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There Where It's So Bright in Me pries at the complexities of
difference-race, religion, gender, nationality-that shape
twenty-first-century geopolitical conditions. With work spanning
more than thirty-five years and as one of the most prominent
figures in contemporary African literature, Tanella Boni is
uniquely positioned to test the distinctions of self, other, and
belonging. Two twenty-first-century civil wars have made her West
African home country of Cote d'Ivoire unstable. Abroad in the
United States, Boni confronts the racialized violence that
accompanies the idea of Blackness; in France, a second home since
her university days, Boni encounters the nationalism roiling much
of Europe as the consequences of (neo)colonialism shift the
continent's ethnic and racial profile. What would it mean for the
borders that segregate-for these social, political, cultural,
personal, and historicizing forces that enshroud us-to lose their
dominion? In a body under constant threat, how does the human
spirit stay afloat? Boni's poetry is characterized by a hard-earned
buoyancy, given her subject matter. Her empathy, insight, and
plainspoken address are crucial contributions to the many difficult
contemporary conversations we must engage.
Poetry is one of the major forms of literary expression in both
Africa and the Arab World and this anthology endeavours to provide
the reader with a glimpse of the most representative voices of the
poetic movements, and generations, in the French-speaking countries
of these two regions, at the same time as doing away with the
divisions and distinctions between the countries of Africa. The
poets anthologized here - from North Africa, Sub Saharan Africa and
the Arab World - have long wished to escape from artificial
pigeon-holing and rather to be associated with common threads. The
past half-century has confirmed their work as poetry of great
literary quality, full of a unique vitality and presence, and this
anthology enables an English-speaking readership to discover and
savour these distinctive voices
Tanella Boni is a major African poet, and this book, The Future Has
an Appointment with the Dawn, is her first full collection to be
translated into English. These poems wrestle with the ethnic
violence and civil war that dominated life in West Africa's Ivory
Coast in the first decade of the new millennium. Boni maps these
events onto a mythic topography where people live among their
ancestors and are subject to the whims of the powerful, who are at
once magical and all too petty. The elements-the sun, the wind, the
water-are animated as independent forces, beyond simile or
metaphor. Words, too, are elemental, and the poet is present in the
landscape-"during these times / I searched for the letters / for
the perfect word." Boni affirms her desire for hope in the face of
ethno-cultural and state violence although she acknowledges that
desiring to hope and hoping are not the same.
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