A lyrical and reflective review of Inakali Assumi’s Ìsǘ Le, celebrating ordinary life, memory, and a fading Sumi storytelling tradition.
Matti Bakor M War
In her poem The Patience of Ordinary Things, Pat Schneider celebrates the ordinariness of things and draws delight from how they keep one grounded in life. Along the same strain, Inakali Assumi’s first lyrical offering draws inspiration from a dying Sumi tradition known as Ìsǘ Le, which she calls “songs of the mundane”. These songs, she explains, are traditional melodies inspired by day-to-day activities that are often overlooked due to routine and habit. Through her lyrics, Assumi evokes and celebrates the mundane and the ordinary, seen through the carefully curated memories of her life. To the poet, this collection is a remembrance, a deeply personal way to honour her culture and her past; to the reader, this collection is a serendipitous lesson in hiraeth.
The poems are elegant and have a journal-like quality, offering a glimpse into the author's daily life, past and present. Assumi’s tribute to her tribe’s style of storytelling comes alive in a beautifully poignant way on paper, spanning time, experience, and culture. Her sense and longing for home are rooted in those who add to the feeling of it, both filial and familial, and is further augmented by its distinct sensory impressions, as seen from Song VII, where she cogitates: “Home is the fragrance of my mother’s curry” or Song X, where she describes her father’s voice as being “like a woollen blanket on a cold winter day” and equates it to the “warmth of home”. Such poignant metaphors are in abundance and call for quiet contemplation and appreciation for the things often taken for granted.
There is much appreciation for the simple things in life here, whether it be the birdsong that signals a brand-new day to the author, as seen in song XIII:
I told the old woman
Who lives below the house,
Isn’t it wonderful to wake up each morning
To this delightful song of nature?
or the willingness to see beauty in blue mist flowers in song XVIII:
Weeds do not bloom,
flowers do.
I shall keep them.
While perusing the collection, one is reminded of Barbara Crooker’s Ordinary Life wherein the poet celebrates the moments that may seem unimportant but are often the greatest reminders of the splendour of life. Similarly, the poet of this collection is aware that it is easy to dismiss the daily activities because they lack glamour and because people now seek out the new and exciting. While Crooker’s perspective in Ordinary Life celebrates and delights in little victories of a routine life, Assumi painstakingly seeks out and displays to the reader the overlooked beauty of our world – she makes one pause to listen to a bird warbling a melodic tune or to stop in the middle of a long drive home to gaze at a field of wildflowers just as the sun is setting.
Assumi’s poetry is not loud but it demands that the reader slow down and take a break from the fast-paced world, to make time and take in the vibrant sights and sounds of life, made seemingly dull by routine and lassitude. The poems are simultaneously an exercise and celebration in slow living in an era that demands our time and attention without giving anything soulfully substantial in return. Perhaps, one views these poems as the poet’s way of rebelling against an ethos of instant “grand-ification”, in which fast-changing micro-modern trends dictate how one lives. By taking the time to appreciate and reminisce about old sights and sounds, the poet extends an invitation for the reader to do the same.
Ìsǘ Leis remarkable and lovely in its celebration of the normal and the mundane. Inakali Assumi is able to wield her words to offer a clear-eyed perspective of one’s presence in a seemingly still world that makes way for change without one noticing. It serves as a love letter that celebrates the ordinary and the mundane strand of life while seeming to rue gently over the dying of an art of storytelling that once formed a vital part of peoples’ lives. However, all is not lost! Assumi injects quiet optimism in her thoughtful utterance and rumination – the birds, even if viewed by others as pests, still chirp to welcome the new day; blue mist flowers may be considered weeds but they still bloom regardless – and there is no doubt that her own offering of Ìsǘ Le will serve to tell their stories to any listening generation of readers and listeners. This hopeful essence of this poetry collection is best summed up in song IX:
This morning,
I woke
to live the life
I had lived yesterday.
…
Tomorrow,
I shall wake up
to the same old melody.
Matti Bakor M War is Assistant Professor at Nongtalang College, NEHU & doctoral scholar at Centre for English Studies, JNU, New Delhi.