One of the greatest obstacles to progress, is the ability of some to turn away, even dismiss outright anything that makes them uncomfortable. We see it in the silent complicity of the privileged classes, who’d prefer to not watch the news because it’s just so upsetting. We witness it with celebrities (multi-millionaires with nothing to lose) who choose to say nothing for fear of losing a few hundred bucks. We see it everywhere in a general refusal to read, to research, to understand the complexities of political conflicts, both historical and current, because some of us have decided that all these wars, all these genocides, all these horrific and illegal conflicts initiated by those in power won’t affect us or are simply none of our business. All this turning away – a global epidemic of indifference – threatens to destroy empathy, the very thing that makes us human, humane.
In Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike’s opening note to readers he explains his own struggle to understand the legacy of war, “the memories of heinous atrocities” and he describes We Survived Until We Could Live, his latest collection of poetry as an “attempt to portray a glimpse of war’s horrific aftermath on the family.” In his “attempt to converse with the past,” he believes it is with poetry that he “can document the untold stories of suffering, invite readers into this world, and sharpen their empathy for fellow human beings in pain.” As fellow human beings, as readers, we have an obligation to not turn away, but more than that, we have an obligation to seek out these books of poetry, of fiction, of memoir, of stories that make us weep, that make us angry, that make us want to put a stop to the horrific and incomprehensible insistence on war as the only path to peace.
In his “attempt to converse with the past,” he believes it is with poetry that he “can document the untold stories of suffering, invite readers into this world, and sharpen their empathy for fellow human beings in pain.”
Umezurike’s poetry is intimate, sensual, tender; it is violent, heartbreaking, uncomfortable, and it is joyful, loving and beautiful. The collection invites us to consider three distinct voices, FATHER, MOTHER, SON as they each wander through the aftermath of war. Among the “Dramatis Personae,”, we also see MOTHER’S YOUNGER SISTER/AUNT, NEIGHBOURS, and VETERANS all walking among the emotional ruins. FATHER “was sixteen when the war broke out in July 1967 and served first as a child soldier in the Biafra Boys or Boys’ Company, then later in the Army.”
During the three-year Nigeria-Biafra War, millions of people, mostly civilians, died. With government blockades and forced displacement, many Biafrans starved to death, hunger an effective weapon of war. Sound familiar? A pattern repeats itself, from the Holodomor to Biafra, to Bangladesh, to Khmer Rouge, Sudan, Somalia, Darfur, Congo, South Sudan, to Palestine, but Umezurike doesn’t explicitly consider this inhumane weapon of war in his poetry. However, in “My mother is the new moon,” a SON poem, food has become the cure for FATHER’S violence, where MOTHER “eats like she has found joy among the debris of my father’s anger.” Is FATHER’S violence the only thing quieted by eating twice a night, or is there another lingering hunger?
MOTHER holds, arguably, the most tender, sensual imagery in the collection, with moments of beauty caught in hers, and in FATHER and SON poems about her. What radiates, what hums and thrums throughout the collection is all the hopeful joy, and her desperate love for her husband. The gaping hole of “freshly dug earth” isn’t just a space to be filled with food, but an absence of what might have been had war not scarred their bodies and minds. When SON shares his concern for the violence he hears during the night, he worries about MOTHER, “I heard you crying last night.” then “Son, my mother says, lighting up, your father was only hurting me with joy.” Her contempt for war, against its insistent lingering violence, exists in emotional and physical expressions of love. Neighbours stare at us––my husband and me–– “holding hands like newlyweds. Why should anyone tell me how to love” “a man fighting with his memories”?
FATHER returns this love, a devotional adoration, recognizing that he owes her more love than he can give, for he is blinded by the darkness, the memories of war that compel him to keep the lights on, the haunting reminders of war at every turn. Veterans sawing off their hands, bleeding to death because “no amount of vinegar or bleach could cleanse the blood he’d seen since he began washing his face.” Bodies turning up in the lagoon, children in a playground, “little rebels, toy guns in hand, declaring so proudly, like generals, I shot you first!” We are held, hypnotised, as readers, by the imagery, and regardless of the joy present in some poems, the breadcrumbs – memories – always lead us back to the war.
While the SON attempts to see FATHER as a man, FATHER is just a boy shredded by war and then pieced together with gin, blood, shrapnel and howling songs about children “who have no idea what war is,” and as the resentment separates them, as the violence threatens his mother’s physical wellbeing, SON wishes his father were nothing but “a log lying in our backyard –– gnarly, ashen, and lonely.” What the reader knows is that SON has lost something he didn’t know – a funny, joyful, happy father who now wastes every day trying to erase deep penetrative scars with gin.
While the SON attempts to see FATHER as a man, FATHER is just a boy shredded by war and then pieced together with gin, blood, shrapnel and howling songs about children “who have no idea what war is,” and as the resentment separates them, as the violence threatens his mother’s physical wellbeing, SON wishes his father were nothing but “a log lying in our backyard –– gnarly, ashen, and lonely.”
Umezurike uses some poetic license with his Dramatis Personae, a distancing that allows the reader to see FATHER, MOTHER, SON, apart from the author’s very real and deeply personal experiences as a son, but regardless of how you see the personae, how you hear their voices, what is most important, is that you do see and hear – and listen.
What is required of a reader, a reviewer, to urge as many as possible to pick up this book of poetry that expresses the inexplicable pain of war, with all the trauma, heartbreak and violence floating in the air with the smell of blood? How does a reviewer demand that you read We Survived Until We Could Live as a small step in, a turning toward and not away from this thing, this violence, that has become an unnatural, unacceptable, unfathomable, result of an increasing lack of empathy? I hope you will read this book, and every other book like it, because it will give you a greater understanding of what it is to survive, and it is in this understanding I hope you find empathy.
We Survived Until We Could Live is available for purchase directly from University of Calgary Press or your favourite local independent bookseller.
Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike is assistant professor in the Department of English and Wayne O. McCready Emerging Fellow at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Masculinities in Nigerian Fiction, Double Wahala, Double Trouble, Wish Maker and he is co-editor with Rona Altrows of Please Don’t Interrupt.
Publisher: University of Calgary Press (April 15, 2026)
Paperback: 9″ x 6″ | 136 pages
ISBN: 9781773856827
Alison Gadsby writes in Tkaronto/Toronto where she lives in a multigenerational home that includes several dogs. Her story collection Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive(Guernica Editions) was listed as CBC Books for Spring 2026. Her debut novel, Dreams of the Weary is forthcoming (Palimpsest Press, 2028). Alison is the founder/host of Junction Reads, a prose reading series.
