A Body of Water
A Body of Water by Chioma Urama. University of Georgia Press. Georgia Poetry Prize.
Hardcover 96 pp. $22.95.
“This is the part that needs to be screamed...” This line in the poem “Ka Chi Fo” embodies the voice of Chioma Urama and what she is revealing in her debut collection A Body of Water. It is a poetic exploration of her historical ties with the American South and the result of a conversation she has with her ancestors. Stemming from Nigerian Igbo and African American heritage, Urama’s work discusses her family’s fragmented history of enslavement, the connection she has with her past, and how those two aspects intertwine with her current interactions with the world. In “Google Search for my Ancestor,” “John Best,” “Plantation,” and “North Carolina,” Urama writes about the way plantations are described online.
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She uses bold formatting on the word best throughout the piece to draw attention to the popularization of modern plantation tours and how people present history in a way that erases the experience of enslaved African Americans who once occupied the land. The work is separated into three sections titled: Bride, Groom, and Witness. The “Bride” section opens with the name of a Black woman and Urama’s ancestor, Barbara Ann Gardner. She explains who she was and her family line beginning from the year 1818. In totality, the poems are a revelation of Black girlhood and womanhood, and the titles can be considered mini poems themselves. “A 70% Probability that You Will Have the Same Attachment Style as Your Mother (or Six Generations Removed from Enslavement)” is repetitive but effective with the line “go away” repeating six times before changing to “come here, go away” for the rest of the poem. In “Tryna Get Right with God,” she writes: “They say, “the black body,” and she can smell the burnt basement bulb swinging on its cord, a black girl in a blue dress lying in a pile of rust-colored leaves, George Washington’s wide-toothed Igbo grin.” She articulates her emotions using imagery and gives the reader a chance to visualize the scene, hear the sounds and musicality she is trying to convey, and lets us come to our own conclusions on how to interpret the moment.
In the section titled, “Groom,” her poem “Rocky Mount Mills” is a multi-page work that is part lyrical prose poem and part history lesson, centered on the Rocky Mount Mills cotton factory, the Tar River Trail that surrounds it, and the slaveholding Battle family that occupied the land (and still has claims to it today). She opens with a five-star review of the trail and writes: “The river was flowing and the sunrise was beautiful. I never felt unsafe. This is a great place to run.” However, her seemingly straight-forward review revealed a dark history and pervasive time where an enslaved Black man killed a White overseer on the plantation that housed the cotton mill. The enslaver, James Smith Battle, defended Will, the enslaved man, in court after an investigation convinced him that Will was defending himself from the overseer's attacks and promise of violence. She writes that Battle was perhaps the first slaveholder in the American South to defend an enslaved man. The connection she draws with her carefree run at the beginning of the poem ends with Will running for his life against the enraged overseer and the other enslaved men who were ordered to run after him while he tried to evade capture. Urama often draws on these associations and marries the past and present in a single poem to make the reader reflect on their connection to the space around them.
Beautiful and lyrical, Urama carries the reader on a journey throughout the entire collection. The work contains poems that are visually unique, where formatting techniques, erasure, and prose poems coexist and divergent perspectives take over the narrative with Urama orchestrating the exchange. “Mending in the Pediatric Ward” is a poem that exemplifies this testament and shows how playful Urama is with white space. The words are separated by virtual and horizontal lines that resemble a staircase or a timeline. Urama is not afraid to create art with new forms and let it speak for itself. I appreciate how she inserts aspects of joy and culture with “Recipe for Jollof Rice” and ruminates on the creation of her family name with “Blue.”
The last section titled “Witness” is Urama’s final alter call to the collective and those with ties to the African American experience. She opens with a question: “what star did you come from?” in the poem that shares the title of the collection, “A Body of Water.” Historically, many African Americans have had a difficult time finding and reckoning with their origin story. With this question, Urama is almost offering a challenge to African American readers with similar ties to enslavement to figure out the truth and the trauma and leave behind what no longer serves our futures. She inserts her understanding of religion and the ever-present sanctuary scenes that can be found in most protestant churches in “Bible Study” and the negative experiences she’s had with organized religion in “Jehovah’s People.” The line, “then my mother, who committed the terrible error of being too much flesh and too much fire in a place where only God can be both,” was an honest revelation of how she felt to be in this community: chased by religious imperfections, but still required to go after what she was taught she would never catch up with. In the next poem, she writes, as if to offer solace to the reader and to herself, by quoting: “I have the words I need to heal myself” on the same page eighteen times. It’s a mantra and a balm after reading through so much history of the destruction of the Black body from the beginning of the collection, and I accepted it with open arms.
As the collection winds down, she is clearly guiding us to a resolution and to a more positive ending. In “A List of Things that Give Me Pleasure (Or, Redirecting my Body Towards Pleasure)” she engulfs us in a list of tangible objects and experiences that make her happy. She extends a hand to the reader to reflect on the same things and find a place to finally call home. This collection is visceral, inventive, and historical. It is an exploration of dispossession and kinship, and Urama repeatedly calls on the reader to occupy the space within history that we are often told we have no access to. In her words, she addresses us as her own family and reminds us to remember our past rather than circumvent the history of who came before us—because nothing, like the memory of water, is ever lost.
— Tyra Douyon
