In modern Nigerian culture, the “Japa” story is typically framed as a binary: success or tragedy. Salmah Salam Oiza’s debut collection of poems, Foreign in a Long-Familiar Leap Year, subverts such easy dichotomies. Instead, she gives us what she describes as an expensive experiment in optimism: “a kind of poetic tally of how I spent a year stretching myself across time zones and truths I never expected to hold,” she writes.
The way Salmah uses her craft shifts from conventional lyrical to “visual poetic” techniques to produce a text that reads less like a book of poetry than an art gallery of sorrow. The heart of her writing lies in structural temporalism, wherein the twelve months of the year form a frozen framework to hold her mutating plans. This enables her to measure the ‘dance in Utako’ against ‘the imported bleach’ of London on a “scale” to compare “the warmth to the cold.”
The collection opens with the clinical accuracy of departure. January is “one-way ticket, in disguise,” as “the warmth of Abuja, with a woman in rollers coaxing flame from coal,” is exchanged for the “slick cathedral” that is Heathrow. Oiza distills the initial “spectacles and second guesses” that come with being an immigrant, and the “conditional love letter” that is the visa inscribed upon green pages.
But with the passing of the months, the “starry-eyed” hopes of a “magical production” with “meet-cutes à la Netflix” start to unravel. By April and May, the poet is “two girls in one,” grappling with the “ache to bloom” in a space that is at once a “wound” and a “womb.” The commentary here is quite pointed: the “debt to the self” that comes with “beginning again” can never really be repaid.
The collection refers to a winter that doesn’t bring the expected snow. December in London at 6:17 p.m. is a “platform littered with old receipts,” a world far from the prayers she keeps inside her “spine.” The “lies” of October, the “jars and serums,” the memorised cover letters, all lead to a “permanence” that “cracks into return.”
The collection is chronological, based on a structure that utilises the months of the year to follow the psychological unravelling of the writer towards “unmaking”. Time is specifically defined as a unit of loss and accommodation by Oiza. In “Last March,” she asks, “What is the measure of a year?” She later declares that “March is a scale.” Thus, it becomes possible to observe the transformation that takes place from “starry-eyed” to “cold bones” to “dripping fire” through the months.
Oiza’s most interesting stylistic move is the application of “Spaghettification,” which she adopts from astrophysics, a technique of self-stretching, and then applies this technique through typographical manipulation, which involves breaking down words on the page, leading to the loss of vowel forms and the breakdown of consonants due to the displacement effect. The scientific phenomenon, called tidal forces, conveys the message about being an immigrant through “a constant sense of breaking” in which “vowels lose their shape” while “time…swells.” “The sharp white pain” of July “when nobody texts back” is succeeded by “August that stretches until all that’s left is length.”
It is also important to note the contrast of the dictions in the collection. Salmah weaves together prayers in the Arabic and religious tradition, such as “Kun Fa-yakun” and “Ayatul Kursiyu,” and presents them as a form of prayer carried in the poet’s “spine.” The poet juxtaposes this prayer in the form of the religious tradition with the “biometric” and “27 points of ID” and “coordinates” used in the immigration process.
Another technique she adopts involves the use of a split-column page design, which presents the reader with the experience of “healing” and “haunting” at the same time, which represents the split mind of an immigrant.
The most moving commentary Oiza makes about the “host” state is in “Biometric,” where she is “a human being whose existence is under consideration” by a “blinking red” machine. She says she is “reduced to 27 points of ID,” a “body transformed into coordinates,” with the “countries she carries inside” being “ignored.” This is a perfect example of the removal of “dignity…at the borders.”
Oiza employs a meta-poetic approach to self-correction through “lyrical diary” entries. Oiza regularly interrupts her poetic rhythm to analyze her “starry-eyed” delusions or confess to “lies” told as a ruse to give the illusion of prospering. This approach, coupled with the incorporation of “artefacts” such as Spotify URLs or grocery lists, brings Oiza’s lofty ideas of exile down to the practical reality of “surviving on schedule.”
The title itself, Foreign in a Long-Familiar Leap Year, is indicative of “an extra” or “a time that doesn’t fit the regular rhythm.” This is much the same experience the immigrant has, being “stretched” across different time zones, a “longer” year spent in a state of “postponed sorrow.”
For Oiza, “Immigration is learning to carry longing like a debt you’ll never stop servicing.” The ‘Note to Reader,’ which serves as a prologue to the collection, is a breath of fresh air wherein Oiza turns to “Netflix” and “delusion” for the romanticised version of immigration she once subscribed to.
Foreign in a Long-Familiar Leap Year is a stunning interpretation of the movement of life itself, as a poet, that serves as a crucial reflective tool for any person who has ever been “fluent in survival” yet “not local enough.” This work is a painful reminder that, while a year might be a “scale,” it is the weight of what we leave behind that tips the balance.
