‘The first time my father speaks of his cancer/is to my mum, on Christmas Eve…’ This is how Feranmi Ariyo begins the poem, ‘My Father Undoes Darkness’, in I Watch you Disappear. It is filled with many such meditations on the nature of ailment and truth. Ariyo’s style is anecdotal and intimate. Death features everywhere in Ariyo’s I Watch You Disappear. The talk of certain kinds of chronic ailments such as only leads to that morbid conclusion. But there is an undeniably autobiographical link. The poet seems to be searching for answers to the events of his recent past. It is there, indeed, in the title (‘I watched you disappear’), and how harrowing to witness the disappearing act of illness! To watch one’s loved one descend piecemeal into rigor mortis by the ruthless act of illness is to witness disappearance. Elsewhere we see how the poet’s speaker wants us to partake intimately in his sorrow. In ‘Fission’, in typical anecdotal form, he details the stages an illness goes through (‘fission does not begin when a father holds a scan’). The lucid images of endings continue in ‘The Last Smoke’. At a later stage of cancer, the patient gives up inwardly and begins a spate of previously abhorred indulgences. The poet sees it as a kind of psychological victory or healing (‘the false utopia of our minor victories’), or really, it is a form of coming to terms with the inevitability of death. 

Connor Cogil’s Light Through Water emerges from an imagistic landscape: conscious, futuristic, and aware of the political incontinence of the African continent. To be fully aware of this, a poet has to be a reader of his society. In Cogil, we find an abundance of that immensity of knowledge and understanding of the world and its insufferable inequalities, of race, gender, and sexuality. Fully aware of his heritage in a country that is burdened by the inequities of its past, Cogil affirms his own role in it, by association, through his heritage as a white South African (‘You whose lineage is exact’):

Say, This home has been
In our family for generations. I will not ask
Whose war. I will not ask whose land. I will
Tell a charming story: how I was born in
The backseat of a car because the nurses
Didn’t know shit and sent my bursting mother
Home. 

The poet calls out the denial of privilege by the white community who tells ‘charming stories’ about the poverty they never experienced. This awareness of a certain guilty heritage seems to be how the poet invokes contrition upon himself and his race. His chapbook sheds light on the forbidden aspects of history. It seeks to play into the oft-remarked sore point of the South African historical predicament if I am to limit it to national boundaries that, for some reason, remain unresolved. Another knot that plagues the poet’s preoccupation which he tries to shine a light on, to see through its different convolutions, is his sexuality: his search for home in homoerotic desire: ‘My yearning wakes at dawn’ (from ‘Tantalus’).

Nome Emeka Patrick’s Voyaging takes the condition of exile—which we have seen poets in this edition of the chapbook treat—to new territories, the realm of the mind, of the configuration of temperament and sexuality. The poet’s mature language operates near the sublime and his observations are elevated by an advanced poetic imagination; everything good about this box set seems to come to a head here, given flight through language. Need I say that a poet’s superpower is his control of language? If he gains that power, then there is no end to his exquisite creations. One image that emerges in Patrick’s poems is self-confession. 

In ‘Good Dreams’, the poet voyages around the changes that occur with dreams as one typically matures. The changes are a matter of fact and are not deliberate. But the poet tends to philosophize even this, to construct fantasies out of them: ‘Outside myself, what am I but a white/calf? Around me, my future is an umbrella. Above me, my frame is a flourishing/forest’. Patrick wants us to partake in making dreams and in that concept-making making there is creation. Thus, he deconstructs and minces language into new forms and meaning. We glean these meanings everywhere in multiple layering: ‘I storm into the temple,/instead of pews I find pebbles from a dark past. I’m living inside/a grove, yet the vision translates it to a grave. Here, my good heart’. The poet considers how many things and situations hold different meanings at different times for different people. It seems to emerge from the wisdom of the Igbo proverb which holds that where one thing stands, another stands beside it. It seems to me then that Patrick’s poetry holds much of that duality of meaning. In short, the poet seems to luxuriate in the twin poles of language and meaning. 

Sarpong Osei Asamoah’s Yaanom is perhaps the most overtly political of all the chapbooks in the box set, though of course it partly incorporates some of the same concerns in Qhali’s Crying in My Mother’s Tongue and fellow Ghanaian Owusu’s In these Bones, I am Shifting. Each of these works is concerned with the notion of ancestral heritage, history, and the role of women in the preservation of culture and lineage, as well as culture’s unvoicing of women. In Asamoah’s Yaanom, the poems are overarched by a vindictive umbrage against colonial and neocolonial influences in Africa. He specifically takes offense with a mono-dimensional representation of the dynamic history of Black people in the West. The major project of the collection seems to be reclaiming the true history of Africa. Asamoah uses the historical figure of Yaa to foreground how women possess the power to unify Africans and diffuse colonial and neocolonial agendas. We see this clearly in the high lyricism of the eponymous poem, ‘Yaanom’, which the poet disambiguates as ‘Yaa’ and her children/descendants, Yaa being the common Akan (and in this context, African) ancestor:

The last night of their voyage cast shadows
onto Virginia’s feet. Full moon turned Yaanom to stone gods falling
from my child’s eyes. Their loose teeth, cemeteries in the spleen of a soft sea.
The sold sails in their blood made song for devil grass.

The African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) chapbook box set, Kumi, explores African identity, cultural inheritance, and collective memory. It includes prayers expressed in glossolalia, reflecting a desperate plea for survival. Themes shift from timid girlhood shaped by patriarchal culture to fierce modern womanhood, meditating on truth, illness, and mortality, and revealing the inescapable realities of human existence through contemporary African poetry⎈