The Cartographer of Water
Clifton Gachagua
In The Cartographer of Water, Clifton Gachagua
presents himself with an almost absurdist
challenge of seeking to map the constantly
shifting surface of oceans. This, then, becomes
a fit metaphor for the quixotic effort to chart
the complex and shifting human condition
that he discovers where he lives in Kenya.
This challenge allows him to test his poetic
range—his facility with meter, assonance,
and rhetoric—and the result is what can only
be described as a stunning tour de force of
poetic skill that rewards us with a delightful
and emotionally complex series of poems.
One reads these poems with the pleasant
anticipation of someone staring in awe at an
iceberg and imagining that gigantic talent that
lurks just beneath the surface of the water.
—Kwame Dawes
Titles in the
Seven New Generation African Poets
Box Set:
Mandible, by TJ Dema
The Cartographer of Water, by Clifton Gachagua
Carnaval, by Tsitsi Jaji
The Second Republic, by Nick Makoha
Ordinary Heaven, by Ladan Osman
Our Men Do Not Belong to Us, by Warsan Shire
Otherwise Everything Goes On, by Len Verwey
Seven New Generation African Poets:
An Introduction in Two Movements,
by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani
To order
the Seven New Generation African Poets box set
or for more information, please contact
Slapering Hol Press at:
www.writerscenter.org.
for Lilli
C.G.
*
This inaugural box set of new generation African poets
is dedicated to the memory of Ghanaian poet, Kofi
Awoonor (1935-2013), who was killed in the terrorist
attack at Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya.
Look for a canoe for me
That I go home in it.
Look for it.
The lagoon waters are in storm
And the hippos are roaming.
But I shall cross the river
And go beyond.
from “I Heard a Bird Cry,” by Kofi Awoonor
This is the abridged, electronic version of The Cartographer of
Water. To purchase the original, full-length version, please contact
Slapering Hol Press, The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, 300
Riverside Drive, Sleepy Hollow, New York 10591
(www.writerscenter.org)
The
Cartographer
of Water
Clifton Gachagua
S l a p e r i n g H ol P r e s s 2 0 1 4
in association with the African Poetry Book Fund, PRAIRIE SCHOONER,
and the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute
P OETS IN THE WORLD series
Compilation copyright © 2014
The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-1-940646-52-7
Copyright in each individual poem and in other material contained in this chapbook
remains with their respective rightsholders.
Cover and all other art reproductions used by permission
of the artist, Adejoke Tugbiyele.
The Poetry Foundation and the Pegasus logo are registered trademarks of
The Poetry Foundation.
“I Heard a Bird Cry,” by Kofi Awoonor, reproduced from The Promise of Hope: New and
Selected Poems, 1964–2013, Kofi Awoonor, by permission of the University of Nebraska
Press. © 2014 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
Slapering Hol Press
The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center
300 Riverside Drive
Sleepy Hollow, New York 10591
African Poetry Book Fund
Prairie Schooner
University of Nebraska
123 Andrews Hall
Lincoln, Nebraska 68588
The Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street
Chicago, Illinois 60654
Contents
4
9
10
11
12
13
15
17
19
20
21
22
24
26
27
Preface
Cars
The Lights in Zanzibar
Utetheisa
Gardener’s Guide to Britain
2087
In Remembrance of Elsa Okello
Basic Freudian Fantasies
A Blue Precision
Promenade
Out There
Principles of Variations
Imitation Bodies
The Antechamber
At the Suicide Galleria
Preface
By Chris Abani
To be African has always meant to be cosmopolitan. Arguably,
that sounds like a simple rendering, but many terms over the years
have attempted to capture the unique continental identity that
tries unsuccessfully to hide itself in subnationalities. Upon closer
examination, a commonality and an intermingling of language and
worldviews emerges, especially when viewed with the distance
and the perspective that the diaspora lends to the matter. There is
something about the vastness — of land, of peoples, of cultures, of
languages, of histories, and of cosmologies —that refutes any simple
notion of nation or people.
For the African, it seems to me, the drive toward knowledge
and civilization is a synthesis of science and faith, an almost religious
impulse to connect to vastness, a vastness inspired by the continent
itself. This is possibly what drove the pyramids to be built, a melding
of science and poetry— a connection to the larger cosmos but
also to the self; and it is this wonderful melding of the scientific and
poetic impulses that we see manifest in Clifton Gachagua’s poetry.
Gachagua’s is a startling new voice in African poetry that is full of
promise largely because of this strange and wonderful series of
contradictions and assurances that reside uneasily but beautifully in
his poetry.
There is also the sheer aesthetic and topical range of
Gachagua’s poetry. In the first four poems, we travel from Zanzibar
to a country garden in Oxford, England. In fact, this kind of leap
through time and space can happen in a short, eight line poem such
as “Cars,” “lying on grass, I watch myself on Mars.” The last line of
the poem refers back to the fourth line, “Yes, I need to migrate.”
This migration speaks not only to the outward thrust of the body
into the world, which is implied, but also an even larger thrust, one
of the imagination into a foreignness and familiarity that can only
be contained by a reference to Mars. In the fifth poem, “2087,” the
movement is made clear that time, much less space, will not deter
the imaginative leaps of this writer. For all of that, the reader is never
lost, never at a loss, feeling completely at home and located in the
concreteness of the craft so deftly displayed here — “. . . stars. The
truth is that I do not know a single Greek god or the names of
pharaohs. I thought Tutankhamen was an extinct plant; Orpheus, a
drug; Aztec, a data-mining company.” Contained, of course, within
these simple lines that speak to being and not being, place and
not place, is also a sharp and acerbic political wit that dismantles
the notions of hierarchies of knowledge, while pointing to the
exploitation of the old and new in a blatant renarrativizing of history.
For all this, Gachagua is uniquely Kenyan. Maybe, it is even
this specific Kenyan self that gives his work the range it has; after
all, the Rift Valley, the wonder of nature that is a conduit of history,
landscape, and savanna, runs from just south of Kenya all the way
to Egypt. There is in Gachagua’s musicality the fleetness of strings, a
mark of East Africa, distinct from the drumbeat throb of the West
African line. There is also the presence of the Indian Ocean on the
other side. The press of open savanna that seems to sprawl into the
sea allows Gachagua to make musical and narrative moves. In “2087,”
he writes, “Talk about one of the fishermen, how you go to his place
and find weird things. Memory.” Or the lines from “In Remembrance
of Elsa Okello,” “The evolution of nova, the gradual shift / into an
idea we call destiny,” is the kind of line you would hear from a poet
like Awonoor or, dare I say, even Walcott—poets who do not see
the line between land and sea. Colors saturate these poems, an
understanding of light that can only come from seeing its sprawl
across land and sea, unfettered from the dense troubling of a West
African rainforest and the delicacy of its dust-filled sunsets.
This last line of “2087” points also to the deeper project of the
book, an archeology of memory— historical, personal, political, and
even the kind of memories that are falsely planted by imperialist
interests. Part of Gachagua’s gift is his ability to move seamlessly
through a collection of poems so perfectly balanced as to create a
narrative that simultaneously resists a singular reading. This idea, of
convergence and simultaneity, is the heart of the cubists’ aesthetic
espoused by Pablo Picasso but which we know to be originally
African in conception and development. Or as Gachagua says in
“Promenade,” “Certain truths, you hold them against the light, / and
they change color.” And as though that were not enough, he goes on
to deconstruct Chekov: “In a sense, I am either the dog / or the lady
with the dog.”
It is this free-ranging allusive quality that is beyond a mere
play in a well-studied world tradition, beyond even intertextuality.
He is a true cosmopolitan with a mind and an imagination versed
in the contradictory narratives of vastness and yet capable of
resisting the sentimentality of reduction. He is still able to carve a
craft and aesthetic that allows for a pitch-perfect interpretation and
articulation. As Gachagua says in “Imitation Bodies,” “Yet, I talk to you,
as is the fashion / of the forwards of books by unknown authors. //
Imitation bodies.”
Here is Clifton Gachagua, already grown in this first chapbook
of poems, a true cosmopolitan, an African.
The Cartographer of Water
Cars
I dismember grasshoppers,
eat their frosty limbs,
hop over the carcasses of cars.
Yes, I need to migrate,
spread this plague, complete the
latitudes they have mapped on my vessels.
Collages of organs:
lying on grass, I watch myself on Mars.
The Lights in Zanzibar
You say the idea of collecting shells
off the coast of Kenya—South Coast—
is a fantasy of an animal looking for its conscience in sand.
You’d like to spend your life near the big lake
but not close enough to hear
the lapping of waves against naked stone.
Our lives revolve around ambition and a force
like a minister speaking at a funeral wake.
At night, when you walk down the coast at low tide,
you can see the light in Zanzibar.
A string of beads on the seceding land,
receding salt water.
At night
you can see the bodies floating in the water,
swept up by the currents—
the bodies of drowned men
clutching their wives’ clutch bags—
all the way from Zanzibar.
The reef is an imaginable wall of resistance, put up
by dreams of drowned ferries.
In the paper it said the ferry moaned like a whale.
Some salty music before its last dive.
I call you from kilometers away, to ask you
about leaving for the South Coast
where, if it’s dark enough, you can see the light in
Zanzibar.
2087
The tide is low, naked children are swimming, anchored dhows
move to the rhythm of the waves like girls who laugh with you
but will not accompany you home. Tiny crabs with eyes like
periscopes steal images of me walking toward them and dart
into their holes. The migratory sea with its bird oblong songs,
cats walking like their feet were cymbals. The breeze and the
murmur of the sea all work in paid harmony. As of now all
reverie I have ever known came from Rock ’n’ Roll bands. I
strip down to my underwear and jump into the salty water.
I’m back in the tv room. I sit back and smoke my cigarettes,
away from the city and its obligation festival of perfume music
and sweat. Mother doesn’t know I smoke. Today. I live in a
honeycomb complex with secret doors. Residents gather in the
common room to watch Papa Shirandula on plasma screens.
I have been thinking about fairy tales of late. There are pockets
of air in this room where I hear children singing and see English
gardens. I have been searching for them under tiles and coffee
mugs, but all I find is the smell of new paint, turpentine,
sawdust. How lovely it would be to touch the delicate rainbows
and have conversations with Annabel Lee. Then the tv flickers,
and Cynthia Nyamai is looking smashing today as she rumbles
about bonds and shares, common markets. She is the reason I
watch the news.
I take out my cock. The plasma intervenes as fluids come
rushing out.
I have only two interests in this world: Gabriel Garcia’s The
Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores (I have read it 105 times) and
commercials on tv. I’m okay. I am. I have been watching the
same song 73 times. I should be out there with them watching
movies at imax or out lying to a girl and staring at the stars. The
truth is that I do not know a single Greek god or the names of
pharaohs. I thought Tutankhamen was an extinct plant; Orpheus,
a drug; Aztec, a data-mining company.
Bathsheba is out today bathing in the swimming pool. I have
been waiting for her for a week now. I might be having visions,
but something tells me she is there. Maybe an impressionist
painter sits behind the iris of my eyes painting the world as it
should be and not as it is. Bathsheba, you are there, aren’t you? I
take out my cock again.
I found my muse, finally. That means there is nothing left for me
to write. I have no use for friends now, only perfect solitude.
In this room there is a place where currents meet and life is
abundant. Where fishermen wear octopuses for ornaments and
their teeth are made of sea shells.
I can see Bathsheba. If the sun were out, her skin would glisten,
and I would stare out the window and listen to the conversation
of birds and matatus.
Talk about one of the fishermen, how you go to his place and
find weird things. Memory.
In Remembrance of Elsa Okello
It is not a beginning; it’s death.
It is not a means to an end; it’s a dream.
It is not dream; it’s a shifting scar.
It is not a swinging pendulum;
it is the endless reminder of a winding river.
It is not a river; it’s a box house, card on paper card,
memory upon memory, time upon everything.
Maybe silver hues of halfway places
will bring you back at an hour like this one.
Maybe a departed ship
will tire of the high and open seas,
of being trapped in a bottle
and will bring back our child.
Maybe God will tire of angels
and send them back to us,
mortal, as children at birth.
Until then,
here, breaking mirrors to search for your face,
baking you castles in the white sand,
watching them fall.
Building up the hope of seeing you again,
willing a high tide,
willing the silent drone of continental floors.
A remodeled memory of you
in purple and magnolia hues,
you are gliding like a soaked origami boat in deep water.
Promenade
Certain truths, you hold them against the light,
and they change color.
I am a cartographer of water. I
walk on it as long as it is an inch deep.
In a sense, I am either the dog
or the lady with the dog.
Imitation Bodies
Yet I talk to you, as is the fashion
of the forwards of books by unknown authors.
Imitation bodies.
Eyes, an unblinking display, closed signals
of a time we used to talk, exploding into vowels and vapor,
fingers stretching out, collapsible on contact with light.
We were magnificent, living dead along a vertical bed.
Now I decode teleprompts in the eyes of strangers
as private, momentary thoughts we had.
Walking along a street, I meet you from another time,
almost holding the hand of the other lover.
You do not see me, but our reflections quiver
on the walls of banking halls, signals
ferrying our souls to the park, the café, or, alas, back home
alone to a pile of laundry, mothballs, books, dolls.
For now, you balance on flat heels,
contemplating new and emerging markets for
the experiments we call dreams.
You forget when we invented a different language
to be broadcast through touch.
Its etymology was a thing hidden in the future.
Our eyes are now coated
in the mascara of strangers;
a film of gold
paves our vision as soon as a blink is possible.
The languages we are busy forgetting
are our only accomplices.
We are all strangers in this city,
existential sheep in traffic.
The Antechamber
In a city with flickering lights,
the wicker more in your eyes than mine,
and boundaries drawn on the walls,
like memories that never furnish what we call the conscious.
This room can be the antechamber if we decide
that this is the body of a father whose decay smells
like an old clock rusting away in the ceiling.
Beside this father is an encyclopedia,
which is my way of saying “a mistress,”
with her arms and hem around him.
In this room, fear is my immutable bond to boundaries
on their bodies. The portrait
of the mistress heads toward me,
where I am the room, the Rex, the paperweight
on his agony.
At the Suicide Galleria
One can play the marimba to
the stammering of your letters.
How inappropriate, you ask me,
is it to quote the nude marquis?
In the distance, coming
toward me, waving the tubercle of lips,
a secret revolution,
iris veneer, hanging whips, coming.
I have learned to read you the journal of sex medicine
from the very thin veneer, my Szpilman fingers
in your miracle of birth.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to the editor of the publication in which this poem
first appeared:
Saraba: “At the Suicide Galleria”
About the author:
Clifton Gachagua lives in Nairobi, where he was born and
raised. His poetry has appeared in Kwani? 06 and Saraba. He
recently finished work on a novel. He is also a scriptwriter
and filmmaker.
*
About the artist:
Adejoke Tugbiyele was born in Brooklyn, New York, to
Nigerian parents. Her work has been on exhibit at Aljira, a
Center for Contemporary Art; Galerie Myrtis; the Museum
of Arts and Design; the Museum of Biblical Art; the Reginald
F. Lewis Museum; the Goethe-Institut in Washington, DC; the
United Nations Headquarters; the Centre for Contemporary
Art in Lagos in Nigeria; and the FNB Joburg Art Fair (2013) in
Johannesburg, South Africa. Her short film, AfroOdyssey IV: 100
Years Later, will premiere in Spain at LOOP 2014 Barcelona
and at the Goethe-Institut (Washington, DC, and Lagos,
Nigeria). AfroOdyssey III, the previous series, will be part of the
2013– 2015 international exhibition “Sights and Sounds: Global
Film and Video” at the Jewish Museum of New York. Tugbiyele
is an Artist-in-Residence at Gallery Aferro and the recipient of
several awards including the 2013–2014 Fulbright U.S. student
fellowship, the 2014 Serenbe Artist-in-Residence program,
the 2013 Amalie Rothschild Award, and the 2012 William M.
Phillips Award for best figurative sculpture. Tugbiyele holds a
Master’s of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the Maryland Institute
College of Art. Her work is in the permanent collection of
the Newark Museum and significant private collections in the
United States.
Published by Slapering Hol Press
in association with
the African Poetry Book Fund, Prairie Schooner,
and the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute
Poets in the World series
*
THE HUDSON VALLEY WRITERS’ CENTER, a nonprofit organization, presents
public readings featuring established and emerging writers, offers workshops in
many genres, and organizes educational programs for school children, people in
underserved communities, and those with special needs.
In 1990, the Center’s small press imprint, SLAPERING HOL PRESS, was
established to advance the national and international conversation of poetry and
poetics, principally by publishing and supporting the works of emerging poets.
The AFRICAN POETRY BOOK FUND, based in Lincoln, Nebraska, promotes
and advances the development and publication of the poetic arts through its
book series, contests, workshops, seminars, and through its collaborations with
publishers and other entities that share an interest in the poetic arts of Africa.
Together with Prairie Schooner, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s international
literary quarterly, the African Poetry Book Fund sponsors a yearly chapbook series.
THE HARRIET MONROE POETRY INSTITUTE (HMPI) is an independent forum
created by the Poetry Foundation to provide a space in which fresh thinking about
poetry, in both its intellectual and practical needs, can flourish free of allegiances
other than to the best ideas. The Institute convenes leading poets, scholars,
publishers, educators, and other thinkers from inside and outside the poetry world
to address issues of importance to the art form of poetry and to identify and
champion solutions for the benefit of the art.
Seven New Generation African Poets is part of a collaboration with the Poets in the
World series created by the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute.
The Poets in the World series supports research and publication of poetry and
poetics from around the world and highlights the importance of creating a space
for poetry in local communities. For more information about the Poetry Foundation,
please visit www.poetryfoundation.org.
Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute
Poets in the World series: Publications, 2013–2014
Ilya Kaminsky, HMPI director,
Poets in the World series editor
Another English: Anglophone Poems from Around the World, edited by Catherine Barnett and
Tiphanie Yanique (Tupelo Press)
Elsewhere, edited by Eliot Weinberger (Open Letter Books)
Fifteen Iraqi Poets, edited by Dunya Mikhail (New Directions Publishing)
“Landays: Poetry of Afghan Women,” edited by Eliza Griswold (Poetry, June 2013)
New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, edited by Ming Di (Tupelo Press)
Open the Door: How to Excite Young People about Poetry, edited by Dorothea Lasky, Dominic
Luxford, and Jesse Nathan (McSweeney’s)
Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America, edited by Raúl Zurita and Forrest
Gander (Copper Canyon Press)
Seven New Generation African Poets, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani (Slapering
Hol Press)
Something Indecent: Poems Recommended by Eastern European Poets, edited by Valzhyna
Mort (Red Hen Press)
The Star by My Head: Poets from Sweden, edited and translated by Malena Mörling and
Jonas Ellerström (Milkweed Editions)
The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Writing Across Borders, edited by Jared Hawkley, Susan Rich,
and Brian Turner (McSweeney’s)
Upcoming African Poetry Book Fund Series Titles
Kofi Awoonor, The Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems: 1964–2013 (University of
Nebraska Press, 2014)
Clifton Gachagua, Madman at Kilifi (University of Nebraska Press, 2014)
Upcoming Slapering Hol Press Titles
Richard Parisio, The Owl Invites Your Silence (2015)
Julie Danho, Six Portraits (2014)
Molly Peacock and Amy M. Clark, A Turn Around the Mansion Grounds: Poems in Conversation
& a Conversation (2014)
Colophon
This book was designed and set in Eric Gill’s Perpetua and
Gill Sans types by Ed Rayher at Swamp Press in Northfield,
Massachusetts. The text and cover stocks of this chapbook
are Cougar Opaque. Digital printing by Printech of Stamford,
Connecticut. Swamp Press hand-bound, letterpress books can
be found in rare book rooms at major institutions in the United
States and Canada. Ed is a poet, letterpress printer, and publisher
of limited edition books of poetry. He has a MFA and a PhD
from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 2015, his next
book of poems, The Paleontologist’s Red Pumps, will be released
from Hedgerow Press.
Clifton Gachagua lives in
Nairobi, where he was born and
raised. His poetry has appeared
in Kwani? 06 and Saraba. He
recently finished work on a
novel. He is also a scriptwriter
and filmmaker.
“There is in Gachagua’s musicality the fleetness of strings, a mark of East
Africa, distinct from the drumbeat throb of the West African line. There is
also the presence of the Indian Ocean on the other side. The press of open
savanna that seems to sprawl into the sea allows Gachagua to make musical
and narrative moves. In ‘2087,’ he writes, ‘Talk about one of the fishermen,
how you go to his place and find weird things. Memory.’ Or the lines from
‘In Remembrance of Elsa Okello,’ ‘The evolution of nova, the gradual shift
/ into an idea we call destiny,’ is the kind of line you would hear from a
poet like Awonoor or, dare I say, even Walcott....”
—Chris Abani
from the Preface
Seven New Generation African Poets, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani,
a publication of Slapering Hol Press in association with the African Poetry Book Fund,
Prairie Schooner, is published as part of the Poets in the World series created by
the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute.
Ilya Kaminsky is the Poets in the World series editor.