Healing mother Africa: contemporary African poets explore new rhythms and themes.

Jelly Roll: A Blues by Kevin Young Knopf, January 2003 $23.00, ISBN 0-375-41460-6

If recent happenings in Africa's poetry scene are indicators of things to come, it appears the continent is headed for a poetic resurgence. Not since the 1960s and 1970s, when the likes of Okot p'Bitek, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Wole Soyinka and others blazed the world with their oeuvre and opus, have there been as much interest in the continent's poets. Political, economic and cultural events that shape Africa's regions and spheres have always bolstered a flurry of poetry from the continent's wordsmiths.

Gone are the days when the shades of colonialism were an unending preoccupation of poets. Today, works that focus on the healing of family, country and folklore dominate African poetics.

Why is the exploration of these themes important? Quite frankly, cultural workers who set the foundation for today's poets provide examples. The late Ugandan-Acoli poet Okot p'Bitek, renowned for the groundbreaking Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol (Heinemann, (1969), June 1984, ISBN 0-435-90266-0), is an example. Written at a time when independence from colonial rule was the stand-up event of the day, Song of Lawino marked the liberation of the African ethos:

   My husband treats me roughly
   The insults:
   Words cut more painfully than sticks!
   He says my mother is a witch,
   That my clansmen are fools
   Because they eat rats,
   He says we all Kaffirs.
   We do not know the ways of God
   We sit in deep darkness
   And do not know the Gospel,
   He says my mother hides her charms
   In her necklace
   And that we are all sorcerers

   --Song of Lawino & Song of Ocol

P'Bitek was, no doubt, a rare talent for his time. His ability to explore tactfully such serious issues as religion and culture is thought provoking but not new to African poetry. Pressed with the rhythms and melodies of oral traditions that desire the interpretation of written text, poets have sung or written to explore the impact of colonialism on the African mind.

Many have followed p'Bitek's path successfully. The Nigerian-Ijaw poet Gabriel Okara's famous work Piano and Drums (Heinemann, 1978) echoes the trying conflict of merging two separate and different cultures. Many had to settle differences with cultural alienation in order to "decolonize" their minds. Very similar, one would say, to W.E.B. Du Bois's theory of "double consciousness."

Okara's poem evokes the aura that comes with such an experience:

   ... lost in the morning mist
   of an age at a riverside keep
   wandering in the mystic rhythm
   of jungle drums and the concerto ...

   --The Fisherman's Invocation (Heinemann,
   December 1978, ASIN 0-435-90183-4)

The subtleness of tone and the sentiments of clashing cultures expounded a need to elevate an African consciousness.

Poets in Africa have faced issues in ways that not only explain how indigenous cultures are absorbed by Western standards but how limiting in vision their leaders have been. Therein lies the dilemma: the questioning of authority. It is nothing new to African poetry. Poets have satirized their governments or written to change or disrepute the flaws of authority for decades. Many have paid dearly in one way or another. African poets have been jailed, killed, forced into exile or compelled to commit suicide. The history of African poetry exists as evidence for the conscious mind.

According to records, South African poet Arthur Norje committed suicide in London in 1970; Christopher Okigbo, blamed by many for sacrificing his art for warfare, died while fighting for Biafra against the Nigerian government during the civil war of the 1960s; South African poet Mongane Wally Serote was detained under the Terrorism Act in 1969-1970 and released without trial. The Malawian poet Jack Mapanje was jailed without charge or trial in 1987 as a result of something he said to someone over a beer in a university bar. Ken Saro Wiwa was hung by the Nigerian military junta in 1995.

The scars of exile have carved an alcove for such devotedness to writers of conscience, at least for those writing from a soil other than their birthplace. The poet-scholar whose work typifies this style of writing is the Nigerian Tanure Cjaide. His poem "No Longer Our Country" is written in the tradition of a ballad or lament to his heritage. Sentimental but precise, the poem is an indictment of the country's transformation to urbanization, which as the poet fears, is robbing the country of its natural habitats and sense of humanity. The speaker in the poem demands attention from the world, while indirectly questioning those in authority:

   We have lost it,
   The country we were born into.
   We can now sing dirges of that
   commonwealth of yesterday.
   We live in a country
   That is no longer our own.
   Our sacred trees have been cut down
   To make armchairs for the rich and titled;
   Our totem eagle, that bird of great heights,
   Has been shot at by thoughtless guardians.
   ... counting the obscenities from every mouth,
   You can tell that we live in a country
   That is no longer our own ...

   --From The Blood of Peace by Tanure Cjaide
   (Heinemann, October 1991, ASIN 0-435-91193-7

The veteran South African poet Dennis Brutus has been known for voicing his dissatisfaction with his homeland since exile. Limiting as the term/name might be, the issues explored by African poets are universal. Brutus in his famous poem "Sharpeville" writes:

   Remember Sharpeville
   Bullets-in-the-back day
   Because it epitomizes oppression
   And the nature of society
   More clearly than anything else ...

   --From Somehow We Survive: An Anthology of
   South African Writing by Sterling Plumpp
   (Thunder's Mouth Press, April 1982,
   ASIN 0-938-41001-6)

But much has happened in the post-Brutus era. South African poetry has been dominated by the likes of Oswald Mtshali, Mongane Wally Serote, Zindzi Mandela, Sidlane Dikeni, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Ingrid de Kok and many others. Of these writers, Mtshali stands out for addressing the role of oppression and its effects. In his poem "Nightfall ha Soweto," readers are introduced firsthand to the terrible nature of living day to day under apartheid:

   Nightfall comes like
   A dreaded disease
   Seeping through the pores
   Of a healthy body
   And ravaging it beyond repair
   A murderer's hand,
   Lurking in the shadows,
   Clasping the dagger,
   Strikes down the helpless victim
   I am the victim.
   I am the slaughtered
   Every night in the streets.
   I am cornered by the fear
   Gnawing at my timid heart;
   In my helplessness ...

   --From A Selection of African Poetry edited by
   K. E. Senanu and T. Vncent (Longman Group
   UK, March 1990, ASIN 0-582-01683-5)

The poet takes readers on a journey as an observer through the poet's journey as a participant. Outsiders are introduced to the nature of the community. Apartheid oppressed black South Africans in many disturbing, undocumented ways. The psychology of fear is alive in this poem.

But if fear as an element of craft and theme predominates in Mtshali's work, nostalgia and the sense of reconnection with one's place of birth after years of exile is a strong feature in the work of Malawian poet Frank Chipasula. In the poem "The First Three Nights," the speaker attempts to capture all experience upon returning to his place of birth after 20 years in exile:

   The first night stole sleep from my eyes;
   The second night stole dreams from my sleep;
   The third night leashed me to a star
   (Frank Chipasula [c] 2003)

Nevertheless, times have changed. So have rhythms and themes. Chipasula, Cjaide, Mtshall and Serote form a core group of African poets whose works are gaining more recognition in the West and elsewhere, as they attempt to bridge the gap between generations of pre-independence and post-independence African poets. Many of these poets address issues of similar concern because Africa is still undergoing the transition to Democratic governments after years of dictatorship. The adoption of Democracy has not been easy, given the continent's allotment of time and space to economic repression, wars, AIDS and political instability.

The combination of the personal and the abstract in this poem shows the poet's seriousness and debt to the land. His anger is sparked by what he sees, but it is the human destruction that is the real instigator of his anguish.

Nevertheless, while the experiences evinced show the trials of a continent, hope smiles from thriving publishing outlets and cultural programs. Such publishers as David Philip and Kwela Books in South Africa; African Heritage Press and Spectrum Books in Nigeria; Zimbabwe Publishing House in Zimbabwe; Africa World Press and Third World Press, both in the United States, among a host of others not mentioned, have helped African poetry in sustaining a readership over the years.

--Dike Okoro is a poet, critic and fiction writer who has published widely. He is an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing Program at Chicago State University.

Kevin Young's Jelly Roll displays the self-assured voice of a poet in mid-career. Given Young's relative youth, however, we know he is still just gathering steam, promising years of reinvention. Weighing in at nearly 200 pages, his third book of poems uses blues to evoke the intimacy of confession, while challenging conventions of the lyric narrative poem.

Young dusts off his blues and reconstitutes it in a contemporary context to surprising effect. His wit, an essential ingredient in the blues, is at times awkwardly employed. Add to that Young's penchant for punning and the reader's faith in the authentic sentiment of the poems might be undermined. But the poems in Jelly Roll, many written to an anonymous love that is either lost or leaving, transcend the whimsical. In the poem "Suite," the speaker is "... far from your fire/detector which sang unceasingly, whenever/ you cooked ... Lady, it may/have been hell, but it was ours." He adds, "& warm."

The poetic voice could be that of an anachronistic love child of Yusef Komunyakaa and Emily Dickinson. The jazzy swagger and the quirky syntax (and the omnipresent long dash) marry to produce a dizzying flow. Lines such as, "I want, like/water, you--," and "You have me/ to you quite addicted//dear--," keep the reader slightly off balance and always guessing.

Couched in surprising titles such as "Envoy," "Jook," "Muzak" and "Scherzo," these blues celebrate a diverse history and bring new life to the tradition.

--Gregory Pardlo's writing has appeared in Callaloo, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ploughshares and Warpland magazines. Pardlo has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and teaches in New York City.