Back Home There’s A Box Of Chocolate: An Intersection of Loss and Love
A Review of Odu Ode’s “Back Home There’s A Box Of Chocolate” by Adamu Yahuza Abdullahi
Odu Ode's Back Home There's A Box Of Chocolate revolves around socio-political happenings in our immediate environment—Nigeria. While it centers on the themes of loss, memory, motherhood, and sacrifice, it explores the social unrest and the temporariness of life. Written in simple and intentional lines, each poem draws the reader to the realm of love and loss. In each poem, Odu grieves with a unique language that makes you doubt the eeriness of grief. Painting it with so much brevity, Odu makes this collection a book to return to for everyone that seeks solace from grief and its ineptitudes.
We see the poet narrating the loss of his mother, with a dexterity that conspicuously confirms his mastery of the narrative style of poetry. The collection started with an empathetic opening, a heartbreaking narration of the circumstances surrounding the death of his mother.
In the collection, Odu Ode experiments with loss and love from the lens of human experience. The poems poignantly capture shattered dreams, unfulfilled wants, and sacrifice. Michael Imossan titled a poem in his collection— “For The Love Of Country And Memory Because Nigerian Poets Shouldn't Be Writing About Love And Ice Creams”, Odu Ode, in contradiction, shared with us an offering “Back Home There's A Box Of Chocolate”. Just like Michael's collection, Odu, in his mastery of the language of poetry and its devices, ironically call us to home, where a box of chocolate awaits us.
Reading further into the collection, we find out that the chocolates that await us at home are:
"songs folded into a pillowcase— songs flowered with mortal petals ", " bodies bruised by bullets", " barns tuned into small huts of bones", a dissolving country, and recollected memories baptized into names of colors.
"You hold a pledge and a rifle
I hold a dissolving country in my mouth"
The above lines tell us how gruesome home has become. The persona started the poem with personal grief and then extends to his grief for his home, our home. This came as envy in the lines "she holds a portion of her dad's smile/ at least, she inherited something." In an emotive and powerful way, the persona grieves the absence of fatherly love, of something to hold on to as what reminds them of their father. We see communal love in its raw and truest forms in the poem that portrays a mother searching for death in Zamfara.
In the collection, the author deliberately chose not to give the poems full titles but alphabetic numberings— which I think is a deliberate act, because there is no name to give our ruin. We see the poet imploring us to cover the scars of our grief.
"let's not brag about how much grief we nurse, let's not mention the wounds"
There are no names for how we grieve. In each of the poems, the poet’s persona experiments with grief with the imagery of love, and he does it so well that it leaves one awestruck.
This collection is a subtle commentary on how to mourn a beloved, how to return to memories that peel you off, “how to say goodnight here when none is ready to bid you farewell”, how to fall in love with death, how to find survival — ‘in your bones’, and how to find pieces of chocolates in a home floored with war. If you’ve lost someone, or something dear to you, Back Home There’s A Box Of Chocolate is the book for you. Find it. Read it and fall in love with your grief.
Poetry is a beautiful thing, you would be reminded of that again after you've perused the beauty in Back Home There's A Box Of Chocolate.
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Adamu Yahuza Abdullahi, THE PLOB, is a member of The Poetic Collective (TPC) and a finalist at the most peaceful University of Usmanu Danfodiyo, Sokoto. He is a budding poet, essayist, and aspiring researcher. He is a Best Of The Net Nominee and a second-place winner of the first edition of the Hassan Sulaiman Gimba Esq Poetry Prize. He won the National Association of Kwara State Students (NAKSS) UDUS chapter 2023 harmony essay contest and was shortlisted for numerous essay contests and poetry contests. When not found reading, he discusses literature with his peers.
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