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 do i tell my mother
that she gave birth to a hurricane
part shapeshifter & part indigo child
at any given moment
i am bending the rain, faithfully
Unmoor everything around me to grieve;
The cost of unraveling all mine to pay.
There’s not a man in this world I would die for,
including the Lord.
I’d burn the whole world for my son.
I’m not afraid of the water
but what it makes of me. the
fishmonger wraps a trout
head in brown paper and I want
to say wait stop it can’t breathe
I want to take all the fish back
I have the exact body of my egyptian father,
& his mother & his mother’s
brothers, a round belly & broad shoulders
which will someday disappear
he sang to me all childhood
composing tender songs
eluding one dream for another
in the immigrant way, loyalty
exceeding a drumbeat
all so I could be benevolent
amidst the seamless blend
of Sángo, houses with smelly
gutters cluster like beehives. here,
street children stomp their feet
with hysterical laughter. slowly,
Mókólá opens up its mouth
I want nothing more than this
eyes like mine have failed
to present a more arresting glance than yours
so I must be forgiven for these forbidden wants
you wonder at this world where
blackness in girl form is a round
and rotating emptiness
that one can hold in a disappearing hand.
Yet if I were to tell this story of a boy
who has never known a home,
about the nights he has tried to snuff his life,
what difference would it make?
these days, I walk
out into the fields, I give in to
the red light of the perpendicular
moon on my skin, I let the gauntlet
down, then the open threads of sobriety
you move through the cords,
naming each loop by the glimmer
of its elbow. you fondle the two
sides of the world, which are
hope and disaster. a bird suspended
by the whip of the universe.
I am finally
building you a sheathe. come rest
under my tongue easy
after days of chiselling
breath into swords and freedom
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