Wherever we live, we are all in sore need of such sustenance that only poetry can offer. Poetry from the contemporary African diaspora, in particular, has much to offer us in this fateful crossroads in our human history, betwixt global pandemic and existential climate emergency.
In Makshya Tolbert’s miniature nature poem, “Tree Walk with Frog and Toad,” the speaker grapples with too-muchness of our times:
Some days I want
a vocabulary of the body
more than I want
a body
Furthermore, these poems act to resist the racist conditions wherein a Black body must always access oneself voyeuristically from the perspective of a supposed superior other – the white gaze – and the speakers inhabit the space famously described by Du Bois as double-consciousness. Yet to be visible is also to be seen. To be seen is to be understood. The white gaze seeks to make the Black body invisible. This is a diminishing stance a Black body must adopt and contort to be externally accepted while counter intuitively being internally at conflict. The white gaze does not seek to understand the Black body holistically – its concerns, its vulnerabilities, its joys and contributions. Instead, it comes preloaded with preconceived ideas, myths that subject the Black body to harm. The polite term for this is microaggression. The full definition of a microaggression is a hostile, derogatory, or negative attitude toward stigmatized or culturally marginalized groups. The word micro is misleading as it suggests small. The actual experience is anything but small. Think of how a hammer works on a nail. A large force on a small area. This preamble is necessary as a way of directing you to what so impressed us about these poets.
Abigail Mengesha’s duet of poems, “Lens Theory #1” and “Lens Theory #2” both do this important work, juxtaposing “one boys’ smirk” alongside the quoted caption, “highly motivated young recruits –” to deftly expose the white gaze so as to transcend it.
As we stand in this moment, these poems offer both a salve and a challenge to acknowledge our difficult truths. Other times, the reader is invited simply to bear witness. From Vuyelwa Maluleke’s “Based on a True Story”:
& what you are running from cannot catch you here
& what you sow you must hand over to the last song
Once again, from Mengesha’s miniature prose poem “Lens Theory #1”: “See how the sun beats the road beige. The children, squinting andmid-march.” Here the children are not simply playing, they are soldiers marching: “Look away and they vanish. Look again and the armed children still look back.” Indeed, these poems challenge us to look. To connect with people’s humanity rather than voyeuristically view them as news artifacts. Caleb Femi integrates the divergent Black masculinities replete in luscious imagery – “a mint November night” – in “Every Party is Another Party.” Ola Elhassan expands the Arabic gaze through a fusion of poetry and science that engineers an aesthetics of climate repair wherein the stanzas are centred as the earth:
clouds burning in pastel levitate over vistas of sea & unruly green
nomadic landscapes architecturally rotate to meet regenerative rain
There’s a ferocity to the love poems here. Connecting with each other in meaningful and intimate ways presents challenges in this world. Many of these young poets presumably came of age IRL and digitally. There are numerous references to technology’s pervasive and seemingly unavoidable reach into the private spaces of the human heart. The speakers of these poems want to reclaim that real and private space where intimacy – real intimacy – can be delicious and flourish. Intimacy is not just what is seen but also what is revealed. It is the authentic parts we share without prejudice.
From Hibaq Osman’s “Restraint”:
when i ask who’s loving you?
don’t want no names, no
no location or proximity,
no train station meet-cute or dating app eye emoji
Listen to the way the speaker’s voice not only speaks but challenges the listener into an authentic response as if to say, enough with the pretty artifice. Can we be real? In other words, can we be vulnerable about our need for love in spite of the thousand reasons not to be vulnerable?
Love is not solely romantic. There is also spiritual love and familial love, both of which present high stakes and unique risks of their own. For example, the speaker of Precious Arinze’s “The hope of floating has carried us so far” makes the following disclosure:
When asked how I am, I talk
about my friends to keep from admitting anything.
Ostensibly, that disclosure of non-disclosure makes way for this vulnerable truth:
I am hurrying towards a place where
my mother and I can love each other without first
disguising who we are.
Such lines as this disarm the reader, completely. The hope that runs like a shining thread throughout these works is palpable and restorative. The vulnerability that accompanies such hope converts protective armour into a mirror that shows ourselves to ourselves.
There are simply too many verses that deserve to be quoted in this modest introduction, but we don’t want this preface to be one of those trailers that ruins the actual movie. Therefore, we assure you that the rewards of reading each and every poem will pay dividends many times over.
As we write this from our respective cities, New York and London, the world is hurting in a thousand small ways. The day before yesterday, in Brooklyn, I, Safia, saw the sun looking like an orange penny glowing strangely. Children played, couples strolled, and there was a jarring feeling of normality. Amid the surface placidity, a baby crying. Was the baby simply crying, or was there something really wrong? The following day, yellow smoke blanketed the Manhattan skyline and city residents were told, for the second time in our lifetimes, to stay indoors, this time due to hazardous air conditions.
In London, I, Nick, notice that democracy seems to have become a parody of itself. Leaders hang the problems of the state of our national affairs on the backs of external forces: the pandemic, the war on Ukraine, the cost of oil price due to Nord Stream, and Brexit (something the current government voted for and promised they would deliver but subsequently have not) and not on their ineffective leadership. Inflation currently is through the roof and so too the mortgage rates. Yet the current leader (a child of immigrants) seems convinced in this “Cost of living crisis” that we must rid the country of the UK shores of people coming to the country in small boats and ship them off to other countries in bigger boats. This diverts the problem from the fact that the incumbent government has cut the budgets of the National Health Service (NHS), The Police force and Youth Services to name a few. In the last year alone, the Government has had three leadership changes. If this happened in any other part of the world the powers that be would insist on some form of intervention. In times like these rather than the bravado-inflected performances that our politicians show us, it would be refreshing to see honesty, aptitude and inspired leadership.
In our editorial conversations about the Black body’s many appearances in the following poems, we shared stories from our respective diasporas. In New York City, a Black man was lynched on a subway train by a white man. In Spain, a Black footballer was strangled during a game by a white footballer. In both cases, the wheels of justice have been tentative and inadequate. The reality is this: to exist in a Black body – intersectionality speaking with all our diverse strands of identities and multitudinous experiences that we carry – is to live in what Claudia Rankine might refer to as “the historical self.” To live in a Black body is to reckon with feeling unsafe due to actual danger. And so, we ask: in uncertain and trying times, following collective trauma on a global scale, who suffers? Who is scapegoated? Whose climate falls apart first when countries delay vigorous action to preserve vital natural resources?
Another problem that emerges which the speakers of these poems reckon with is that of authenticity in the face of a world that requires certain stories to gain access – not just trauma, but the desired kind of trauma. It’s a dicey conversation that Zibusiso Mpofu illuminates in a poem whose title is a Telegraph news headline – thus, the poem becomes another kind of dispatch, a confession of deception created as would-be currency for survival:
I once faked a queer hate crime
to get a police report.
I thought I could use it
to get asylum somewhere
The vagueness of the word “somewhere” tugs at our lived and inherited experiences as poets of the African diaspora and the pain of abstraction. This honesty is life-affirming. Perhaps the “faked” story is a resistance against the way in which people of colour are expected to perform their trauma – asylum applications, diversity statements – which becomes a kind of second arrow of exploitation. So yes, we are claiming the poetic license to feel neurotic, at times.
The poems in this anthology are a beacon: they illuminate realities facing us all in the year 2023 and offer guidance along a path towards productive change from an African perspective. Above all, there is a diversity of voices here. They in their varied complexity have made their worlds and selves be seen.
We welcome you, dear readers, to turn away from the overwhelm out there, and towards the life-giving blast of fresh air present in these poems, published in this latest edition of 20.35 Africa, featuring young, vital voices – aged 20 to 35 – African writers from the continent and across the diaspora, a community of poets: our community. In addition to exposing wounds, the poems in this collection offer us soul medicine by way of nature, spirituality, and joyous connection.
The poets here write their verses from South Africa, Congo, Ghana, Somalia, Zimbabwe, and beyond. They are also living, working, and pursuing degrees in such myriad places as Virginia, Alabama, New York City and the ancient city of Kano.
We bid you to wait no further: sing, speak, and breathe these verses anew.
Safia Jama
Nick Makoha