The Kitchen-Dwellers Testimony by Ladan Osman

Reviewed by: The Kitchen-Dwellers Testimony by Ladan Osman Ron McFarland (bio) Osman, Ladan. The Kitchen-Dwellers Testimony. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2015. Shiferraw, Mahtem. Fuchsia. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2016. The second and third titles published in the University of Nebraska’s African Poetry Book Series as winners of the annual Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry could scarcely be more different from each other or from that of the first Sillerman Prize winner, Clifton Gachagua’s Madman at Kilifi (2014). Ladan Osman was born in Mogadishu but moved from Somalia to Columbus, Ohio, at an early age, graduated from Otterbein University in Westerville, a suburb of Columbus, and earned her MFA from the University of Texas. She lives in Chicago. Mahtem Shiferraw grew up in Africa, and she reflects on life in Ethiopia and Eritrea in most of her poems. She received her MFA in creative writing from Vermont College and currently lives in Los Angeles. In “Kalashnikovs,” Shiferraw recalls hearing the “rumble” of the AK-47 at age seven amid “Wrecks of buildings / and the streets of Asmara / sagging.” In “4AM” she remembers the call of the muezzin, “the icy pupils of a white hyena,” Mount Entoto overlooking Addis Ababa, “the gentle click-clack / of rifles against warm cloth,” houses “made of chikka [a mud and straw plaster] and battered cement.” In poems like “The Language of Hair” Shiferraw moves from Ethiopia, where she reflects on tending to her cousin Absara, dealing with head lice, and having her hair braided, to Los Angeles, where she cuts her hair “in a fro,” dyes it orange, and adds “blonde polyester hair” so she can “pass for American.” She ends up braiding her hair “because I cannot speak that language.” Ladan Osman’s world as presented in The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony appears familiar enough, at least up to a point. That world is urban, working-class United States, where the first-person speaker observes a classmate “change an F to a B by the lockers”: “He was the one who poked a hole in the Barbie pool.” He becomes “the man who used to play in the dirty stream / where the Sears used to be.” That poem, “Unsolicited Witness,” ends with the speaker following the man to “a magic dumpster filled with day-old pastries,” newspapers, and “dog shit.” Osman wears her first generation status lightly, or perhaps strategically—reference to “jinn” here and to “Somali hail” or “cardamom” there: “The free toys from Salvation Army are embarrassing because we’re Muslim.” Readers are as likely to come across Barbie and Ken or Princess Di or Coltrane or Miles Davis or James Dean. Somalia is the land and culture [End Page 957] she knows mostly at second hand from her parents and other relatives—it is simultaneously here, at hand, and distant. Her aunts speak approvingly of female circumcision, and with “kohl eyes kind,” they warn her about going out after dark in this threatening country. On a totally different note, I profess myself a sucker for cogent one-liners, and Osman delivers these from time to time with force: “I enjoy watching men’s eyes eating women for breakfast.” “What is the smell of trouble?” “But my face is a black mug.” “If this life is a marketplace, and I am the vendor of my soul . . .” how would we not want to hear what comes after that? Or consider the opening quatrain of “Diviner of Teacups”: The brew is a woman lifting her skirt for a man who’s seen what’s beneath. He makes no distinction between her and stewed carrots. Whatever else they accomplish, these lines compel us to read on. The woman who acts as the speaker in most of the poems experiences sexual anxiety, as in “First Red Dress,” where her brother tells her, “’Go out in that dress / and you’ll get split like a watermelon. Down there.’” In that environment the speaker can “dream of a baby left in a shopping cart under a box of cereal.” Her vulnerability spreads to race, as in “How to Make a Shadow,” which begins, “Give her the spirit of a dog, / a

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