Only If You Look in the Mirror: A Study of Rupture and Renewal

One of life’s quiet joys is meeting a fellow reader who hands you a title you didn’t know you needed…and suddenly they’re holding up a mirror to your mind.

Mariam Temitope Alayande’s Only If You Look in the Mirror emerges as a blend of poetic text that draws from confession, myth-making, spiritual introspection, and feminist assertion. It is a work that exists in the borderlands between trauma narrative and devotional text, between emotional monograph and aesthetic experimentation. This collection’s ambition pivots not merely in its thematic range but in how it attempts to convert private emotional weather into public literary expression.
Across its 22 chapters, what unfolds is a chronicle of a woman’s descent into despair, her entanglement with psychological violence, her confrontation with ghosts of past experiences, and her eventual ascent into self-love and divine assurance. The book therefore adopts the structure of an emotional pilgrimage, foregrounding rupture but insisting on renewal.

One of the collection’s most insistent themes is the transformation of romantic experience into cosmology. The speaker renders heartbreak not as a mundane event but as a metaphysical disturbance. In “Blooming,” she describes early love as a sensory intoxication. “He looked at me like I was edible… yet my fingers didn’t fit into his”–a scene that exposes desire’s ambivalence, the simultaneous pull of longing and misalignment.

This ambivalence later mutates into tragedy, as seen in the striking metaphor: “He drove her into the ocean of shattered hearts and walked away without a scratch… Now she’s a mermaid.” The transformation of a wounded woman into a mythic sea-creature exemplifies Alayande’s literary predilection: emotional states are rendered as fantastical metamorphoses.
This reliance on mythopoetic transformation aligns Alayande with contemporary poets such as Warsan Shire, who similarly extends emotion beyond the body into landscape, storm, sea, and ruin. Like Shire, Alayande’s exploration of heartbreak is not a private event but a cosmic disturbance, an atmospheric, even geological shift.

A more sombre thread runs through the book’s exploration of emotional abuse and psychological manipulation. In one of the collection’s most lucidly written piece, the speaker confronts loss of selfhood within an abusive relationship:

“He loved me, yet he put mental cages over my mind… Slowly, lines of ‘me’ blurred.”
Here, the diction is precise: “cages,” “blurred,” “defiance,” “compliance.” Love becomes an apparatus of control. This section represents one of the text’s critical contributions to contemporary Nigerian poetry: a clear articulation of psychological violence that refuses melodrama yet retains emotional force. The speaker’s fragmentation, “I could no longer tell who I was”, reads not merely as confession but as a commentary on the ways patriarchal intimacy may take over female identity.

The collection’s middle chapters reveal a marked shift: from vulnerability to reclamation, from wound to weapon. The poems in “She,” “Love Thyself,” and “Another Love” articulate a confident feminist subjectivity:

“She is one of a kind, one to behold but never to hold.”
“No matter how deep those scars are… they can never take you from you.”
These moments of reclamation resist the logic of earlier pain. The voice becomes declarative, performative, and unashamedly celebratory of womanhood. Alayande’s aesthetic of self-affirmation recalls the directness of Indian-Canadian poet Rupi Kaur and the fierce sensuality of Yrsa Daley-Ward, poets whose work similarly insists on the dignity of the female body despite wounding and erasure.
Perhaps the most surprising transformation in the book is its final third, where the poems transcend romantic trauma and situate healing within a spiritual cosmology. In “Embracing God,” she shifts from earthly longing to divine intimacy:

“Hands raised high… showers of faith, peace, and joy may rain upon me.”
At this juncture, language that previously signified pain, fire, light, water begins to signify purification, grace, and renewal. The spiritual verse becomes not an escape from the earlier narrative but a consequence of it: suffering is the crucible in which the speaker discovers transcendence. This section gives the text a theological architecture, suggesting a journey from the carnal to the divine, from the self to the sacred.

Stylistic Observations

Alayande’s stylistic palette is lush, dramatic, and steeped in hyperbolic imagery. Her metaphors often draw from natural and elemental sources like oceans, storms, volcanoes, stars to produce a sensory overload that is both immersive and occasionally overwhelming. The diction is emotionally maximalist, favouring intensity over restraint. Lines such as:
“Let my tongue tell you the catastrophic history of this soul”
or
“My memories beg to vaporize as their ashes lay in a gold urn”
exemplify her preference for the operatic register.

Formally, the collection oscillates between free verse, prose-poetry, aphorisms, and journal-like entries, creating a composite textual landscape. This hybridity strengthens the narrative arc but sometimes contributes to tonal unevenness. Nonetheless, the multiplicity of forms mirrors the multiplicity of emotional states…an intentional instability that mirrors the thematic concerns.

Despite its emotional resonance and imaginative richness, the collection exhibits certain limitations that temper its overall impact.

First, the imagery, while often striking, leans heavily on recurring motifs (fire, oceans, the devil, darkness). This repetition, though stylistically intentional, occasionally blunts the force of metaphor by overfamiliarity.

I also noticed that the emotional intensity remains consistently at a climax, leaving little room for quieter moments that might deepen complexity or introduce nuance. A wider emotional spectrum that infuses silence, uncertainty, irony, or slow-building tension, would enrich the collection’s texture.

However, Only If You Look in the Mirror is an ambitious debut that situates Mariam within the growing tradition of contemporary African poets who merge confession with myth, feminism with spirituality, trauma with wholeness. Its power lies in its emotional truthfulness, its imaginative daring, and its refusal to reduce pain to silence. Despite moments of excess, the collection is compelling in its scope and courageous in its vulnerability. It is a work that will resonate deeply with readers familiar with heartbreak, rebirth, and the ongoing labour of self-love.

Shittu Fowora, Lagos