Forty years after his country's independence from the British, Jack
Mapanje has returned to his concern for ordinary people in Africa
and in the world at large. These were the themes that made his
first collection Of Chameleons and Gods an inspirational book in
Malawi and throughout Africa. The new poems in Beasts of Nalunga
are boldly lyrical narratives cunningly crafted in mesmerising
spirals. His voice is still ironically cheerful, his tone
impotently angry - but confidently measured with wit and humour,
however bleak. He fears the saying 'once a prisoner always a
prisoner', and questions why prisons refuse to go away. Jack
Mapanje was imprisoned without trial or charge by the dictator
Hastings Banda for nearly four years, and chronicled his prison
experiences in many of the poems of The Chattering Wagtails of
Mikuyu Prison (1993), Skipping Without Ropes (1998) and The Last of
the Sweet Bananas: New & Selected Poems (2004). In Beasts of
Nalunga the soul is still skipping without rope, and the landscape
the soul traverses provides memorable and fresh metaphors and
symbols. Read Beasts of Nalunga as the soul struggling to liberate
itself, and fighting against the beasts of silences that were once
rampant in the African despotic regime under which Mapanje matured,
silences that threaten to continue today, even in distant homes and
variegated exiles. Beasts of Nalunga was shortlisted for the
Forward Prize for Best Collection.
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