2023 read #79: Birds Don’t Fly for Pleasure by Táíwo Hassan.

Birds Don’t Fly for Pleasure by Táíwo Hassan

25 pages

Published 2022

Read July 13

Rating: 4 out of 5

This slim but gorgeous chapbook is a concentrated document of grief woven after the death of Hassan’s twin brother:

to find yourself a grave            to house guilt & wonder

if this is the right soul for its weight

(from “The Nomenclature of Pain”)

Hassan refuses to flinch away from the helplessness of mourning, the stagnation of “moribund pools,” the weight in one’s mouth. “these days, i find myself fearing the rain,” is how he begins “some boys don’t wear colours of the wind,” then responds to his mother’s seeming acceptance with “perhaps, she hasn’t drowned enough.”

Water pervades Birds — drowning water, living water, the sweat and tears that constitute a body: “& in a split second, his / mouth isn’t an ocean anymore…” “i make a river and swim in it.” The unreality of loss, the dislocation of mourning, pulls back a curtain and reveals nothing to fill what was lost: “what if the laws of physics are nothing but dust, nothing but abstract projectiles and fading footprints?” Yet living itself is informed with the nearness of death, of fierce love clinging to whatever remains: “how long till butterflies seep out of this body?”

A running list of particular favorites:

“dear brother,”

“some boys don’t wear colours of the wind”

“Birds Don’t Fly for Pleasure”

“when i say i love you”

“Ẹdúnjobí: A Love Letter”

“The Nomenclature of Pain”

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at My Mother’s Radio”

“Salat”