A Thousand Voices Rising: Institutionalizing Contemporary African Poetry
The poetry collection was compiled and edited by Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva, whose singular exertion is lifting the African poetry to a whole new level. She is the founder of the now popular BN Poetry Foundation in Uganda, which has facilitated numerous activities beneficial to the African practice. In addition to this landmark publication, the BN […]
The poetry collection was compiled and edited by Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva, whose singular exertion is lifting the African poetry to a whole new level. She is the founder of the now popular BN Poetry Foundation in Uganda, which has facilitated numerous activities beneficial to the African practice. In addition to this landmark publication, the BN Poetry Foundation is an endorser of an annual poetry award for African poets. This effort of an awe-inspiring woman in Beverley, alongside the African Book Fund (APBF) project, is sending a shock wave across the poetic waters of the continent, and is helping carve out an identity for it.
It features exciting voices like Richard Ali, Jack Mapanje, Clifton Gachagua, Harriet Anena, Regina Asinde, David Ishaya Osu, Michelle McGrane, Akinlabi Peter, Lillian Aujo, Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim and Namulondo Rashida among others. This book is a doorway to experience the best of emerging African Poetry.
The anthology coerces the poems through eight movements, with each movement setting out to pull off a picky thematic preoccupation. The Beginning started paradoxically as The End. Then end is always the beginning of something new, something heavenly is often achieved by drawing a curtain, like when death gives rise to a new experience after life. ‘’Death knocking” seeking to break walls, pushing the boundary of what life can experience. Here one feels the pain of loss often characterized by the fatality of loved ones.
Like Jesus’ arms on the cross,
She shed her last drop of blood,
As the light in her mind’s eyes
Flickered off permanently! ( Imali J Abala. P17.)
This poem for example gloriously portrayed something horrendous in an exquisite stroke. And most importantly it keeps in synch with the thematic objective of “The End” as it is from extensive contact with reality and as it is depicted in several poems under the same grouping.
The poem becomes a preacher, warbling the gospel of hope, singing on how the tiniest of light’s flicker, can be held onto as the hope to overcome an overwhelming darkness.
The waves deep there in the sea
Tussle with the waves on the surface
All yearning for the shore
Day and night waves cannot sleep
Even in their dreams
Always wishing to reach the shore (Stanley Onjezani Kenani. P26.)
The reader feels the personification of hope from end to end of verses that seek to empower with the idea of endurance, with the idea of seeking answers where questions are not answered, in a language that has the predictability of common but mind-boggling experiences that are habitually overlooked. The poems are picturesque, so well animated that the reader can see everything as clear as a fine weather, the reader can see hope “… rekindle the flame from the broken down deserted fire place”.
His fingers race over the frets
The guitar vibrates rebelliously
He hums
It thrums
Between the two I cannot tell
Which one is in charge of the music. (Susan Piwang. P42.)
And the poem sings too, striking the cords of the guitar, it becomes “The Music Man” whose voices have the lilt of a rain fall, “A soprano of notes floated onto the humid summer night”. Every poem should be a song, but there are some poems that sing better than the rest, poems that exemplify music in its mellifluous oomph. The one who hears the voices of the Poem in this anthology has ears buried in the spasm of sweet songs. “… Music waters my desert…” and “new song forms”.
… love is overpowering in its gentility like water. The poems beam, soft of love, like…butter… under the sun… one experiences the abundance of love in sensual verses that appeal to senses giving bearing to the tangible and intangible with equivalent sum of concentration. Love accepts all that love has to offer, the purity, the impurity, the sadness, the happiness. In the verses we come to realize that love brings many things aside love. We have to be sad in other to understand happiness; love offers both, in a quest to give meaning to the conviviality it brings. A poet understands the language of love, better than the lover- hence those that love, learn to speak like the poet. But here, the poems illustrate the poets as lovers. To speak the language of love and to love, is to be its eternal epithet, because a love that can be interpreted and articulated is gratifying, rivalled only by the allegory of bliss. A love poem is peerless- and a poet, who loves, is a peerless lover. These poems teach you to love and think as a devotee. The poems are like necklaces intense with the enlightenment of love.
The collection speaks of country and self, of the beast feasting on blood, of poachers of dreams, of tree cutters, and of the storm that besets the garden when the kernels dared to flower. Of the ones whose hands keep the river of blood flooding home, but wash off the stain and eat from same bowl as siblings. It purrs of the love for country, the pain that love inflicts- it is like that of a mother to her child, a love that is unwavering, one that the heart carries even if it weighs far more than Everest.
It’s a new era, drums roll… voices converged to sing, verses that will seize the African Poetry scene, before long. Here are verses that appeal to all the senses and leave the reader fully experienced with the life of the poets. A poem is the one that can draw you into it, and allow you live it- each page here, call onto you to live in it and experience the African world.
Saddiq Dzukogi is a Nigerian poet, with three published volumes of poetry: Images of Life, Canvas, Sunbeams and Shadows. His poems have appeared in KalahariReview, EbediReview, ANAreview, SarabaMagazine, Fireflies, the Sun Literary Review and elsewhere.