Carnaval
Tsitsi Jaji
In Carnaval, Tsitsi Jaji offers us a taste of her
ease with the surreal, the experimental, and
the lyric poem. Founded on a revelatory
understanding of music theory and
composition, Carnaval contains poems that
range from the poet’s plumbing of memory,
shaped by her life in and outside of Zimbabwe,
to the swirling music of her dialogue with
classical musical forms. Her poems speak to the
challenges of finding meaning in the concept
and reality of home. Her experimentation with
form seems inevitable: she is, after all, seeking
to reflect the cosmopolitan complications of a
twenty-first century African sensibility.
—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.
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 Carnaval. 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)
Carnaval
Tsitsi Jaji
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 978-1-940646-53-4
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
13
15
16
17
18
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
28
Preface
I. FAMILY TREES
II. CARNAVAL
Préambule
Pierrot
Arlequin
Eusebius
Florestan (a.k.a. Fela)
Paganini
A.S.C.H.— S.C.H.A. (Lettres dansantes)
Chiarina
Estrella
Pantalon et Colombine
Aveu
Promenade
Pause
Preface
By Nii Ayikwei Parkes
Zimbabwe is better known for its female prose writers than its
poets; names like Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera (often better
known for her prose work) come immediately to mind—but poets?
Not so much. For important historical reasons, this has been the
case across Africa, but things have been changing in powerful and
fitting ways. Tsitsi Jaji, who bears no sign of carrying the burdens of
the female African poet, represents a boldly accomplished voice in
this regard. Her liberty is a blessing for the reader —Jaji is able to,
in not attempting to carry a mantle, exhibit the kind of expansive
hybridism that many Africans possess by virtue of multiple languages,
colonization, and trading.
This kind of hybridism does not exist in the Western myth of
Africa. Yet there is a preference for titles in French and references
such as Eusebius (one of Robert Schuman’s personae in his
composition Carnaval) as the title of a poem that appropriately
ends with the lines “how is it that water spills / without spreading?”;
and Colombine (another of Schuman’s piano pieces) in a poem
called “Pantalon et Colombine,” which offers the unsettling image:
“Of how to cure the disease without a name by finding a toddler
niece’s / pantyline.”
These choices are a reflection of both a hybrid formation and
a mind that pursues all paths that come its way—a migrant mind,
so to speak. Ultimately, poetry should lend itself to appreciation in
isolation from the intertextual connections and cultural references;
it should create a world that the reader can trust and get lost in; it
must hold language captive and make it do its bidding. Jaji’s work
demonstrates these abilities in abundance. Her poems, while clothed
in English, bristle with the muscle of another tongue; there is an
undercurrent of music that is more than poetry’s flexed musicality,
and they possess the kind of regard that unsettles the eye and stills
the heart. In this chapbook, the opening poem, “Family Trees,” begins
with a word in bold type:
mother was a mango transplanted by moon-light. she glowed like
spilt cream. on unknown days she would burst into bruises, or leak
tears, but it was just a skin game. fruit do that, seeping out ripejuice, when inside all is sweetening. the real hurt was slower, deeper.
The first thing to catch the reader is the perspective —mango
is transplanted rather than a seedling; the spilt cream does not
flow, it glows; the bruises do not burst as boils do, the body
bursts into bruises —the language is just a skin game. Then, there
is the emphasis by use of typography, echoing the like of Kamau
Brathwaite, giving the work another layer of feeling, another dermis,
an extra skin with which to game. In the sequence, each family
member is characterized by a plant—all indelibly linked to Jaji’s
home country, Zimbabwe —all possessing beauty as well as faults,
just like the country.
While Jaji does not dwell on politics, she does cover it with a
nuanced touch, reflecting the complexity of Zimbabwe’s history. In
“Pierrot,” the idyll portrayed is misleading:
Under the bridge there are
stones growing
smooth with the
slippage of water
and the
smear campaign of silt.
while “Arlequin” gently mocks:
and i came in a black-front, red-back,
eye-whites rolled-back Fela juju suit
and told jokes ’bout how i sent you back to
yo’ old country lookin’
like a howlin’ dog an’
cryin’ fo’ the
po/lice.
Beyond the choice of subject and reference, what underpins
Jaji’s poetry is a musicality, an ear for unusual juxtapositions and
variety. Striking as the contrast is between the longer prosaic lines
of “Family Tree” and the Amiri Baraka-like brevity of pieces such
as “Paganini,” what carries the work is Jaji’s wonderfully surprising
perspective: in “Aveu,” acacia trees are “a mess of pods sung empty”;
in “Promenade,” there is the “golden wilt of maize”— imagine that,
the bloom of gold juxtaposed with the flopping husk of maize. The
quality of such imagery relieves the burden that for so many poets
rigid craft must carry—observations so clear that the image will do
the work even if the craft fails.
In the end, there can be no better metaphor for poetry than
to make the world of home. Jaji’s lexicon is clearly vast, and within
it she experiments with text in a non-semantic way on a visual and
auditory level, but the reader is never alienated and still feels at
home in the world. That quality is the mark of a true poet—a poet
for past, present, and future.
Carnaval
I. Family Trees
(1)
mother was a mango transplanted by moon-light. she glowed like
spilt cream. on unknown days she would burst into bruises, or leak
tears, but it was just a skin game. fruit do that, seeping out ripejuice, when inside all is sweetening. the real hurt was slower, deeper.
as the years swelled, her tenderness rooted in the soil of bruised
fruit. the real rage was churned with the fatherwomen. then they
hurled it together like paint at uncles gouging lobola or marrying
twice or taunting children.
these days everyone is quieter as she begins to sag into the third age,
so terribly afraid of going blind.
(2)
brother was a flamboyant tree. he arrived like flint, which they
fought over and everyone died. at first he would run through the
house bass-booming for us to wake up. but as it became clear to him
that no one would dye his room red he settled down to chewing gum
and playing foosball.
now, once a week, he hands out pocket money, backwards.
we are so proud of him.
(3)
father, an acacia, was just the same only he herded cattle while
brother hustled steel. and he handed out proverbs with a largess too
tardy to make anyone fluent. there was always a tangle of thornwire
barbed under his skin.
i cannot remember the history of the scars, except to know that it
was our own uncles who lit the fire.
the acacia, then, is a tree that survives immolation, that screeches
with laughing children, and that cries like a man, pregnant with
meaning.
(4)
the sister is difficult. she is dropping frangipani blossoms on the
soil-red plot while things fall apart. her ivory bloodlets are the
inverse of the mother’s. everything is chilled, yet somewhere within,
sun coals burnish her buds.
she is a locked bowl of bee’s gold.
she is equally silent,
equally flammable.
(5)
we call that aunt a fatherwoman. she is the sort of tree whose
branches a boarding school master snatches, stripped for the caning.
hunted, hers was a hardwood. mopane or mukwa perhaps. and with
tellings it emerges that she is remembering a pendulated body, the
rape of the royal house of zebra, the lustfear that drove the brute
away, and the winning of the land for sweet potato cultivation. like it
was yesterday.
she plucks away at her bearded chaos.
who can count the mouths she feeds?
(6)
there is an “uncle.” how can i put it? some claim he gripped us like
an unplanted vine.
yet the fact is, water is better than blood when one is thirsty. and all
those years there were sister-brother fruits on the table when the inlaws were spoiling. and everyone had enough. for the moment, it is
better to keep still and plan on grapes some other time.
let’s stay together.
(7)
some things are like an earth mirror, as with this recent
grandmother and simultaneously, her fathergrand-uncle. he
was wide and whorled and just as empty as a cream-of-tartar fruit.
she was wiry and wizened like national baobab roots. together they
met at the drought: the corruptions, the lamentations. they sent
Morse code across the ocean for years, about pick-up trucks and
bags of maize.
one day they stopped haggling and ate a goat and we all went back
to dying peacefully.
(8)
the cousin-brothers grow like weeds, to put it bluntly. hence the
fatherwoman and others are all for pulling them up, groundnuts or
not. but this is a drought, and the field is all that stands between us
and digging rectangles. i think it is worth the itching, the cuts, the
aches, and the sun-lash to salvage a pumpkin plant twice as edible
(or more, if we add the blooms as approximate tomatoes, to the
flesh and the leaf).
and passing eucalyptus, which grows back when cut down, clears
our airways.
*
II. Carnaval
The piano originated in Africa.
— Abdullah Ibrahim
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm
in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women
glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of the evening that swing between
the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and
Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn
nor condescension.
—W.E.B. Du Bois
Préambule
These have been the days
I wished to break like a stick
across my own knees, to splinter the
joy that took me. Because it was not my own.
Listen, listen!
One time, there was rain that came after we prayed. We had learned
thirst’s fervor swilling mouthfuls of sand.We danced a rain dance, and then
the rainfall came. It fell back to the earth.
Another time, I fingered a heart culled from my own herd, a cattle
globe whose valves leaked into my palm. In the lines of criss-crossed blood I
read a future that blurred out the mothers’ tantrums, like bones tossed by a
n’anga.
To those who believe a flood is a spiritual thing,
preceded by tonguèd winds: Be ashamed.
It comes creeping up on you like
a snare…lightly, lightly
loosening the soil’s death rattle.
And then you are washed away
in the rain’s rush.
Listen. Listen.
Abdullah Ibrahim, “The World of Dollar: The Piano Originated In Africa,”
Cape Herald, 19 October, 1968, 4.
W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: McClurg, 1903).
The poems in this sequence are inspired by selections from Robert Schumann’s
Carnaval, Op. 9, for piano, which the author performed in 1998.
Pierrot
Under the bridge there are
stones growing
smooth with the
slippage of water
and the
smear campaign of silt.
The moon floats
closer
and closer,
dragging below the bridge.
Is it time
or a limpid ripple
of maize-silk swimming?
And while we look away
she glides under
to the other side.
Light.
Arlequin
And you thought I was coming
dressed in a three-corner hat
with bells and pastel diamonds
to tell jokes and reminisce about the
When We’s over tea and crumpets…
Please!
and i came in a black-front, red-back,
eye-whites rolled-back Fela juju suit
and told jokes ’bout how i sent you back to
yo’ old country lookin’
like a howlin’ dog an’
cryin’ fo’ the
po/lice.
Florestan (a.k.a. Fela)
Starting at full speed was what did it, mother-propelled, playing
with sticks and eyes and matches and guzzling tea, it all became an
inflammable glue, and I saw the tormented crowds were left waiting,
a multitude too dazed to make noise. So I started racing towards
them, only they were a sightless throng, and the old ones were
wearing embroidery and propped-up on wood canes, and the fiveyear olds, already coquettish, stretched dimpled arms towards me
begging god-knows-what while the uncles advised ad nauseum.
The glitter’s glare confused them, the short shorts, the shekere
vamps so long so shuffle so shufferin so shmiley, and catching the
glint in their brassy eyes, I knew I should run but I had already
started at full speed, yet not really because I felt myself growing
faster, louder, a terrible shift in trapezoid mirrors. There were lines,
beautiful Euclidian curves, slipping their smooth arcs across my
thighs, my cheeks, my painted perfect body as I played my two horns
in one mouth, a cigarette, a hoarse, but I no be gentleman at all!
And I say:
The frumpery of responsible women must end. (Ashé)
The indigo beans of night are Truth. (Ashé)
The garnet of cut skin is worse. (Ashé)
Children will scream in church. (Ashé)
Coated ones,
bearded men,
opulent ladies,
crocs, cowboys, and iron ladies,
the beastly, and the hastily-praised
will be put in the stocks.
(Ashé) (Ashé) A.S.C.H.
I regret that I have been forced to flee the shooshing, shushing,
embarrassed hushing of your too-strong concerns. I refuse to go up
in flames.You will ransom me. I may go out like a spent cigarette, my
dear sarcophagus, but rest assured, I will return. Kalakuta.
Pantalon et Colombine
Of dirty old men gunning down chicory coffee in the same crusted shirt
morning in, morning out.
Ogling
the canteen girl
(Despina/Colombine),
with goat-eyes.
Of how such men pick through the ashtray
pilfering old butts. The pettiest of parsimonies.
Of how their stale thoughts ever shudder
across their flies and wandering thoughts.
I’d like
to teach her
a thing or two.
About this life or the next?
Of how the girls get younger every year,
but the hype never flatlines.
Of how to cure the disease without a name
by finding a toddler niece’s pantyline.
Of how your odious little cigarette-barrel
(yes you, Vakomana, I’m talking to you)
dangles between your legs, and
how it will never again do you a lick of good.
Fuck you.
Promenade
In the second year of the golden quarter
a body slipped over our own
although we had not known it
since the first of the stone virgin dances.
It carved across the laughter and
razed with cubist ire all that had been evident.
This was how the aftertaste of
whitened manganese returned,
as we recalled the golden wilt of maize,
the empty glint of rice grains
and the absent-minded bread.
At that time sugar was a bitter joke,
flour pointless, oil a stinging insult.
We began haunting muzhanje trees,
and scheming wild lupin greens.
We shut up about the lost days,
the flame trees, the outdoor rugs,
unclassified herds, and smoking thunder.
These also became things to hoard.
And we watched, stunned at neighbors
turning hunger into coinage.
Rude profit soiled everyone’s hands.
There was less clasping.
You know, we had heard of places
where such things were not uncommon,
bribes to grease a barrow-wheel, or ink
the commissioner’s stamp. But we
were not like that. We never boasted
of damask, or gold, or libraries lost in sand.
All we had were calloused hands.
And now, callous minds.
This body came and waited
in spite of the Grand Measures Board.
It simply hooded its roosting eyes
and watched from a distance, malingering.
Pause
for all the Madibas
There is a breath before the pendulum rends its center,
a breath before what leapt comes back to its ground.
There, men and women in chains
broke rock, forcing it to deliver
silence.
Hours on end, for year after year
of gravel’s grating humiliation,
men and women, clay-footed,
sat with Shakespeare.
They were never shamed.
May their memories be ever
blessed.
About the author:
Tsitsi Jaji was born and raised in Zimbabwe. She moved to the
United States to attend Oberlin College and Conservatory of
Music, and music continues to inspire her work. Her poetry
has appeared in Bitter Oleander, Runes Review, InTensions, the
Broadsides Series of the Center for Book Arts, and on Poetry
International’s Zimbabwe webpage. After completing a PhD
in Comparative Literature at Cornell University (2009), she
joined the English faculty at University of Pennsylvania. Her first
scholarly book, African Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African
Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2014), which traces Ghanaian,
Senegalese, and South African responses to African American
music in print and film, was completed while on a fellowship at
the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
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.
Tsitsi Jaji was born and
raised in Zimbabwe. Her first
scholarly work, Africa in Stereo:
Modernism, Music,and Pan-African
Solidarity (Oxford University
Press, 2014) traces Ghanaian,
Senegalese, and South African
responses to African American
music in print and film. She is
on the English faculty at the
University of Pennsylvania.
Her poetry has appeared
in Bitter Oleander, Runes Review,
InTensions, and in the Broadsides
Series of the Center for Book
Arts. During 2012-2013,
she was the Mary I. Bunting
Institute Fellow at the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study at
Harvard University.
“[P]oetry should lend itself to appreciation in isolation from the intertextual
connections and cultural references; it should create a world that the reader
can trust and get lost in; it must hold language captive and make it to its
bidding. Jaji’s work demonstrates these abilities in abundance. Her poems,
while clothed in English, bristle with the muscle of another tongue. There
is an undercurrent of music that is more than poetry’s flexed musicality, and
they possess the kind of regard that unsettles the eye and stills the heart.”
— Nii Ayikwei Parkes
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.