Reading Progress:

My Darling from the Lions: A Critical Reading

by Aisha Oni

Dark, sensual, whimsical, and razor-sharp, My Darling from the Lions is a remarkable collection with plenty to say and the gift of saying it in a fresh way. It’s a coming-of-age collection, travelling the distance from girlhood and youth to maturity and Black womanhood.

my darling from the lions - rachel long

From girlhood and sex, to family, trauma, and Black womanhood, Rachel Long’s beautiful debut collection My Darling from the Lions is dark, sensual, whimsical, and razor-sharp. The contemporary feel of the artwork and tonal levity of the writing belies the profound nature of the stories told within, stories of ancestry, commodification, and the body. But, at its heart, My Darling from the Lions remains a coming-of-age collection as we travel the distance from girlhood to youth to maturity across three sections – “Open”, “A Lineage of Wigs”, and “Dolls”.

We’re at the mercy of a versatile stylist, excelling at everything from imagist bursts and surrealism to prose poems. In the first poem, “open”, we get a taste of sensuality and freedom with danger lurking in the shadows:

This morning he told me
I sleep with my mouth open
And my hands in my hair
I say, What, like screaming?
He says, No, like abandon.

These six lines are repeated again and again, both spoken by and spoken to lovers, mothers, and friends. In “Helena” a dancer and sex worker also recounts an incident to friends Tiff, Scarlett, and Rachel. It’s a devastating poem about coercion, punctuating its excavation of young women’s trauma, power, and sexual politics with a nonchalant Helena prancing off to the shower amidst laughter.

“Sandwiches”, a short and captivating display of two girls on the cusp of adolescence, also heaves with fun and desire as “Tiff’s got me against the railings, doing my eyeliner”:

Break time
her body on mine, stoosh then soft; sugar
on the tongue of all she hasn’t done yet,
all she’s heard she could do. Already, Tiff’s a reckoning

The collection, however, remains dominated by the darker side of adolescence, inviting us at every turn to weigh up the power imbalances of youth. In “Night Vigil” we meet a “choir girl – a Real angel” and a preacher ushering her into “incensed corridors” with “blown candles for hands” where “Smiling Eyes also meant teeth.” It’s a poem about how the sweetness and trusting innocence of youth is often tarnished by self-interest, resulting in a more conflicted relationship with all forms of faith.

In “Clean”, we see her purge herself:

Girl, you can be new
Surrender it all
Into one bowl. This,
your hollow

The girl’s mother also experiences a loss of innocence. In “The Musical Box” her prized possession is prised open by a violent cousin. It’s this girl, abused and robbed of her innocence, who becomes parent and eventually ancestor to future generations.

In “Hotel, Art, Barcelona”, we see the past play out in the present. Our speaker, a mixed woman navigating the complexities that come with that identity, is on a date with an older white man and they “are eating roses on a rooftop.” “Every table is white except ours”, she says, to which her date responds, “I don’t think I’ll identify with a brown son.” Later, when he lifts her dress up, she can’t help but to spread her thighs apart and ask:

is love not this – gripping a fence in the sky.

We meet her again in “And then there was the time I got into a fight” in school. She’s trying to prove the white man outside is her dad arrived at the gates to collect her. This is not the only poem that exposes the absurdity of race and the contradictory push and pull of life, emotions and actions. In the poem “Black Princess, Black Princess”, Meghan Markle’s family are vetted and an unknown asks for a urine sample, following that request with quips about her hair and sexual history. It’s uncomfortable and invasive, demonstrative of both the spectacle of ruling-class institutions and what it is to be an ordinary Black women working and dating.

My favourite part is when the speaker looks back on their family and home life growing up, describing the house as a street overcrowded with ten children. I loved how the ode to her Nigerian mother is also an ode to African women’s hair. “A Lineage of Wigs” begins with “Orb”, a three-line verse deifying her mother’s afro:

Mum combs her auburn ‘fro up high.
So high it’s an orb.
Everyone wants to—but cannot—touch it
.

“Communion… Deana Lawson” also rejoices in Black womanhood, speaking loudly and proudly to Black history, diaspora, older women, and our bodies:

Scalp sliced so many times you can’t recall if you are girl or railroad… you’re kidding if you think that a box of wings and chips won’t be eaten over your fresh weave… Girl, you’re the Blackest you might ever be in here, stop pulling away from the crepe roll of her belly.

My least favourite features poems like “Sharks and Victoria Beckham” and “The Sunflower”. Name-dropping public figures like Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and Princess Diana, these referential poems attempt to home in on critiques of media, objectification, and contemporary consumer culture but end up losing the reader to obscurity.

My Darling from the Lions is a remarkable collection with plenty to say and the gift of saying it in a unique, witty, and fresh way. Long sharply contrasts playful warmth with piercing tones, doing us a charity in obfuscating the heaver subjects. But My Darling from the Lions shines brightest when she brings us intimately close, letting us in on stark truths we might not otherwise learn.

By Aisha Oni

AISHA ONI is a British-Nigerian writer, book blogger, and avid reader. Find her on Instagram at @aishathebibliophile.

RACHEL LONG is the founder of Octavia Poetry Collective for Womxn of Colour, based at the Southbank Centre. She began writing poetry after attending a workshop with Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, a transformative experience she describes as “radically intimate, and yet simultaneously expansive. I’ve been writing poems since I left that room.” My Darling from the Lions is her debut collection and has been shorlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection.

My Darling from the Lions: A Critical ReadingMy Darling from the Lions by Rachel Long
Published by Picador on 6 August 2020
Genres: Coming-of-age, Poetry
Pages: 88
three-half-stars

Each poem in Rachel Long’s award-winning My Darling from the Lions has a vivid story to tell—of family quirks, the perils of dating, the grip of religion, or sexual awakening—stories that are, by turn, emotionally insightful, politically conscious, wise, funny, and outrageous. Told in three sections, it’s a book about growing up, falling in love with not-great men, girlhood, and Barbie doll men in fast cars; a book about femininity, divinity, familial shame, Black identity, and modern culture. Long reveals herself as a razor-sharp and original voice on the issues of sexual politics and cultural inheritance that polarise our current moment. But it’s her refreshing commitment to the power of the individual poem that will leave the reader turning each page in eager anticipation: here is immediate, wide-awake poetry that entertains royally, without sacrificing a note of its urgency or remarkable skill.

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