With the influx of poetry being written by Africans both on the continent and in the diaspora, it has been said before: this is an exciting time for African poetry. I (Itiola) am honored to have a hand in curating some of the best work of our contemporaries alongside Cheswayo Mphanza. 20.35 Africa has prevailed into its third volume because it continues to trouble the pervasive narrative that there is only one way to be an African writer. Like any good anthology, this is a living collection as alive as the writers whose work comes together to create this cohesive body. Volume three of 20.35 Africa serves as a timestamp for the urgency of contemporary African Letters. Questions about God, loss, intimacy, shame, love, home are at the forefront of these poems. Nonetheless, we must acknowledge the elephant in the room. Where we are in the world at the moment is surely a strange time. A global pandemic is amidst that has claimed the lives of over 100K people and countries are protesting sanctioned state violence. With so many failures in governments around the world, living for a lot of people has also become its own type of tragedy. All the ills of the world that we have known (famine, poverty, and so forth) have become greatly exacerbated by the lack of resources which are leaving people to become even more desperate. This isn’t a scene from Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, I (Cheswayo) am paraphrasing, but this is the state of our current world. The more I keep reading Butler, the more I realize literature has already predicted this. More so, it has examined that the solutions we are going to need to weather this storm during and post COVID-19. In this way, literature is a window into the fragile thing we have constructed and called ‘humanity.’ Perhaps more than ever, this is why the third volume of 20.35 Africa is a necessity.
The poems we have chosen for this anthology are works of that essence. We suspect the poems written in this anthology were written well before the pandemic, but how timely they are is an eerie reminder of how these particular poets are soothsayers. That what we do as writers is prophesize. These poets range from a vast experience of the African diaspora, but from the outset they make clear that terms like diaspora or home are not to be romanticized but critiqued for the many multitudes they contain. Such multitudes range from violence, piousness, love, apathy, rituals and traditions. What remains outstanding from what was started in the first volume of this anthology is the singularity the poets maintain. What this shows for the present condition and what we hope to be the future of African poetry is that the time is now to insist upon our voices being amplified. From poems that channel metaphysics into their dialectics to poems that speak of living in exile from one’s own country, the veracity shown in these poems and poets stem from both intellect as well as craft.
I (Cheswayo) read Abdulrahim Hussani’s “Poem At Twenty-Four,” which is an engagement with Sonia Sanchez’s “Poem at Thirty,” that tethers two Black diasporas into a singularity where the speaker asserts rather than waits for permission to will themselves into a voice:
perhaps I should begin by telling you about the night
but I’m six long, long miles away
bewildered, traveling in a boulevard of dead bodies
and merrying vultures—
a quadrant, where lies the rest of me.
The aside of death—the violence of it from the speaker’s voice beckons a thought of the passiveness of this violence, but as the speaker shows throughout the poem—there is still control in the self. And this moment in the poem becomes further examined by Nwaoha Chibuzo Anthony in their poem “Ellipsis” when he writes:
We all have excuses for being born in a graveyard of living corpses
but we cry every morning, singing melodies of ancient folktales,
dreaming ourselves into thorny floors of stolen images.
Both these poets show the transitory nature of things. A type of impermanence where we as readers are to find beauty and longing that we know we cannot hold on to. And so these poets push us to think further of the idea of nationhood notably in Dalia Elhassan’s poem “Conversations About Home” which positions itself in the space of lineage, being written after Somali poet, Warsan Shire. A poem governed by dropped lines as well as line breaks that pulls its readers from one striking image to the next, Elhassan takes us between countries, moves us from the ethereal to the immediate. As the poem continues its journey, Elhassan’s work shows us ‘home’ is not always a place, but those we are lucky enough to call “our people”:
i wave
a flag with their faces on it,
the closest thing to home
looks like an immigrant,
like the creases in my father’s face,
like the sunset touching miami,
like every mural of malcolm x
in every diasporic city.
i never asked to leave, they took me.
feels like i’m every nation’s castaway.
Hiwot Adilow’s “RED” weaves an intricate narrative about her father and the artifacts that connect her to the memory of him. Stanley Princewell McDaniel’s “Like Light Moving Across Oblivion” negotiates a single body containing multiple selves and surrendering to the great eventual quiet. The single binding thread of the aforementioned poems and all the works that grace this anthology is their insistence to confront the human condition in all its complicated, beautiful, nuanced glory. These poems and others here are a testimony to the strength to the growing legacy of this critical anthology. As 20.35 Africa’s reach stretches on, these poems set a precedent for what is boundless in African Letters. The future of what is possible is brighter because we are and continue to make space for our people to flourish.
Yours in Letters,
I.S. Jones & Cheswayo Mphanza