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AbstractThe ecological visions of two African poets and their portrayal of the precarious condition of the environment in Africa are discussed in this article. Their nostalgic reflections on the idyllic image of the continent before anthropogenic activities degraded its fertile greenery also received major attention. Zakari Musa’s Elegy for the Earth (2020) and John Ngong’s The Tears of the Earth (2019) are critically analysed to expound the poets’ temporal triangulation of ecological discourse in Africa. I adopt Nigeria and Cameroon as models of African ecological space to interrogate the poetic contemplation of eco-precarity, temporality, and a vision of a new Africa built on human-nature interdependency and the green economy imaginary. Drawing on insights from ecofeminism and other relevant conceptual perspectives in environmental humanities, I examine sundry ecological topoi, including the politics of gendering and anthropomorphising the environment, the effects of the politics on nature, and the possibility of educating the African mind through the focalisation of precarity in African ecological poetry. I argue that the poets’ romanticisation of nature offers them an opportunity to intensify their education project by emphasising nature's contributions to life sustenance, while warning that human beings are self-destructing because of their insensitivity to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is concerned with the ways in which lyric poetry, as a certain kind of literary practice, reconfigures and reimagines dominant constructions of the liberal subject. In so doing, it focuses on the work of Susan N. Kiguli, a Ugandan poet whose 1998 collection, The African Saga, was published in the wake of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) government's attempts to improve the position of women in Ugandan society. Although these (neo)liberal reforms were successful in bringing more women into the orbit of national politics and the economy, they relied on a process of recognition that, when analyzed using the work of Kelly Oliver, appears to do little to change patriarchal structures. This essay argues that four poems in The African Saga – "I am Tired of Talking in Metaphors," "Where am I?", "Deconstructing You," and "The Swing" – constitute an attempt to move beyond the version of the female liberal subject implied in the government's rhetoric. Through a sustained manipulation of personal pronouns and syntax, the poet articulates a lyric subjectivity that is characterized by movement, constant change, and a redeployment of the desire for recognition that is central to liberalism. This subjectivity, which is highly adaptable yet firmly embodied, therefore cannot be "recognized" within the government's liberal politics. It is also articulated against deconstructive theories of subjectivity which, according to Kiguli, would construe it as an entity that is entirely relational in its construction. The essay concludes by considering how, in the case of Kiguli, the lyric poem does a certain kind of subjective-political work that is out of the reach of novels written in Uganda during this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on poetic production in South Africa to theorize connection as a dominant motif in contemporary poetry. In South Africa, poets compensate for the lack of state or market support for the arts through community organizations and collaborations. Under lockdowns, in-person events like open mics were replaced by digital programmes hosted on corporate-owned public platforms like Facebook Live, as artists sought to transmute social capital into material support. Performance poetry, in particular, exploded in popularity, offering comfort and connection amidst isolation. With the turn to the digital, spaces for community formation increasingly reflect the neoliberal logic of the network. The South African literary organization Hear My Voice raised a "Poetry Relief Fund" to pay honoraria for weekly poetry performances on Facebook Live. At the same time, poet and playwright Siphokazi Jonas reconceived her politically urgent poem-play #WeAreDyingHere as an international call to arms, reaching new audiences around the world. These events, alongside international festivals like Zukiswa Wanner's Afrolit Sans Frontières, created new possibilities for understanding connection within the creative economy. But what kind of community is instantiated through those platforms? Who, specifically, is supported, and under which terms? And how does poetry itself mediate those relationships? I analyse both individual poems and the media platforms in which they are embedded to argue that, if relationality and networks represent two different models of sociality, connection offers a paradigm that acknowledges the ascendance of network modes of production without acceding to their logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the textual aesthetics of the Congolese-born (later Tanzanian naturalized) Swahili singer-songwriter Remmy Ongala. In the first part, I argue that a textual approach is also important for songs. The theoretical discussion is mainly based on the studies by Karin Barber, which offer a fundamental perspective on these issues. On this basis, I propose a more literary perspective, related to the ideas of the father of aesthetics Baumgarten (1714-1762), the American writer Susan Sontag (1933-2004) and the Swahili writer Euphrase Kezilahabi (1944-2020). Since Ongala belongs to different textual traditions, Congolese and Tanzanian, I use texts from these traditions for a comparative analysis of style and thought. On the Congolese side the comparison is based on elements of oral literature, like folk tale and song, both in relation to the proverb Kipendacho roho hula nyama bichi (A soul in love eats raw meat), while on the Tanzanian side the comparison is based on Swahili literature of that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with the works of Sudanese American poet Safia Elhillo, a rising star in Arab, African, and diasporic literary circles. It explores the chronotopic use of metre, repetition, keywords, and mise-en-abyme in Elhillo's works to think through the ontological stakes of postcolonial verse. It consequently proposes fractals as a non-binary way of conceptualizing hybridity, linking these to a polychronic logic, where the poems' form and content foreground temporality as a recursive, self-repetitive contemporaneity. Further, through a sustained focus on how Elhillo creates a network of intertextual links between her poems, the article shows how recursive structures that highlight time-space dialectics cast scale as the main link between the various building blocks of the poems. By linking these chronotopic fractals to patterns of orature that draw on both Arabic and African traditions, the article gives an aesthetic reading of the betweenness of Elhillo's American Sudanese positionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a roundtable discussion on the book "The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity and Ownership" by Mukoma Wa Ngugi. Topics discussed include the role of the book as an intervention into the debate on the current form of African literature, influence of the 1962 Makerere Conference of African Writers of English Expression in the literary tradition, and the failure of the book to examine African poetry and contradictions in early Black radicalism.

In a conversation about their shared interests, the authors discuss methodology, reading strategies, and comparative historiographies relating to the recuperation of residues of hope that linger in the wake of failed revolutionary projects. The conversation draws connections between people power (poder popular) in Chile during the Allende era and ideals of participatory democracy circulating in South Africa concurrently (during the so-called Durban moment), discusses in detail the work of Nadine Gordimer, considers the politics of contemporary South African activism, and weighs the usefulness of the insights of thinkers from Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin to David Scott and Achille Mbembe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including African poetry and music, Bengali science fiction and cyberpunk fiction.

The argument begins by claiming that the phrase, ‘a clear lucid stream of everywhereness,’ taken from Ben Okri'sThe landscapes within, at once encapsulates the postmodern theories of complexity and relativity and evokes a cosmic dimension and a striving forDasein[authentic human existence] that inform his poetic vision in his latest collection of poetry,Wild(2012). It proceeds to argue for the complexity inherent in the notion ‘postmodernism’; then discusses selected poems in terms of modernity's curious dilemma of ‘just now’ negating the preceding ‘just now’, that the French philosopher Jean-François Leotard talks of, treating recurring motifs of change, transformation and continuing presence. This includes a discussion of the two poems, dedicated to the memory of Okri's late mother and father respectively, that bookend the anthology, contextualising them within postmodernity. The article concludes by re-invoking its own abstract title in ‘Towards the Sublime’ in terms of Leotard's definition, before briefly assessing the import of Okri's latest collection of poems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The oral poetic tradition in Hassaniya Arabic emerged as a distinct trans-Saharan genre in present-day Mauritania in the pre-colonial era, fusing stylistic features of classical Arabic poetry with the musical heritage and griot1 traditions of neighbouring sub-Saharan cultures. As a popular musical art performed in a colloquial dialect, Hassani poetry is accessible to a range of social classes, and mastery of composition signifies linguistic prowess and social prestige. Drawing on ethnographic research with male and female Sahrawi poets in 2006–07, this article traces the roots of oral poetry in Hassaniya-speaking communities in northwest Africa and discusses recent shifts in modes of transmission, performance contexts, and poetic content. While the proliferation of new media has decreased the apprenticeship of younger poets, Hassani poetry has maintained an active following among mixed age groups. In the context of the protracted international conflict over the Western Sahara, the genre has gained new visibility as part of larger national projects to promote Sahrawi cultural heritage and advance opposing political agendas. Examples from Sahrawi poets in southern Morocco, Western Sahara,2 and refugee camps in Algeria demonstrate how the genre serves as a discursive strategy in critiquing modern urban culture, employing social capital, and supporting the political rhetoric of nationalist movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious poetry is generally considered the fruit of a people's long reflection on their relationship with their gods, with the ancestors, and with the partly seen and unseen universe. It is used to celebrate events in the life of the individual and the community, to express fellowship, and as a powerful means of communication. Thus, religious poetry is an integral element of a people's heritage. In this paper, I intend to present some forms of religious poetry, which are found among the Bakossi people of Cameroon, in order to show how magically-oriented formulaic expressions are used in order to maintain adherence to the normative order of society. The point I intend to make is that the incantatory form of religious poetry, was, and still is, used among the Bakossi people of Cameroon, as well as in other parts of rural Africa in terms of individual and communal education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay uses African ecofeminism as a lens for analyzing healing elements in the poetry of Malika Ndlovu. It argues that in using nature as a site for “re-memorying” an alternative African history and culture in the anthology born in africa but (2000), Ndlovu constructs an African ecofeminist poetic, aimed at healing the contemporary psychic wounds of colonization and apartheid. Drawing on Toni Morrison's and Pumla Dineo Gqola's formulations of “re-memory” – the way subjugated peoples reconstruct histories which have been destroyed by oppressive practices such as colonialism – I argue that Ndlovu's poetry uses nature as a generative site for “re-memorying” erased, pre-colonial African histories, as a way of healing trauma, and a method for countering the shame of miscegenation inscribed within “coloured” identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The arts, and in particular poetry, have been swords of resistance for the Saharawis since the 1975 Moroccan and Mauritanian invasion and subsequent occupation of their country. In this article, I aim to investigate whether Saharawi women writers go further than the more common objects of Saharawi resistance and fight against patriarchy. Firstly, I focus on the work of the Saharawi 'Friendship Generation' of writers, exploring the Generation's collective (nationalist) aims. Secondly, I look at the construction of gender in Saharawi poetry, analysing how gender, particularly the idea of woman and femininity, are imagined according to the sex-identification of the author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For centuries ugogo (grandmother), mothers, aunts and other black African storytellers have entertained and informally educated children by means of folktales. Folktales form a substantial part of African folklore and they are an essential genre of African traditional children's literature. Folktale performance was combined with mimicry, gesticulations, song and poetry. Many Zulu tales have songs as one of their distinctive features, which is vital in the interaction that takes place between the performer and her audience. Folktales are regarded as narrative fiction because they tell a story which is not real but taken as something that took place in the remote past. Like in all communities, Zulu folktales are a fountain of knowledge of days gone by. They are the treasure of the nation that was not recorded but passed on from one generation to the next by the spoken word. The aim of this paper is to investigate the various roles played by songs in the narration of folktales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until the recent effacement of aspects of the Igbo traditional values through the combined and sustained conspiracy of Western colonialism and Christian evangelical missions, the masquerade was one of the most venerated symbols of the people's social cohesion. It was particularly revered for its juridical functions in many Igbo communities. Whereas it provided entertainment to the communities, it was also often evoked as the most important symbol of justice amongst the people. This paper offers a critical reading of Ezenwa-Ohaeto's The Voice of the Night Masquerade, a work of rare achievement that brings into focus not only aspects of the cultural idiosyncrasies of the Igbo of South Eastern Nigeria through the cultural genre of the night masquerade, but also does so with an elegance that resurrects the age-long question on the nature of the language of traditional African poetry which engaged scholars like Chinweizu and his team, Wole Soyinka, and many others during the long, and continuing quest for the decolonization of the African mind. It locates aspects of Igbo language and culture through the vision and mannerism of Ezenwa-Ohaeto. The Voice of the Night Masquerade, it concludes, is particularly relevant because its ethics and aesthetics provide profound insight as a postcolonial statement in social equipoise that debunks colonialist civilizational assumptions of Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents Yari Yari poetry in Africa. `The Burial of a Building'; `Yari Yari: Writing for the Future'; `Planted by the Waters: A Tribute to Maya Angelou.'

In South Africa oral poetry has been studied as literary/aesthetic material, a viewpoint that saw the performance of oral poetry as a hindrance. Linguistic views unearthed the peculiar linguistic features of oral poetry. Features related to performance came to light with the orality, anthropological, and political views. Using aspects of these views, language use in Ndebele izibongo is discussed. By looking at the extent of the use of features it is possible to ascertain which features are privileged in this poetry. In the context of the performance of Ndebele izibongo one can conclude that linguistic features, especially metaphor, are a resource to assert or gain power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]