A striking number of poems in 20.35 Africa: Volume V manifest as elegies, giving us personal, heartfelt meditations on the realities and echoes of death, displacement, and absence. And if elegy is relentless in the way it insists on coaxing back old ghosts and painful memories, the body – its primary wind tunnel and vehicle – is often forced to confront the loss of its own agency in the service of the elegiac mode’s mandate: the consuming invocation of that which has been taken away. Or at least grapple with the risk of that double loss. The tensile current running through this anthology, however, stems partly from the body’s need to mourn, in addition to the body’s resistance to surrender wholesale to the caprices of unalloyed elegy, preferring instead to expand its limits and complicate its terms.
As they commemorate and mourn lost loved ones, the elegies here often invoke the figurative, and even the surreal. In his poem “Ikpoba Hill,” where the speaker visits his grandfather’s grave on what would have been his birthday, Praise Osawaru writes:
let’s agree that loss is a chained rock pulling
the body to the riverbed.
& it grows pain into a field of wildflowers.
& the tongue becomes a sponge of saltwater.
Even in their hesitancy to plunge into or perform despair for its own sake, there is no questioning the speaker’s intentions to revisit the past, to rouse history and make it speak. For the grief that courses through these poems is not strictly over the departed; in many cases, the loss expressed is a living one, associated with losing one’s land through immigration or political injustice. The suspicious shadow of history is at once erased and menacingly present. In “Blessed Is the Past, Most Eternal, Most Merciful,” Ọbáfẹ́mi Thanni writes:
In the dream of my country
I am a child plucking violets, into a bouquet of trails, for my pilgrimage to the past
The poets here embark on pilgrimages, they perform rituals, and they stow away objects as both talismans and comfort toys. Yet a safe passage to the end of any narrative is never guaranteed, in the same way that memory – a recurring motif among these poems – does not aid in its own orderly retrieval or redemption. Instead, memory often disguises itself “in the slush and the rushing winds of grief” (“Rot” – Belinda Munyeza). Munyeza’s poem shape-shifts and litters its own landscape with graves that are at first mistaken for stones, and a grandmother at once sure-footed as a mountain and evanescent, like the wind itself. It does not bring lasting comfort either, or any comfort all for that matter, that the mother, who stands as a sort of tour guide, a reliable intermediary with the ghosts of an old world, suddenly becomes an apparition herself, an extra slab of rock on the mountain of graves, when called upon to participate in the complex heart-work of affirming a daughter’s sexuality. Thus, the journey stalls halfway; as unresolved as a dream.
In “listening to my father read his autobiography,” Asmaa Jama bemoans the wall of silence often encountered in the journey to retrieve narratives from a parent’s past, especially when they relate to topics collectively deemed taboo or shelved away in private boxes, labelled trauma.
for what they won’t explain, who they folded into cotton and their names
But in pursuing the winding trail of the unspeakable, the speaker also comes upon their own inability to remain stable receptacles for the violent and lacerating memories of the past.
my father held open a telegram line, long
enough for words to be sent to the people that
needed them, there is more, except i can’t inhabit
those memories, the ones
where his voice disappears and his hands turn air
Here we witness a heartbreaking lyrical shift as the speaker’s iron resolve gives way to vulnerability, equal parts tender and cathartic, without tapering off or betraying the integrity of the narrative journey. It reveals to the reader, therefore, the gnarly and emotionally charged flipside of grief work. It rarely arrives at a neat resolution. There is no exit in sight, and no destination; the narrative has its tail in mouth, beginning where it ends. Echoing what the African American poet Phillip B. Williams noted in his introduction to a folio he curated for The Yale Review on Black hauntology, the haunted poems in this anthology emerge as cyclical, and trade in both intense focus and dizzying defamiliarization. The ride towards apprehension is a loop, and the pulse of the resulting elegies is varied and endless.
Even the poet who seeks moral absolution in investigating the past is sooner implicated in the mess than afforded any lasting or meaningful redemption. Obáfémi Thanni’s poem “The Festival” unrolls like a diviner’s scroll:
I sit in the hours before lullabies shut my eyes, taking census of my sorrows—the tenderness lost, the boisterous children who turn my mind on itself, the silence after a good joke, the period swollen with distance in a lover’s postscript, the fickle warmth of touch, the October earth offering water before a corpse fills its mouth. I take census in the dark. I speak softly to the sorrows whose lineage serpent my spine
The poems in this collection thread together the fluid zing of oral poetry (once the dominant poetic mode of griots on the continent) with the compact architectural strength of written poetry. The narrative poems are meaty yet woven through with exuberant lyrical verve and lucent imagery that even what in dim light approaches the prosaic mesmerizes the reader like latticework.
These poets reveal an urgency to name, to storytell, and revisit known and unknown pasts – and they do so while experimenting with form, inventing novel and mesmerising ways of wresting control from the blank page. In “10 Years After My Arrival, I Take An Immigration Satisfaction Survey,” for instance, Honora Ankong mimics the language of a government survey, but in a radical act of self-reclamation, she upends this banal document that is designed to flatten personal stories into pre-designed response boxes, instead fleshing out a sprawling narrative thrumming with resilience and irony. By deconstructing this mechanical form, Ankong has not only elevated the story of her working-class family as they leave their former lives in Cameroon and plant new roots in America. She has also insisted on cultivating a robust and living language where previously, only flat political stereotypes and clichés were demanded.
Traditional poetry forms seem to be making a comeback recently, and, with it, the well-worn conversations around their capacity to contain the wild and temperamental moods of our contemporary politics and digitally-mediated lives. But with concerns more pragmatic than oppositional, the measured and gilded range of the sonnet form, for instance, or say the popular hegemony of free verse must contort themselves, if not fall apart, in the hands of contemporary poets no longer working as mere wordsmiths but as excavators of history and translators of the archives. New poets emerging from the continent are without doubt at the forefront of the charge to salvage the wreckage of traditional poetic forms, and use their best parts to construct urgent works. One after the other, the poems in this volume take wild leaps beyond and outside the safe zones, leaning freely into hybrid and constructivist forms.
Sara Elkamel
Bhion Achimba