After Suicide – Àkpà Arinzechukwu
We wanted happiness, you wanted flowers.
& when the chrysanthemum germinated
you asked if I had ever thought of losing something
Guest Editors: Safia Elhillo and Gbenga Adesina
Cover Design by Tochi Itanyi
In 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry we see the august breadth of an African poetics that dominates the space of intersections; intersections of geography, language, gender, faith… The poems gathered here are insights into the possibilities that take shape when we bridge our cultural specificities with a dedication to craft and aesthetic vision. These poems reach well beyond the continent and her diasporas and into the intimate spaces of every reader who encounters them.
– Matthew Shenoda, Professor – Rhode Island School of Design and author of Tahrir Suite: Poems
With poems ranging from interrogations of the nature of borders and the legacies of colonialism to questions of nationhood and ethnicity; reflections on gender and identity to legacies of personal trauma and national violence, the editors of 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry have taken care to select a wide variety of themes and voices that reflect the myriad experiences of young African writers coming of age. The best poetry awakens language to distinct possibilities before unimagined; here, with lyrical language both hauntingly visceral and evocatively imagistic, these young African writers do just that.
– Hope Wabuke, Professor – University of Nebraska-Lincoln and author of Movement No.1: Trains
The poets here are in love with words and the fractured worlds they live in. The poems are at once sublime yet political, global but rooted and contradiction is the border they call home. The publication of this anthology boldly marks a before and after moment in the African literary tradition and it leaves me feeling humbled, lucky and blessed to be a witness.
– Mukoma Wa Ngugi, Professor – Cornell University and author of Nairobi Heat & Logotherapy
We wanted happiness, you wanted flowers.
& when the chrysanthemum germinated
you asked if I had ever thought of losing something
Because Gakti is of the Sami people who are the people of reindeer
and the Tapa cloth can be used to decorate walls and for poetry
I am hungry for a love my country cannot afford,
the way white lusts for a backdrop to outshine
endlessly exposed, now and again, and especially then when we
stood, at ocean’s edge, morphing in and out as the waves
what is it they say about dancing into your own story without soles
or nakedness as fireproof lord knows he let us come this far just so we
could feel us come apart
This is absurd for on my wall, right down that American hall, stands a painting; a mythical conga bird
perched on a tree branch
yet somehow, our shame we left unclothed.
earth sopping in bone-lava us burning us failing to decide
whether it was dirty whether it was a sacred purge
fa-la-la-la-la can you believe that? and i was so happy to see grandma so alive, singing all these words – of which i understand nothing
The mountains vanish and took her too.
When I return, the land spits at my feet.
There is no shame in this, I’m told
My mother said I must hold the sun in my mouth
For days too dark to live through
For days that sound like mourning
Your fingers are large.
My strings are thin.
And when I am wet,
like paper, I tear
حيّ الله As the humming flies
That hover like worker bees
Dressed for a funeral An ecosystem
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