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HURLING WORDS AT CONSCIOUSNESS
“By turns soothingly tender or implacably harsh, Hurling Words at Consciousness is an unflinching meditation on our globalized inequities. It is thoughtful and richly rewarding.”
--Tejumola Olaniyan, University of Wisconsin-Madison “Mukoma wa Ngugi is a poet of extraordinary expressive gifts. This impressive volume casts a critical yet forgiving eye on closely-observed episodes from life in the United States, with knowing glances towards poets as diverse as Le'opold Se'dar Senghor and Matthew Arnold. The social concerns of an African poet in sympathy with political struggles throughout the Third World here jostle up against and defamiliarize the details of North American everyday life, which then suddenly take on new significance.” --Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois at Chicago “While treating the reader to an expansive range of themes - death, war, life, love, nature, human relationships/encounters, personal reflections, art, politics, history, social justice, revolution and others – Mukoma wa Ngugi also succeeds in making a deeply profound, artistic statement. He decorates his intensely reflective utterance with a lacework of images, metaphors and other forms of figurative expression that reveal a keen artist at his craft. With this first volume of poetry, Mukoma wa Ngugi has clearly entered the world of published poets in style!”
--Micere Mugo Githae, Syracuse University Like his late mentors, Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney, Mukoma is a catalyst, a circuit board, a generator. Through his writings and activism, he expresses the idea within which many will think change, the dream within which many will envision change, and the hope within which many will imagine change.” --Meredith Terreta POEM FROM THE BOOK
Letter to My Nephew For Ken Saro-Wiwa The sun is locked in evening, half shadow half light, hills spread like hunchbacks over plains, branches bowing to birth of night. It's an almost endless walk until the earth opens up to a basin of water. You gasp even the thin hairs on your forearm breathe, flowers wild, two graves of man and wife lying in perfect symmetry, overrun by wild strawberries. Gently you part the reeds, water claims the heat from the earth, you soak your feet, then lie down hands planted into the moist earth. You glow. Late at night when you leave, you will fill your pockets with wet clay. But many years from now, you will try to find a perfect peace in many different landscapes, drill water out of memory to heal wounded limbs of the earth. You will watch as machines turn your pond inside out, spit the two graves inside out in search of sleek wealth. Many years later, after much blood has been lost and your pond drained of all life you will wonder, shortly before you become the earth's martyr, what is this thing that kills not just life but even death? |