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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.
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Think of Lampedusa (Paperback)
Josue Guebo; Translated by Todd Fredson; Introduction by John Keene
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R405
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Save R75 (19%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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A collection of serial poems, Think of Lampedusa addresses the 2013
shipwreck that killed 366 Africans attempting to migrate secretly
to Lampedusa, an Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea. The
crossing from North Africa to this island and other Mediterranean
way stations has become the most dangerous migrant route in the
world. Interested in what is producing such epic displacement,
Josue Guebo's poems combine elements of history and mythology.
Guebo considers the Mediterranean not only as a literal space but
also as a space of expectation, anxiety, hope, and anguish for
migrants. He meditates on the long history of narratives and bodies
trafficked across the Mediterranean Sea. What did it-and what does
it-connect and separate? Whose sea is it? Ultimately he is
searching for what motivates a person to become part of what he
calls a "seasonal suicide epidemic." This translation of Guebo's
Songe a Lampedusa, winner of the Tchicaya U Tam'si Prize for
African Poetry, is a searing work from a major African poet.
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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