Much like past anthologies, this ninth volume of 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry features established and budding poets who are continuously expanding the breadth of contemporary African poetry from in and outside of the continent. The poems in this anthology manipulate language in ways both familiar and unfamiliar. They weave the proto-semantic and the semantic elements of language into a rope that pulls us into reimagined depictions of romance, violence, wars, the everyday, the past, and the present, and even the mundane. The poems explore what is hardly seen by most but must be said to all. These poets use language for grief and its many heads, for longing, and its many stomachs. They scratch at what is refused a name, dig the truth out of the darkness, and walk between timelines, unafraid to occupy the uncomfortable corners and the places they are unwelcome.
The poems demand that we sit with questions like “What is at stake?” These questions take on different shapes throughout the anthology leading us to think about what memory cannot hold, what the dark devours as it travels from one place in time to the next, what cannot safely be named and what loss forces us to call out directly.
The anthology begins with Star Zahra’s “Soot,” where a traveling dark tells the story. Normalcy and destruction run together through the same sky. The poem’s lines travel with it, framing across the page, centering and snapping back. It starts, “From here, / not much can be done.” It is direct and aware. “The stove burns blue,” “the hummingbird sings,” and even the “clouds… [run] towards God.” But the sky that draws so beautifully here “remains, somewhere else, dark and even worse.” The poem closes on a single mirrored gesture: the speaker shuts her eyes “to the pleasuring sound / of rain drops dancing on the tin roof,” while elsewhere “a child closes theirs to soot.” The same act, eyes closing, opens onto two different worlds, one to comfort, one to ash. That is the duplicity the poem turns on, how the same darkness is simply weather in one place but ruin in another.
While Zahra’s poem moves through what the eyes can see, Mario Melo’s “A Caged Pastoral” begins with a location we can only get to through memory: “In a place that is no more.” The place is gone before the poem can enter it. We arrive through this absence, and the poem is shaped by this absence. The pastoral arrives in a similarly uncertain place:
At the center, an eagle dives for a fish,
anteaters feel out for fire ants
and a hippo practices swimming.
It is loud and awkward.
The pastoral is “At the center,” but that center is left uncertain: the center of the bench, the memory, the pastoral? The poem does not answer this. Instead, like many of the poems in this anthology, it pulls us into the surreal. For Melo, nature is not working in these images. The hippo, who needs practice enacting its own nature, is “loud and awkward,” and that awkwardness turns back toward the speaker and the “you.” And just like nature, their reality does not function as it should. The pebble drops in the final lines:
We are loud and awkward, writing love letters
to prisoners. Extending sentences.
We are no longer in this awkward pastoral. We are in a world with incarceration, where sentences are forever extending. The pun functions as a political gesture, and for Melo, even love letters are punctuated with violence, and the stakes are forever expanding.
Fatima Elbadri’s work moves through violence differently. Elbadri’s poems work with violent imagery, syntax, sound, and questions as the spine and flesh of the poem’s logic. In “dar,” the poem begins with the problem of measuring war:
cannot study war from satellite
pictures drenched in color of
what soaked hibiscus does to
innards outside of grasslands
War is too complex to be understood from above, and the sentence itself struggles to hold the image together or refuses to hold it. The syntax does not arrive at a clean description of war because war itself has become insurmountable. When the poem asks, “so what of it? war?” it is asking what war even is, while also showing that the word cannot contain what follows:
like sun burning
genocide or woman
child cracked from
taking then watan
sunk from it! sunk!
sunk! from it!
War spirals the language into an unfamiliar place. The lack of capital letters and successive enjambments add to the stakes; this is how violence enters even the form. Language, like nature in Melo’s work, is denied its usual order, perhaps the only protection the speaker has from war.
In Joemario Umana’s, “What the Road Refuses to Name,” the war continues but where “dar” denied language its order, here the brutality is held in couplets, a traditional form. This stylistic choice makes violence look neat, almost routine, as though it is a common thing. The neatness helps hide the disarray of harm, extending the same refusal that the title names: systems and structure refusing to openly name the injustice. The poem reads as an announcement of the speaker’s position, a recognition that what it says is not safe to say, not supposed to be said, and is the reality regardless. “Anxiety is a constant.” The bravery is in speaking while showing how unsafe the speaking is.
The road itself works as a vehicle in both senses. It is continuous, so as the speaker rides past in the bus, the road follows, echoing the longevity of the unspoken “harm” and of the silence around it. The road, so often government infrastructure, becomes a thing that has seen and made space, unstopped, for the “dark animal” hungering, for the “ladies whose footsteps once trekked,” for the “nomads now gone.” The poem makes you ask what happened to them, and why we can’t name it. The title tells us the refusal is a decision. The road does not speak, yet it acts as a “long throat,” an image of voice, putting people in the position of prayer, kneeling, begging for mercy, seeking refuge.
The doubling reaches the speaker too: if the road can’t speak, what of me? “I do not want to write… I tell myself not to imagine their faces.”
The speaker writes in the margins, saying what they can say, facing what they can face. It echoes the witnesses and story-bearers of war, who say enough to be understood but hold the rest back, the doubling of harm and disappearance set against innocence and presence, “of boys who learned to whistle the music of grass.”
Paul Obongodu also probes into the details of what is unsaid. Tackling memory and questioning what stays as time moves on. In “Harmattan,” we must take “notice” of what we leave behind in change, even if we don’t quite know “what to do with that.” There is a cycle to it: the dust arrives every year “on everything left outside too long,” and you only register the threads of change once you put your hand on the surface of it, “you only notice when you run your finger across something and it comes away grey.” Memory here can be sealed out like a closed window to dust or involuntary, it can settle with you the way the dust does.
The anthology ends with Obongodu’s “What the River Keeps,” another narrative poem that demonstrates his eye for detail. A grandmother kept her money in a tin “buried under the third yam mound from the fence,” trusting that “paper rots but soil remembers.” She could name exactly where in the ground the money was buried. That has now been replaced – a cousin sends airtime, “just light moving through a cable.” In both poems, the old way is a placed thing, the sealed window, the buried tin, knowledge that lives somewhere you can point to. The grief is in watching that place dissolve. When money becomes light moving through a cable and the spot under the third mound has no equivalent anymore, home means “the distances are all wrong.”
It has been a pleasure reading these poems and making selections for the ninth volume of 20.35 Africa. We are grateful to the poets for sharing their work and are excited for you to read it. What these poems share is a desire to understand the stakes of the human condition fully. No matter the genre or type of poetry they are writing, whether it be romantic, philosophical, surreal, imagistic, interested in sensation, or focused on the protosemantic, these African poets are reestablishing the English language on their own terms. This is the work of African writers on the continent and in the diaspora, and it demands to be read and heard for what it is, as it is said.
Akosua Zimba Afiriyie-Hwedie
Antony Fangary
