Stephanie by Victoria Adukwei Bulley
For my Poem of the Month in December, I have chosen to write about Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s poem Stephanie, which was published as part of the Tenancy series by MAP magazine, a series that explores what it means to occupy somewhere, or something, temporarily.
It is a poem about absence, about memory, about friendship. We do not know what has happened to the narrator’s friend Stephanie, only that when the narrator walks past her house it no longer belongs to her. We have to guess at the reason for her absence. Perhaps she moved away. Perhaps she has died. We do not know. As the narrator walks past the house, she thinks about stopping by, hoping that she can stay and talk to Stephanie for “a little or too long / until late preferably / until [her] phone rings – ” but she does not stop by, she encounters someone outside the house:
somebody was in your porch
calling to someone else inside
who was maybe your mother, your sister
or even yourself
We think at this stage perhaps Stephanie is there — at the house — or at least a relative, and we wonder why the narrator did not stop to say hello, whether perhaps they had been in an argument or had fallen out, or whether she did not stop because of the person in the porch, someone she did not know. And then there is an unravelling where the veil of memory and thought is lifted, and we are confronted with the truth: “but it wasn’t your mothers’ car / in the drive & no it wasn’t / your house anymore.” And in revealing this to us, we understand that maybe the first three stanzas are also a memory, that when the narrator visited Stephanie’s house she would often stay until it was dark, until her phone rings (perhaps a parent asking where she is, when she is coming home). The rest of the poem thinks of the past, visiting the park at nighttime, a place that seems to hold significance to their friendship (“What is a friend / but someone to sit with / on the swings / out in the darkness.”).
This poem is full of absence: the absence of information, of knowledge; the white space of absence between the lines on the page; the absence of a friendship; the absence of Stephanie. But despite the absence, the distance in the poem, there is still a feeling of togetherness. The poem is written in couplets, and they remind me of Stephanie and the narrator sitting together side by side on the swings. There was a friendship, even if it is not there now, and that means something to the narrator. This is also clear from the lines “I walked past your house today, / on the way to mine / I thought I might stop by again”. The use of the word “again” makes it seem as though the narrator has thought of stopping by recently, prior to this time. And the fact that she walks past on the way back to her own home indicates that Stephanie lived nearby. The narrator keeps walking past and thinking about Stephanie, thinking of stopping by. Perhaps there is regret there — or longing — something she keeps revisiting in her thoughts. She wants to stop by and stay for hours, stay until it gets dark outside, but she no longer can.
Stephanie reveals only very small things about the characters: the fact that the narrator used to tell Stephanie to quit her job; that she has a mother, a sister; she lived in a house that you passed on the way to the narrator’s. There is just enough for readers to construct vague images of these two characters, but, in a way, it is as though the reader is sitting out in the dark. Perhaps we are Stephanie, perhaps Adukwei Bully is giving us as readers the space to come up with our own side of the story, our own conclusions. The poem is addressed to Stephanie, and it that way it is addressed to us.
You can read the full poem here.
Text and illustration by Rochelle Roberts
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