The Architecture of Becoming

A Review of Tomileye E. Abolaji’s The Things Life Taught My Heart
By Femi Morgan

Published by i2X Media, 2026

Number of pages: 62 pages

There is a moment in Tomileye E. Abolaji’s debut collection that captures the entire book of poetry. The book shows that the poet persona is lost in a new city, following the blue dot on her phone, and finds herself travelling fifteen minutes in the wrong direction. “I had not found my way,” she writes. “I had simply travelled farther from it.” It is a simple observation, almost throwaway, yet it contains the essential grammar of this book: the recognition that getting lost is not the same as being defeated, that the wrong road can still teach you something about the right one. It also hints that technology cannot replace intuition.

The Things Life Taught My Heart, subtitled Twenty journeys through love, betrayal, courage, discovery and the beautiful art of BECOMING, is a collection of twenty prose poems that trace a life from its difficult beginnings to its hard-won flourishing. Abolaji, a legal counsel and performance poet who has performed in Nigeria and the UK, writes with the precision of someone trained to weigh evidence and the tenderness of someone who has learned that not all truths can be proven in a courtroom.

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The collection is structured into five movements, “The Wounds We Carry,” “The Things Love Leaves Behind,” “The Value of Being Seen,” “Learning to Stand,” and “Becoming More.” This architecture gives the book a satisfying arc and extends the metaphor of the collection to its structure. We begin in hurt and end in hope, but the journey is never simplistic. Abolaji understands that healing is not linear, that the wounds we carry do not disappear simply because we have learned to name them.

The opening piece, “The Courage Hidden in a No,” sets the tone. A friendship dissolves when the speaker refuses a loan the poet persona cannot afford to give. The refusal is met not with understanding but with recrimination: “I became stingy, unfriendly, a terrible person in stories I had never been invited to hear.” What makes this poem remarkable is its refusal to apologise for the boundary drawn. “Kindness should never require the destruction of one’s peace,” Abolaji writes, and the line lands with the force of a verdict. The poem ends with a question that is really a declaration: “if my no makes me a stranger in a friendship that only understands yes, perhaps I have not lost as much as I once feared.”

This is a book about learning to trust one’s own judgment, and Abolaji returns to this theme repeatedly. In “The Day Friendship Changed the Locks,” a roommate’s betrayal arrives not through confrontation but through a telephone call to the speaker’s sister, a detail that captures the peculiar cowardice of certain betrayals, the way they hide behind other people. “Some people share your childhood but not your convictions,” Abolaji observes. “Some share your room but not your understanding of friendship.” The lines are aphoristic, memorable, the kind of sentences that stick to the ribs.

What distinguishes this collection from other memoirs of survival is its restraint. Abolaji does not dramatise her pain; she examines it. In “When the Eggs Hit the Ground,” a broken bag of groceries on a dark street becomes the occasion for a meditation on loneliness that is almost unbearably precise. “I cried. Not because eggs had broken, but because sometimes the smallest thing becomes the final weight on an already tired heart.” There is no self-pity here, only the clear-eyed acknowledgment that exhaustion has its own logic, its own breaking points.

The collection’s middle sections explore love in its various forms. “Love in the Time of Loading” recounts a romance that began during the COVID-19 lockdown, when boredom and a Facebook message became the unlikely foundation of a marriage. It is a charming piece, light in tone but serious in its implications. “Perhaps love is not always found where we go looking,” Abolaji writes. “Perhaps sometimes it finds us while we are simply passing time.” The sentiment is familiar, but the specificity of the details, the games, the longer messages, the comfortable silences—gives it freshness.

More powerful is “The Truth Had a Baby’s Face,” a devastating account of discovering a partner’s infidelity through a photograph on Facebook. The poem’s structure is masterful, the speaker’s boyfriend asks her, hypothetically, what a man who fathered a child with an ex should do. She answers without hesitation: “Take responsibility. Marry the woman.” He smiles. “What if I were the man?” The ground shifts beneath the reader’s feet exactly as it shifted beneath the speaker’s. Months later, the photograph appears. “A little face with familiar features, a face that seemed to carry an answer I had never asked to receive.” The confrontation is brief, the breakup decisive. “Sometimes, the greatest act of love is the decision to stop abandoning yourself for someone you do not wish to lose.” It is a line that could easily have been sentimental; in context, it is earned.

Not every piece reaches these heights. Some of the later poems particularly “The Wisdom of Not Waiting” and “The Seasons Did Not Ask My Permission”, feel more like meditations than narratives, their lessons stated rather than dramatised.

Clearly, the prose poems in the final section sometimes drift toward the inspirational, their edges smoothed by the desire to console. Yet even these pieces contain moments of genuine insight. “Leaving Is Also a Form of Courage” makes a compelling case for the dignity of walking away: “not everything we invest in is meant to remain with us forever.”

Abolaji’s greatest strength is her ability to find the universal in the specific. Her story is deeply Nigerian, the commercial vehicle, the gunshots on the road, the family connections that both shelter and betray, but it is also profoundly human. When she writes about arriving in a new country with suitcases and expectations, the reader does not need to have crossed borders to understand the disorientation. When she writes about the colleague who saw her potential and handed her responsibility, the reader does not need to have been in that office to feel the weight of being trusted.

The book’s title promises lessons, and it delivers them, but never with a heavy hand. Abolaji’s wisdom is hard-won, and she knows better than to offer easy resolutions. “Hope, I have learned, is not the belief that everything will happen as we wish,” she writes in “The Gift Hidden Inside the Interruption.” “It is the courage to remain open to good things even when life takes an unexpected turn.” This is not the language of self-help; it is the language of survival, of someone who has learned to live with uncertainty rather than wait for it to pass.

The Things Life Taught My Heart is not a perfect book. Some pieces lack the imagistic density of the best prose poetry, and the collection’s final section occasionally tilts toward the homiletic. But it is an honest book, a generous book, and—most importantly—a book that understands the difference between surviving and becoming. Tomileye E. Abolaji has taken the raw material of her life and shaped it into something that matters. We should all be grateful she chose to share it.

Femi Morgan is an award-winning writer, journalist, and culture figure, he was shortlisted for the Glena Luschei Prize, and the Pius Adesanmi Memorial Prize for African Writing.