In Voices from the Soil, the poet Mohammed Salihu reminds us to acknowledge the inevitability of the pain and ache we must all bear journeying through life, and what we must strive for to make the ache worthwhile.
To listen to a poet today, you must look out for what he is really saying. In a time diluted of the magic of language, even a reader cannot be very sure of what he or she is looking at when they encounter a poem—since the democratisation of poetry from the middle 2010s, aided by the Internet, not very much of it makes sense today, especially if it turns out to be confessional or the post-elegiac poetry of the New School. That language, now overbeaten, lacks the jaw-snap of creativity it once had, with every poet ready to cry about something or ‘the body.’ A reprieve from this could be a poet in exile whose work is a way of telegramming home. The latter case is where we meet the words of Mohammed Salihu, postman of his emotions, doing the twofold job of writing the poems and ensuring their delivery.
Voices from the Soil (2025) is what he calls his poetry chapbook, a first-time publication. It signals a ritual of connection, the poet’s connection to something; here, the soil, from which, perhaps, humans come to a greater understanding of life: soil, where the science of growth is understood; where flora, our inextricable ecological parallel, thrives; a place we all return to. But what does it mean to Salihu? In the first poem ‘Al Khaliq’ he writes, ‘We are but travellers in time / Summoned before the blank page of His creation, / Our footprints dissolving into the sands of the earth.’ But our journey can ever only begin from the soil, the clay from which we are molded. This is informed by Salihu’s Islamic faith: ‘Al-Khaliq, The potter of light and shadows, / The hand that molds the clay of being,’ he confesses. So we are back to ritual, and the first part of Salihu’s chapbook initiates this, in going back to the Creator for consultation, for edification—congruent with his Islamic faith—for our journey of ‘being’. From here, Salihu may step into a better understanding of the grief which further poems explore.
The primary emotion we read in most of the poems is grief, but with closer reading, we see that Salihu is turbulent with other deeper emotions or conflicts, as the pronunciation ‘voices from the soil’ begins to take shape. That ‘voice’ is a synecdoche representing these conflicts, one of which is an inability to mourn, or of not knowing how to: a very postmodern milieu which many younger people today may face as a result of their estrangement from family—having left the family fold to live by themselves, or even migrated, as is the case with Salihu, and trying to find their way through a foreign terrain—sucked into the monotonies of adulthood. A poem highlighting this is eponymously titled ‘No one taught me how to mourn.’ When Salihu meets an old friend at a café, they ‘talked, laughed, reflected, paused— but regret burned my throat. / A piece of him existed where I was never present’:
the club, the pub, the church, moments that painted
his breath without my brush. I wonder if he could
see me in the gallery of other moments; perhaps not.
He was alive in my forgetfulness while I was a ghost chasing our memories.
This conflict is shared with a late father too, another male companion whom the poet may have sought to understand his estrangement from his friend. But the absence of this figure, leaving the poet quite ultimately alone now, makes the speaker beg: ‘what of my father— whom the earth now fathers, while I live oceans away, becoming a refugee to his final moments? / How would the breeze ever bear witness to our unshared farewells’?
In the Freudian trajectory, the victim of such placelessness is expected to seek grace in his mother or the nearest female figure representing a mother. But it appears the speaker’s estrangement or inability to mourn already has him captive:
Now I know— even my mother, whose milk of love,
is white, can never soak time’s merciless scar.
Now I know— even my sister, whose gate of arms
are wide, can never fence time’s relentless hands.
Salihu’s persona arrives at his truth, to console himself, that ‘In the end, our hearts become custodians of aching’. Not because our hearts get used to this, but because to navigate life without losing our minds from the great tragedies designed to befall us, our hearts must learn to ache, to cope. The poem that follows this is ‘Modou,’ which seems like a self-referential poem to the poet himself and chronicles the immigrant experience. His speaker probes, among other things, racism, the valuation of himself amidst a nonindigenous space: ‘If rain washed away the trials of yesterday, what salt / will cleanse today’s scars and help me find myself?’
The voice from the soil still cries out in that line. Constantly, Salihu’s persona appears to be a satellite orbiting in the void, in search of the gravitational pull to a home planet. This is why he is tethered to memories of his late father to whom he dedicates a poem, ‘A Prayer for the Soil’, where he grapples with the last traces of their connection. He speaks of a first abandonment when his father left his mother for some other woman, and the stigmatisation his mother had to face for this, which he also inherited as one of the children. The pressing question as any child would ask: why?
Not much has changed for that grown-up child. Only that his questions and understanding have deepened into greater concerns. ‘I question your ways— / What black magic swept your feet away / from us?’ Even as he asks this one time, having to ‘walk the silk road of the capital, / smelling your [his father’s] footsteps— like abandoned photographs,’ he also has to deal with this fact:
But today, we gather to shroud your body, an
offering to the worms, to the soil. Today, even the
crows come to sip from the sight of your funeral—
fortune-telling your destination: stars or smoke.
This ability to not be vindictive but to acknowledge our common follies—seen in the selfish decisions we make sometimes—or our weakness as humans, is a true quality of a poet who by his trade we assume has gained a panoptic view of existence or life, or who is willing to. It is from this place, such deep reflection, that Salihu’s poems speak and connect with us, not only in what he is trying to say, but also in the quality of language. In special moments we read such lines as ‘The canine blade of poetry tears / The flesh of poets’; or ‘the years / the earth swallowed our dreams into its thigh’; or in ‘Her liquid hands soaking my feet in the soil where my dreams would grow.’ In the poem that follows, ‘Mama,’ where the last line above is culled from, we continue the speaker’s journey of grief, this time, as a son trying to place himself in his mother’s shoes to experience her grief, if possible.
This goes back to the Freudian quest mentioned earlier. It appears that that quest, forgone earlier on, fully emerges here. And after much traversing in the realm of mother, the speaker’s conflict with the inability to mourn is finally resolved. It is not that one should mourn, we finally see; but to acknowledge the inevitability of the pain and ache we must all bear: ‘O Mother, I fear death, not for us, but for the vacant silence it may create.’ This second part of the chapbook labelled ‘Gloom Songs’ ends with a last poem titled ‘The Song of the Desert,’ one last mournful note in Salihu’s grief litanies, where he confronts the gradual death of a place that neglects its spirituality: ‘I stand on the spine of these dunes, / Watching a crowd of abandoned faith.’ But it is not clear what place this is. His prayer, however, is that the desert, which is losing its song, will one day be ‘anointed with the oil of the sun.’
The image above now poses an interrogation. They are the last words in the poem. Why does the desert need the anointing of the sun, if it is predominantly a place often baked under the sun? Or maybe this desert is of colder regions? Let’s look at these lines:
I watch the desert devour bones,
Swallowing an entire lineage,
Until each tribe chokes on the thorn of their agony.
We understand that sunlight signifies life, but without proper management of the imagery of ‘desert’ in the poem—isn’t it natural for the sun to, even if metaphorically, ‘devour bones’, whereby the sun only intensifies this?—a lot can become conflated within a poem.
A poet is allowed the fallibility of still learning language. If he has mastered language, then he might run mad or lose the inspiration to write. This is to say that while Mohammed Salihu’s chapbook Voices from the Soil has its magical moments, it still bears the signs of a poet starting out on his journey with words and language, and that these mediums—as anyone who has engaged with them for a long time knows—will always betray you.
It is thus endearing to see that Salihu does not try to impress with language. He is more concerned with expression, the things he wants to talk about, sometimes making his style as straightforward and simple as possible. What comes close to a deliberate style is an influence of Qur’anic recitation as with certain surahs—e.g. Surah Yaseen—where letters are listed and the meanings assigned to them are sung. This is used in the poems ‘Al Khaliq’, ‘Sabir’, and ‘Vowels of Agony.’ This style has also been used by another Nigerian poet, Umar Abubakar Sidi, who sometimes writes in the Sufist tradition (of Oriental and Islamic origins), in his poem ‘Testament of Sand.’ Apart from this, the poem ‘Sabir’ in VFTS takes the evocative form of a religious verse, which trickles into Salihu’s sense of expression throughout the chapbook.
Salihu carves the path for hope, for forward movement, in the last section of the chapbook, subtitled‘Healing Songs’. Though it explores immigrant existentialisms, it bears a universality of truths. We read in ‘Beaded Metaphors’:
Where will my laughter sail when the salt of my
tears spills across the rocks of every palm?
Where will my dreams find shelter when the ink of
my words wanders with every wind?
I stretch my tongue, wide and wrinkled,
my worries spilling onto the canvas of others.
This is an observation of the beginning of one of those philosophical inquiries that meet us in unexpected places; in this scenario it is an evening where the speaker is out in a park in Paisley, Scotland. The poem continues with a rich exploration of the musings of the mind having struck upon fear and wonder at the same time; fear of the unknown hand of fate, and wonder at the possibilities of beauty that can exist amidst uncertainty. And as the park provides the setting for this to happen, Salihu begins to connect, to see the little things that make life endurable, even as an immigrant: ‘I notice the crows nearby, gathered above a carved bench. / I notice the carved bench etched in memory of the dead— / I notice the dead who had loved the gentle rhythm of Paisley town and the green of this park.’
It continues beautifully like this, the flow—then he sees a ‘Nigerian dad, a Scottish mum, and their Scottish-Nigerian child singing near the water fountain…’ Nature speaks to Salihu and he becomes grateful, even for leaves in all their colours; green, yellow, brown, which gather like ‘a crowd of memories.’ If the chapbook was a movie, this is where it would end, perfectly, if not for two more poems to go.
We have received Salihu’s telegrams of poems and he has shown us what a good postman he is, too. In Voices,the emphasis of the beautiful or tranquil, which is inextricably tied to people we are connected to and the places we call home, is always under threat. But is it possible to evade this? ‘Our hearts become custodians of aching,’ Salihu already tells us. Perhaps what we need is a reminder of our ephemerality and a deeper understanding of what we must strive for to make the ache we must bear worthwhile. This is not always easy; we face our greatest struggle trying to confront ourselves, but I believe Salihu is telling us in this work, that it is something we must do.