{"id":3387,"date":"2022-08-05T10:05:00","date_gmt":"2022-08-05T10:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blockspaceballads.com\/?p=3387"},"modified":"2026-10-26T10:13:25","modified_gmt":"2026-10-26T10:13:25","slug":"book-review-new-african-poetry-turns-history-pictures-to-the-wall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blockspaceballads.com\/?p=3387","title":{"rendered":"Book Review | New African Poetry Turns History Pictures to the Wall"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

By Rukudzo Onai<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poetry is a witching game. At a Bantu cleansing ceremony, it must be revealed which words boxed you to an evil fate, and you must break their hold through new poetry chanted in the hearing of the ancestors. On paper too, poetry has always been its own curse. Where poets have divined love, browbeaten strange gods, found the nation its origin story, made utility claims for their trade or undressed evil kings, the new poet has found herself in a fixed category. The fate of words is to accumulate into categories. To unbox words into free play is to turn history pictures to the wall. Old boxes into paper planes bewitched with madness of the kamikaze kind. Old Love Skin \u2013 Voices from Contemporary Africa<\/em>finds new poets summoning divinity where they please to fill in the blank negatives with ambivalence, impiety and intrigue. Poetry is, here, voice and breath, medicine and blood, origin and trace, unresolvedly tangled in a witching combat.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Old Love Skin \u2013 Voices from Contemporary Africa finds new poets summoning divinity where they please to fill in the blank negatives with ambivalence, impiety and intrigue<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Nyasha Chikumbu, editor of the forthcoming anthology from U.S-based Mukana Press, has few curses of poetry in mind. While poetry has always been a popular feature of Africa\u2019s oral traditions, Chikumbu observes in the foreword, it has not been equally celebrated in its written form. \u201cAfrica has celebrated its novelists, essayists and short writers more than it has its poets; poets have been left to steal the little bits of limelight and praise. That has partly been a result of the idea that written poetry is a high art which is meant to be indulged by a select few, also compounded by Africa\u2019s liberation history against colonialism, in which writing became an active act of both resistance and liberation, poetry was looked as at best articulating a private voice, and thus could not carry the larger version of the liberation agenda.\u201d\"\"<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Old Love Skin editor Nyasha Chikumbu (Zimbabwe)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poets have been also recruited for political messaging but equally interesting is their faithful opposition to the system, which one suspects to be a moment in the establishment agenda. The poet is the one who listens for the sound of her own voice away from choices already made for her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Old Love Skin is an offering of possibilities, where radical imagination meets the sheer unrelenting power of creativity<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Though many of 51 poets featured in this collection would have written in isolation from each other, perhaps without sharing a prompt, Old Love Skin is a book with a sense of movement. Not without laughter, the history African writers are always being asked to engage, and the authenticity they are required to perform, become the material for ironic self-probing in some of the anthology\u2019s strongest offerings.\u201cOld Love Skin<\/em> is an offering of possibilities, where radical imagination meets the sheer unrelenting power of creativity; here poets play god with language, form, images and voice, in a battle of reinvention, in ways that are humorous, urgent, striking, sometimes deep and contemplative,\u201d Chikumbu explains the ambition of the anthology, and his poets\u2019 curious windows into \u201cwhat is it to be given the world and not knowing what to do with it, how different and not so different we are.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chikumbu hints at the motivation for the title, Old Love Skin<\/em>, in an interview with This Is Africa<\/em>. \u201cI feel that the title plays in a lot with what the collection is about, the title of the collection, of course being derived from Henneh Kyereh Kwaku\u2019s \u2018playing god in old love skin\u2019; the way the young and not so young poets (if ever there is such a thing as a young poet or writer) are playing and finding their voices in \u2018old\u2019 forms of poetry, \u2018systemic\u2019 language as they\u2019ve inherited it, and as they\u2019ve been taught to see it, owning it and creating a niche out of them. In other words, how the poets are making, language and form work for themselves,\u201d the editor explains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo, old love skin, plays a lot into that in the sense that the poets assume the titular of god (In Kwaku\u2019s poem title) as they\u2019re the creators. Unlike the religious gods, they\u2019re not creating out of nothing, but they\u2019re creating and innovating out of something that\u2019s already there, the old poetic traditions not just out of spite, but out of passion or love. That\u2019s where the old love skin comes into play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs most if not all these poets write in English which is a second, at times third language. There is this love\u2013hate relationship, so that\u2019s the \u2018old love skin\u2019,\u201d adds Chikumbu.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pusetso Lame (Botswana) (L) and Billyhadiat T. Adeola (Nigeria) (R)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book starts as a gentle explosion. The \u201c30-year year old child\u201d and the \u201clittle black boy\u201d soaking up white nerdery in Alvin Kathembe\u2019s opening pieces carry the idea of refusing to grow up. To grow up is, perhaps, to make clear choices, bend world to a world view, or disappear into its adult grind. Kathembe\u2019s boy, maybe the poet himself, doesn\u2019t realise that he is black until he is told so. This is also how you refuse to grow up. But nobody is more self-aware than the one who has refused this human business of growing up. At 34, Dambudzo Marechera is cruelly self-aware regarding the years he has disowned, \u201cI tend to feel ageless, you know, as if time is nothing to do with my mind; and at the same time, you see, I have become aware of my age because kids now call, \u2018Mama, Mama, who is that man?\u2019 and I look around to see who they\u2019re talking about and they are talking about me. Jesus Christ!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Timothy Fab-Eme\u2019s beautiful poem opposes the COVID-19 pandemic to the ecological crisis:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re sick now, and Earth\u2019s healing real fast;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

a grand submit is on in the Sahara\u2014<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

everyone\u2019s there except Human. Coyote sits still<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

on a dinner table with Wolf talking about<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

the unusual peace they\u2019ve got. Zebra and Lion<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

mock Human for gathering things she doesn\u2019t need<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

to live, like nuclear arms and diamond rings.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of all creatures, Tortoise says, Human\u2019s the most<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

pitiable. Reckon God\u2019s regret about the damn thing?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re sick now, and Earth\u2019s healing real fast<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

His poem has something of the leftist opportunism of Slavoj Zizek and his ideological comrades in the wake of the public health emergency:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

COVID-19 has shut us in, like a despot,<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

and all our love for oil and gas<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

and negative science has become naught as noise.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re resting from NBC and VOA breaking news<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

about trade wars, petty politics and greedy folk<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only, this poem betrays too much faith in humankind, as Cold War 2.0 and the mainstream media excitement regarding \u201cthe rearmament of the righteous\u201d and \u201cthe waking up of the West,\u201d would have already shown us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Henneh K. Kwaku (Ghana). The title of the anthology is taken from his inspired thread, Gaana and Other Poems<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is Henneh Kyereh Kwaku\u2019s title poem, \u201cPlaying God in Old Love Skin\u201d, Chikumbu engages in his foreword, \u201cHow do you play god in skin that is not of your own making? How do you stay visible in a space that threatens to unmake you, and render you invisible? How do you speak the unspeakable? How do you amplify the dialects of your dialogue through (a) language that speaks everything against you?\u201d  The idea of an answer is undermined as Kwaku follows up on the cruel moments of Kathembe\u2019s thread \u2013 a friend who \u201ccarries a condom in her purse\/ in case of rape\u201d  \u2013 with other contingency measures \u2013 the magician who  \u201csharpens the metal so he gets a quick death\/ if he\u2019s impaled on it\/ one day.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Chikumbu and his poets answer his question at all, they do so in the only word they know. Poetry. And the messy ambiguity. And the bluesy resignation that implies. In more scenario maps, Kwaku tells just how much he will take from his country if only because it is his country, the country he cannot unlove. The worst of it can be even more casually taken because, as Kwaku says of that country, \u201cwhen it kills me\/ I won\u2019t know.\u201d The one who loves the world is lost in its otherness. The one who writes marvels at the world she cannot know and the knowledge she cannot solidify. Love and poetry are these fallen states in Old Love Skin<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

First published by<\/em> <\/em>This Is Africa. All rights reserved. Contact author at rukudzoonai@duck.com<\/em>
<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Old Love Skin, a pan-African poetry collection, finds new voices summoning divinity where they please, and turning history pictures to the wall to fill in the blank negatives with ambivalence, impiety and intrigue. 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