Guest Editors: Kwame Opoku-Duku
Cover Design by Tochi Itanyi
For these poets, there are more questions than answers, and there are no easy labels or solutions. Each gifts us something better: the struggle to find identities, relations, meanings, and the struggle for a language that can do heavy lifting. Many of the poems grapple with the meaning of family and connection with others, with what we can find in God and what may be needed of us to answer that call properly. In “All Those Losses” by Prosper Ifeanyi there is compassion and poignancy around a family’s past and present. Sarah Yanni writes about a father who gave up music to support his family, asks his child if she writes poems about him, which she responds “no, words / are not enough, too hard / but what I mean is there is too much aching here / and the music is too silent.” Lola Oh uses simple language to reveal the subtle relational complexities in a family in “The Fishmonger.” In Nicole Adabunu’s “God Gets Caught Sobbing Uncontrollably in His Hands,” an inversion of roles (God wracked with guilt) is sustained wonderfully, plus we get the fantastic line: “How all this blood amounts to nothing.” Many lines have stayed with me for days, and are with me as I write now. From the blunt power of Rutendo Chichaya’s “Who is allowed to breathe?”; the complex and glorious concluding image, complete with a Donne-style pun, in “Mosquito Bite” by Chinuzoke Chinuwa, to the complex world, richly on the edge of the surreal that we are almost lost in, offered by Brian Gyamfi. Please read for yourselves and take pleasure in these poets who have found their voices, and in the immense variety of ways African poetry flourishes.
– Len Verwey, Loving the Dying
In an ailing world, these poems are testament that the cure is in our hearts and the heart is always Africa. These are poems that travel far and wide but always find out: “every road leads to our doorknob.” Even in the face of loss, of escape, of genocide, these are poems that still find gardens to tend and hands, even burnt hands, are enlivened. This is an anthology of how we might go beyond resilience and into nurturing the space where we are safe.
– Marwa Helal, Ante body
how many more must it take,
who is allowed to breathe?
some are deemed more worthy,
yet silence in the face of injustice
is betrayal.
Death. Wounding. Displacement
After genesis, Muslims hear the adhan twice.
The birth. Then, conducted by death, the rebirth.
The adhan comes as a vision. A confession.
It washes over you. It swears to you, this
enlightenment, that your soul has, exists.
Certitude stowed in geodes, stowed
in embryos, stowed in a Tribute’s
uterine space. Perhaps this where
the voices of ancestors convene.
So, if the world is different now
that I don’t belong in Heaven, do I have
to grow Paradise alone?
Answer me, dear ghost
of my youthful lust.
You who led me here,
naked and clueless.
but what did he wait for?
A wife who owed him a kiss, a crown from a dying
king’s head, an ill child’s embrace, a life after death?
So much waiting, so you look forward to night-time
when dreams unlikely to come true are the brightest
Sometimes I listen to my
mother & father talk in the bedroom; they must love
each other so much even in their muffled cries of
things they both have lost. What can they do if not
place hearts into each other’s chests?
I slit them. Each cut smoked and flourished.
I became heaven, water flowing from flesh,
blemish-black ginger scent. The priest left the crust
and I smiled like an old man’s
house, sadden to see crumbs scattered
At Sea World my nanny once said, “it’s ridiculous to be given an old heart as if it’s an object, like expensive cement, or a leg so blistered and plunging.” Now she’s dead.
Reincarnated as the centipede father squashed; she’s dead again.
there must be wind high enough to raise this song above the mountains;
there must be waves full enough to fill the hollow which forms
the valley should the tides break
if your feet fail, there must be wings, and only such things that belong to air
We mean to tuck in her backbone
There to nighten, to drink the color and the flight from her
Before she knows enough to call the air a limb,
And to call the limb, a wing, two,
Growing on marrow.
he looked at his hands, looked
at his children’s looking of him. carnage for miles,
generations, the wail of a mother swaddling
a purpled corpse, screaming against heaven
for answers. how all this blood amounts to nothing
lake nalubaale buoys me as i stage
a revolt against you for daring to baptize
my obsidian skin in sin, to soak my largest organ
in your guilt, i say no more
no longer will i pacify your shame
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