I personally love the gendered of hope visible in the poems in Sofiat Ramon’s Stars Don’t Cry. This visibility is evident Ramon’s artistic vision of proffering hope in the face of gendered difficulties is pursued with an unequivocal optimistic trope in poems imbued with grief, one reads the ‘sun’ in what’s supposed to be a rainy sky—something, bright, touches one’s subconscious, as in the lines: “I slip from fear’s glass/And turn tears onto floating light” (in “Here, I’m a Goddess”); also, one reads: “I shape my agony into a paper boat/And watch it float away on the river” (in “Sprout”). Ramon’s artistic vision of proffering hope in the face of gendered difficulties is pursued with an unequivocal optimistic trope.

One reads, pauses, and asks oneself: Why should I be afraid of the cloud of patriarchy, of familial, social, even cultural cumulonimbus covering the sky of my being? Stars Don’t Cry is Ramon’s way of saying that, with “art” (for there are instances scattered about the chapbook where art becomes a lifeboat, saving the poet from life’s distresses: “I weave words where your name won’t exist/but you keep popping up between each space”), one can always write stellar smile on the face of one’s seeming dark sky, as in: “I let my pain fill blank sheet/as I cast every tingle into words”. What she does every night as a (feminist) writerly life of reading and writing is simply “shed my skin/and clad myself into new visage”. In another poem titled “My Skin”, we learn that this skin’ “is a pride/symbol that I’m a descent of conquerors”. For the poet, her black skin, with all its perfections and imperfections, “is who I am”. For Ramon, then, to fret, or pamper one’s “brokenness” is to let one’s “star” “cry”. The implication is one (young girls/women) has to be tenacious and resilient in the face of social, cultural, moral and even mental difficulties.