Poetry book “Like Butterflies Scattered About by Art Rascals” by Nigerian poet Umar Abubakr Sidi

By Ashraf Aboul-Yazid

My journey to the world of Masobe Books a when I got to read “Like Butterflies Scattered About by Art Rascals”; a poetry book written by my Nigerian poet and friend Umar Abubakr Sidi. It was not only the content that attracted me, but the way it is being presented in a published product. I believe that literature is kept on paper will be the same forever, but to print and merchandise, it has to compete in the market. It has to be fully well designed, and perfectly produced. And this was the case of this sharp sleek product of literature.

Nigerian poet Umar Abubakr Sidi exchanges his book with Egyptian poet and novelist Ashraf Aboul-Yazid

I paid a visit to Masobe Books and Logistics Limited’s website, to know it was founded in 2018 with offices in Lagos, Nigeria. It was not only showing a list of previously published books, but also keynotes, biographies, as you browse their bookstore, to read about new releases, be introduced to “Bestsellers”, meet “Young Adult’s Literature”, get an idea of the forthcoming publications, stay longer with “Books of the Month”, read deeply about their authors, and enjoy watching different videos with discussions, features and book trailers.

About Umar’s book, I read: “There is a luminescence of words in Umar’s sophomore collection of poetry, an audacity to employ poetic license without boundaries; a rascality, sometimes verging on creative mischief, to explore all perceptive and expressive possibilities. To probe, using the language as pathfinder, through dense uncharted regions of experience. To discover the mythical, pellucid elixir of eternal life hidden behind the screening stardust of mortal existence”.

On reading this collection of poems, it seemed that I was not only traveling to Nigeria, across the African Sahara, but I was taken to so rich world of the poet who has brought histories, geographies, and world icons of literature altogether, mixing them - in a surrealistic way of art - to let us share hi inspiring imagination.

Masobe Books Logo

So, when you read “The Meaning of Guernica”, no surprise to read “Kahlo denied being a surrealist bomb in the hand of a Spanish matador”, and when a title of “The Bawdy Quatrains of Abu Nuwas” appears, do expect to fly above a hall where a dervish is whirling or a Baobab tree grows. The surrealism is not only bringing names of surrealists, but inserting them in a surrealistic way, and creating an eternal amazing scenes.

The gallery of the book is not only in the BW 10 illustrations distributed across the 96 pages book, but the gala collection of artists mentioned across the poems; added to Frida Kahlo, we are meeting Picasso’s works - “Guernica” and “Woman in a Red Armchair” - and the False Mirror “la faux miroir”; the surrealist oil painting by René Magritte, Dali, Lucy Schwob, Pollock and Heisler for example.

I certainly could add TJ Benson’s illustrations to the works gathered by the author in this world gallery. While they are absolutely African, but they are rendering the surrealism’s effect, as their black backgrounds evoke endless meanings with motifs rooted in the garden of the poems.

Nigerian poet Umar Abubakr Sidi

To be precise, Umar is not only a curator of art, but also a curator of critics, poets and scholars alike. So a huge collections of these literary iconic will also appear: Jacques Rivière, Ingrid Schaffner, Paul Eluard, Mary Ann Caws, Giorgio de Chirico, Jung and Freud.

There is more to be given by Umar’s texts, to present himself as a mentor as well; he can present lessons on “How to Write a Surrealist Novel”, or can note the differences between a metaphor, a bad metaphor, and can easily swings between poets in Arabian literature, such as Antara , Imru’al Qays and Abu Nuwas, to those in different spaces of languages and cultures, as he wrote in:

Let me mould you as a Madonna

and outline your edges like Picasso

I would carve your face from phophory

Straighten your nose like the obelisk of Tosesius

The ancient Saddhus who inscribed the Kamasutra will guide

How I firm up your torso, how its curvature will be the cartography

Of memories trapped between the moments of anguish & vapour of dreams

You thighs – cushions, embroidered in silk

Buffers around a white garden absorbing tears

Tears from a rivulet over the parapet on Mama’s grave

Mama left me a sea of ashes

Mama left me alone in the forest of skulls

Mama left a vessel carrying the liquid carcass of a dying poem

Mamma left me with memories in un-sculpted body of a black Madonna

Mama left me swirling in the cemetery of putrid dreams