• Book bears fresh and fascinating verses from established and emergent poets
Image: JUSTUS MAKOKHA
Book Review: Soaring Above the Pandemic: Poetic Echoes from East Africa. Bungoma: Intercen Books, 2020. ISBN: 97-9914-9857-6-4. 166 pp.
One of the most memorable poets of all time is the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio. His 62 years on this earth about seven centuries ago is best remembered as a spark of sheer genius. He lived in a resurgent Europe that was rising robustly from the ashes of the Dark Ages.
His became a voice of golden verse that rose and rode the literary winds of Renaissance — the re-awakening of Europe after centuries of cultural slumber and civilisational stupor. It is his poetry that vividly captures the most memorable and earliest pandemic, 'The Black Death'.
This was a serious outbreak of the Bubonic plague. It, too, arose from Asia, and it claimed 19 million lives in Europe in the 14th Century. He versified the decaying qualities this old pandemic inflicted on the soul and the skin of mankind. That plague and the poetry it generated have arrived from that bygone history to our modern times via recorded memory like Boccaccio’s.
Fast-forward to the last century and we see the Spanish Flu, also known as the 1918 Influenza pandemic. It also left behind memorable literary evidence in the wake of its catastrophic appearance in Europe exactly a century ago today. Penned in 1921, TS Eliot’s monumental poem, “The Wasteland”, can be read as a statue of the stunning psychological landscapes of that capricious time.
As we begin the second month of this second decade of the 21st Century, we are repeatedly being exposed to initiatives geared towards archiving the raging pandemic of our times. Even as the discovery of various vaccines offers hope to the tired global community, the pandemic continues its march on the warpath, claiming thousands of lives, more so in the most-advanced countries on the planet.
Yet as demonstrated by both Eliot and Boccaccio above, indeed, every dark cloud bears a silver lining. The poetic and artistic output of our times that touch on, or utilise, the pandemic as an artistic impulse or spark, grows by the day.
The bongo hit 'Quarantine' by Diamond Platnumz, as well as his club-banger 'Waah' featuring lingala maestro Koffi Olomide of DRC, are musical souvenirs of this season of searing suffering.
Journals both academic and cultural are serving articles that bring intellectual and creative interpretations of Covid-19 on the table of public opinions. Cartoons by the likes of Gado and Masoud Kipanya of Tanzania will for many years to come remain as mementos of the pandemic.
The release of a new anthology of poetry under the auspices of the Creative Writers Association of Kenya (C-WAK) follows this trend. Soaring Above the Pandemic (2020) is a 166-page collection of fresh and fascinating verses from a constellation of established and emergent poets from East Africa. It is the first of a series of corona-anthologies under preparation, according to my learned opinion.
The multi-authored book is edited by the revered literary critics Prof Peter Amuka of Moi University and Prof Egara Kabaji of Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology. Bryson Omwalo and Barack Wandera, both of Maseno University, are the other editors. It features more than 60 poets, drawn mainly from Kenya and Uganda, the two Anglophone poetry powerhouses of East Africa.
Structurally, the new book has five thematic subsections that bear forth affiliated pieces and social visions of clusters of poets. Issues of love, affection and gender as affected by the pandemic are tackled in the first section (p1–46). Institutional responses to the new virus (or lack of the same) is tackled in the second section (p. 47–79) under the subtitle “Politics, Governance and Hipocrisies (sic)”.
The other subsections are: “Pain, Loss and Loneliness”, “Fate, Death and Uncertainties”, and “Nature, Environment, and Spirituality”. They cover the second half of this literary treasure trove of a book. Save for a few typographies that cannot pass for poetic deviation, the book is the result of sound production and presentation at the level of structure, form and layout.
Several poems stand out in terms of their finesse of composition and flamboyance of artistic imagination. In p72, young Faith Jerop spills over in a deluge of elegy in the poem, “Ocean of Tears”. Summoning the celestial faces to witness the currency of our capricious times, she poses: "This world is now an ocean of tears/Can we climb the heavenly steeps to beg the most high for reprieve?”
To her, the calamitous state of affairs in this epic struggle between humans and viruses can only be adjudicated by their mutual creator. There are many such soul-searching sequences of ably crafted verses that parade the existential angst of our times in this latest offering by Kenya’s premier association of writers.
This book should not be read simply as a new archive of a moment of great tribulation on a global scale. It reveals its best levels of artistic eureka when approached in two ways. Firstly, it can be read as an orchestra of human emotions targeting the faint of heart and spirit with messages of hope and fortitude from poet to poet and theme to theme.
Moreover, Soaring Above the Pandemic is a literary bazaar of individual talents, which in times to come will excel on their own right in poetry books of their own that will outlive our pandemic.
This anthology is available from major bookstores across the country or from the publishers by order at: [email protected]
Dr Makokha teaches Literature and Theatre at Kenyatta University