P OE TRY

Beasts of Nalunga

Jack Mapanje Bloodaxe Books / 64pp. / £7.95

Review by Niccolóó Milanese

JACK Mapanje’s latest collection starts with a new proverb which, rather than encapsulating his spirit, should be read as introducing it:

Resilience is like a swallow, It swoops and turns across Mountains, valleys, waters Evading the sharp beaks of Killer-hawks until it perches On fragrant tree branches.

Mapanje was imprisoned under the Hastings Banda dictatorship in Malawi between 1987 and 1990, and has lived in exile in the UK since. He has often chosen swallows as symbols for his time in the notorious Mikuyu prison, and in an earlier volume uses this metaphor to evoke both his fellow prisoners and their conditions: “those hyenas yapping ... scorpions whose sting sings like brain / tumour, the swarming mosquitoes and bats –/ What, who you won’t find here, welcome / To the chattering wagtails of Mikuyu Prison”. The swallows represent at once the negation which is prison, and the violent unnamed, brought to song and turned to restful silence. Mapanje is one of the most adept followers of his late friend Ken Saro Wiwa’s injunction: “Dance, dance the guns to Silence!”.

The spectres of prison and tyranny are as present as ever in Mapanje’s consciousness, and the poet knows they will not leave. The ‘Beasts of Nalunga’ from the impressive title poem are mysterious vampires creatures which were reported to have appeared in Dowa District of Malawi in 2003, prompting up to 3000 people to leave their homes. They become metaphors for other vampires, and seem at times to represent the World Bank, the IMF, Western pharmaceutical companies, or some of the many other problems and cures that have appeared in Malawi over the last fifty years. But these creatures are ultimately spectres of history and forgetfulness, which live in the people themselves: they lurk here and there, “even in you and me”.

“There is a violence stared-out by laughter –not overcome, but neutered”

Banda’s dictatorship fell in 1993, yet Mapanje still sees the ugly ghost of the tyrant. There are several poems furious about the mausoleums built to the dictator. In one, the endless ghosts of those who Banda condemned –“accidentalised” or “car-crashed” –seem to rise up from the earth and swirl around the new memorials. Yet what is most unexpected about this work is the humour of it. One might be tempted to call it a sense of farce, but these situations are too real for that. There is a violence stared-out by laughter –not overcome, but neutered – and the result is that sometimes the poetry seems peculiarly domestic. Mapanje picks this out himself when he

titles one of the sections of this collection ‘Of Homes Weirdly Sweet’. The kind of at-homeness the poet finds is always that of a traveller or exile, but in this collection one senses that Mapanje believes he has been in the United Kingdom long enough to make claims about it: “Hang on, Mister”, one of his poems starts, “I too was here when / The Winter of Discontent broke out ...”. No doubt the Wordsworth Trust residency, in which he wrote much of the collection, has had some impact too. On the basis of a couple of readings, it seems that there is also a change in the poetic register; and that Mapanje has now started writing for a British audience, and that his poems are often about his homeland, where there was perhaps no need for description before. One of the poems – ‘a prayer for paramount sages’ –seems to be a call for new voices in Malawi. Perched here, Mapanje has started to uncover the beasts that haunt the West: there is a poem about the fallout from the Iraq war, and an angry composition about the cynical reaction in “our Christian claimed states” to pop-singer Madonna adopting an orphan, and other glancing allusions to the kind of sermonising the poet has so deftly avoided. In response to a question about how –in spite of all the tragedies of the continent –African writing can be called a celebration, the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe has remarked that there is an age-old tradition for rejoicing, even in the face of the carvings of the white district officers, of small pox, of thunder: that if one does not celebrate nearby the terrifying monsters, they will go where you cannot keep an eye on them. Mapanje has kept a close eye on the monsters he encountered in prison, and has spotted many new ones since, and possesses the inspiring integrity to make them dance to his songs.

Niccolóó Milanese is a director of European Alternatives, and a Contributing Editor of The Liberal

52 | The Liberal | Autumn 2007