From My Father’s Noose
From My Father’s Noose is the first collection of my poems.
At the centre of this collection is the poet’s birthday, 22 May 1986 and a threat her father first made when she was 13. The collection is published on the 25th anniversary of that initial event, and Dia notes she has done so “to share my memories, and the truth that lives in my poetry. With it I release this big secret and along with his hold over me.”
From My Father’s Nooseis a collection of 86 poems which is not only an ode just surviving, but to the strength and resilience required for continual survival. It is an ode to the power of hindsight. Hindsight not in sense of an immediate look back at events, but hindsight through binoculars, to look back at the past from such a distance that you can see the patterns, the impacts and the links rather than the micro outlook of good v bad.
From My Father’s Nooseis Dia’s forgiveness and acceptance of her past. “I carry no wish to change any part of my life. The noose that silenced me, forced my pen to speak”.
Extract from the Foreword by Sandra Rosier
From My Father’s Noose is a towering ode to survival, to the violation of a child’s broken trust and to resilience, rendered in searingly urgent, limpid, and unflinching prose. Dia takes the reader on a poetic journey, using a versatility of poetic styles, to explore the fallout of family trauma, the construction of identityand the vital, life-giving power of the pen. Paradox is the gold thread that weaves through the gorgeously perilous landscape of this collection.
Dia deftly transmutes the agonizing vulnerability and imposed limitations of being born a girl, subjugated to the will of a man who wished to possess and to dispossess, a man whose operatic cruelty is enshrined in an intractable patriarchal system. The poems in the collection are at once a sacred and raging record, a forcefulwitnessing, a bold process of recovery and self-reparenting, an expiation, an essential exorcism, and the cathartic rebirth of ‘someone who deserves it all and more.’ Dia mines the depth of a paradise lost, mourns the childhood that never was and the father who tied his noose tightly around her heart.
From My Father’s Noose is a gift, a poetic odyssey of loss and life, an affirmation of selfhood, mining the unspeakable depths of childhood trauma, parental violence, guilt and shame to erect a towering monument to catharsis and rebirth. The elephant memories are brutal, often unglamorous and desolate, though they are unflinchingly honest. Dia offers us, not the pat satisfaction of a Disney ending, but rather, she delivers obstinatehope by beckoning the reader to stare ‘into darkness to see deeper.’ Though the process of transformation is not linear, complete or fixed, the construction of this evolving and transcendent selfhood is the ultimate act of resilience, a fluid testament to a woman who is ‘broken and bruised yet standing tall beyond belief,’ in defiance of all expectations.
