African women poetry changing the craft
Aidoo is followed by many incredible poets in the generation after hers, poets who took the framework she provided and continued to complicate and stretch the possibilities.
OVER the last several years as a writer, reader, editor, and educator who teaches courses on global poetics, I have been deeply struck by the significant emergence of female poets with roots in Africa. While African fiction is widely known, poetry has been largely ignored, and the female voices, as is so often the case, have been poorly represented in publishing efforts.
But in the quiet corners of the literary landscape, this group of women has been hard at work challenging and expanding our understanding of contemporary poetics.
There is a new and inspiring wave of this work, and what is evident is that this incredible range of poetry coming from African women has been here for a long time, perhaps waiting for the world around them to catch up.
And so I wish to focus here on one of the contexts that has helped bring this work into the world and, in the process, give the reader a brief dive into the poetry and poets themselves by highlighting a few of the critical voices in contemporary African women’s poetry.
In 2012, a group of poets, writers, and thinkers, led by Kwame Dawes, decided we would embark on an idea that some of us had been toying with for some time. What we hoped to do was to bring contemporary African poetry into the fold of contemporary anglophone literature, and with our tentacles reaching worldwide, we would base these efforts in the United States.
Along with Dawes and myself, we teamed up with Chris Abani, Gabeba Baderoon, Bernardine Evaristo, and John Keene along with, more recently, PhillippaYaa de Villiers and Aracelis Girmay, to form an internationally recognized editorial team that could speak to the breadth and significance of African poetry.
We defined African as those born in Africa, those who are a national or resident of an African country, or those whose parent(s) are African. It was an idea that though somewhat audacious in scope was simple in concept. We would work to broaden the literary landscape and show the necessity of African poetry as a central agent in contemporary poetry.
After all, when we talk about Africa and all of her diasporas, we are talking about a significant piece of the globe, a recognizable population. But the thing is this: at our core we wanted this idea, an idea straightforward in some ways, to be done in a considered and intentional manner, sustainable and with a global scope.
What existed of contemporary African poetry in the English language before this effort were largely single volumes championed by individuals who had broken through in one way or another, editors who had taken interest in an individual book, but few things systemic had been done before and nothing that allowed for a sustained effort aimed at longevity.
And so we established the African Poetry Book Fund (apbf). This umbrella organization became home to the African Poetry Book Series; we started a debut book contest (the annual Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets); we created an annual chapbook box set of emerging African poets; we began publishing the collected works of iconic African poets and the midst works of well-established poets; we, in partnership with poetry communities across the continent, established contemporary poetry libraries in Botswana, Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda; we planted the seeds and began working on a digital humanities project that will highlight the breadth of contemporary African poetry worldwide; we laid the groundwork for a massive forthcoming anthology of contemporary African poetry; and, to date, have published nearly fifty African poets in internationally distributed and accessible books.
And, I would argue, we have ever so slightly changed the face of contemporary anglophone poetry.
We have complicated the landscape of contemporary American poetry, given rise to the way American and other readers have access to African poetics, and have created viable and rich transatlantic communities of poets that have begun a deeply nuanced and engaged conversation with one another and with their literary siblings the world over.
To be clear, I am biased, but I am afforded that right. This is not a scholarly endeavour; this is a project of passionate advocacy, of a craft-centred engagement intended to show all that poetry has to offer, intended to highlight the critically missing works of so many, and it is timely in a moment when such advocacy and reminders of our multiplicity could not be more necessary.
So, as I take stock of the work we have done over these last five years, I realise that we have made accessible the immense and significant works of so many contemporary poets both on the African continent and in its varied diasporas, and in that process we have specifically seen the cultivation of the female voice as an unquestionable barometer of the health and vibrancy of these poetic traditions.
And so I wish to highlight here a group of anglophone African women poets, most of whom we have published, most of whom have lived or do live in some diasporic reality, all of whom are changing the way we read and engage poetry in English.
Women who have cultivated their craft without bounds, borrowing and sharpening from every corner of the globe; trading on the stories of their own mothers, shaving at the verse of the canonical Europeans, building on the power of American poetry, challenging the language of the colonial and the patriarchal; our sisters who have dissolved the expectations set to limit them and have instead shown us a boundless verse.
I begin with the iconic Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo as a way of necessary context. A pathbreaker coming of age in the 1960s, Aidoo is an elder stateswoman of contemporary African poetry, and her work can be seen in its incredible breadth in After the Ceremonies: New and Selected Poems, edited by Helen Yitah (2017). In the tradition of so much of West African poetry, Aidoo often writes poems of praise and naming, directed to individuals and places, a way to address the realities of life (both human and otherwise) head-on through her poems. One such poem is the beautiful long piece “Ghana: Where the Bead Speaks.” In this lyrically playful poem, Aidoo illustrates the idea that the bead (often used for various rituals and divinations) shapes the lives of contemporary Ghanaians, that this object is more than an object, that it is a talisman of sorts, or perhaps more accurately, a kind of barometric mirror for day-today life. She writes:
Elegant and enchanting bead, flowered, flawed, folded, or fielded, you are the true frame of our feasts, our festivals, fetes, and fiestas. Give me a bead that’s wrapped in joy;
find me a bead to carry my grief. We sing of beads, and sing with beads;
just see how well they show on us. [. . .]
Don’t tell me if there were no beads something else could meet our needs. Something what? Something where? Please keep it there, even if it’s rare. In this poem we see the ways that
Aidoo takes tradition and the sociocultural and spiritual practices that have existed for generations and centres them as the subject of her poetry. But perhaps more importantly, Aidoo takes the poetic tradition of much of modernist European poetry, the metrical and lyrical traditions, and renders it anew in an African context, and in many cases a particularly gendered context. As an early forerunner in contemporary anglophone African poetry, her work became a critically important way to establish a global readership and make a space for the generations to come, to work in the anglophone traditions and continue to push their boundaries by recasting the form into a context that was at the time largely unknown in the West. A conversation had begun, even if uninitiated by the West, where African poets began to speak across the Atlantic and carve a space for themselves, despite the realities of history and power.
Aidoo is followed by many incredible poets in the generation after hers, poets who took the framework she provided and continued to complicate and stretch the possibilities. One such person who comes to mind is the Liberian poet Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, whose most recent book is When the Wanderers Come Home (2017). In Wesley’s poetry we see the immense power of a poet working to express the human complexity and grief of a nation and her people often defined by war. Wesley is a poet working to find language that can help show the fractures and fissures of a postwar nation and the personal realities of displacement and return. This sentiment is beautifully illustrated in her poem “What Took Us to War”:
Every so often, you find
a piece of furniture, an old head wrap
or something like a skirt held together like a rusty pin.
Our years, spilled over all the ruggedness
of this war-torn place, our years, wasted like grains of rice. Relics of your past, left for you, in case you returned accidentally or intentionally, in case you did not perish with everyone else. Something hanging onto thread, holding onto the years to be picked up, after locusts and termites have had their say, the graciousness of looters, the graciousness of termites and temporary owners of a home you built during your youth, during the Samuel Doe years when finding food was your life goal. How gracious, the war years, how gracious, the warlords, their fiery tongues and missiles.
Here we see how Wesley takes note of the lived realities and evolutions of civil war, of the subtle distinctions of what it means to be from a place completely transformed and ravaged by violence, and the lasting and personal invasions it causes. Emblematic of her aesthetic style, Wesley often pays attention to the ephemeral, the things both culturally symbolic and domestic, a line often blurred in many cultures. But what’s more is that she uses the framing set by the generations before her to create poetry that not only speaks to her realities as a Liberian woman and survivor of the civil war but a poetry that implicates her own grief, allowing her a fully humanised space on par with the works of anglophone writers from all over the world. In this vein Wesley, representative of a kind of “middle generation” between Aidoo and the emerging writers of today, helps break ground for a myriad of both content and style. — Originally appeared in World Literature Today.
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