Obadike: And then it was over.

Kate Litterer here (alias Carol Caravan). Especially after reading Shannon's carefully-worded post, I am a little smokey in regards to Obadike's collection, but not because I feel she is not a talented writer. In fact, I thought her use of epigraphs and footnotes were meaningful, and although I feel she could have used hip-hop lyrics more evidently and instrumentally to tackle questions of race and personhood, I thought those were important to her collection.

I felt that once I hit "Shook" (p. 9), Obadike pulled me into the themes of her collection, which investigate racism and womanhood, or specifically her speaker's attempt to find a place of safety and comfort both in her personhood and outwardly. I give her a lot of credit for creating a multi-faceted, multi-personalized speaker whose voices aren't quite in dialogue with one another and I feel that this poem makes obvious the plight of feeling comfortable with oneself when one wants to act in different ways. Obadike's speaker is uncomfortable in the dinner situation: "At dinner, I sit next to a woman who speaks as if hemorrhaging" and "One of me can hear a rumbling, but she can't locate it" (lines 1 and 5). The speaker's discomfort comes out when "another of [her]" begins crying violently: "She thinks they mistake / my convulsive weeping for something else" (lines 9-10). But, as the narrative speaker assures the reader, "She doesn't know I am still dry" (lines 10-11). Another speaker emerges and "wants / to protect the talking women," although "She is the weakest among me and fears / the one who shakes" (lines 16-18). Ultimately, Obadike unites her three women-selves to a voyeuristic state: "We only hear the forks on ceramic / and the murmuring at other tables" (lines 23-23). The word "murmuring" shows the reader that the speaker/s has/have not gained stability or comfort and that she/they crave to act emotionally like the fast-speaking woman in the beginning of the poem, but do not. This sense of discomfort or weakness as a female speaker reemerges in the collection.

My blog title, "And then it was over," refers to the way I felt after the last poem, "Residue." "Residue" details the speaker's relationship with her period, which, in relation to the questions of femininity and sex throughout the book, might have symbolized a sense of strength and power. But the poem only briefly allows the speaker to recognize the special, individual power she holds, first as an attraction to a "nasty boy" and then as a house for eggs. Obadike writes: "[...] I bent to witness / unused eggs leak out of me, secret / words whispered from my uterus / to no one" (lines 17-20). While the speaker's blood is an object and does hold mystical power (to create; sexually attractive to the nasty boy), it is also a private thing, something for "the bookstore bathroom toilet" and something that to be "[lost] down a foreign drain" (line 1, line 24). Reading this poem, I thought "the speaker is finally finding a sense of comfort and strength that she derives from her womanhood"...and then I turned the page and it was over.

While the book didn't completely create closure for the female speaker's sense of comfort or protection, I don't think Obadike necessarily meant for it to close up happily so the reader could say, "Right on, girlfriend!" Instead, I was left contemplating the ways that the female speaker was strong, facing racist institutions and telling about it, and bringing up women's discomforts so they could be made obvious--I had the feeling throughout this collection that the speaker was yelling with her mouth wide open but no sound was coming out (and I mean that in a good way, because obviously I, as the reader, could hear what she was saying).