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What resonates most strongly with the reader is a sense that there is a conversation going on in this collection, one that is both intimate and outward-facing, both true to history and speculative of the future of race and its effects on the self.
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Title: Wild imperfections, an anthology of womanist poems
Compiler: Natalia Molebatsi
ISBN: 9781485904076
Publisher: Penguin
There is a surging wave of creative art by black women that does the work of critical thriving through the task of paying close attention to what is often perceived to exist on the peripheries. Think of the rapturous reception for collections like Claudia Rankine’s Citizen or Koleka Putuma’s Collective amnesia, boldly human poetries that speak to the many-layered complexities of black experience, queer lives and the struggle for social justice. It is this literary context that provides the setting for the collection of poems gathered in Wild imperfections: An anthology of womanist poems, which come together to present an experience of black being-in-the-world that pushes past the conventions that gateway poetic doctrine.
This remarkable collection runs to 200 pages of poems by 40 black women, some of whom are familiar crowd-drawers – think Nikki Giovanni, Gabeba Baderoon, Warsan Shire – while others have smaller but no less committed audiences. All of the poets here are impressive in their ability to summon creative energies to the task of responding to the world. The book opens with a welcome from Bernardine Evaristo, whose deft introductory remarks frame the “multi-generational, cross-cultural” nature of the anthology, paying tribute to the community of black women poets: “Poetry by Black women is most likely to be valued first and foremost by us. We are often our most loyal readers, and we have always been the curators of poetry anthologies that gather the scripts of our songs within the book-bound walls of a single volume, a home” (xiv).
This sentiment is reinforced in what is an interesting and informative curatorial note by editor Natalia Molebatsi, who says that “throughout this book, we as poets remind ourselves and our readers that the act of writing for ourselves is a liberatory strategy in a world that is not only anti-Black but is as misogynistic as it is homophobic” (xvi). What Molebatsi has gathered together moves beyond remonstrance, while acknowledging that there are forms of feeling that require sustained attention. Thus we witness poems that speak to an array of political subjects, across a wide historical sweep: Diana Ferrus’s address to Sarah Baartman sits in conversation with poems by Nikki Giovanni to Rosa Parks and Nina Simone, and indeed with Makhosazana Xaba’s short and powerful lyric dedication to Dulcie September. There are poems here that think about the trauma of gender-based violence, and poems that celebrate and affirm LGBTQI+ identities.
What resonates most strongly with the reader is a sense that there is a conversation going on in this collection, one that is both intimate and outward-facing, both true to history and speculative of the future of race and its effects on the self. Some of the poems are splintering in their treatment of deep histories of pain. Here is Lebogang Mashile’s haunting call to memory:
Do you know her name
Where she lived
Who loved her
Who left her
Do you know what she ate
And when she starved to feed her children
Do you know who she came through
Her childhood sicknesses, STDs and genetic predispositions
Do you know that you are a corridor
Between slums and aspirations
Do you know that there are more body parts in ships today
Than there were during the Middle Passage (“This is not a poem”, 59)
Others harmonise around themes of love and rebuilding and remembering. Here is Gabeba Baderoon displaying her striking skill for wresting quiet truths from their hiding places:
After the war
people carried the remains of their homes to one hill
and all the stones made the hills grow
again by half
And then the green grew over the brokenness
And nothing can tell its height
is made of rubble and memories (“Nature”, 116)
It is understating things to say that the experience of this marvellously choreographed collection is profoundly moving. These are poems whose collective subject is not reducible to victimhood alone. To read them is to register the psychic effect of immersing oneself in work that is by turns visual, emotive, visceral and embodied. Some of it is truly bold – see how Maneo Mohale’s “Google Translate for Gogo” leaps off the page with its sighted scene of the untranslatable. Other poems, like M NourbeSe Philip’s searing pandemic-oriented meditation, “Before after / after before (A work-in-progress)”, uses a cautious questioning to trace a thread from the desire to return to some form of ordinary life: what, in the context of state-sponsored violence, the refugee crisis and the destruction of the environment, are we wanting to return to? It’s one of a number of poems in this collection that takes a normative view of the world and dismantles it unsparingly.
Another is Vangile Gantsho’s poem “Missing”, which reverberates strongly through the long, tangled history of alienation and loss that clings to black life. Gantsho is a writer whose exquisite storytelling deserves more outings. Describing the lonely death of an uncle, Gantsho ends with a scene from a world both sad and familiar to our COVID times.
he is gone and there is no body. A cold message with an online address.
a box without a white sheet and a candle. Oomakhulu ezilalini
huddled in front of a granddaughter’s phone listening to
people describe their eldest son in English.
To be sure, Wild imperfections is a collection that appeals because its voices are so myriad, but so fully realised, so united in their resistance to being inhibited. This may be due to the editor’s decision to give more space to each poet than is traditionally afforded in poetic anthologies. This has the effect of making the book a propulsive read, one that compels sitting with it from cover to cover. The overall impact of the collection may depend on your proximity to what you’re reading, but its creative restlessness is both optimistic and regenerative. Although it signals to one key readership above all, it is a volume whose revelatory power can be enjoyed by all.
The post Wamuwi Mbao reviews <em>Wild imperfections</em>, compiled by Natalia Molebatsi appeared first on LitNet.