As the world descends into fear in the midst of a pandemic and global political unrest, one looks to art and particularly poetry as a place of collective healing and sense making. Now more than ever, the voices of poets are necessary and thus, it is an apt time to discuss African poetry, particularly some of the daring works that have been published by 20.35 Africa in their first two anthologies.
Gloria: It’s been such a pleasure re-reading these volumes together. The poets in these anthologies and their contemporaries are charting important new paths in African Poetry through form, subject matter, and the reframing of familiar themes in a new light. What is it about the works in the first anthology that struck you upon re-visiting it alongside the second anthology?
Tariro: What I did find to be very central to this anthology is the theme of home and identity. These themes, I find, are treated with immediacy.
Gloria: What do you mean by immediacy?
Tariro: In Ama Asantewa Diaka’s poem, she writes: “I am hungry for a love my country cannot afford.” Here, I’m looking at the immediacy of this hunger. I’m looking at that hunger that makes it seem that it’s introspective now. There is an urgency to the feeling as opposed to the introspection in the second anthology in which it seems like poets are at rest and thinking about life.
In the first anthology, black bodies are mentioned in relation to loss and violence. Tryphena Yeboah’s poem, “Driving Lessons with my Father” has a lot about violence in it. Black tax is another recurring theme in the first anthology. For instance, Lydia Kasese has a poem about retrenchment, “Silver Spoons” in which she writes, “I cannot go back to my parents empty handed, I am their success.”
Gloria: I have spent some time reading Volume I; I am happy you’re reading it too. While reading Volume I, I translated the violence in this particular anthology differently. I viewed it through the lens of mortality. The violence in the poems you have mentioned, I think, speaks to mortality in such fragile terms. So many of the poems felt like they were referring to dying through metaphor, and one could not help but think of life, and the brittleness of mortality. I especially reflected on the fragility of life while reading Akpa Arinzechukwu’s “After Suicide.”
Tariro: I get your point about violence and fragility. I appreciate the beauty of this imagery. What did you think of “Revision” by Victoria Adukwei Bulley? It seems that a lot of poets in the first anthology used discernable form in their writing. I’m looking at J.K. Anowe, Afua Ansong, Lillian Akampurira Aujo, you, and Lydia Kasese. There’s a lot of play with language and with text, but I particularly find Victoria Bulley’s poem phenomenal. She writes:
Consider/ from the 1400s the area later known as the Gold Coast would/ (choose one), discovered/ invaded/ visited/ landed upon.
I think her subject matter, the (mis)writing of African history by Western colonizers, is such an important discussion. She writes, in this same poem:
in the year of our lord/ 1471/ in the year of our Lord 2017/ I look for my language, / still finding their hairs in it.
What I want to highlight is the desperate fervency in Bulley’s attempts to reclaim her history –our histories – in this poem. This reclamation is essential, if you consider the number of African countries currently recovering from the rapture of colonialism. For many of us, the subjects of history in high school – or even social studies in primary school – was framed from a white gaze. And unless one had a teacher who said, “No, it was actually like this,” or a school committed to framing history in a Pan-African way, what one learned about African history was largely Eurocentric. A lot of my contemporaries didn’t hear about W.E.B. du Bois or Steve Biko until they got to university. “Revision” captures that mood of rethinking such narratives.
Gloria: What I really love about “Revision” is how it appropriates the form of a British-styled test/examination. The poem takes on the form of a standard classroom test. Victoria’s style catches my attention because I am currently working on a piece that mimics the Ugandan test format. I think Victoria’s style of translating the experience of linguistic alienation and the tragedy of revisionist history through this form is really brilliant. She succeeds in making the reader an intimate partaker of the theme of the poem. “Revision” does not feel distant at all when I read it. It’s very bittersweet, and it comes home at the end, to something so much more personal.
Tariro: As you spoke of the subversion of form in poetry, I was thinking a lot about Safia Elhillo’s style of writing. Much of her craft involves her manipulation of language and of form. I’ve wondered: to what extent are poets in this anthology influenced by her poetry?
We now have access to more poetry because of the internet. We can read anything published anywhere and play around with form. I’m trying to figure out why there are so many poets in this anthology who were experimenting with form? Was it one influence? Was it that people have more access to international journals nowadays? Or is it just that right now, poets are experimenting more?
Gloria: The first time we talked, I mentioned that a part of me felt like playing a bit more with form. This was because of what I’d seen in the works of poets like Elhillo. So, the influence of other poets could be a reason. Perhaps influential poets are influencing the style and craft of other poets. Or it could just be a trend or movement.
I lean more towards the idea that these experiments with form is actually the result of poets pushing other poets to open up with the way they write. I don’t want to speak for everybody, but if you look at the Ugandan schooling system, the kinds of poetry students are exposed to are very rigid in form. There’s a very Ugandan thing about it, a rigidity. It is refreshing to see some contemporary poets experimenting more with form. I was happy to have also done that. I used to experiment with my work a lot but had stopped to focus on the quality of my text. I’d missed the rhythms, the playfulness, and the joy of that exploration.
I think that a lot of these poets are just trying to write their truth and find their way. We’re learning from each other, and we’re pushing the boundaries together.
Tariro: Definitely, definitely. Like your experience in Uganda, the Zimbabwean schooling system also exposed us to writing that was traditional and rigid. I think it’s only recently that I’ve seen that one can actually use different forms when writing poetry, such as Victoria Bulley’s “Revision” which resembles a test. I have noticed, with some delight, that a poem can flow within a given shape, that a poem can be conversational.
Gloria: Speaking of the traditions and rigidities in our respective national curricula brings me to another theme I wanted us to discuss in our consideration of contemporary African poetry. What is the general attitude of Ugandans towards an individual’s relationship to their mother tongue? In reading Lillian Akampurira Aujo’s “A dream in English,” I found that her poem talks a lot about language and about loss. The imagery she uses is around the tongue: “Every time/ I try courting syllables/ my tongue is cut.”
When you read through Volume II of the anthology all at once, you notice how many poets reverberate the ideas of language, home and the “cut” and gaps one experiences at the loss of language. And it made sense. There are a lot of writers who are in the diaspora. There are a lot of writers who are in formerly colonized countries who’ve been cut off from their language. There are a lot of people here in Kampala, who grew up in the city and never knew their mother-tongue. I felt that in terms of what the works in this volume achieved – to get to what this generation of poets is talking about – it made sense this was a theme throughout.
Tariro: I wrote down a quote by Cheswayo Mphanza from his poem “Prodigal Son”: “‘What do you have to give Lusaka? / and ‘Haven’t you lost the language?’”
It feels like this metaphorical place is a place of loss. It’s like he’s saying now that you don’t have the language, what else do you have to offer to the land, to the people? Without a language, of what use is a person? I’m trying to put a finger on that emotion – that experience he’s trying to convey, and I think Safia Elhillo tries to communicate this same emotion in her poem “Date Night with Abdelhalim Hafez” when she says “I have an accent in every language.”
I think loss of language is a defining thing. I was reading an essay by Amiri Baraka in which he posits that language or rather, speech, is an integral part of culture. In many ways, people who don’t have a connection to their language don’t feel a connection with their culture. And this includes me.
If one says, “I can’t speak my mother tongue” or “I don’t feel comfortable in my mother tongue,” it’s another way of saying “I don’t feel comfortable at home.”
Think about home, think about its politics and dynamics and think of your not being fluent in knowing what cultural thing you’re supposed to do at every time (because that’s also a kind of language, you know, it’s a language that’s not very obvious).
But if it’s not firsthand to you, you always feel excluded. I can speak Shona, but I went to a school where it wasn’t encouraged. Someone said to me, “you speak Shona like you’re a Ndebele person,” which is a whole different tribe. And people say things like that to you. At times you brush it off, but other times you think, “What’s this person saying? Are they saying I’m not part of everyone else?” There are times when I’m around people and I don’t talk. It’s like I lose that ability to function. Because the minute people hear my accent, there is that judgment already.
I don’t know what it’s like in Uganda. But in Zimbabwe, there’s a general perception that Black people who cannot speak any African language are superficial and pretentious. The Shona have a word for this: kuzviitisa. The term connotes a willful pretentiousness – like you’re pretending to not speak right.
It’s an interesting thing that at this moment, collectively, people feel alienated from their language(s).
And in that there’s an ability to say, “I’ve been carrying this around, it’s not my burden. It’s just a collective burden we have and I can put it down. I don’t have to carry it.”
– Tariro Ndoro
Gloria: In Uganda, when people do speak, say Luganda, but they don’t speak their mother tongue, that’s a problem. If they speak with an accent, that’s also a problem.
There are so many ways that our cultures interpret our inability to have kept both the actual language and the cultural language, and we are judged for this. And I think this generation has really felt the weight of that. Some of us left our countries of birth because we had to, some left because of exile, and others, because of our parents. Whatever it is that happened to us, it wasn’t necessarily our choice. Yet, this burden has been put on us anyway.
Tariro: It’s an interesting thing that at this moment, collectively, people feel alienated from their language(s). There’s also a growing alienation one feels as one begins to navigate the path of religion and spirituality. One thing you notice as you move from Volume I to Volume II is the reinvention of religion by poets. I found “Genesis” by Nkateko Masinga very moving, especially the stanza about Moses.
Gloria: I was really drawn to the notion of the reinvention of God in Nkateko’s “Genesis.” Our generation’s engagement with the notion of God in poetry is striking. Momtaza Mehri’s poem is a good example of such reinvention. In the poem, she says: “I don’t know what it means to stand in front of a goddess/ and not see my own reflection.”
To me, this signaled the god idea we were talking about in the second anthology in which a lot of poets seem to find the divine within themselves, and not necessarily as an external religious power outside of themselves, controlling them, but rather see it as something within themselves.
Tariro: Ekpenyong Kosisochuckwu’s poem “I swallowed him whole” ends with this line: “Throw your god inside and I’ll swallow him whole.”
Notice how the poet ties an upper-case God together in the same poem with a lower-case god. There is one instance where the poet presumably met this god and that gives an interesting glimpse into people possibly transitioning from pantheism or, I don’t know, something else. The poem also communicates ideas of seeing god in the self, seeing god as a smaller “g,” seeing goddesses. These poems are a reflection of the breaking of monotheism into a whole lot of different splinters.
There is a myriad of articles on the internet about Black women leaving the church, about Black people leaving White churches. When I log on to Twitter and Facebook, there’s a lot more chatter now about religion, people saying “this never worked for me.” There are a lot of people who are openly seeking alternative forms of religion. 20 years ago, you couldn’t – out loud, especially in Africa – tell people that you sought different approaches to spirituality because there was a lot of stigma around that. I wonder if the arts are influencing society. Or is it just people out there deciding for themselves, and their decisions and choices bleeding into the poetry that’s coming out in our age?
Gloria: I think that’s the change. I think many people are discovering that traditional forms of religion, or maybe churches, are not working for them. For my siblings and I, saying that we were no longer going to church, saying that we don’t believe in this God, was a really big deal for our parents. You can’t say that, you know, and they can’t believe it. But for me, this feels less like a struggle for freedom and more like the realization that you can discover spirituality for yourself. These discoveries are coming to fruition in our writing.
Tariro: I thought of this discovery when I read Megan Ross’ “God is a mother and she’s everywhere.” She talks a lot about spirituality in her poem. And she’s also talking about feminism. In part three she writes:
God’s faces multiply, at coffee
shop She works two jobs for her meals
and sharpens a fist on
Tuesday at boxing and counsels every customer who cries, all
prophetic and promising new love, while
her eldest, only seven, sleeps in the kitchen,
eating grated cheese from an ice cream
container when he wakes.
That part particularly hit me because I was raised by a single mother. If you’ve been raised by a single parent, you don’t really see a lot of the differences with kids from homes with two parents. It’s a passage that gets me because you do see the work ethic that comes from having a single parent and you also see, especially in the line: “sleeps in the kitchen, / eating grated cheese….”
My sister and I had a lot of those meals that you have when your mom can’t be home every night to prepare home-made dinners. Our culinary choices were an adventure for me when I was younger. But now, looking back, I think our choices were more a matter of necessity.
Gloria: What you have shared with me, like Megan’s poem, reminds me of a lot of some of the stories I’ve read, written by people coming from single-mother households. I recently read Ocean Vuong’s novel On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which feels like a love letter to his mom. Now I’m reading Saeed Jones’ memoir as well, How we Fight For our Lives. I really see in both books the centrality of mothers to these writers. There is a reverence they have for them. And sometimes it comes later on in life, right? Like you’re saying, in retrospect, you realize that this was out of necessity, that your mother had to fight for this. I grew up in a two-parent household, but with a very traditional father who I thought of as the vengeful god of the Old Testament. The idea of the single-mother household resonates a lot with me because I always spent more time with my mom; my dad was away a lot. I understand why god is a woman and why she’s everywhere. I understand, because I see this all the time with so many of my friends. I see reverence and love in the way they talk about their mothers. I know that’s not everybody’s experience, but to me, such poems create this deep sense of spirituality, a spirituality that is keenly aware of a nurturing god who is the direct contrast of a vengeful god.
Tariro: I see Megan Ross’s imagining of god as nurturing, too: “I tell her how I have/ tried every pagan rite: a wish of Vix on my son’s/ chest, …”
And I’m thinking about how, when I was growing up, I was constantly sick. In retrospect, I think of the implicit trust I had in my mother in those times. All I thought back then was: “I’m sick, make me better,” but she must have been so young and so clueless and so scared. If you’re a mother, you’re actually thinking, “My child could die. I’m not a doctor. I’m not a nurse. I don’t know what’s going on.” But even within that space, you’re always giving, and always giving selflessly.
Gloria: In my readings, I marked this idea of continuously connecting to our mothers and our foremothers through the legacy of trauma as opposed to the legacy of their resilience or their humanity. The poem “Folktales” by Claudia Owusu reads: “I am a long line of women holding on to each other within arm’s reach, panic shut deep into their chest.”
I felt like I could immediately put myself not only in this poem but in so many of the other poems that reference mothers, grandmothers and the trauma that is carried along. I can put myself right there because it’s so present in my life and my friends’ lives. The Ugandan artist Liz Kobusinge has a series on skin that focuses on her foremothers and what they’ve passed on to each other and the trauma that they carry on. I completely connected with “Folktales” and with a lot of other pieces that referenced that.
Similarly, Kondwa Rayne’s poem, “My Legacy will be Different” is especially emblematic of trauma, motherhood, and reclamation:
Knit into my skin, carved into my bones
By my mother
And her mother before her
This generational millstone
This wicked inheritance
It’s time to lay this burden down.
It’s interesting looking at this idea of mothers in spirituality, and then looking at generational trauma and realizing that it’s time to put it down. This is a question my friends and I have been grappling with a lot. I don’t know if other people in their 20s are grappling with this, or if they are feeling more inclined to set these burdens down and say that this is no longer my burden to carry. I have my own life to live. For me, grappling with these burdens, and deciding to lay them down, empowers me to redefine the world and my place in it.
Tariro: You wonder if people in their 20s are holding on to generational trauma, or laying it down. I think the answer is it’s a little of both; they carry it around and lay it down all at once.
You mentioned earlier that when you were growing up there was less – should I call it – freedom of speech. I don’t exactly think there has been drastic changes in that sphere; we only have more tools for self-expression than we did before. I still see a lot of the problems lurking around; the patriarchy, the residues of colonialism. They’re still there. But now I think we have more tools.
Just as there was a stigma with religion or the lack of it, I think there was a lot more stigma attached to PTSD, depression and anxiety. You didn’t talk about that 20 years ago, true. But now you can openly say, I’m going to therapy for this, you can openly speak about those things. And I think having a community where people are talking about issues helps. On Black Twitter, there is a lot of these discussions about generational trauma. There’s a lot of good that comes from being able to read someone else write about a familiar trauma. This is especially life-saving when everyone else around you thinks your pain isn’t important. I can look at it and say, well as a residue of colonialism, there’s a whole generation of African children who feel alienated. Yeah. And I’m one of those children. And in that there’s an ability to say, “I’ve been carrying this around, it’s not my burden. It’s just a collective burden we have and I can put it down. I don’t have to carry it.” In naming it, you get to reclaim it in a sense. So maybe that’s what Kondwa Rayne is saying in “My Legacy will be Different” about the millstone: I’ve said it, I’ve seen it. I’ve named it. And now I can conquer it.
Gloria: It’s amazing to me. It’s like reading a story so familiar and finding it has a different ending. For so long, our work was mired in trauma and we only did the work of seeing it and naming it. What a relief to be among poets helping us conquer and discard of these burdens.
Gloria Kiconco is a poet, essayist, and zine-maker based in Kampala, Uganda. Her poetry has been published on various online platforms and anthologies. Gloria shares her work through spoken word performances, readings, and audio compilations in collaboration with music producers. Her use of zines is a way of self-publishing and exploring alternative forms. She has created various zines including SOLD OUT (2016), RETURN TO SENDER (2018) in collaboration with illustrator Liz Kobusinge, and You Are Lost, You Are Here X (2020) through a residency with Crater Invertido in Mexico City, Mexico. As an arts journalist, Gloria’s work on African and afro-diasporan artists appear online and print with People Stories Project, Dazed magazine, The Wire, and Perform! Her personal essays can be found on Adda and on undermyourskin, a collection of interactive essays, created in collaboration with writer Raksha Vasudevan.
Tariro Ndoro‘s debut poetry collection, Agringada: Like a Gringa, Like a Foreigner (Modjaji Books, 2019) was the recipient of the NAMA Award for Outstanding Poetry Book. Her poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in a wide range of international literary magazines including 20.35 Africa, Best New African Poets, Cyphers and Oxford Poetry. Tariro was shortlisted for the 2018 Babishai Niwe Poetry Prize, the DALRO Poetry Prize, and the Intwasa Short Story Prize. Tariro has made appearances at Pa Gya! Literary Festival, Page Poetry Alive, Paza Sauti, and Wordfest.