Reviewer: OjoOlumide Emmanuel
Title: Inside My Pain
Author: Miracle Attah
Year of Publication: 2017
Number of Pages: 52
Publisher: Polarsphere Books, Minna Courtesy of the Hill-Top Creative Art Foundation Teen Authors Series
ISBN: 978-978-54725-5-4
Introduction
Inside My Pain by Miracle Attah is one of the success stories of the Hill Top Creative Art Foundations Teen Authorship which is poised towards discovering, nurturing and publishing teenagers to use art as an instrument in liberating themselves, tell their own stories and give the world a new outlook; who says young people have no story to tell. Dishing into this short story collection is sure a swift point of fixing one’s eye on the author’s eye-socket in order to see events portrayed in the stories.
The work in its entirety is a collection of thirteen short stories. The first story “Aftermath” through the character of Sophie and the Basseys’ opens the reader to one of the issues of the teenage age “the desire for freedom”. While the quest turned sour for Sophie in the story, it is quite instructive that the teenagers are in an age where they want to do things themselves and can pull any stunt to realize it. Although things got twisted in the story, in the end it was still HAPPILY EVER AFTER.
The second story “Doomsday” explicate to the reader the story of a woman who murdered her husband despite the amount of affection he bequeaths her. We’ve seen such happenings heightened in recent times and the course of justice over such matters is not stealthily difficult to determine. The theme of this story relates more to marital faithfulness and abuse.
Inner peace, the third of the collection utilized the character of Claire and her mum to discuss certain contemporary issues such as drug trafficking, human trafficking, deception and the injustice meted at widows after the demise of their husbands. This brings the reader to the author’s consciousness of her environment which is one of the aspects Literature tries to mirror.
A Grim Day, the fourth story in the collection allows the reader to share the personal grief of the author bottled in painful reminisces; she recalled her own loss and how much chunk of flesh it sheds of her heart.
The story of Catherine, her honest lifestyle and the rewards helped in accentuating the need to give the destitute a home as penned by the author in the short story “Dust of Fate”. Truly dusting off the painful part of one’s faith through positive living is the highest kind of help one can render him/herself as exemplified in the story.
The sixth story “Quietude” if I may speculate provided the teenage voice an avenue to share with the readers the circumstance surrounding her birth and the joy of motherhood.
While “Deceit” the seventh story focuses on deception; the eight which carries the title of this book carved up a story on rape and instances where parents are part of the remote causes of this beastly sexual assault on their children; the ninth “guilt” bothers on young people engaging in premarital sex and the fear of unwanted pregnancy.
Also while the tenth story “the end of the beginning caution young girls against Greek-gifts. “Dark Yesterday”, the eleventh story extends a message of hope to ladies with battered past due to teenage mistake that they can find people who can accept them for who they are. Secret under secrecy, the twelfth story exposes deceit and finally, the last story “Naked transaction” traces the root of injustice, poverty, sexual assault and other ills in the society ascribing it to the lack of love for our neighbours.
It is important to state that the teen author penned with the eye of the girl child like her in perspective by discussing their plights and in the last part of the story she gave her solution. Summarily, every story in the collection portrayed pain. This perhaps is waking the consciousness of her peers into the realities embedded in life. It is said that “life is not a bed of roses” but of course one can choose to lay his bed of roses by carefully picking it out of the thorns.
My only disappointment is the continuous re-occurrence of accident and plane crash as only the source of pain among many. Life itself is painful. While the stories looked like the usual telemundos we’ve watched, the literariness she added to her work gave it some freshness.
I like to appreciate her for sticking to the theme as tagged by her title which centres on the vulnerability of the girl child/womenfolk and I believe since this is the first time she entered into print, there are still more years of improvement on her path.
