TITLE: QUESTIONS FOR ADA
AUTHOR: IJEOMA UMEBINYUO
GENRE: Poetry
NUMBER OF PAGES: 248
PUBLISHER: CreateSpace
DATE OF PUBLICATION: August 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1505984347
REVIEWER: Shoola Oyindamola
In QUESTIONS FOR ADA, Ijeoma Umebinyuo reclaims womanhood with pride, strength, and compassion.
Umebinyuo wrote healing to loss and brokenness, honesty and love for women and womanhood. She exalted femininity by connecting women to the reality of their power, by teaching them to guard and let loose of the god they are when the time is needed.
QUESTIONS FOR ADA re-tells the graduation from being a girl to becoming a woman, and she adds to many things that females are not taught at this ceremony, like occasional forgiveness of their selves. She embraced counseling, not only to tell one’s problems or to be diagnosed but as a place, an atmosphere and heaven where women and girls find their voice without shame or judgment.
Umebinyuo’s words most certainly bring deliverance and relief to females who have been hurt and taught to hide their pains in shame.
In QUESTIONS FOR ADA Ijeoma also presented her perspectives on immigration and culture, highlighting the feelings of being a stranger to a new country and an outsider to one’s home after relocation, like how she painted a caricature of the individuals that forget how to pronounce their surnames because they have lived outside their birth countries for a while.
Overall, QUESTIONS FOR ADA is highly recommended, especially for women who seek liberation within and around themselves. It is a gospel of women and for men’s understanding as well.
This is one collection that exalts the female gender in a unique, never-seen way.
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SHOOLA OYINDAMOLA was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. She is a published poet, a feminist, a mentor, a blogger and Co-founder and Resource manager of Sprinng Literary Movement. She loves to writes poems, essays and her non-classifiable opinions. She uses her writing skills with her feminist drive to discuss the gender injustices that need to be fixed. She published her first collection of poems titled “Heartbeat” in New York, USA at the age of 16.