SELECTED POEMS - TCHIYAYA U TAM'SI

Before I get to the content of the book I’d like to note that this is the oldest book I’ve ever checked out of the Seattle Public Library and came with the card-catalog pocket I remember from elementary school and this old, double-mermaid logo for the SPL. Someone checked this out in ‘71, when some of the poems in this volume would have been fairly new. So onto the poems themselves, I got my hands on this due to a combined desire to read more African poetry generally and wanting to follow up some of the suggestions and illusions Johnson dropped in MI REVALUESHANARY FREN. This did not disappoint. Tam’si is Congolese and from the class of Africans who grew up during the end of colonialism (he knew Lumumba apparently) and was educated and later largely lived in France. The poems themselves are translated from French, not Kikongo or one of the other Congolese languages. As he himself writes, “I take pity on those who read me: / I speak their languages-here in Europe- / Thus: / It’s raining” I struggle not to make my poetry reviews simply a long list of quotes and pulled out lines that really struck me. Rest assured, this book is full of them. It’s very, for lack of a better term, surreal and strange. It focuses more on arresting images and weirdness than coherence. I don’t have a deep background in French poetry but it did strike me as Rimbaud-esq. Formally, there are both long cycles and sections that are written as dialog. The longer cycles contains lots of recurring images, especially around the sea and Christianity and it’s legacy in the Congo. These poems contain both the only poetic reference to Antsirabe I think I’ve ever seen as well as the phrase, “the pale king” decades before DFW. I was particularly taken by a section about Emmett Till, especially the idea of a francophone African writing about an American teenager which includes the section: “They / Killed him under water / as they baptise hereabouts / in such Christian fashion / never with a mother’s name” Occasionally he gets pithy and aphoristic, as in “Nothing is closer to a cry than music” which is one of my favorite poetic modes. Occasionally the strangeness and surreality felt overdone and confusing on purpose, but overall I was left wanting more. As a weird aside, I found out that Tam’si died on the exact day, April 22, 1988, that I was born. 1960 Hearts of Darkness.