All I ever wanted was a world without maps writes Michael Ondaatje in his intimate meditation on the human condition. In his magnum opus, The English Patient, Ondaatje wrote in a language that outstripped and far outreached our notion of the spoken word. What might read as a fairly innocuous line at first glance, the measure of its profundity can only truly be felt after having read through the entire book. The written word, stripped of all superfluous weight, carrying the weight of only the world it inhabits. This ancient art through the ages in its multitude of forms, poetry, prose and beyond, truly hits home when it has that supremely tantalising quality of restraint, of what is said and more importantly what is not. Fulfillment and its lack, leaving the reader on the cusp of a private inquest. A tentative submission to the senses in giving shape to the seemingly vacant, in breathing form into that void. Steady cadence, moving epilogues, stirring prologues, stem-winding rhymes that offer us at times an escape from barren days like clockwork, and other times hold a candle in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, reminding us and the world at large around us that perhaps the idyll we always aspire for is within us, in this desire to be heard and felt.
What is singularly fascinating about words, in their potential and their reality, is the uncanny ability to draw parallels between the word and everyday life, between the audacious and mundane. To blur those lines, when it is all eventually the same thing, a ruse to gain some foothold in the grain of life, in all its weary manifestations. I recall to my heart the words of Osip Mandelstam.
Where to start?
Everything cracks and shakes,
The air trembles with similes,
No one world’s better than another;
the earth moans with metaphors.
Our bosoms, a repository of parables and fables. We parade them as we walk on gingerly as pilgrims towards different destinations. For some, catharsis; for others, a pedagogy of inquiry and inclusion. Parables containing a primitive yet fundamental truth that either drive a point home (although what is truly home is debatable, contested, even contentious. Home, a place, a feeling or an escape, a disappearance? Home, a coiling up, a womb or a verdant mountainside?); or maybe shock value, to jolt us out of a certain slumber. An ancient trunk of infinite wisdom, one truly kneels in awe at the sheer magnitude of time, and the vastness of space a word travels to reach us. Unannounced miracles reaching us without fanfare. Culminating in a fête, a welcoming of all worlds in one small world. Contains multitudes, everything and perhaps nothing. “Families fascinate me. They are a universe unto themselves with norms, codes, and histories that are both unique to them and illustrative of the wider milieu they are situated in. If you can see how a family operates behind closed doors, you will get a true window into the beliefs, attitudes, and systems of their society and, sometimes, the world,” says Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond in an illuminating response to a question regarding her compelling use of motifs of familial linkages.
A word, at its core lies the human condition. Despite the attempts to divide and heighten individuation, where every man and woman are concerned with their own looming fate, robbing us of an eternal light, the written word comes down like a generous downpour, a rain which infects us with the phantasmic reminder of our link with others. Where everything else around us defiles this quiet camaraderie between the human race, this rain of sublimely crafted letters ennobles the spirit and quenches the hearts of all torment. Every heart, consecrated to the idea of unity, an encompassing sense of being an inviolable part of ‘The Whole,’ a necessary covenant attesting to the truth of one big soul.
Poetry and prose. The most delicious when they are slow-burners. If prose be the body and spirit of art, giving that perpetual void in our lives a form, prescriptive like a catechism, a dogma; poetry on the other hand is more esoteric, a void without form, brimming with mystique and surrender. Their effect, lasting. What we nurture nurtures us.
The poetry in this issue is riddled with living, breathing poems passed around in wicker baskets, infused with the mellow light of the dying sun, and a southern breeze heralding a new world. The cusp of an eternal struggle, and its end (or the beginning). They chart a map of gentle but rousing melancholy. The prose captures the nightmarish contingency of human survival, as well as the inevitable human callousness towards nature, towards fellow beings, with an ironic elegance, and miraculously free of bitterness. Stories of great beauty, with an underbelly of ecstasy and under which lies a drumbeat of grief and vitality for life.
Olabimpe Adedamola’s poem “Five Weeks in Bwari” is a rite of passage, a fusion of fury and the ripening of prayers; a fruition of an entire life, when nothing comes to naught and takes us on a journey to discover the possibility of human freedom. Leading us on to John Chinaka Onyeche’s soft meditation, “Amen” imbued with a refreshing lightness that holds on to the coat-tails of redemption. Christian Emecheta’s poetry serenades us with a symphony of words that transcend space-time and shape-shift into a universal embrace. Language becomes an afterthought to the rising tide of feelings that the word evokes. We are all transfigured into one, and the same. Mothers and sons, fathers and brothers, daughters, all walk hand in hand towards their unifying fate. There is yet a flagrancy of despair and purpose; a singular vagrancy rife with anecdotes in Mohamed Mahou’s poetry.
Anthony Ikeh brews a silent revolution with his poem “Anti-Matter,” at the core of which is an enduring human spirit. At once, curled up into an old womb, at once, rising like a phoenix. Much like Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, Aishat Yahkub’s poetry mirrors a giant tussle with the sea. Her narrative voice is built up slowly, on occasion mysterious like hidden chambers, and other times unrestrained like high towers that branch out. She fashions a delicate portrait of memory and passion. As vigorous as they are restorative, as humble as they are wise, Yahkub’s poems are a wry acceptance of life’s folly and by the same token, a weapon against tyranny and bad taste. Abraham Kedong Ali comes around as a time-traveler whose vision of the world through his poem is a unique, moving and self-effacing delight. A poignant meditation on the past, and an inspection of the present with a question propelled into the future.
The short stories, Tomilola’ Adejumo’s The Hunger that Remains, Wesley Macheso’s The Spices of Stone Town, and Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza’s The Blue Fighter are a world seething with curious appetite, sensuality and anguish. The prose, both plain-spoken and luminous, the combination of skepticism and merry, mischievous irreverence makes for encapsulating reading. The palpable thirst for the endless surprises of fresh perception means the writing is the enemy of all tyrannical certainties. A stark contrast with the ever-looming darkness, the work on display is free, restless and questioning, but never divested from everyday life. An epiphany draped in vivid imagery often, it stands taut and brave, clothed and naked.
As we all grapple with myriad moments of indecision and frank caution; interrogations of a single unifying truth and the tight-rope walk over a chasm as deep and fundamental as our undying hope for a better future, we welcome you to dive into this well-spring of cosmic delight, sensuous and chastening in equal measure.
