This poetry book opens with a defiant edge. Migration-themed poems, especially those that document African relocation tales, usually highlight a traveller with the whole life stuffed into a bag. But Lilian came with more than a suitcase. She came with certificates and experience, and a CV carefully folded/ into the shape of possibility.
Migration in this book isn’t just geographical; it’s emotional. It’s not merely terrestrial; it’s astronomical. It’s less about arrivals than departures; less about new dreams than the ones abandoned. The migrant is a paragon of paradoxes, a coin of adventure, bearing memories of exits and advents. But arrival is not an event; it’s a process.
‘The Life I Learnt to Carry’ is a journal that reflects on grief as migration, migration as betrayal, and loneliness as grief. Lilian Onyinye Okoloye’s collection of fifteen poems is a narrative exploration of mental displacement, resilience and transformation. The diction is conversational, bereft of the figurative, and heavily reliant on emotional honesty and experiential sentiments. The chapbook features short-lined, prose-driven free verse.
The first poem, ‘The Job Hunt’, spans six pages. ‘Culture shock’, the collection’s shortest poem, spans four pages and has seventy-two lines. Lilian’s poems come unfiltered and didactic. But poetry demands precision of language. It begs brevity and intensity.
Okoloye can be more artistic with her titling too. Titles like ‘When You Left’, ‘The Day I Got Lost’, ‘Learning the Roads’ kill curiosity. Titles should elicit intrigue and create suspense. They set the foundation for creative twists.
‘Trust has a Price’, unlike the opening poem, deals with a different kind of rejection. The poet persona processes betrayal, realising that every departure calls for a new beginning, an invitation to explore new promises and embrace green experiences in unfamiliar terrains. The loss of a loved one leads to a surrender. Because grief is not a straight road. / It circles. / It returns. It takes you back to self. Mourning takes you through a season of moulting; a period of introspection and rebirth.
“I am becoming:
softer with people,
wiser with boundaries” [Trust has a Price]
Sorrow is a big burden to bear. Love is something you carry forever. Perhaps this explains the poet’s skirting of memories, avoidance of specifics, and search for escape in abstraction. But poetry is confrontation. Beyond structure, verse thrives in truth and mystery. A poem comes naked, unencumbered by the need to deliver self-help wisdom or moral commentary. It is a participatory art; the writer invites the reader to interrogate what is expressed and contemplate what is inferred.
Moving to a new country is a different kind of loss. It’s a peculiar variant of absence. You sacrifice relationships, careers, and a lifestyle to pursue dreams. Departures leave you with wounds. With exits, there is no closure, just memories.
Nursing a loss can be a lonely journey. You are never prepared enough for a relocation. You find yourself stuck in the margin, tossed between hope and grief. In ‘The country I Imagined’, the poet laments. She would trade the new quiet and the cold for things she erstwhile moaned about back home. It’s the pain of growth. The torture of unlearning and relearning; harnessing resources and building confidence.
“I arrived with plans
Then reality started
editing them” [Money Had Other Plans]
The poet persona learns to carry home; bend without breaking.
“Perhaps that is what starting again
really means: not forgetting where
you came from” [The Country I Imagined]
The author calls resilience an amazing oxymoron (page 12). This is the most thought-provoking expression in this collection. An oxymoron technically has two words. But rather than dismiss this interesting submission, I explored the word’s etymology. Resilience comes from the Latin verb ‘resilire’ (re-salire), meaning “to jump back”, “rebound”, or “recoil”. In physics, resilience is a material’s ability to absorb energy when stretched. In psychology, resilience is a metaphor for the mind’s dynamic ability to adjust to challenges and trauma. Resilience is a function of time and will, not necessarily a strength. It’s a human attribute. Every human eventually rebounds with enough motivation.
The migrant’s baggage, while navigating new cultures and existential complexities, is largely mental. Finding safe communities (and friendships) eases the saddle; this is loneliness, defeated. But activities or new memories cannot fill absence. ‘The Weight of Ordinary Days’ shows us that mundane events and everyday interactions are dress rehearsals for future grief. The poem closes on an emotive note, reminding readers to cherish every moment with loved ones, because they eventually become the memories that hold space during transitions.
“So now,
when family gathers,
I try to stay a little longer.
When someone speaks,
I listen.
When laughter fills the room,
I let it.
When there is food on the table,
I remember
that tables do not remain full forever”
Jide Badmus
Author, Dawn is an Open Wound
Jide Badmus is a poet and literary critic, and the author of five poetry books, including Dawn is an Open Wound (Noirledge Publishers, 2026), and eight pamphlets. He is the poetry editor for Con-scio Magazine, a mentor in the SprinNG Writers fellowship, and a member of the Board of Advisors for Libretto Magazine. Jide’s works have appeared in The Rumpus, Black Bough Poetry, The Nigeria Review, Agbowo, and elsewhere. He writes from Nottingham, United Kingdom.
