Inua Ellams

Original, inventive, not a retelling or interpretation but a direct response. I like this, I like the nod to classic format as a play in verse, I like the intertwining of Yoruba mythology, and I appreciate the thought behind it all. My reservations may be more about how it was marketed to me, or just where my thoughts have been recently regarding mythologies. And they are: for a story about vengeance from and solidarity for female victims, most of this story centers around men. The heroine acts not in defense of herself but her child. The women, the victims, are ultimately mostly unnamed. I'm inclined to think the focus is just on how we-general-society react to the ongoing abuse of women, and that's why, and maybe I just really needed more about specifically Zeus' victims taking him down. Listen, it's been a long quarantine, I listened to a lot of Greek mythology and it revived my grudge with Zeus. 3.5, and maybe I'll raise it.… (más)

90/2021. The Actual by Inua Ellams, is his fifth poetry collection (and his umpteenth publication). How did I love this? Let me count the ways. Except I don't have time so here's my execution of a summary.

I love the cover, which gives precisely 46 fucks... gold-plated fucks in fact.

I love the decorative illustrated 2Pac endpapers in recto and verso.

I love the poems, yes, all of them, except page 64 because Fuck / Dust!

I especially loved:

Fuck / Sympathy "Because Christ was the first Black man lynched / who went viral /"

Fuck / Border Guards "Heavy-booted and uniformed / the armed who man the borders / of narrative and myth /"

Fuck / Perseus "and Poseidon stayed silent / his crime forgotten when Perseus won / And story by story / myth by myth / urban legend by urban legend / locker room talk by locker room talk / men make other men "

Fuck / Diminutives "/ our tails are dark blue flames / our hooves are coal half-crushed to diamonds / The racecourse is obstacled with glass ceilings / slow squad cars and niggling doubt / Our task is to reach the end with our selves / our names intact /"

Fuck / Logophobia "/ Things we don't have words for in our language don't exist / I have an autistic niece /"

Fuck / Camels (but don't fuck with amusing tall tales about camels, that aren't quotable)

Fuck / The Joker "/ enough to sidestep the foolish machismo /"

And absolutely Fuck / Batman for spreading covid-19!

I do have one minor historical nitpick from Fuck/Empire 4/ about Benin: "There were boys play-fighting in the soft grass / girls with half-braided hair snoozing beside their mothers / There were infants trying to catch flies idling by in the heavy heat / fathers working the wide fields /" Because which gender, in that part of Africa as in most of the pre-mechanised world, did and still does most of the food growing, the food harvesting, the food marketing, and the food preparation? Although there are rare times when there are more men in the fields and more women at home because there's always one exception to any rule (like this is the one exception to the Inua Ellams is always spot on rule, lol).… (más)

(Akinlabi's work of lengthy narrative poems was difficult to get through, in terms of imagery/metaphor and topic focus, but worth it for his emotional cartography of what it means to be African in the modern era.)

This collection was a lengthy project I took my sweet time on and that is absolutely the best way to engage with this work. The editors clearly let their poets bring to the table poems that they thought showcased the best of their work, and did not restrict them thematically across poets. For the most part, all these chapbooks were fascinating and engaging - some poems hard to read, some poems hard to parse - but every ending felt like a satisfying resolution. I highly recommend this collection to anyone who wishes to explore current African poets and I am certainly going to be getting the other collections.… (más)