Efiotu Jagun

A Mother in a Refugee Camp

No Madonna and Child could touch
Her tenderness for a son

She soon would have to forget. . . .

The air was heavy with odors of diarrhea,

Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs

And dried-up bottoms waddling in labored steps

Behind blown-empty bellies. Other mothers there

Had long ceased to care, but not this one:

She held a ghost-smile between her teeth,

And in her eyes the memory

Of a mother’s pride. . . .She had bathed him

And rubbed him down with bare palms.

She took from their bundle of possessions

A broken comb and combed

The rust-colored hair left on his skull

And then—humming in her eyes—began carefully to part it.

In their former life this was perhaps

A little daily act of no consequence

Before his breakfast and school; now she did it

Like putting flowers on a tiny grave.

http://www.universeofpoetry.org/nigeria_p2.shtml#english3

Biography

Chinua Achebe was born in 1930 to a member of the Ogidi Church Missionary Society in eastern Nigeria and attended the church's primary school as a child. At the age of fourteen, he was one of a small number of boys selected to go to a government college at Umuahia, one of the best schools in western Africa at the time. After finishing his secondary education, Achebe attended the newly founded University of Ibadan which was closely associated with the University of London. Following his graduation, he began his broadcasting career at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation. In 1957, Achebe left Nigeria to go to a broadcasting school in London, where he published his first book Things Fall Apart in 1958. Threatened with imprisonment from the military regime for his writings, Achebe moved to New York in 1994 where he died in 2013.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/chinua-achebe

Image

https://pxhere.com/en/photo/760354

Despite the broken state of this glass, it is still able to stand. This resilience is very much like that of the mother whose son died. Even though her son is dead, she still treats his body with respect and looks upon him fondly.

Analysis

In the poem A Mother in a Refugee Camp, Chinua Achebe describes a mother laying her young boy to rest. Despite her son being dead, she handles the lifeless body of the child as if he were still breathing. The author, Chinua Achebe, was born in 1938, more than twenty years before Nigeria gained its independence from Great Britain. Since he stayed in Nigeria until 1995, Achebe had witnessed several bloody coups and civil wars as well as the suffering of people caught in the crossfire left homeless and starving.

Achebe's Christian background is reflected in the poem, where he describes a mother's love so strong "no Madonna and Child could touch." Madonna--when used as slang--means a romanticized woman, but in Christianity refers to the Virgin Mary. Since the word "child" is capitalized, it can be inferred that the author means baby Jesus. The refugee mother loves her son so greatly that it cannot be compared to any other, not even that between Mary and Jesus. This poem is not divided into stanzas, nor does it contain a rhyming pattern. In my opinion, the absence of any discernible organization makes the poem flow more naturally and get the intended message across more easily.

With phrases such as "dried-up bottoms waddling in labored steps / Behind blown-empty bellies," Chinua Achebe establishes a despondent tone with a situation that does not show any signs of improvement. A mother, with a "ghost-smile between her teeth," rubs down the body of her son reverently as opposed to other bereaved parents who had "long ceased to care" about their lost children. Refugees in a camp reeking of the "odors of diarrhea" are starving and dying of disease, forced to "forget" those who had perished in order to survive. The theme of this poem is that a "mother's pride" in her child will persist, even after the child's death.