Eyiwumi Bolutito Olayinka

Behind the Curtains: A Collection of Feminist Poems and Others Eyiwumi Bolutito Olayinka

Behind the Curtains is a unique first collection that brings poems with a common purpose together, a feature not often associated with first books of poetry. It gives a daring, consistent and fresh voice to the agony of the woman as victim and asserts the primacy of oneness to marital union. While the poems threaten radical responses to the infractions of the man, they equally project an unmistakable Christian outlook, which we may read as either tempering or negating their anger.
The poems invite us to rethink received models for reading the relationship between men and women. They exude an emotional consistency that suggests that the poet has invested a great deal of imagination in capturing the agony of the traumatised woman. Most importantly, they assert the woman's right to be loved: "She's not asking for much/All she asks for is love/But he makes it a zone inaccessible/She blesses his soul/He stabs her heart in return/Hating her with a passion ("All She Asks For"). If an awareness of unequal exchange runs through most of the poems, there is also the exciting way in which they present the wholesomeness and legitimacy of marital intimacy, thereby recreating the Edenic ideal that the collection appears to project as model. In all, Behind the Curtains is at once a fearless confrontation with an evil and an impressive advocacy for underdogs, which, ironically, ends up making the voice of only one party to the conflict audible. All the same, in both substance and rendering, this is a remarkable outing of a promising and readable poet.