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  “Bernard Farai Matambo casts images that quiver with terror and desire. These images root within us as if we were the very landscape the poet renders spectral with the residue of human passions: cities of ruined arches and potshards underfoot, the human cost of conflict, populations bowed in reverence and fear. Matambo is an archer of lyric poetry. His words are ‘drawn out and taut, anxious as catapults.’”

  —Gregory Pardlo, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Digest

  “Stray is a work of great sensual intelligence and evocative urgency, consistently intimate and political. With painstaking concentration and dazzling lyricism, Matambo dismembers the cult of pitiless masculine strength and paints a portrait of a ‘half man, half anger’ in the ‘empire of the zoo.’ Then he puts this ‘man with an ape inside him’ through the meat mincer of African and American histories. Matambo’s short prose poems are gulped down like bitter pills of remembrance and forgetting.”

  —Valzhyna Mort, author of Collected Body

  “Lush, yet urgent, determined to design a language that can feed the hunger for truth. . . . Follow Matambo’s poems as they stray from Zimbabwe to the U.S. and back, through landscapes haunted and illuminated by unforgettable images: ‘Once I caught a bough leaping into the air, a thicket of birds lifting off of it, dissolving among the stars.’”

  —Evie Shockley, author of semiautomatic

  Stray

  African Poetry Book Series

  Series editor: Kwame Dawes

  Editorial Board

  Chris Abani, Northwestern University

  Gabeba Baderoon, Pennsylvania State University

  Kwame Dawes, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

  Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, University of the Witwatersrand

  Bernardine Evaristo, Brunel University London

  Aracelis Girmay, Hampshire College

  John Keene, Rutgers University

  Matthew Shenoda, Columbia College Chicago

  Advisory Board

  Laura Sillerman

  Glenna Luschei

  Sulaiman Adebowale

  Elizabeth Alexander

  Stray

  Bernard Farai Matambo

  Foreword by Kwame Dawes

  University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London

  © 2018 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

  Acknowledgments for the use of copyrighted material appear in Acknowledgments, which constitute an extension of the copyright page.

  Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image © Charles Bhebe.

  Author photo © Gwendolene Mugodi.

  All rights reserved

  The African Poetry Book Series has been made possible through the generosity of philanthropists Laura and Robert F. X. Sillerman, whose contributions have facilitated the establishment and operation of the African Poetry Book Fund.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Matambo, Bernard Farai, author. | Dawes, Kwame Senu Neville, 1962– writer of foreword.

  Title: Stray / Bernard Farai Matambo; foreword by Kwame Dawes.

  Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2018] | Series: African poetry book series

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017043648ISBN 9781496205582 (hardcover: acid-free paper)ISBN 9781496207791 (epub)ISBN 9781496207807 (mobi)ISBN 9781496207814 (pdf)

  Classification: LCC PS3613.A822 A6 2018 | DDC 811/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017043648

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Contents

  Foreword by Kwame Dawes

  /

  Preamble to Stray

  All the Merry Hills

  In the Name of the Tongue

  In the Name of the Father

  Holy Ghost

  Catechism

  Ota Benga Returns to the Congo

  //

  You Don’t Want the Light to Find Out What You’ve Done

  Diallo

  We Must Return

  The Last Time I Saw Annamore Tsonga

  ///

  Preamble to Fever

  The Cunning

  It Came to Pass

  A Town on the Frontier

  Feasts for the Blind

  Farther Inland

  Far Country

  My Dear Menshevik

  As a Moonflower Curious of the Night

  A Hunger

  The City

  ////

  Preamble to In the Case Regarding My Brother

  Requiem: In the Case Regarding My Brother

  ////

  Mugarandega

  In the Throat of the Heaven’s Guide

  Acknowledgments

  Note

  Foreword

  Kwame Dawes

  Bernard Matambo’s Stray joins an illustrious group of debut collections in this series. Matambo’s penchant for the prose-shaped line, and his persistent sense that contradictory impulses in poetry are necessary for a poet in search of emotional and intellectual truth, shine throughout this moving collection of poems. Yet what remains as the hallmark of these poems is their reach for images that reflect invention and precision: “The mountains were full of song, their trembling not our enemy” (“All the Merry Hills”).

  Matambo takes us through several key familial (father, brother, and mother) relationships that have symbolic value, as each allows him to explore broader issues of identity, place, and ideology in intellectually complex ways. In poems that explore the legacy of a masculine indiscretion and cruelty, there is a clear sense that the son is seen as an inheritor of sins from the father. Rather than blame, the speaker appears to be caught in an inevitability, a twisted notion of a birthright. And in this, there is in the beauty of the language, the invention of description, a quality of empathy caught in the memory of a father who whimpers after orgasm with his long-suffering wife, a man at once flawed and, thus, human:

  It was a sport I knew little of then

  except for the beads in the corners of his eyes

  when he returned delicate with his thunders.

  (“In the Name of the Tongue”)

  The father, though, will fail, and the mother will leave. The father, caught in both regret and a strange kind of unhinged hope, waits for her return, expecting it, even as he holds onto the one thing he has left: the totems of his tribe. Again and again, Matambo offsets a penchant for acrimony and blame by turning these poems of censure into poems of quiet confession: “Sometimes I catch him in the taste of my tongue” (“In the Name of the Father”).

  In the opening poems, Matambo variously describes the legacy of the speaker’s father as a stain, an inheritance, a taste, and a residual sense of self; and much of what gives these poems tension is their attempt to outline what is clearly religious hypocrisy with the necessity for respect—if not love. These poems move through narrative “confessions” on behalf of the father into a reluctant sense of complicity: “It all begins with the stain of him, the marrow / leaking out into the bone” (“Holy Ghost”).

  The stain returns around matters of faith and desire. And in this, Matambo writes as a poet excavating themes that haunt the young writer—the discovery of desire, the disquiet and excitement of troubled faith, and the hunger to find language to express all of this. He is both ironic and sincere in the belief that poetry cannot contain these feelings:

  Remind me again, dear love, of that time when the world was as young as we were and I was lit bright with urges, light as the shroud Christ yielded when he gave up his tomb, sick of sleeping alone and dreading the eternity of it, when he sought himself some company. Of this no poetry shall come.

  (“Catechism”)

 
The father functions as an intellectual trigger for the poet such that even as he contemplates, in the brilliantly realized long poem that explores the story of Ota Benga (“Ota Benga Returns to the Congo”), it is the father who Matambo connects with Benga before making his own symbolic connection to the complex figure. Ota Benga, of course, is the Congolese man who at the turn of the last century was made a spectacle of in the United States as a zoo dweller:

  I remember nothing of what riled the orangutan

  inside the cage deep inside my father, the one

  he concealed so long and deep in him like a bad habit

  until it too raged for its freedom, and my father placed his pistol

  on De Boer’s ear. I too sometimes hear its rolling call in my bones.

  From that connection created by a drunk father’s witty reflection, “Was Ota Benga the first Afropolitan—” we arrive at the “call in my bones” of Matambo, whose task is to find a thread of connection even as he is coming into his own—straying, as it were from home. But what remains strikingly inventive and impressive about Matambo is the complex thinking that allows him in this poem to offer a very contemporary examination of the persistent relationship between the West and Africa and how it is played out in the intimate place of the psyche. Ota Benga, Saartjie Baartman, Matambo’s father (whose narrative includes an act of violence that is heightened by the willful treatment of it as something that could be more than symbolic), and Matambo himself are deeply connected—they are wrestling with the idea of being viewed as subhuman spectacles by white culture and with the implications of return to the “motherland” once the knowledge of what is out there has corrupted them.

  xix

  Before the credits climb up the screen

  closing the film on his life, Ota Benga

  in the stadium at Matadi rises from his seat

  and surveys the floodlights undressing

  the audience aching for him to speak.

  xx

  Dear Gentlemen of the Academy: I wish

  I was not the music the bow offers the mouth

  the arrow leaps out to touch

  saying, I am a man, I am a man, I am a man!

  The poem serves as a fit segue into poems that reflect Matambo’s exploration of the complications of the immigrant’s life in America. In poems like “You Don’t Want the Light to Find Out What You’ve Done,” much of this is reduced to a peculiar but seemingly necessary excavation of race in America: “I am still wondering about being black enough.” The African man traveling through Nebraska with a woman who could pass as Persian “when the weather permits” throws out the clichés of race, MLK, collard greens, Mike Tyson, lynching, and ends with a vulnerability that is admirable and troubling:

  I am in want of my egg over easy, my sunny-side up. I am still searching for a room dark enough to hang my skin in, let the light come in.

  But it is exactly this kind of “uncomfortable” articulation—these confessions that amount to questions that unsettle the idea of race that makes Matambo wholly modern and necessary for these times. He is fully aware of the artifice of art, the ways in which language shapes sentiment and the way meaning can be manipulated by the poem. That self-awareness proves refreshing because it comes to us as a genuinely sincere willingness to press for truth. In “Diallo” his identification with the young African immigrant killed by police in New York is subject to scrutiny:

  Here is a scene, Diallo studying by night, his stoic hopes

  in a mound beside him, noosed by the chains that sunk

  the names of his ancestors in the crossing. Because I am

  sentimental he will study by candlelight. Because reason

  will prevail, he will study the wisdom of the crow.

  This of course is a lie.

  Matambo builds his mythology of exile and return that will echo through this collection, where return is a constantly troubled notion marked by the years of ideological dismantling and rebuilding around issues of negritude, Pan Africanism, and Afropolitanism, all of which are contained in the figures of both Diallo and also Cato, a kind of alter ego who is full of dreams of return. Images of the disquiet of postcolonial Africa is explored through figures like Lumumba, who is forgiven for his idealism because he “did not know [at the time of his execution] the [Pan Africanist] tree was corrupt.” These poems are full of a longing for meaning and value, a longing that, in this case, highlights absence and need, which is not there and thus can be read through the archaism of that which is “wanting.”

  I want so much to believe in the goodness of the ape within me,

  he said, the highway behind us roaring with the weight

  of our American dream.

  The worlds that Matambo creates have the uncanny ability to be fully rooted in the details of an earthly existence marked by the specifics of survival in “independent” Zimbabwe—the riots, the dying currency, the challenges of finding food—and yet are filled with the strange mystery of the surreal, the inexplicable, the confoundingly spiritual:

  That year it rained crows. Birds fell out of the sky in midflight. Their squawking made mother nervous. It gave her the chills and made her teeth chatter. She threw her eyes everywhere, and through the window caught the taut sky tightening.

  (“Feasts for the Blind”)

  The swelling dead crows will soon become the bodies of corpses floating down a river, and the worlds that Matambo creates in the third movement of the collection build an extensive prose narrative broken up into small chapters that reflect on the memory of home, a home that is presumably in the “ghettos” of Harare, in which the mother is the protagonist—the one who sees all, the one whose story is told. It is a story that has the quality of fable, a cautionary tale about the many revolutions that have marked the continent as a whole. Matambo’s vision for these revolutions is not positive. The narrative is the same. Long-suffering people wait and wait until their suffering becomes too much, and so they rise up, and they revolt, and they eventually “triumph” only long enough to see that what they have won is another epoch of suffering. One could accuse Matambo of cynicism in passages like this:

  We trudged about and salvaged the remains of past civilizations. Stretches of asphalt that betrayed old roads. Shards of cheap crockery and half-burnt books, dolls with singed hair. Fat men loitered in abandoned alleyways. They clasped their offspring to their chests like secrets. They cast telling eyes on us. Out in the distance, the begging cup still clanged.

  (“The City”)

  But Stray manages to test this cynicism in its tender and unsettled exploration of the self. And here again we see that one of the complicated features of longing and need is the implicit understanding that there exists in the body a capacity to be satisfied. The sequence of poems “Requiem: In the Case Regarding My Brother” represents exactly that elegant and moving combining of loss and necessary hope in art:

  Because belief too is an act of faith, I believed the wound in my brother would liberate him to the music within him.

  (“viii”)

  The hunger within him worried me with song.

  (“xiv”)

  These contradictory omens are the hallmark of this collection, and it is in their emotional uncertainty that we recognize the inevitability of poetry that has the capacity to unsettle the dangers of assurance

  It is impossible to come from stretches of verse like this without having a sense that the poet has sought to contain in this hymn to his brother, who is at once to himself and to the artist who must work within the limitations and possibilities of being part of the “skinfolk”:

  My brother said something was tightening within him. He was looking, he said, for more space to move within his skin.

  I worried with understanding. It was a hunger I knew could not be diminished. Colossal in its cravings, unimpeachable with its facts.

  The sculpture he was building fashioned a cage around him. On its roof, drawn out bales of cotton, a thicket of nooses dangling like nec
kties.

  The leg irons, he said, were the only symbolism.

  (“vii”)

  The two poems that end the collection return us to the challenges of exile and loss and the combination of belonging and un-belonging that marks and fascinates Matambo. In the third part of “Mugarandega,” “Akanga nyimo avangarara” (“Them who have chosen to roast round nuts must stay the course”), an anecdote unfolds with characteristic mysteriousness and significance. The “you,” one imagines, is the lyric “I”:

  Once, in a foreign land, you muttered confusedly, Breath is a syllable cremation cannot afford, then alighted the train to hug the first African you saw, because they were African. The scent of his sweat, raw shea butter, sage, and cinnamon. His glow carried you back up the mountains. Flame lilies and lavender; aloe and rose. Still after all you wish to be buried among your kin. You fear the weight of return the way you fear in death the earth pressing down against your corpse will snap your clavicle into two.

  And in “In the Throat of the Heaven’s Guide,” we find a work of deep and dark wit that comes as close as Matambo will get to addressing the dictatorship that has ruled Zimbabwe for decades. Here, however, the names mentioned and the figures alluded to are part of the rogue gallery of dictators including Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Mobutu Sese Seko, and Sani Abacha. The leader’s reported struggles with prostate cancer and his peculiar predilection are given only veiled treatment here, and yet what comes of this musing on the illness that dictators face is a cryptic statement that leaves us with a puzzle to solve: “Born of the gun. Give me sight, so I too may see. An eye for an eye, our scrambled world.”

  /

  Preamble to Stray

  We forgot the unsubtle pleasures of the light. And because we forgot the pleasures of the light, we forgot what beauty resided in the shadows, what we possessed. The city lay within us, dark, dank, and skeletal. We forgot the rooted scent of our dreams. And because we forgot the rooted scent of our dreams, we forgot they could flower. No, not anymore; no longer could everyone read the coming air for the rain. Everything knew its way around everything else, you said. Quietly I nursed my doubts. We lost the petals of the flowers within us; we forgot the radiance of their color. And because we forgot the radiance of their color, we wandered about the city and worried its ruins with our suffering. The city lay within us, dark, dank, and hungry.