is made very clear when she says, “I move away tomorrow, I will leave behind only a house/ on a bare street corner.” Finally, the dream of returning to that home weighs heavily on her psyche, remaining a strong desire. The poem “While I Wait for the War” (78) is about that. The waiting to return has been a long one and the writer tells us, “I used to say, ‘When the war ends, we will go back home.’/To the sea and the river, where the humid sun turns miles/ of marshland behind my house into solid ground.” But “I used to say” suggests being tired of waiting; the war has gone on so long that one has to make contingency plans, yet the desire to return is always there: “So I buy a house, a car, to look like I’m settling, to replace/ what the war took away. I write a book for everyone/ to read the stories . . . Sometimes I want to just get up/ and walk back home.”

Another group of poems take us from land and water to the sky. Planes must take us from one to the other . . . liquid, air, solid . . . each having it own virtues and dangers.  The writer tells us in her poem, “In Case of Water Landing” (13), that she loves “the feeling of staying afloat, / but landing is such a good thing. The feet were made/ to dwell on solid ground . . . the attendant is teaching/ us how to stay alive in a crash, how to stay afloat.” She closes the poem, noting that water is forever seeking to know land and become land: “I love the earth, / its cruel solidity of crushed surfaces.” The poem, “In a Moment When the World Stops” (71), speaks about the horrors of 9/11, while “Under the Rubble” (56) addresses the psychological impact this incident had on those who saw it second hand. It reinforces the idea that they, too, became passengers in spirit.  “One of These Days, We Should Give Her a Medal” (18) lauds flight attendants who returned to the air after 9/11. Their bravery is reflected in the line “. . . woman who has turned gray in the air.” The writer continues to sing their praises. “We should all line up beside/ the plane upon landing, and give/ her the Bronze Star for not/ letting us drown/ in the Atlantic.” The role of the flight attendant is followed up on in another poem, “Until the Plane Drops” (39). The poem, “City” (37), takes us in another direction. It focuses on the idea that the city looks beautiful from the sky at night in the plane that was “groaning” and that the reality below is hidden. It is a place where people are worn out and the city is broken. It is a place where “All the birds/ moved out long ago. / The trees too.”

The last section of the collection, “Woman”, talks about some famous women such as Mary, mother of Jesus. She, like all mothers, must cope with the death of her son. The writer, however, in focusing directly on her own roots, exposes us to the Grebo tradition and the women who belong to it. She delves into indigenous mythology, for example in “Mammie Wata” (92): “When we saw her or when we thought/ we saw her, there she stood, / in the middle of the Atlantic . . . She’s really a fish, I thought, a woman-fish/ or a fish-woman or a woman with/ a fish at her tail.” There are also the rituals as found in “A Winding Trail” (85) and “In the Making of a Woman” (83), which affirm that “After all, she must be made a woman/ in every sense that a Grebo woman can be./ Then the naming ritual must begin. / The recounting of histories/ she may never hear repeated/ except the day she brings forth/ another like herself.” Finally, there are the taboos. The poem “Taboo” (84) takes us on a journey of discovery of the women’s place in the Grebo world.

The reader will find the various themes interesting. The collection gives the reader a very personal view of the Liberian Civil War, as well as it brings into question the meaning of home. Is home a physical place or a psychological place, or both?  Can we have many homes? For those like me who have lived on several continents, the question of home carries particular depth. As well, the influence of the ocean, the river and streams will resonate with those who grew up near bodies of water. They have learned to fear Tsunamis, hurricanes, cyclones, have held them in awe, and have spun mythology around the underground river world, Atlantis, the city in the ocean, and Mammie Wata or mermaids. Ancient and modern men see the oceans and rivers as challenges and have respect for these elements which directly and indirectly affect our lives. As I was born and grew up on an island, I share this fascination with the writer.  She has also caused me to think of the elements in a new way.

The ocean as an entity trying constantly to reach land is an interesting concept.

In every culture, there is a ritual of some sort regarding the process through which we become women and men, some richer than others. The stronger the ritual, the closer it is to our heart, and the more meaningful it becomes. It is a process all cultures can learn from and which many cultures share.  Tradition is our past and our future. This is very intriguing as I come from the Caribbean and I have learned about my African past from these poems. Lastly, the plane is a twentieth century phenomenon. Its power to remain in the air is a mystery to the ordinary mind and a realization of the intelligence of humankind. And for those, like myself, who like to be in control of their lives, it takes that power away. For many, flying in a plane brings on anxiety. This is heightened by the reality that planes can become weapons of destruction as proven in the two world wars and the carnage of 9/11.

Many of these same themes run through Jabbeh-Wesley’s previous publications, Before the Palm Could Bloom and Becoming Ebony. They are subjects that are obviously important to her. Especially dominant in all three is the discussion of the Liberian Civil War. Those who are war weary or wish to put the war behind them might find the persistence of this theme disturbing. For others, reading about the war again might be a form of catharsis.  For those who wish to put the war behind them, the other themes-water as a source of life, a source of awe and respect;  the meaning of home; our fear of and fascination with planes; and how we become women-are worthwhile exploring and will stimulate your imagination. I suggest you read the collection and find out what each poem means to you.