Posts filed under 'witness poetry'

Every Dirge Sung: Patricia Jabbeh Wesley on Liberian Poetry as Literature of Witness

March 25, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I wanted Liberia placed on the literary map of the world. And my life’s goal was to be that writer. . .

Named by The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry (2017) as “the first major poet to emerge from Liberia in decades,” Dr Patricia Jabbeh Wesley was born in her mother’s hometown of Dolokeh, Maryland County, southeastern Liberia, and raised in Monrovia, the capital city of Liberia. She then emigrated from there to the United States with her family during the First Liberian Civil War (1989-1997). With six critically-acclaimed poetry collections under her belt, Nigerian historian Ayodeji Olukoju has called her “a rising Liberian female literary star who has made a mark as a poet of note”, and she has been named Chee Dawanyeno by her people, the Grebo. Dr Patricia believes in the poetic moral imperative to bear witness on the brutalities—such as war, settler-colonialism, carnage, and genocide—perpetrated by those with structural power against the common people. In the words of Zimbabwean poet Tsitsi Jaji, from her panegyric “Praise Song for Patricia Jabbeh Wesley”: “But you look death in the eye and it looks down.”

In this interview, I spoke with Dr Patricia, recently proclaimed the Republic of Liberia’s inaugural Poet Laureate, on Liberian poetry as literature of witness and its poetic topography de nos jours; the presence of African orality and indigenous storytelling in Anglophone African writings; and the anthology she edited from the University of Nebraska Press, Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): As a survivor to the First Liberian Civil War, your activism involves documentation of and fact-finding on Liberian women’s stories of trauma as well as speaking your truth as an expert witness (such as during the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Hearings in Minnesota in 2008 as commissioned by The Advocates of Human Rights). You once spoke of enshrining the war through words and of literature as testimony. Is that, for you, the role of the poet in times of lawlessness and monstrosities—a witness?

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley (PJW): Yes. I believe that the role of an artist and poet is to be the town crier of her people, the voice of the voiceless, the preserver of tradition and history of her people’s sensibility. In our African tradition, the artist belongs to the people, to the community, to the village, and to the clan. As a survivor of the brutal Liberian civil war, I must keep alive our families, friends, and all the people who were silenced in the fourteen-year-long series of civil wars. I have always used my poetry and writing as a tool for activism. One of our mother authors, the late Ama Ata Aidoo of Ghana once said, rightly, that, “For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.”

AMMD: In Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), you historicised Liberian poetry, finding its roots as early as the 1800s in the time of statesmen Hilary Teage and Daniel Bashiel Warner—the anthology’s impetus being that “the silence [of Liberian literature at the global level] was deafening.” Can you speak more about this silence and how this anthology is speaking against it?

PJW: The anthology does not speak against the silence, though. It ends the silence. Liberian literature, art, and culture have been suppressed since the country’s founding. The founding fathers who were freed slaves from the South of America built a country fashioned after their former slave masters, where those who had always owned, lived on, and tended to the land were made the subordinates and those from outside were the lone leaders. They relegated the Africans who owned the land at the country’s establishment to a near second-class citizenship, not allowing indigenous Africans in what is now our country to help determine the direction of our country. That lasted for one hundred and thirty-nine years until the first military coup in 1980. The only other time an indigenous African was anywhere near the top of the country’s leadership was when Himie-Too Wesley, or H. Too Wesley, my husband’s great uncle, was made the Vice President in 1924 when the League of Nations charged the Liberian leadership with the enslavement of Krus and Grebo people, H. T. Wesley’s ethnic group. And for historical context, the newcomers, or Americo-Liberians, the freed slaves who founded the nation, were a very tiny minority, ruling the nation for 139 years while indigenous Africans were the huge majority and continue to be today. READ MORE…

The World in Transformation, The Poem in Translation

August 11, 2022  |  in News  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

A guide to translated poetry through our archives!

If you happen to be participating in The Sealey Challenge, wherein the literary community is encouraged to read a book of poetry everyday for the month of August, then the following is a guide to translated collections that might help you meet your mark, curated through Asymptote‘s annals of world literature. And if not—consider picking up one of these authors or text anyway, for within these works are brightnesses of spirit and sensuality, ranging journeys through landscapes and psychologies, and the courage of witness and words. These bold and wondrous works show that if you want to know a language, you should seek the knowledge of its poets.

We read widely to nurture our wonders—this much is true for all of literature, but is underlined especially when reading poetry. As the particular challenge of translating this tempestuous and evasive craft continues to unfold across the pages of poets and translators around the world, the growing numbers of collections that come to meet our shelves and hands are a testament to an endless dialectic of what Kenneth Rexroth called “imaginative identification”. The translation of a poem starts with wonder, with the identification of a gleam at the centre of the words, and a fierce urge to protect it. When this intensity then survives the removal of its own language and finds an exacting home in another, the result is just as wondrous. So much is left behind in translation, this much is true and shall always be true, but what remains constant is this sense—of awe, of the sense of something having opened up, of breathlessness in front of beauty, in front of truth. It arrives with a different music, in a different voice, but it was struck with the same spirit.

In the many poets and collections that we’ve covered at Asymptote, the work always identifies with the precise tenet of poetry to be close to its language. In German poet Kathrin Schimdt’s Twenty Poems, translated by Sue Vickerman, reviewer Andreea Scridon describes how “the two poets meet in their exigency and perspicacity, their quintessentially European writing towards a determined and defined idea.” Similarly, in Chinese poet Yi Lei’s collection, My Name Will Grow Wide Like A Tree, reviewer Marina Dora Martino notes translators Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi’s efforts to “open Yi Lei’s private world to the possibility of dialogue.”

Some translators work closely with their poets, in constant exchange and negotiation. Filip Noubel notes how in Taiwanese poet Amang’s Raised by Wolves, translator Steve Brandbury was careful to consult the author, ensuring that she “understands the various options I have for representing that in English.” Their collaboration defied limits, resulting in “a humorous approach to these seemingly insurmountable obstacles.” Other translators do not possess such luxuries. Alexander Dickow and Sean T. Reynolds, the translators of Swiss poet Gustave Roud’s Air of Solitude and Requiem, had to work without insight from the originating mind, the poet having passed in 1976. Nevertheless, reviewer Sarah Moore exalts the work as a “powerful, superb translation from one of Switzerland’s greatest poets of the twentieth century.”

So much of the importance in these texts lies in introducing the works of vital figures in movements that changed the world. In Alice Paalen Rahon’s Shapeshifter, translated by Mary Ann Caws, we see a collection that sheds light on a multi-faceted Surrealist, whose literary output had previously been overshadowed by her achievements in visual art. As reviewer Georgina Fooks states: “. . . with the arrival of Shapeshifter, we can gain valuable insight into this remarkable poet who was one of the best of the Surrealists, despite the lack of wider recognition.” Another Surrealist giant, Giorgio di Chirico, is revived in poetry by way of translator Stefania Heim; in his collection, Geometry of Shadows, reviewer Garrett Phelps identifies “a visual mind orienting itself toward the written word: a promiscuous use of strong imagery, and waves upon waves of metaphors at the expense of a more nimble and protean style.” Also defying any singular definition is Russian sculptor and founder of Russian Conceptualism, Dmitri Prigov, whose defiant and liberated poetics have reached the Anglophone by way of Simon Schuchat and Ainsley Morse in Soviet Texts. READ MORE…