Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

#29: Ogun Abibiman by Wole Soyinka
#30: Bill of Rights by Fred D'Aguiar

These are both long poems (though Ogun Abibiman is only 24 pages long to the 133 pages of Bill of Rights), and poetry being poetry, I don't feel very confident in reviewing them, but I'll try. Ogun Abibiman is about Ogun, the Yoruba smith-god, seen as a symbolic revolutionary figure that could unite Africa; it was written in 1976 after the president of Mozambique effectively declared war on the white rulers of Rhodesia -- now Zimbabwe, and the fact that the end of white rule gave Zimbabwe a whole new set of problems that they're still struggling with casts a bit of a shadow over the poem. Because, in a way, the good guys won -- but what did they win?

I got the feeling that there were things I was missing -- if I knew more about Yoruba mythology or 20th century African history, I think I would have appreciated it more. Which is not to say that I didn't appreciate it. It took me a few pages to get into it, and there were quite a few pages where I wasn't sure what he was getting at, but I always felt that he was getting at something, and I could see glimmers of it through the haze of my own ignorance. Even when I wasn't sure of the meaning, the poem felt right, if you know what I mean; if I had read it aloud, it would have felt like music. I want to try some of Soyinka's other poetry and see if that context makes Ogun Abibiman more comprehensible to me.

Bill of Rights, on the other hand, is dense with references that I did get, which just goes to show that the more you read, the more you get from what you read. D'Aguiar references Shakespeare and Bob Dylan and Benjamin Zephaniah and W.H. Auden and the Bible and a bunch of others, as well as the patois native to Guyana, where D'Aguiar was born and where the story of the poem takes place. The poem is a sort of imaginative reconstruction of the last days of Jonestown, as seen by a black man from Brixton who joined the People's Temple and just barely managed to survive. It's moody and atmospheric, capturing the squalor of the settlement, the tyranny Jones exercised over his followers, and the sense of being trapped that remains for the nameless protagonist even after he's left Jonestown.

It's one of those books that I get absorbed in, and then when I put it down I have a little trouble picking it up again; the rhythm of the lines and the oppressive atmosphere pull me in when I'm actually reading, and then I need time to digest what I've read and recover from it a little bit. I'm still not sure that I've digested it, but that's just a sign that there was something there to digest.

20: Sleepless Nights: Verses for the Wakeful by Wen Hsiang, translated by Thomas Cleary

One of the terrific things about this challenge is that it's encouraging me to take out old books that I bought years ago and never got around to reading properly. I bought Sleepless Nights, um... 12 years ago *cringe*, while I was going through a Taoist phase, and never did more than skim the odd verse. Now that I've read it through from start to finish, I think I can say for sure that despite the blurb describing Wen Hsiang as a Buddhist poet, there were definite Taoist elements to his thinking; but then, that's not so remarkable given the standard Chinese syncretic attitude to religion. (Chinese religions have tended to be ways of dealing with life rather than claims about absolute truth, so it's totally acceptable, and indeed very common, to pick and mix whatever elements work for you. As the old saying has it, "Confucianism is my cloak, Buddhism is my cane, Taoism is my sandal.")

Wen Hsiang was born in China in 1210, just before the Mongol invasion, but although his poems do reflect the turbulence of the times he lived through (one of the topics he returns to several times is the soldier's wife waiting for his return for years on end), the overwhelming impression I get from them is one of peace: not just the peace of the quiet country retreat, but the peace of the tranquil mind. It's a melancholy kind of peace, to be sure; Wen Hsiang's eye lingers on the leaf that is falling and the waning moon, and on his own grey hairs. This sense of the transience and impermanence of life resonates in every line. In this respect, Wen Hsiang is indeed deeply Buddhist.

Here's one of my favourites: "Cinnamon Feelings"

The cinnamon's not of a kind
with the peach or with the plum;
only when the dew is cold
do its flowers finally burst open.
Its fragrant branches can be taken
to give an appreciated guest;
but the road is far
and no one can come --
I go back and forth
all day and all night.
When the sadness of separating
is felt through things,
a thousand miles
isn't really apart.

#16: Unheard Voices, edited by Malorie Blackman.

I was looking for Noughts and Crosses in the library; they didn't have it (though they did have the second and third books in the trilogy, which is bloody typical), so I came home with this instead: it's a collection of stories, poems and first-hand accounts on the subject of slavery, put together to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. The pieces are of variable quality, as is probably inevitable. The non-fiction excerpts are all fascinating, and superbly written -- I now have all four excerpted books on my "find and read as soon as possible" list: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, The History of Mary Prince, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. (God, I love 18th-century titles. "Interesting Narrative". How's that for an understatement?)

The fictional pieces (and I include the extract from Roots in that category, since it's written like a novel and is full of stuff Alex Haley couldn't possibly have known) are less impressive. I didn't like the James Berry piece much, found the Roots excerpt almost unreadable, and was interested but underwhelmed by the extract from Lalita Tademy's Cane River and by Sandra Agard's "Runaway". I was wondering, with a sinking heart, whether they were all going to be as much of a slog; fortunately, the next fictional story in the collection was "The Last Words of Cato Hopkins" by Catherine Johnson, which was terrific. Blackman herself has a story in the collection, "North", which was pretty good, though not so much as to make me eager to read further work by her. And I really enjoyed the extract from Gary Paulsen's Nightjohn.

The poems are somewhere in between -- less disappointing than the stories, not as riveting as the non-fiction. Two are by Langston Hughes (whom I can take or leave), two by the always-awesome Benjamin Zephaniah (who refused an OBE because he wouldn't let the establishment compromise him -- respect!), and one each by Daniel Aloysius Francis, John Agard, Grace Nichols, Grace Quansah and James Berry. The Francis, Agard, and Quansah poems were a bit meh; the Nichols I really liked; and the James Berry, "In Our Year 1941 My Letter to You Mother Africa", is terrific.

I found this collection a bit uneven and frustrating, but worth reading. I suspect its main value for me is as a prompt to find the original slave narratives and maybe also read some more Zephaniah.