Patricia Prime, New Zealand

Museum of Reminiscence is Hamza Hassan Sheikh’s second collection since Some Moments of Love was published.  It is accompanied by a Preface and comments on his first collection of poems.  In his Preface to Museum of Reminiscence, Hamza says a, “Museum of reminiscence keeps a person connected with his past as well as with the memories of nears and dears.”  The collection contains 60 poems, some of which are fairly brief and others that run to two or three pages.

Hamza juxtaposes the longer poems with short pithy pieces, such as “To Some One We Love,” a poem about a person in love, “When they go out of sight / Shining eyes dim.”  In the titles of these poems, many of them one-word titles, the poet expresses a gamut of emotions from abhorrence, sorrows, peace, solitude, to a sad tree.  For example, in “Abhorrence” the persona is self-effacing, which makes the juxtaposition of a voice which feels hatred for another with the poem “Eyes,” where misunderstanding leads to sadness, all the more striking, urgent and dramatic.

Thus Hamza enables his readers to eavesdrop on figures that he says “behave rudely, cruelly and with much hatred and abhorrence.  But yet you tolerate all this atrocity and abhorrence and love them.”  (Preface).

For Hamza:

            Her face is like an open book,

            You understand all, once you look.

            Her face was reddish with love’s shame,

            Just like as a flaring red flame.

                                                (“Quatrain”)

It is an enlightening experience to read a young man’s lyrical love poems.  “Envoy of My Happiness,” a poem in rhyming couplets, expresses the heartfelt longing to find the perfect woman which whom to share his pain:

            The envoy of joys didn’t come here,

            For whom I strayed here and there.

            Just looking for you everywhere,

            Seeking for you O! My sweet dear.

In Museum of Reminiscence, Hamza manifests his strong sense of self-hood and what it means to explore love and rejection.  In “To See You Again,” Hamza’s persona dreams of a lost loved one:

            Though you are dead

            And gone from my sight

            Yet your figure

            Is part of my soul.

Hamza relates to one of poetry’s oldest functions, which for him is to “become the sculptor and sculpture the idols of stones in the glooms of night.”  (Preface).  Poetry, for him is not just to memorialize faces and people, but to translate his longings so that they can be an archive in itself but also as a measuring stick for future change.

“Hawks of Air,” “Sun Flower” and “Sparrows” concentrate on nature.  The hawks are “courageous, full of dare,” the sun flower “rotates” all day to watch the face of the sun, while sparrows make a neat house “To lay eggs / And build up their race.”  The poet uses these natural phenomena as a metaphor for his own desires for fulfillment.

Hamza uses a romanticized style that might in its diction, rhythm, subject matter and phonological quality; remind one of the Shakespearean sonnets.  However, Hamza admits the impossibility of the poet’s task to capture the ideal.  In his poem “Ideal”, the persona’s effort to capture the ideal woman and to define her beauty is nothing without a glance from her:

            What to talk about eye-brow or eye-lash,

            And without whose glance the world seems a trash.

            I croon madrigal and then I compose,

            Either on her forehead or of keen nose.

“Peace” defines the word as soothing the heart:

            Peace

            A word when expressed

            From the tongue

            It soothes up the heart.

“Secret of Moments” is divided into four parts and is a metaphor for the poet’s themes of his heart being conquered, then broken by harsh words, becoming lonely and seeing the loved one deserted by “fair weather friends.”  Yet, for all that that, he will be there “Near your dying” when, at last,

            You will come to know

            how sweet was my heart?

            For you

Reading these poems with the care they deserve gives an intimation of what it feels like to be you, in love, rejected and scorned.  In the title poem, “Museum of Reminiscence,” Hamza combines a fairytale quality (“I love a statuesque / Who dominated over my senses”) with a disconcerting atmosphere produced by the choking of his feelings and the assassination of his passion.  However, this beauty he has conjured up in his remembrance is going to remain a figment of his memory:

            But I have decked one more

            Unforgettable statue

            In museum of reminiscence.

Central to Hamza’s collection is the poem “Life,” a sequence that focuses n the various meanings of life.  In various stanza forms, he tells his story.  The following stanzas may serve as an example:

            Life

            Life is a desert

            With bushes, thorns

            And sharp stones.

            Like warm sand

            Where legs tremble

            Feet bleed

            And man falls

            On each step.

            Like a flower

            Withers after blossoming.

Poems now follow which deal with everyday life:  “Wheels” is a sad poem about a boy’s death beneath a motor car “Whom his smooth hands / Washed daily.”  “Butterfly” tells of a “gorgeous butterfly” - one minute there and the next piercing many more flowers “With her beauty’s magic.”  Perhaps this too is a metaphor for the way in which some women flit from one man to another?  “The River Bank” is a rhyming poem in couplets, about the way in which the sudden waves disperse the thoughts of the poet, as he rests by night on the river bank:

            All of sudden, waves splashed with a noise,

            And dispersed my thoughts, now let me rejoice.

            At far away, there embraced earth and sky,

            O! Lord from your nature who can deny.

In “Story of a Night,” we see the poet

            Dipping the pencil

            Of my dry lips

            In an ink of affection

            I drew a love’s landscape

            On the sheet

            Of her face.

In “Valentine’s Day” the poet is alone, watching other lovers.  His last valentine has withered and betrayed him, while he was “just an idol / Heedless of love.””Lost Love” and “Wait for my Beloved” are heart-rending poems of rejection, waiting and dreaming of the beloved.

In the final pessimistic poem “Future Generation,” the poet looks into the future, where he sees “humanity danced nakedly / On the reddish land” and he sees and feels a vindictive figure:

My tongue muttered

“Who are you?”

He laughed wildly

And caught my neck

Then replied

“I am your future generation.”

Hamza is a young poet, and the pieces in this new collection point to an enormous potential for language.  Museum of Reminiscence ranges from a number of lengthier pieces that converse as they describe, to shorter works with their quick-silver epiphanies.  Reading this volume, a gallery of emotions, wide in their almost spiritual discernment and intrigue unfolds.  The persona that emerges is mentally alive, alert of eye, quick to enlist sympathy.