Title: Letter to Lilly

Genre: Poetry (a collection)

Author: Funmi Coker

Publisher: The Roaring Lion Newcastle LTD

Date: 18th May 2021

Reviewer: Afer Ventus

Coker’s ‘Letter to Lilly’: A life manual for the girl-child

The collection of poetry, ‘Letter to Lilly’ is a recently published work of this year’s. Disentangling it would be quite an easy task but because of how mundane it is to Nigeria and the world at large sleepless situations; then, on ‘disentangling’ it, one might forget that it still remains a work of fiction.

Notwithstanding, this review unravels three themes amongst others in their tags: the need to educate every girl-child on sex education, the need for the girl-child to awaken from obsolete beliefs and the condemnation of ‘silhouette’ girls.

Sex education is now being introduced into many school’s extra-curricular activities. It is because of the never ending issue of molestation towards the girl-child in the society that even at unimaginable ages; little girls have different experience to share. Here, Coker wastes no time in delving into a similar matter in her eighth poem, ‘Education’. In the first stanza, the poet persona compares a girl-child trying to scrutinize a wooer as ‘an eye fighting sleep’ (of course, ‘sleep’ would always win). Moving to the second stanza, she presents a setting (‘Valentine’s Day’).

On this day, ‘two bodies moaned on earth [a suggestion of sex], / two more in heaven’ [a suggestion of losing heaven]. In the third and last stanza, the poet persona denotes another setting of the girl-child in question becoming pregnant at seventeen. Therefore, ‘A girl will become a mother in three weeks/cause nobody taught her how to guard her heart.’ In conclusion, Coker is saying that the girl-child needs to be educated on sex education so as to prevent unwanted serial pregnancies, more especially, in the sweep of Valentine’s Day.

In furtherance, and on the need for the girl-child to be radical about beliefs that should be obsolete, Funmi Coker presents in her third poem, ‘Burn’. With an imperative tone, Coker declares that the girl-child should burn ‘crude scheme of things’ and ‘the school/ of thought that taught you to surrender the wings/ with which you’re to soar for subjectified clipping.’ Impressively, Coker adopts the literary allusion of the twentieth century (1941) comic book of ‘Wonder Woman’ in later lines of the poem by William Moulton Marston to vividly relate her idea.

And the main reason for the creation of this archetype (Wonder Woman) was to make the girl-child, who have over the centuries been declared weak and relegated to the confines of a home, to show their repressed strength; although, in a kind-loving way like the archetype. She persuades the girl-child to emulate the archetype and be ‘the right kind of fire’, burning and melting ‘the hold of all that’s so wrong’ in the society and world by extension.

Lastly, Coker condemns the ‘silhouette’ girls. However, she started by praising the girl-child in the first-three stanzas. Metaphorically, Coker compares the body of the girl-child to gold. In the second, their physique was ‘pottered by a god’. In the third, the poet infuses a light humour by comparing the girl-child’s body to the boldness of a ‘Lagos truck driver’.

Truly, this is a fine comparison for those who have seen any Lagos truck driver. They are as fearless on the road like lions in a jungle. When a Lagos truck driver approaches you with his truck, of course, you would have to run or scamper for life, more probably because of the sheer size.

This sole effect is what the poet wants her readers to get. Similarly, she poses further in the next line that: ‘Little wonder your body causes traffic on Twitter’. Here, the ‘traffic’ suggests a large amount of viewers to a girl-child on Twitter, creating a visual image in the minds of the readers.

Contrary to the immediate aforementioned paragraph, Coker changes her tone of appraisal to that of sarcasm, which is set out to lampoon some wrong steps of the girl-child. The poet thinks the girl-child is more beautiful with their clothes on and goes further to ask if they are from ‘yaba left’—a Nigerian metaphor for mentally deranged people. She believes a girl-child behaves madly when they pose their half-naked or naked selves on social media platforms using Twitter as a sample. She ends with a piece of advice:

‘Darling

Keep the spec special

& your body away from the crowd’

In all, Coker’s ‘Letter to Lilly’ is a life manual for the girl-child; a lighthouse for the lost souls who embark on this life’s journey. And like Ogun (Yoruba god of war and metallic ore), she has paved a pathway.