When Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani started editing New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box-set Series, they were inspired by their conviction that emerging African poets lacked the publishing opportunities to impress their work on the world but not the talent to produce excellent art. Kumi (Akashic Books, 2024), the tenth and latest installment of the series, is a collection of poems that speaks both softly and forcefully, as well as emotionally and ideologically, about what it means to be human and African today. The poets’ remarkable capacity for experience and expression consolidates the promise of the earlier editions from which renowned poets like Warsan Shire, TJ Dema [and] Ladan Osman, Tsitsi Ella Jaji, and Romeo Oriogun emerged. Featuring gifted emerging poets from Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa, who live in and outside the continent—Qhali, Dare Tunmise, Nurain Ọládèjì, Adams Adeosun, Claudia Owusu, Feranmi Ariyo, Connor Cogill, Nome Emeka Patrick, and Sarpong Osei Asamoa—Kumi is a tribute to a visionary and valuable investment in African poetry.
Movement is the history of living, the origin of life, yet migration defies the everyday narrative of human belonging. In A Failed Attempt at Undoing Memories, Tunmise probes the memories of migrants whose journeys are impeded by the desert, the sea, and xenophobia. The opening stanza of “Of Strangers and Bleeding Bones” tenderly describes the haunted lives of these exiles:
Outside dreams, there are no rooms
for wandering bones, except the spaces
in water to harbor the remains of dead ships.
These migrants are unwelcome wherever their journey takes them, yet they wander. They suffer severe hardship, yet their humanity is undiminishable.
A Failed Attempt at Undoing Memories opens with “Inheritance,” a poem in which a name is a prayer and the bearer a god whose destiny is to grant the supplication. Born after a shipwreck, the persona was named Tunmise by his father who expects him to be a force that would avert the reoccurrence of the tragedy that inspired his name. The persona is, in this sense, a daily reminder of his parents’ heartbreaking memories. He is aware of and burdened by this reality, which is why he does not believe that the immersion ritual of Christian baptism would sanctify him. He likens himself to a pebble, because “the guilt of pebbles is that they must carry the sea / within their veins, and in the shore is the dark history of rivers.” He is certain that he has inherited a darkness he has neither the will nor the support to erase. But that disenabling inheritance is not his alone to carry. He shares it with his community, whose only hope for survival is resorting to menial labor, “shedding tendrils bruised with saps or / forging their way through layers of granite and rustic stones.” The hardship Tunmise writes about is endured in silence because speaking out can be life-threatening. Given the brutality of the spaces in which his poems exist, his personas often seek an escape. For instance, the speaker in “Flowers and Dark Rooms” is “searching for a map out of this geography of flytraps,” to a new world.
Whereas Tunmise’s concerns are regional, Qhali’s are domestic. In Crying in My Mother’s Tongue, Qhali narrates incidents of domestic violence through a girl’s letters to unnamed relatives and to a deity named Qamata. Qhali’s collection begins with a melancholic invitation into the mind of the poem personas who are themselves embodiments of traumas. “There are corridors in my memory I shall now take you into,” Qhali writes in “Daughter,” recounting the ordeal of an individual whose experience is so delicate that the “smells” she perceives trigger past traumatic emotions in her memory to the extent that “the past becomes the present.” These volatile memories can condition a victim to dwell permanently in the past. One of Qhali’s speakers is a child conscious of the chaos in her home. There are always movements of “bags being packed and unpacked . . . broken glass on the floor, then in Mama’s hands, loud screaming in my ears.” In “June 1, 1994,” the persona complains to Qatama about the silence that her family expects of her, a muteness that enables her abuse. “But no one ever asks me what I want,” she laments, “and tata says children must keep quiet when big people talk.” Since the adults are always shouting, this child claims silence as a mode of being.
This embracing of silence by a victim of violence continues in “A Dying.” Here, the speaker is a mother whose bedroom is invaded by a male rapist at night. But her silence turns out to be a prayer to protect her sleeping daughter from the intruder. It is sad that this mother blames herself for the rapist’s invasion, as though she is accepting her position as a victim and the man’s predatory behavior as natural. But this self-indictment may well demonstrate her love for her child. Throughout this poem, Qhali situates the reader in a dark room, together with the woman, her daughter, and the rapist. The rapist’s brutality is disorienting, which is why the persona in “February 10, 1999” rejects the idea of a male God with this resonating question: “In what eternal place would a creator actually choose to be male[?]” For Qhali, patriarchy is insidious. Perhaps this explains the absence of the father figures in her poems. But the image of the mother is supremely godlike, merciful and present.
Like Qhali, Oladeji is attentive to details pertaining to his speakers’ situations. In “Mercy,” the pang of poverty is weighed against the exuberant luxury of capitalism. Here, a man is flamboyantly wretched, although he is an employed scientist. Even when the persona in “Everything Breaks” is resilient, he is aware of the possibility of breaking in a manner that would “keep him from rising back to his feet.” Since the country is the origin of this fear, the speaker in “Home is a heart that flees,” announces regrettably that home is no longer where the heart is, but the place from “where the heart flees.”
The body is a living, moving history with impulses that necessitate the negotiation of identity. This dazzling sensitivity individualizes and historicizes the queer body in Cogill’s Light Through Water. The persona in “To Save a Country” is reluctant to explore his body because it bears an identity—African and queer—he is afraid of embracing. The speakers in Cogill’s poems come across as people who live imaginatively, subtly reckoning with experiences and desires that unsettle them and make the reader feel and wonder. The persona in “I Wait in Avocados” confesses, but never possesses, his queer desires. He only invents scenarios in which he is in sensual relationships with men he hardly knows:
The boy shopping for potatoes is my fiancé,
the second one, but this time will work out.
For Theo, I make pasta from scratch, and he
pads across the kitchen with garlic for the sauce.
The speaker in “Revisionist History” says: “There are wounds I do not press / like the question of my dead uncles.” He does not ask for more details of his late uncles’ lives from his parents who told him so little about them because, like him, they are possibly queer. “I do not ask anything more,” he says, “not only / because I am selfless / but because I am selfish, because I do not want / to know which doors have been shut to me.” This is the experience of a man whose acceptance of his identity, in a society intolerant of his sexuality, proves to be at the expense of his perception of reality.
Whereas silence shrouds the sexual history of Cogill’s speakers, Owusu’s In These Bones, I am Shifting celebrates sexual and female liberation.In this collection, Owusu uses songs to reinvent her childhood in Taifa, formative years filled with laughter, innocence and love. Bubbling with laughter, the speaker’s aunt in “In My Mother’s Kitchen” says to her, “Nana, date whoever you want, marriage will come when it comes.” I imagine this piece of advice would have benefited Cogill’s speaker if it had been offered by his parents.
Unlike the case in Owusu’s poetry, illness—not shared empowerment and laughter—unites the family in Ariyo’s I Watch You Disappear. This collection follows the experience of a son as he watches over his father, who is sick with cancer. All that matters in the face of disease is hope for healing. In “Cancer Ward,” Ariyo probes the nature of disease, its capacity to make the sick indistinguishable from their loved ones, who put on an expression of grief during hospital visitations, such that a stranger had to ask: “which are you, sick person or loved one?” This is a serious, even if abrupt, interrogation of sympathy and the performativity of suffering. The mother in “My Father Undoes Darkness” forgets how her sick husband would “bruise her,” and becomes empathetic of his condition “so” much “that it is impossible / to tell which of them is actually sick or suffering.” The personas in Ariyo’s work offer readers the most minute of details so evocative one might think of the poems collectively as a personal essay. But the language of the narrative remains abundantly poetic.
Adeosun explores the impact of disease on human experience in If the Golden Hour Won’t Come for Us. But, this time, the diseased speak for themselves. Refusing to accept illness as weakness, the speaker in “In the Beginning, Ablution” says:
And above all, I desire cleanness,
baptism more than a scrubbing down,
an animal softer than my body.
In “An Elegy for the Tender Hearted I,” the speaker came to adopt his mother’s hound, “only when the dog was sick with love / sick with death, its eyes rheumed black, its / coat colored by the earth.” Such is the unmistakable power of disease to facilitate bond between human beings and animals.
The assurance of maternal affection present in the other collections also manifests in Adeosun’s work. The persona in “I Too Have Known Despair” recognizes his mother’s sacrifices for and expectations of him and is saddened by his circumstance. Adeosun renders this eloquently: “Instead of a son, I have grown into a diagnosis.” His condition seemingly never improves, and he fears that one day, like his father, he would no longer be there for his mother. Adeosun’s lyricism is as amazing as the strength this persona forges in his dark times.
Perhaps all the pains in the voices in Kumi coalesce in Patrick’s Voyaging, a bountiful harvest of grief, broken and divided equally between victims and witnesses. Aware of the inevitability of grieving, the persona in “Irapada” wonders:
I don’t know what I would truly be
with no grief. A paper of a human, empty until killed again by
God’s own musings.
Also, the speaker in “Prelude to Survival” sees the world as a field of gloom, “where leaves / floating down a tree could mean a disaster / rather than descent.” This is assuredly poignant, for it speaks to the kind of violence Nigeria is capable of wreaking on its citizens, no matter where they are in the world. Even when he alternates to pidgin, Patrick’s tone remains morose.
The concluding collection in Kumi, Sarpong Osei Asamoah’s Yaanom, takes readers to the heart of history. Why are these African poets singing of movements, of wars, of hardship, of homophobia, of shame, of lack? Asamoah asks us to consider the role slavery and European colonization of Africa played in engendering and sustaining this continental outpouring of madness and grief. The voice of the persona in “Ahwenepa Nkasa” strikes with unforgettable clarity of history: “My grandmother slingshots spit onto the lips of a British colonial guard. / His sharpened shoe makes holes in my grandmother, thus, my mother is born with a limp.” Focusing on his Ghana and drawing from historical archives, Asamoah reveals the mutilated image of Africa since the arrival of the first British slave ship in 1562.
In his introduction to the boxset, Abani writes that the ten years he spent working with Dawes on the New-Generation African Poets series taught him the weight of gratitude, gratitude to everyone who believed in and supported the project of African literary modernity. Reading Kumi reminded me that both silence and sound are powerful. The voice that is silent points to the truth, and the voice that speaks names the truth.
