Sheniz Janmohamed’s collection of poems, Reminders on the Path, invokes hope amidst loss, memories, and intergenerational trauma in a peculiar, evocative way. In the first section, memory is interspersed with loss but also with a sense of optimism. Each poem invokes feelings of nostalgia and grief as a journey. Janmohamed’s approach cannot be considered, strictly speaking, nature writing, but still, the earth, flowers, stars, and moon permeate each human experience. 

My DNA has prepared me 
for deserts and droughts
but what about the abundance 
of rain?
What about a dappled 
maple leaf in a spring forest?

The poem, “Ancestors,” reflects how Janmohamed deals with her losses and traumas. From the author’s note, it is evident that she has been uprooted many times and now feels she belongs to nowhere. She is too brown for a Toronto suburb and too white for Kenya, where the poet’s family resides. She remains distanced from her familial roots in India, and upon her first visit there, she feels like a stranger once again with her foreign accent. This pain of feeling like a stranger—belonging nowhere in particular—echoes throughout, albeit with a pinch of hope. One can never be completely rootless when grounded in nature, and within ourselves. From the desire to locate her past and her roots, the poet goes on to locate home, and again, there is acceptance of both loss and fluidity in this concept. The line, “Home is in every step you take, home is every rock on this road,” from the poem “The Road,” dismantles the stereotype of home as a cosy, static space. Anyone who has been displaced and uprooted finds home in every new place and new territory. The whole journey of finding oneself and one’s home is expressed by Janmohamed through the interplay of verses that denote both hope and despair. Jahmohamed encourages readers to stop looking to the shattered and broken world for any validation, and to instead look within oneself:

Every knock at the door of your chest is an opportunity to hone, 
beloved.
Stitch the scars of your heart and finally declare: 
I am my own beloved! 

As a person of colour, a woman, and a minority in a country witnessing much communal hatred, this collection of poems feels both like home and an escape from a home that is becoming a more hostile place each passing day. The trauma of the 1947 partition that the Indian subcontinent witnessed has not yet healed, yet we see increasing violence and up-rootedness. Home, in this context, becomes a contested space. When the state is adamant about erasing existing homes, one tries to find a home in every experience. The same is true about our sense of belonging; it is in vain to find one way to belong—there are many ways to connect and disconnect from what feels like home and what feels inhospitable to us. 

In the four sections of Janmohamed’s probing collection, she takes us on a journey home; on a quest to find herself. Beginning with what feels like a homage to her ancestors, she moves on to a long and uplifting journey of finding roots and then finally, comes back to the question of home. The final section is ironically titled “Home.” The line “Now, let go” from the poem “Cheers,” absolves oneself from the hurt our memories cause us. This is a succinct message, and one that can remind us to shed the weight that’s holding us back on our own journeys.