Japa Fire — An anthology of poems of African and African Diasporic Migration
Edited by Ambrose Musiyiwa and Munya R, Civic Leicester, £9.99
Ourselves in Rivers and Oceans
Edited by Claire Thom, Marc Brimble, John Tessitore and Sarah Jeannine Gawthrop, The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press, £13
POETRY anthologies are a popular way of presenting a theme, and because they involve many poets can also be used, especially by small publishers, to present voices excluded from more mainstream publication. That is true of both the anthologies reviewed here.
Japa Fire is named after a poem by Ayo Ayoola-Amale exploring Nigerian experiences of irregular migration. The publisher, Civic Leicester, has a strong track record of supporting refugee and immigrant experiences, and here presents 63 poems from 20 poets as a cultural adjunct to an official Africa Migration report from the African Union Commission and the International Organisation for Migration.
The poets tackle a wide range of topics and themes. Efua Boadu imagines the journeys of Okukor, a Benin Bronze cockerel displayed in the University of Cambridge, that was one of the first to be returned to Nigeria. In Color Trials, Mark Kennedy Nsereko speaks in the voice of a “colourful man” in a court hearing about deportation to Uganda, where challenging heterosexual stereotypes can be fatal: “How am I colorful enough to be/ disowned, fired and almost lynched,/ but not colorful enough for asylum?”
Nandi Jola writes about the anger of descendants of enslavement that results in the overthrow of the Colston statue in Bristol. Sello Huma speaks of his hopes for the future in Africa 2063. All told, this anthology is a great introduction to a range of political African voices you won’t come across in many other places.
An anthology around rivers and oceans might appear less directly political. But then think of the privatised companies dumping sewage in England, the Israelis stealing Palestinian water, the role of the oceans in global warming, and this may be far from the case. The Foreword to Ourselves in Rivers and Oceans states: “The poems reveal the importance of a way of being with water that goes beyond a controlling and extractive interaction, instead embracing the value of bringing play, love and intention into that relationship.”
This is a much larger anthology than Japa Fire, with more than 150 pages of short poems, one from each poet, a number of them from outside the UK. It also comes from a small independent publisher, Wee Sparrow Poetry Press. Its size means it is very much one to dip into, rather than read from cover to cover. It includes a heart-breaking piece, Woman, Life, Freedom by Nazrin Parvaz, an Iranian poet in exile in London, on torture by water deprivation (see Morning Star, https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/woman-life-freedom-0).
In Kakhovka Dam, Alison Sesi remembers the deliberate breaching of the dam in Ukraine by Russian troops as a weapon of war, and Jenni Wyn Hyatt recalls the Welsh valley flooded for a reservoir that sends water to Manchester, in Capel Celyn. Steve May has a short concrete poem in the shape of a tree: Olive Tree in the Occupied Territories, Palestine. On a more personal level, Renee Cronley writes of an adult who had themselves been adopted taking their own adopted child to the beach in A Jigsaw Puzzle of an Adoptive Family.
All told, this is a wide-ranging anthology of both personal and political responses to the theme of water and oceans, that rewards the reader with work they might otherwise never encounter.