We Survived Until We Could Live

A powerful, intimate portrait of a family navigating the memories of war.

Who survives war? What does survival mean? And at what cost? Yes, the sirens and bombs have ceased. Yes, peace has settled over the rubble. But even in moments of laughter, ghosts chafe. Blood still smells in the air. The present is as fraught as the past, filled with shadows and fumes. Old wounds sting the body and the mind, rekindling nightmares and memory.

In poetry by turns lyrical and intense, elegiac and intimate, We Survived Until We Could Live plumbs the contours of vulnerability, inviting readers to reflect on loss and the broken flesh. Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike skillfully uses multiple narrative voices and personas —a father, a mother, a son—to show how postwar trauma and memory warp family relationships, how violence persists long after a war has ended.

Umezurike doesn’t turn away from contemplating the psychic and physical scars that war leaves on people, whether on the old or young, parents or children. These are poems of taut breath, silence, and echoes. These are also poems of love and its redemptive power. Poems of the courage to continue. Tender yet enduring snapshots of kindness, grace, hope, and resilience, reminding us of our capacity to emerge from the crushing shrouds of darkness and tragedy into the light.

Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike is assistant professor in the Department of English and Wayne O. McCready Emerging Fellow at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Masculinities in Nigerian Fiction, Please Don’t Interrupt, there’s more, Double Wahala, Double Trouble, and Wish Maker. >

Umezurike’s book will give you a father turned by war into a fury of ghosts, his love for his family a confusion of violence. Yet it is a book of hope, too, in a mother and son who endure but not abandon him, or love, as they struggle with the darkness that penetrates their lives like bullets into flesh.

—Richard Harrison, author of On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood

We Survived Until We Could Live is a riveting, exceedingly powerful book. Umezurike’s unflinching verse, with its rich music and remarkable imagery, shows that hope and tenderness persist—precariously—even in war and its aftermath. A bold, breathtaking achievement.

—Peter Norman, author of Some of Us and Most of You Are Dead

In We Survived Until We Could Live, Uchechukwu Umezurike bears witness to war’s aftermath, to family, and to the intimacies of survival. These poems inhabit memory, giving voice to a father gripped by trauma, a mother’s love thinning into silence, and a child inheriting scars bound to reopen. Threaded with the language of kinship, the collection binds love and loss in war’s shadow, sustained by Umezurike’s gift for holding tenderness and rupture in the same breath.

—Cornel Bogle, Book Reviews Editor for the Journal of West Indian Literature

We Survived Until We Could Live is one of the most engrossing and powerful poetry collections I’ve read in years. Umezurike masterfully plaits an unforgettable narrative that moves beyond the scars of war to reveal the complex inner workings of a family repeatedly confronting both past and present. The collection is unflinching and steady in its vulnerability, engaging all five senses with astonishing clarity. Readers are invited into a world so vividly alive that we feel everything—so close we can trace the veins of a leaf with our fingertips. In this cinematic collection, our view of the world expands as we witness how love and grief can coexist, often in the most unexpected places.

—Chelene Knight, award-winning author of the memoir Dear Current Occupant and Junie.

Both devastating and uplifting, Umezurike’s poems lurch, careen, and then sing against a family (and national) heritage of violence and, in response, gently cup peace in the tranquil moments of language. There is a fierce bravery here that is becoming a signature of new Canadian letters, a signature assertion of identity and belonging that has an unflinching gaze and a healing hand. Poems of parental redemption and national pain mingle in Umezurike’s resounding images; they are applications of gauze-like language carefully administered to wounds. In this book, the personal speaks in the city square, essential songs in the cultural evolution of who we are.

—Rob Budde, author of Dreamland Theatre