Roseline Mgbodichinma is a Nigerian writer, poet, and blogger passionate about documenting women’s stories. She is currently pursuing a law degree and actively freelancing. Roseline is a contributing fiction editor for Barren Magazine, a submissions editor at Iskanchi Press, a Nairobi Fiction Writing Workshop (NF2W) scholarship recipient, and a  SprinNG alumna. She served as a judge for the second SprinNG Women Authors Prize (SWAP) and has received a pushcart nomination for her poetry. Her work has been published in Isele, Native Skin, Down River Road, Illino media, Amplify, JFA Human Rights Mag, Blue Marble Review, Kalahari Review, Indianapolis Review, The Hellebore, and elsewhere. You can reach her on her blog at www.mgbodichi.com where she writes about art, issues and lifestyle.

Precious Okpechi: Hello Roseline, I am pleased to have you as our featured poet for December. As a writer of both poetry and prose, tell me, do you think one form of writing should be regarded as high art over the other?

Roseline Mgbodichinma: Thank you for having me, this is such an honour. I think that in some ways the foundation for poetry and prose is storytelling and it’s the underlying story that makes for either prose or poetry that I deeply care about. I mean, sometimes an idea can span out as poetry or prose, or even poetry and prose. I am just a vessel and the story determines which form it should be told. Both forms of writing can be elevated in their own ways, so I do not think one should be regarded as high art over the other, or maybe I am biased because I have the luxury of writing both. Also, I’d like to add that poetry is my first love. I find that I don’t have to explain or justify anything when I write poetry: the sun can be pitch black or lavender if I want, and a man can be an orange juice. When I am writing prose, however, I am more cautious about chronology and how to make sense, it’s almost like I have to be fully present and in touch with all the blurred lines to make a good story. Of course, I have read short stories that don’t go through all of this to be great, but this is what my reality is looking like at the moment and I am very appreciative of it.

Precious Okpechi: My favourite piece of yours is the short story, Souvenir, published on Isele. There’s something poignant about how the life of the narrator was made bare to us, yet we the readers do not really know her. We are kept at a distance about how she feels about everything going on in her life. I am curious about the origin of and what this story’s intent is.

Roseline Mgbodichinma: This is a very interesting question and I love that Souvenir is your favourite because I wrote it on the spur of the moment. I needed to meet a deadline for a contest that I did not win, so I left it alone for a while because I felt it was either too strong to be conventionally relatable or just in need of more reworking. I guess Souvenir originated from my hunger to document diverse experiences of women, to show that it’s not a taboo for women to be flawed and make rash decisions because of the trajectory of their lives. I also wanted to capture detachment because I believe People can be very familiar with the events that lead up to a person’s trauma but they can become completely aghast when that event begins to translate into unfamiliar emotion. It’s more common than we know, the ability of Human beings to be emotional without being emotive and I wanted to show that in Souvenir, through pain and love. Sometimes gory or sad experiences in one’s life can turn them into bystanders in their own story. It is a very retrograde form of witnessing where you are too present in your mess to fully engage with the reality of it, so you choose blandness as a coping mechanism.

Precious: Poetry, like everything about art, is ever-evolving and open to several interpretations due to shifting individual perspectives. In your understanding, what is poetry?

Roseline: I confess to going to google the meaning of this question, I have also come back unsatisfied with the answers. It’s because poetry is not one thing to me. For me, poetry is a form of immortalisation, it is actions pressed into words to preserve the meaning of life or document it. Poetry is a versed kind of doing and undoing, it is an art form that is alive and revealing. Poetry in some ways is a form of relationship, between persons, objects and even nothingness. Sometimes it is a spark, other times it’s the thing that quenches the fire. I’d just sum it all up to say that Poetry is metamorphosis and nobody can really dictate what form it is capable of becoming.

Precious: In your poem, The Market Place, you write: If you haven’t given your arm out in kindness / & gotten nothing in return / you have received something / strong enough to leave your heart / begging for love. There’s in these lines an underlying meaning, that only a heart whole and without hurt yearns for love. I’d love to hear more about this. 

Roseline: Your interpretation of these lines has sent me back to the poem again and I see what you mean, but really what I was trying to do was paint a picture of the starvation and vacuum that makes us crave love. It is hurt, I think, that propels us to love. I used the word ‘begging’  in those lines because I believe that once in our lives we have been faced with situations that leave us with so much void that our hearts are earnestly crying out for some sort of affection and like a beggar, it often takes whatever it is given. The wants of the heart can make us unreasonably desperate and before we know it, we have, like in the subsequent lines of the poem,  discounted our worth with hope that it will fetch us any kind of affection.

Precious: Thinking about poetry as a tool for social function, what are those themes that are central to your work? 

Roseline: I read somewhere that poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise, and this divination is poetry’s social value. I resonate with this very much, so themes of spirituality, burden & bodies, Escape, love, and loss are central to my work.

ALBINO

Where do you go when paleness means you could go extinct?  

How do you witness the rainbows 
when lack of pigment means you don’t deserve
to dance in the rain. 

The irony of colour,   
that black bodies wear poison 
to become white enough, to evade prosecution

But if you are born with sun in your eyes   
and spots on your skin,
if by nature’s chance, melanin is absent 
it means you are wild animal for slaughter   

Here – too white to be black 
There – too black to be white   
What was the world before monochrome?

To fall in love with lightning

Raindrops are sweat beads
cascading your body &
the sun – a way you smile 
with fire brewing on your teeth
The rush of wind in 
my marrow might mean 
this love is only momentary 
like a wisp of knowing
that loses itself in the mystery
of another’s arm
It is this uncertainty 
That makes me think of affection in seasons

If you hold me today
you might build a shell over my body tomorrow 
So, I say to myself 
run, run, lest you fall in love with lightning