Guest Editors: Safia Jama and Nick Makoha
Cover Design by Tochi Itanyi
20:35 AFRICA is a beautifully arranged volume of poetry that explores the complexities of being African/African Diaspora/being a people of the globe, navigating our many experiences from all corners of the world. Through each poem, one sees a people cleansing themselves, a body that defies definition as a single group. The volume is filled with such powerful poems, including, “Self Portrait as Brenda Fassie,” the poem that opens the volume with such fresh lines like, “Borrow yourself to happiness/You wanna be loved. You just wanna be loved/…” or as another author in the collection says, “All our wounds begin from the same place. Sometimes, the grief we carry/ is better than the one we deserve…/” As if all of us are one people, writing the one poem about our one existence, over and over, each poet does what a poet is supposed to do, unsettling things, or finding the unsettling things around us. There in these poems are a quest for answers, as in “Mosque at Hadejia,” where the poet draws us into the presence of God by exploring the silence of that very God in the haunting lines, “What I understand of God is/ His Silence…/ or “You see, I thirst for little clarities;/ for syntax in the great chaos/.”
The volume ushers us into the presence of that longing everyone knows within their skin, sometimes, denying, but a longing we however carry forever, and uncovering that longing, that pain, the ironies that define us, we find healing. Each poem takes us on a journey we must navigate, whether it be a persona piece deconstructing the “Brenda Fassie” the poet sees or that of the lone worshiper seeking to find God. These are some of the finest poems I have ever read from the youngest among us, and how fresh, how mind-boggling, how urgent each line, each word. They belong on every shelf, in every library, in everyone’s heart.
– Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems
These are gorgeous poems, lush and haunting, full of tenderness and life: rendering the beauty of joy and nightlife, of Brenda Fassie, of loss and its sorrowful rumination. They delve into the fragility of black boyhood, the dangers, the pleasures, the joys and the tests in the periphery. Visceral and aching with physicality, this anthology holds poems about love and its sweetness as well as the desperation of those who have lost their homes and life. Hopeful poems, scanning the earth for signs of life, invoking music and the voice of God: “What music is that? I say, give me your hand. / You are already dancing.” Some poems are prayers, others a declaration of survival.
– Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head
Let the yout stand there and see us metamorphose
into our parents, uncles and aunties,
see our Miyakes, crop tops stretch into butter-gold
aso-okes that make our walk suede,
a mint November night,
Here, a stationed tank and rock barricades. There, one boy’s smirk flashing against the backdrop of patchy fields. Look away and they vanish. Look again and the armed children still look back
In the middle of the caving cottage, you are trapped in. In the middle of their one-arm embrace, the girl and her father are also captives. Unlike yours, their shackles don’t break by averting the eyes.
& sometimes I’ll sing at a funeral & a wedding at the same time
so you know, I’ve lived & died & seen it all
like to marry is a woman problem
like in both cases she is the outfit
But there’s another
dimension to this where the ocean doesn’t
puke the whale out of pure neglect. It is
the miracle of hands that grants the
conjurer a success of magic, not his wits.
tonight, I notice your skin in faint moonlight your arm moves slow to the ripple of the bass each percussive thud a different side of skin brought to life
a new dimension now apparent
the woman you borrowed tonight narrows
like a riddle when touched or looked at
& what you are running from cannot catch you here
& what you sow you must hand over to the last song
to the feet half full
i wonder if you knew i could do that too?
that in theory (if only just for you)
i am capable the way a cat is
slink without reason, entering lives as we please
just enough teeth to leave a mark
The heart is limited in its pursuit,
valves opened and closed like doors
leading nowhere. What being
designs its own destruction, falls
short of longings it feeds the earth
instead tu me manque means
you are missing from me
[i.e, you first taste absence on a colonizer’s tongue]
no french word for longing either, nothing for
what the absence of Zaire does to me
A replica of madness it is when a lamb is coughed out
without the skin of his mother.
History says that these boys are descendants of war.
Nearly all the mouth I’ve kissed pushed an ocean
into my belly
I worry I can’t love my friends out of the worst
of themselves. I am hurrying towards a place where
my mother and I can love each other without first
disguising who we are. I want to get there faster
than time can kill us.
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