Gambia-L:
Below you'll find an interesting Draft MA Thesis submitted to Sana'a University in Yemen, by Student Ali Malhani, on the literary works of Tijan Sallah, the well-known Gambian poet/economist/writer. The thesis, supervised by Professor Thakur, Chairman of the English Language Department at Sana'a University, offers, for the first time, a "full-length critical assessment" of Tijan Sallah's poetry.
Be informed though that while it is indeed an interesting thesis, there are notwithstanding "lots of typographical errors and inaccuracies" in it.
Anyway, I am forwarding it to the L, hoping that those of you in literature would find it not only useful, but inspiring and instructive as well. Tijan Sallah deserves our support and encouragement for his achievements in the literary world.
Ebrima
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgment 3
Introduction 4
Biography 6
Major Influences 22
A Discussion Of His Poems 32
Conclusion 52
Bibliography 54
Appendix I: An Interview with Mr. Tijan Sallah 58
Appendix II: Selected Poems: 104
1.When Africa Was a Young Woman 105
1.1. WHEN AFRICA WAS A YOUNG WOMAN 105
1.2. BIRDS 106
1.3. IF YOU ASK ME WHY MY TEETH ARE IVORY WHITE 107
1.4. TARAZAN NEVER LIVED IN MY AFRICA 108
1.5.CRY NOT 109
1.6. WORMEATERS 110
1.7. THE TENANT FARMER 111
1.8. THE PLOWMAN 112
1.9. COUNTRYFOLKS LET US GO BACK 113
1.10. TONIGHT 114
1.11. WHY DO YOU COME YAADICONE 115
2. Kora Land 116
2.1 DISTANT MY LAND 116
2.2. DIALOGUE WITH MY DEAD GRANDFATHER 117
2.3. GENERATIONS 120
2.4. MY POOR GRANDFATHER MADE HISTORY 121
2.5. THE ELDERS ARE GODS 122
2.6. SO STRANGE 125
2.7. DAWN VISIT 126
2.8. PILGRIMS TO THE MAGAL 128
2.9. NO ARGUMENT TONIGHT 132
2.10. AN AFRICA 133
2.11. ON DENTON BRIDGE 134
3. Dreams of Dusty Roads 135
3.1. ROOTS 135
3.2. LOVE 138
3.3. THE LAND COMES TO CONSCIOUSNESS 141
3.4. FREE SKY FOR ALL 142
3.5. SIMPLICITY 143
3.6. WATCHING 144
3.7. THE EVADED MOON 146
3.8. TELEVISION AS GOD 148
3.9. MEDITATION ON AMERICA 150
3.10. AMERICA (Or Piano-notes for the Immigrant) 152
3.11. THE COMING TURNING 156
3.12. BEFORE THE BREAKING OF THE FAST 157
Appendix III: Some Selected Biographical & Professional Details 159
Acknowledgment
No matter what I say, words fall short in conveying my deep appreciation and gratitude to Prof. Thakur for his consistent help, advice, and support not only in successfully finishing this work which is in partial fulfillment of my MA degree, but in advising me on putting my priorities right to achieve success in practical life. I would also like to thank Prof. Tijan Salleh for his assistance with primary source information about himself and his work as well as for providing some useful references while writing the thesis. Thanks are also due to my best friends Yahya Al Madani and Khalid Al Maweri for their help and encouragement to finish this work.
Finally, and most important, I am really grateful to my wife for her endless support, care, and dedicated love all the way not only in this work but throughout my life as well.
Introduction
This thesis is aimed at evaluating the creative work (mainly poetry) (and life) of a new, modern writer, who has not been fully recognized but whose work is increasingly gaining worldwide attention among the community of world poets writing in English all over the world. Generally speaking, the discussion in this work will present a critical and descriptive analysis and evaluation of this Gambian writer, Tijan M. Sallah, as a poet. This work will specifically explore the following aspects of the poet: biography and its significance for a proper understanding of Sallah’s poetry; the major influences on his poetry; the discussion of his poems which will rely on the trends of the poet; and finally the conclusion.
Tijan’s literary career being not very prolific can be fully covered in this dissertation. He has written three books of poetry, an anthology on new poets from East Africa, a book of short stories, a book on Africa named Wolof and many essays. This thesis will only concentrate on his poetry. Given this, an attempt is made to explore the relation of his life to his works. The main focus is being on the impact of some episodes or incidents of his life on the writings. His education as well as his life in the United States has a great influence on his literary works.
Actually, most of Sallah's work shows his concern with the world of the modem man, in particular his countrymen. His already written literary works present the life of a poet, striving to contradict and to correct others’ opinions about his continent in general and his homeland in particular. The poet discusses many topics relevant to human life. A brief discussion of his past life will determine the type of poet he is and the base he launched his literary career from.
Biography
It is befitting to start a critical evaluation of the Gambian writer Tijan M. Sallah’s poetry with a quote from the Gambian literary critic, Dr. Siga Fatima Jagne, who wrote, “The Gambia has yet again produced another genius for the literary world. Tijan M. Sallah, an economist currently working for the World Bank, has emerged in the last ten years as a strong contender for poet laureate of the Gambia, following in the footsteps of Lenrie Peters.” Although literary judgments are always susceptible to controversy, and the works of the poet considered here is no exception, yet there is a sense in which the assessment of Dr. Jagne is not far from the truth. This work describes, analyzes and evaluates the poetry of Tijan M. Sallah and invokes specific works to support the claim advanced by Dr. Jagne.
Sallah was born in Sere Kunda on March 6, 1958. The town he grew up in, Sere Kunda, is a small town about 8 miles from the Gambian capital of Banjul. Before we go into detail about the life of this talented poet, essayist, and short story writer, it would be useful to give some relevant information about his family as well as the nation he comes from, i.e. the Gambia.
The Gambia is almost the smallest country in Africa located in the northern West Coast of Africa. The entire land of The Gambia is surrounded by Senegal, except for its Atlantic coastline to the west. The country consists of a narrow strip of land, not more than thirty miles wide, on either side of the River Gambia. It extends inland along the banks of the river and towards the heart of Senegal for about 200 miles. “This peculiar shape has given rise to many vivid comments such as ‘a mouse in a Senegalese trap’ and ‘a long swollen-knuckle finger probing deep into the heart of Senegal’.” This, together with the close cultural affinities between the two countries, is also the reason why the region of the Gambia and Senegal is often called Senegambia. The total population of the Gambia was about 1.2 million in 1999, comprising mostly of immigrants from the neighboring regions such as Senegal, Mali, Guinea, and Mauritania. They migrated to the fertile banks of the river Gambia to engage in farming, cattle-raising or trading purposes. This immigration resulted in the rich ethnic composition of the population, which includes the main ethnic groups of Mandinka, Fulbe, Wolof, Tukulor, Aku, Jola, Manjago, and some others. The majority of these groups have an Islamic affiliation because of the early incursions of Islam into this area of Africa through trade routes with Arabized North Africa. The Islamic emphasis on brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind have also helped in having various ethnic groups getting mixed up with each other via intermarriages.
Historically, the Gambia was exposed to the transatlantic slave trade by the European colonial invaders. Slaves were taken to the “New World,” i.e. America where they were used to work in plantations and to create profits for their enslavers. In the 19th and mid-20th century, the Gambia was a British colony. “The British dominated the Gambia and carried out a colonial system based on ‘indirect rule,’ a policy of using traditional chiefs to rule in the rural back country.” These traditional chiefs were usually the heads of the Gambian tribes and they were used as peons to serve the colonial economy, collecting taxes from the “natives” and reporting to the colonial government. Their areas of rule were called districts and they were financed by the British government through revenues locally collected. The British colony of Gambia made profit out of the export of groundnuts and palm products which were the engines of growth of the Gambian economy. The British built up a few roads to facilitate access into the hinterland, and medical centers and schools where English and the Bible were taught for the local elites who would serve in the colonial bureaucracy. The Gambia became politically independent from Great Britain on February 18, 1965.
Sallah comes from a comparatively well-educated family. His father is a Muslim and comes from the Tukulor, one of the Gambian ethnic groups. His father attended Koranic school and then Western elementary and high school where he learnt to read and write in English. After graduation, he worked as a clerk during the colonial period at the Bathurst Town Council (B.T.C), from here he took his first retirement. We should note that Bathurst was the name given to the Gambian capital of Banjul during the colonial times. Subsequently, Sallah’s father worked as an accountant at the Gambia Oil Seeds Marketing Board (G.O.M.B), a Gambian parastatal company which used to buy groundnuts from the farmers and export them abroad for hard currency for the government, where he took his second retirement. His father is a wise man with a strong sense of judgment, and after retirement became the Imam of Sere Kunda’s small mosque. Neighbors used to come to him to seek his advice or to have him settle their issues and disputes. Tijan’s mother comes from the Wolof and Serere ethnic group.
Although she did not attend any school and was, therefore illiterate, she was a very intelligent woman who raised her kids admirably and gave them good values and abundant maternal love. She came from Sine-Saloum on the north banks of the river Gambia, bordering Senegal.
Tijan described his father as “a strict disciplinarian,” consequently, “He believed in ‘spare the rod, and spoil the child.’ He tolerated little nonsense, and emphasized among his kids a strict regime of schooling (koranic and western); respect for elders; personal hygiene; non-rowdiness; adherence to Islamic tenets, particularly following the teachings of his Tijani sufi tariqa (Islamic denomination with origins from Fez, Morocco) spiritual leaders in Tivaouane, Senegal; respect for women, particularly mother and grandmother and aunts; non-tolerance for playfulness; and a scorn for some traditional Gambian practices (such as drumming and dancing) which were seen as contradictory to Islamic teachings. I grew up fearing and respecting my father (like many of our neighbors who felt the same way) but being more fond of my mother. My father was a man of unblemished moral reputation, who never failed in his parental responsibilities, and who often exhibited his tender side on rare occasions: during Muslim festivals or when a needy person came by or some one was sick in the family.
Somehow, I often felt he was a kind man who shied away from excessive tenderness for fear of sending the wrong signals of indiscipline to his children.” As Tijan grew, “My fear of my father vanished and turned into a friendship; but my respect grew.”
Sallah has two sisters and four brothers. In sequence of age, Ndey-Isatou (Aisha) is Sallah’s eldest sister who finished her high school and worked as a nurse in the Gambia. She got married to a medical doctor and had three kids. Aisha passed away at a very young age, i.e. in her 40s. Her husband is currently working in the Gambia, although their kids are living in the U.K. The second is Sallah’s elder brother, Habib, who finished his high school in the Gambia and got his MBA (Master in Business Administration) from the United States. Currently he is a professor in the Gambian institute, MDI (Management Development Institute). The third is Halifa who, like his elder brother, finished his high school in the Gambia and went to the U.S. for higher studies. He got his B.A. in psychology and then an M.A. in international relations. Currently, he is the leader of the very well known Gambian opposition party PDOIS (People Democratic Organization for Independence and Socialism). The fourth in the family is Sallah.
The fifth is Musa, Sallah’s half-brother. Sallah’s father married two women. The second one, being Musa’s mother, only gave birth to Musa and then was divorced. Musa, however, lived with Sallah’s family. He finished his high school in the Gambia and went to the United States as well, where is now working in Atlanta, Georgia. The sixth is Sallah’s younger sister, Sainabou (Zainab). She has finished her high school in the Gambia and now lives there. The seventh last son of the family is Sallah’s youngest brother Mawdo-Malik. Like his brothers, Malik finished his high school in the Gambia and then left for the US. The reason why all the sons went to the US for college or higher studies is that there was no university in the Gambia at that time. Malik got his MBA from Murray State University in Kentucky.
All the family including Tijan lived together for quite a long while in their house in Sere Kunda which, at that time, was still a village with mango, palm, orange, papaya and guava trees and other beautiful scenes of flora and fauna. At the age of five, Sallah started his formal education. He attended the Koranic school and learnt “the art of reciting poetic verses and the rudiments of being a capable student.”
At the age of six, in 1964, Sallah attended the Sere Kunda Primary School and remained there until 1970. This school was a formal, western, co-educational school with English as the medium of teaching and the curriculum covered reading, writing, arithmetic, civics, arts and crafts, and general science. Most of the teachers in this school were Gambian nationals and a few were British. The headmistress of the school was Mrs. Hariette Ndow (known more popularly as Mrs. Ndow or fondly as Auntie Harrou). Other Gambian teachers included Mrs. Cobola Jones, Mr. and Mrs. Forbes, Mrs. Sarah Secka, Mr. Dawda Faal, Mr. Danso, Mr. L.K. Jabang, and Serigne Njai. The school was of six yearly levels and, at the sixth level, students had to pass the “West-African Examination Council Exam” known as “Common Entrance” in order to graduate and meet eligibility requirements to enter the high school. The school’s headmistress, Mrs. Ndow, an energetic Gambian national, was very keen on spotting talented students with the potential to become great leaders. She used to group them and teach them the dignity of work by making them grow crops in the school’s garden. These crops, once mature, were sold to the market and the money would be used for the welfare of the school. Sallah was one of the students who used to work in this garden. At the fifth and sixth levels, Sallah used to write comprehensive essays on a variety of topics as assigned by his teacher of writing. (see appendix I: Interview with Mr. Tijan Sallah for more details)
After passing the Common Entrance, Sallah joined “Saint Augustine’s High School, an all male Catholic missionary school run by Irish priests of the Holy Ghost Order.” That was in 1970 when he was at the age of 12. In this school, Sallah studied hard passing its five levels successfully. The school curriculum and medium of teaching was in English too. The fact that the school taught the Bible and preached Catholic Christianity did not hinder his academic achievement. He was, and still is, a very open-minded person who sought to learn and develop himself intellectually and spiritually. Therefore, he looked at it from a positive point of view given the fact that his religion is an extension of Christianity and both religions believe in one and the same God. Recalling the past about himself and his school mates, Sallah said, “we had to learn and memorize passages from the Bible, Old and New Testament, despite the fact that Gambia was largely a Muslim country, but it did not matter: it was still in the same Abrahamic tradition – Islam a continuation from Christianity and Judaism.”
In high school, Sallah was “fed with a heavy dose of the British Classics –Shakespeare’s plays, Coleridge, Joyce, Yeats, Orwell, Robert, Louis Stevenson, etc.” He encountered Gambian teachers like Ms. Ralphena d’Almeida (who taught World History), Mr. Sait Touray (who taught Latin, English, and Science), Mr. Sola Joiner (who taught Geography), Mr. Marcel Thomasi (who taught Literature), and Irish teachers like Rev. John Gough (who taught English and Literature), Rev. Father Murphy (who taught Bible Knowledge), Rev. Tammy (who taught Mathematics), Rev. Comma (who taught Chemistry), and Rev. Cleary (who was the school’s principal). Although the education was a well-rounded one as subjects like physics, chemistry, biology, geography, foreign languages and history were part of the curriculum, Sallah liked literature most because of his Irish priest, English teacher’s influence on him. Sallah used to write very good essays and showed them to this teacher called Reverend John Gough. The teacher detected something poetic in his essays and “was so impressed ... that he told the young writer: ‘ Why don’t you try your hand at poetry?’”
In the beginning, Sallah thought that poetry is rhyme and whenever he tried to write a poem, it was in “rhyming words”. He started by imitating what he had studied in English literature. He began writing poetry in 1973, when he was fifteen years old and at the third level at St. Augustine High School. The first poem he wrote, “The African Redeemer,” was a tribute to the late Kwame Nkrumah, former President of Ghana. When he showed this poem to his teacher, John Gough, he liked it very much and told him “someday your work will be anthologized in the Ulli Beier and Gerald Moore Anthology of Modern Poetry from Africa.”
This prediction has now been realized. The poem was published in the school’s magazine SUNU KIBARO and received admiration from both teachers and schoolmates. The subject of the poem was, as Sallah puts it, “the continentally-admired, Pan-African nationalist leader and first head of state of Ghana.” This leader was known for his call for the unity and development of the whole of Africa, a noble goal which Sallah also embraced. With an inspiration from Reverend John Gough, Sallah continued to write poems and showed them to his inspirer. After this, he met the Gambia’s first internationally known poet, Lenrie Peters, who is a medical doctor working in the Gambia. Peters has written two books of poetry and a novel. Sallah used meet Peters who helped him refine his poems by the genuine criticism. In the late 1970s, Sallah was invited to Bemba Tambedou’s program over the Gambian radio called “Writers of the Gambia”. The program which was about Gambian literary writings in English gave Sallah initial national publicity.
Sallah’s interest in literature, self-development, and higher studies did not find its full satisfaction in the Gambia. So he decided to go to the U.S. Since he had no money by then, he worked as an audit clerk at the Gambia Government Customs Department and the government General Post Office from 1975 to 1977 in order to accumulate savings to pay his fare to the United States. His thought was that, once he made it to the U.S., he would manage to survive and excel. So in 1977, Sallah left the Gambia and went to Georgia, America. Although accepted by many colleges and universities, he had no financial support for his study.
Finally, a high school called Rabun Gap Nacoochee admitted him to study the last year by doing a work-study, i.e. study and do some manual work to pay his school fees. While in this school, Sallah studied under the American poet Harry Lioyd Van Brunt known as H. L. Van Brunt. This poet had a summer program offering “Creative Writing Classes” where he invited young experimenting poets from all the southern part of the U.S. Young writers would participate by writing and criticizing each other’s poems. Brunt would encourage these poets further by sending their good pieces to some magazines or journal publishers. Sallah got very close to this poet who liked his writing very much. He “began to develop and consolidate his writing through the encouragement and influence of ... Van Brunt, who taught him ‘real poetry’.” He used to tell him that “poetry is trying to express ideas through the use of images.”
He also used to tell him that poetry is what needs to be said. While at Rabun Gap Nacoochee School, Sallah edited the student newspaper called “Silent Runner” and published his first poem “Worm Eaters” in the Atlanta Gazette of February 17, 1978. This poem was his first to be published in the U.S. It was a social satire about people who gave in public one image and in private, happened to hold another.
His outstanding academic performance at Rabun Gap School got him a scholarship in 1978 to Berea College, Kentucky. Sallah concentrated his academic career interests on business and economics and his major at this college was Business Management and Economics. However, he kept on writing during his study in this college where he did a huge amount of literary productions. He first wrote many poems, published a book of poetry, edited three campus publications, tutored writing, and got some of his poems published in newspapers, magazines as well as anthologies in several U.S. and international publications. On top of it all, he was recognized as the most outstanding student of the year at Berea College in 1982. Moreover, he got Berea Senior Award for Economics and was honored as the Berea College Student Nominee for Carnegie Endowment for Peace Internship, both in 1982.
The book of poetry, which he published at Berea College, is When Africa Was A Young Woman. It was published in 1980, when Sallah was 21, by the Writers Workshop of Calcutta, India. The book brought Sallah an instant celebrity status and was even reviewed over the BBC in the same year. Many of the poems in this book had appeared previously in newspapers, magazines, as well as some anthologies. The book represents Africa as a young woman whose beauty and self confidence has been raped by marauding Colonizers. More details on this book will follow later.
After receiving his B.S. (Business Management) and B.A. in Economics from Berea College in Spring 1982, Sallah joined Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) in order to do higher studies. In 1984, he got his M.A. in Economics and subsequently his doctorate in Economics in 1987, both being from Virginia Tech. While studying and working on his dissertations, Sallah worked as an instructor of Microeconomics and Macroeconomics at Virginia Tech. He continued to write poetry as well as short stories. He also reviewed three literary books: “The Tragedy of Platitudinous Piety” by Bill Best, 1981; “Summer of Pure Ice” by William White, 1985; and “Gem Within” by Rosemary Wilkinson, 1986. Yet this was not the limit of Sallah’s literary initiatives and talent. He started Kaleidoscope at Virginia Tech, a student publication and became its first editor. He also received an honorary doctorate in literature from World Academy of Arts and Culture, Taipei, Taiwan in 1984.
While finishing his PhD dissertation, Sallah first met his wife and life-sharing partner, Fatima Haidara, who got her B.S. in France at “ECOLE de Mechanique et de I’ electricity” and came to Virginia to do both M.A. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering. Fatima comes from Mali and her mother comes from Tukulor group, just like Sallah’s father, and is basically of Senegalese origin but her ancestors immigrated to Mali. Fatima’s father comes from the Songhai, a tribe that lives in the Timbuktu area, one of the oldest centers of civilization in Africa. Having received her Ph.D. degree, Fatima now works as a Satellite engineer at Intelsat, Washington DC. She gave birth to two children; the oldest, a daughter named Selly Aisha and a son named Abbass. The well-educated couple now live in Maryland in the United States.
After receiving his Ph.D. from Virginia Tech, Sallah started with a teaching career that parallels his writing career. In 1987 to 1988, he taught economics at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. While teaching, in 1988, Sallah published his second book Before the New Earth. This book of short stories was published by Writers Workshop of Calcutta in India too. From 1988 to 1989, he moved to the Business School of the North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro where he continued to teach economics. The third book, a collection of poems, came out in 1989. The book titled Kora Land was published by Three Continents Press, Colorado.
In 1989, Sallah brought his two passions together at the World Bank:
As one of 30 men and women selected by the World Bank for its young professional program out of 2800 applicants, Tijan plans to wed economics and literature to ‘help him see the human side of raw numbers.’ He hopes to give economic development ‘not only a statistical face, but a human face.’ He posits that ‘people who make policies shouldn’t be people who sit in Washington and read numbers,’ and his project at the bank hopes in some sense to place ‘the human being at the canter of the economic drama. Since then, Sallah has edited an anthology, authored another book of poetry and a book on the Wolof people of Senegambia. The book of poetry, Dreams of Dusty Roads, was published in 1993 by Three Continents Press of Colorado; an anthology edited by him New Poets of West Africa, was published in 1995 by Malthouse Press Ltd. In Oxford, England and Lagos, Nigeria; and his book, Wolof, was published in 1996 by the Rosen Publishing Group Inc in New York. Some of his books can be ordered and bought over the Internet.
Sallah has been working in the World Bank since 1989. Since then, he has supervised and managed many development projects in South Asia, Middle East and Africa. Currently, he is covering the projects on natural resources, water and environment in Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen.
To summarize it all, Sallah is a talented and gifted writer who has several interests. This undoubtedly gives his life a good balance, a balance between literature, what he calls the heart, and economics, the mind. It makes Sallah a fully integrated person.
Major Influences
Sallah spent his early life in Sere Kunda which, as mentioned previously, is the crossroads of Gambian cultures and a cultural experiment of ethnic groups. Sere Kunda, at that time, was a big village surrounded by rural hunting ground for rabbits, squirrels, and deer, and dotted with big trees of mango, guava, baobab, oil palm, banana, and papaya which often served as shades for the aged story tellers, nooks for sabarr (or tam-tam) drumming, and venue for an amalgam of native tongues of Wolof, Mandinka, Jola and Fula. As described by Sallah, “There were also various species of birds: robins, woodpeckers, finches, parrots, crows, sparrows, vultures; mammals such as goats, sheep, pigs, cattle, bats; and reptiles such as snakes, chameleons, agama lizards, and various species of insects. Growing up in Sere Kunda, really, was a fresh period of lush vegetation and glorious animal life, as if it was Chinua Achebe’s morning on creation day. It seemed as if, over time, there has been a fight of man against nature, as real estate development seized the terrain, and sprouted all over the place, and undermined the beautiful feet of nature.” Sallah’s poetry is richly interlaced with these scenes. In general, African, particularly the Gambian cultures, traditions, and customs have a great influence on his poetry. Before we discuss this aspect, let us see, through his life and educational development both in the Gambia and the United States, what are these significant factors which influenced him to write.
Sallah’s early study in Koranic school in Sere Kunda gave him the basic view and perception of poetic sounds. Rote memorization of the Koran without understanding its meaning disciplined his young mind and alerted him to poetic musicality. The reciting of the holy Koranic verses (Ayat) equipped him with the basic sense of poetry at an early age. He attended first dara (or Koranic school or madrassat) ran by the venerable teacher Serigne Jobe, who taught the Koran in the verandah of his home and included among his own students his own children: Barham Jobe (current Imam of the main mosque of Sere Kunda), Sakou Jobe, and a step son, Ebou Jobe (Ebom). There were also other students, who came from various places of Sere Kunda. As Sallah describes, “Every day, after Western schooling, and over the weekend, we, I mean the students, will gather on the verandah of Serigne Jobe and sit on a mat with legs folded, with a tablet scribbled with a chapter from the Koran placed between our thighs, and each student will read aloud in various lyrical tones the surrahs depending on whatever stage one was in memorizing the entire Koran. The ultimate goal was to be a Hafiz-ul-Koran (one who mastered the entire Koran in memory), a very much sought-after goal and title. A student who was a Hafiz commanded great respect and was the prized envy of other students and, indeed, of the entire Muslim population of Sere Kunda.” The technology of Koranic education, at the time, would appear crude to the modern eyes. Sallah explained the technology of his education in Koranic school thus: “I learned the Arabic Koranic text on wooden tablets with the sacred verses or chapters (surrahs) scribbled with ink made from a mixture of charcoal soot scraped from the back of cooking pots and water, and washed after completion of each chapter.” Later, he attended another Koranic School in Sere Kunda ran by Serigne Sarr, a teacher who studied at Egypt’s famous Al-Azhar University and who taught reading of the Koran in perfect classical Arabic accent. Quick witted, Sallah rose among the rank of students in the Koranic school to become an assistant teacher (a favor bestowed only to the best students in the Koranic school). Despite this background and ability to read and write in Arabic, Sallah never understood the meaning of Arabic except those essential basics to practice Islam.
He, therefore, did not write in the Koran’s language nor in his native mother tongue. His educational life from elementary school until he received his Ph.D. was in English and that may have been a factor as to why he wrote his poetry in English.
Sallah first started to write comprehensive essays which contained poetic sounding sentences. In the first chapter, biography, Sallah’s high schooling period and relationship with teachers had a great influence on him to write poetry. Particularly, a very important influence on Sallah to write came from his teacher John Gough. His first inspiration in English to write poetry came from Reverend John Gough, the Irish priest and English teacher at Saint Augustine High School in the Gambia. Sallah used to show his essays to this teacher who was impressed by his ability to write such comprehensive essays, which had undertones of poetic verse. Having discovered this poetic potential in his talented student, John Gough kept on encouraging Sallah to write, to hone his skills, including even writing poetry. Inspired to write, Sallah crafted his first poem “the African Redeemer” which was a tribute to the well-known and continentally admired African leader, Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana. His Irish teacher, mentor and source of inspiration was so impressed when he read it that he told him “someday your work will be anthologized in the Ulli Beier and Gerald Moore Anthology of Modern Poetry from Africa”.
The poem was appreciated by his teachers and classmates and was even published in the school’s magazine. The encouragement of John Gough and the praises from his teachers and schoolmates inspired him to go on writing. This poem, like Sallah’s first poems, was a rhyme, and therefore contained a lot of rhyming words. This is clearly the influence of classical English literature with its emphasis on metrical strictures and his reading of Shakespeare, Coleridge, Yeats, Orwell, Joyce and the Romantic poetry of sonnets and rhyming poems in general. Even in form, by having a glance at his first book When Africa was a a Young Woman, we can notice this influence clearly on poems like “Birds,” “Cry Not,” and “Tonight” by imitating E. E. Comings in de-capitalizing word initials. Sallah started his writing by imitating these English literary giants. Although he imitated their rhythmic structure in his poetry, his images were totally different. He was, and still is, influenced by African images. Since his start, Sallah’s poetry is packed with African imagery, a characteristic that makes his poetry rich, unique, and very distinctive.
He also used to meet his friend and compatriot, the internationally known Gambian poet, Lenrie Peters, a Gambian medical doctor, who wrote two books of poetry and a novel. Sallah used to go to the West Field Clinic in Kanifing, Sere Kunda, and read his poems to him. Peters edited some of Sallah’s poems. He used to encourage him to remove a lot of old or archaic English words and substitute them with modern English and African ones to help the African aspects of Sallah’s poetry come out. Later, Sallah met Bemba Tambedou through one of Sallah’s friend, the Tanzanian university- trained teacher, Mr. Ebou Njie, who was then teaching at the new Muslim High School. Subsequently, Sallah was invited and interviewed over Radio Gambia in Bemba Tambedou’s radio program, “Writers of The Gambia,” which gave Sallah his first national publicity in the Gambia. At this point, Sallah felt that he had a responsibility of representing his nation, in particular, and Africa, in general, in his poetry.
Sallah real productivity and maturity in writing grew significantly in the U.S. When he came to the U.S. in July 1977, he attended for one year at a Presbyterian high school in northern part of Georgia, U.S.A. which was called the “deep South.” The Southern part of the United States was not known for its tolerant racial attitudes, as the majority of American slavery was practiced there before Emancipation. Nevertheless, Sallah thrived there, and did all kinds of farm work (land mowing grass, feeding cattle, etc.) to pay his way through high school. He notes, “I arrived in the U.S. with only a dismal eighty dollars. I studied mostly in the American South—an area I consider to be the heartland America. I made it from high school to achieving my doctorate in economics. In retrospect, I did not do too badly.” He further added, “As you know, in America, this story of rags to riches or rags to success, as I could not claim riches, is known as the Horatio Algers story. Well, I consider myself pretty lucky.”
At Rabun Gap Nacoochee School, near Clayton, Georgia, Sallah became fond of his English teacher, Ms. Edith Christy, who became keenly interested in Sallah’s poetry and creative talent. The late Edith Christy introduced Sallah to an American poet in temporary residence in the area, Harry Lloyd Van Brunt (known as H.L. Van Brunt), who taught in poetry in the schools program in New York and Pennsylvania. Van Brunt, at the time, was residing at the Hambidge Center for the Performing of Arts in Dillard, Georgia, a few miles from Rabun Gap. Van Brunt liked the images in Sallah’s poetry and recognized that he had talent, but it needed development. Having seen Sallah’s ability to write poetry, Van Brunt, started teaching Sallah “real poetry”, i.e. expressing ideas through the use of images. The American poet helped Sallah publish his first poem “Worm Eaters” in the U.S in the Atlanta Gazette of 1978. The poem is also included in his first poetry book, When Africa was a Young Woman. Sallah also consolidated his skills of writing as he edited many college and other publications in the U.S.
In Rabun Gap Nacoochee School he was literary editor of the school newspaper, Silent Runner, under the direction of Mrs. Beaver (wife of the Reverend Jack Beaver, the campus pastor and Sallah’s teacher of American Government, who was fond of Sallah due to the latter’s thirst for learning and intellectual prowess). Jack Beaver proved quite instrumental in helping Sallah subsequently to enter the college.
The influence on Sallah’s poetry also came from other West-African literary pioneers like Leopold Sedar Senghor, David Diop, Birago Diop, the Caribbean Aime Cesaire and Leon Gotran Damas. Senghor was the first president of Senegal and most prominent African poet of the Negritude Movement. Negritude, which started in the Paris Cafes among Africans and Caribbeans from French colonies, was a reassertion of black African values and civilization achievements in response to French colonialism. “It therefore turned into a poetry of celebration, the celebration of glories of the black past. Some of the most beautiful poetry at the time was written by the Negritude poets;” Sallah explains. “There is, of course, a risk with celebrations—one joins in the excitement of the crowd, and one loses one’s capacity for individuality and self-doubt.” The influence of Negritude poetry is clear in Sallah’s early work. Negritude poets usually called for the rise of the black African to improve life and country, and to live independently and refute the cultural denigration imposed by the white man through the rackets of colonialism and empire, and to express pride through remembrance of the glories of the African past in the building of such magnificent civilizations as in Mali/Timbuktu, Ghana, Benin, and Egypt.
Sallah is greatly influenced by Gambian traditions, beliefs, and customs. He would like to follow these traditions and customs as long as they lead to affirmation of humanity. “We have to note that not everything bestowed from the past is good;” Sallah argues. “Human culture rests on improving the failures of the past. Some customs and beliefs and even traditions are terrible; we have to shed them and relegate them to the trash bins of memory. Enduring human progress rests on standing on the redeeming moral strengths of the past and innovating with love and care. It seems as if we have to ride on the train but always have to have our eyes open to ensure that we do not oppress the earth too much with too much noise and cranky railroad tracks.” In his poetry, Sallah exposes and criticizes those traditions and customs which are not good.
Even his native language has a great place in his works. He uses some Wolof and Gambian words in his frequently. For example, “Bajob Njai” in “Dance of Passion” and “Kamby” in “You Must Come to Kamby.” The poet sees, and he is right in a sense, that using the word “Bajob Njai” in his own native language conveys the meaning in a perfect wholeness. The word means a seductive chant used by Senegambian drummers to induce dancing women to exhibit a momentary display of lower body nudity; it literally means, “Bajob Njai, I have seen nothing”. In the second case, the word “Kamby” is the Mandinka name for the Gambia. The word used in the poem spurs the reader curiosity to get to see this place of Kamby. The whole poem in which this word exist “You Must Come to Kamby” is an invitation for the West to come and see the beauty of Gambia. Had it been written as Gambia, it would not have struck the reader with curiosity and eagerness to see the place. Look also at the use of the word “terranga” in his poem “Woman” meaning Senegambian hospitality. The meaning of the word is very apt and close to the heart in the poem than the English word “hospitality,” it conveys something special about the poet’s own culture and his pride of it. In general, Sallah uses the Gambia, in particular, and Africa, in general, as the landscape of his poetry.
Not only his homeland but also his life in exile has affected his writings. His experience of displacement, one of the most important themes in his works, is reflected in most of his poems. Themes of exile is particularly frontal in his poetic obsessions especially during his first years of residence in the United States. Many of his poems contain the tone of nostalgia for his homeland. It seems that while he was in the United States, he felt closer to his homeland than when he was at home. “Strange as it may seem,” Sallah notes, “exile, involuntary or self-imposed, heightens one’s sensibility to one’s homeland, to the familiar, to things that one takes for granted; a minor encounter about one’s homeland echoes deep reverberations and sends one into a chain of endless self-questionings.” In addition, being that far from the Gambia and Africa, Sallah saw the whole continent with a clearer focus and vision. “Distance,” he adds, “is not necessarily a bad thing. For me, it has given me an angle to see and heightened my feelings about my homeland.”
A Discussion Of His Poems
This part of the thesis will critically examine and evaluate the content and form of Sallah’s poems from three of his books, When Africa Was A Young Woman (1980), Kora Land (1988) and Dreams of Dusty Roads (1993). Sallah’s concern is mostly seen in many interrelated human problems. Most of Sallah’s work focuses on the experiences of West Africans abroad and their need to restore African values, and a call for the return of all African exiles to help in Africa’s rebirth. There is a notion of cross-cultural encounter, which involves his reactions and sometimes defensiveness of his homeland. He also focuses on the causes and experiences of immigration and the impact of exile on both the immigrant as well as his relatives and friends left-behind. This theme is presented in different forms. Immigration is the cause of the author’s sense of loss or displacement. It influences him to further draw comparison between the Western and Eastern values. The experience of immigration characterizes the most outstanding themes in his poems; yet there are other relevant issues also: his concern for African culture and literature which is the mark of his identity and his longing for good values of the past, which are being increasingly lost and which are endangered by the intrusion of the foreign cultures.
Sallah’s first poetry book When Africa Was a Young Woman, 1980, brought him instant celebrity status. The book represents Africa as a young woman who has been raped and ripped of her treasures. The book begins with a section entitled “On Africa” which contains nine poems. They reflect Sallah’s defense of Africa during his early years in the United Sates. All poems share direct statements and demonstrate clear focus. In this book of poems, Sallah tries to prove wrong the stereotype response of seeing Africa as a deprived land by inculcating the image of a rich continent in our minds: rich not only in resources but in culture and values. Most of the poems in this book have fascinating titles. For example, the poem “If You Ask Me Why My Teeth Are Ivory White,” which is given the title of a question, draws the reader’s curiosity, and boasts Africa’s healthy, natural foods while the food of the West is based on chemicals and bio-engineering. The poet’s defense of Africa is quite clear:
Not that we have confectioneries
Just that I have not joined the Candy revolution
Further, in this poem, the poet discusses one general theme, cross-cultural encounter. This theme has another extension, that is, the call for the fight against colonialism and its legacies of cultural denigration and stigmatization of the natives. He uncovers the complex fate of modern Africa with two unobvious touches. First, the high school which did not only teach the Bible but also taught the western literature and demanded full understanding of this literature from its students. Sallah called it “Colonial Education” which tried to impose its literature and culture on Africa and replace African culture with a half-baked western culture. To Sallah, Africa’s fate is gloomy as a result of a non-selective acceptance of western culture which aimed at robbing Africa of its beauty, undermining of its indigenous strenghts— something which disturbed Africa’s own organic development. Second, the teacher who criticized his habit of eating sweets was Irish. Sallah is trying to show us the relative innocence of Africa and the harmfulness of the western cultural imports into Africa, in which artificiliaty is hailed into a global norm and value, with consequent negative consequences for the recipients. Sallah cautions that so-called Western Culture and its harmful export products to Africa, such as tobacco, violent movies, drugs, crime, and excessive individualism, needs to be put in check. Although Sallah is not a throw-back celebrating only what was great in the African past and closed to Western influences, he senses a danger in contemporary Africa where there is no grasp of the solid values of the past and where the landscape is polluted with imported ideas and products. The old is assaulted by a European cultural enterprise which seeks to impose and to undermine, and not to cooperate and build on Africa’s indigenous strengths. The book actually aims at showing Africa as a society that is more complicated than the reader or the questioner might think. Africa is not what Europeans or Americans depict it to be. Despite its shortcomings, it is a rich and complex continent of many ancient civilizations, of peoples with a rich endowment of skills, folklore and crafts. Africa should not stand and permit the production of harmful influences that undermine its cultural progress. These ideas are further reinforced in, “When Africa Was A Young Woman,” another poem mainly expressing Sallah’s desire to see Africa freed from foreign intervention and the stereotypes of the western minds—that is Africa a place of continuos war, famine and death.
In the poem “Cry Not,” Sallah displays the contradictions inherent in the West’s globalization of the materialist ethic and its consequences on non-western peoples. Because of the lure of money, many Africans immigrate to greener pastures. One of the main causes of immigration is the myth of making quick money in the West. Western films and movies, journals and magazines, and even novels glorify the life of material success and the acquisition of luxurious wealth. The quest for wealth is sometimes undertaken at the cost of enormous sacrifice—at all personal level. The poet sees a danger in this strategy. Is materialism worth the sacrifice at all costs? Sallah’s sees some value in simplicity and possible costs imposed by immigration on those left-behind. It is good to search for wealth and personal comfort but one should not do so at all costs—even selling one’s own soul. There exists the displacement of the immigrant, a theme that frequently appears in his work. Another is the emotional and sentimental deprivations for both parties as a consequence of immigration. He focuses in the above poem on women’s suffering when their husbands leave home to go abroad in search of wealth and success. The wives continue living in their dwellings, managing the lives of the household, including the children left behind.
In “Distant My Land,” one of the poems of The Kora Land, homesickness is a dominant issue which can be taken as one of the most important results of immigration. Sallah expresses longing for and loyalty to his place of birth, Africa:
Distant my land, but
Pure is my fixation
My heart-and-vein land
My diastole and systole
The image of the heart in this poem is to depict closeness- a place where strong passions are kept and which is also the center of nostalgic activity.
Sallah’s second book of poetry The Kora Land, 1988, consists of twenty-five poems. The poet uses the Gambia as his landscape. Sallah asserts that there exists a very unique deeply rooted literature, which is as rich and profound as that of the other nations. The literature, or more correctly, orature, is part of the oral tradition of the Gambia. The “Kora” is a twenty-one-string west African harp-lute used by Senegambian griots (members of the class of musicians, poets and entertainers who also record oral history) as an accompaniment in poetic rendering. It is an instrument used by traditional storytellers to narrate a certain type of literature. In this book, Sallah sees himself as a griot who sees the Gambia as connected with the rest of the world. In the third poem of this book, “Dialogue With My Dead Grandfather,” for example, Sallah illustrates the use of the oral tradition of storytelling and proverbial quotations among the people of the Gambia. Among the Wolof, the oral tradition is the reservoir of the culture, tradition, philosophy, history and morality of the people. The oral tradition, however, is passed from generation to generation, from the dead to the living, through word of mouth:
There are several ways
To have a dialog with a dead man.
Say, my grandfather,
whom I have never met
Sallah, here, tries to answer the questions of “Is there a Gambian Literature?” or “If so, what is its history?” by saying there are many ways to communicate with the past, with our ancestors and inherited values. One of these ways is through oral tradition which is the base of contemporary Gambian literature. To Sallah, literature can take the form of written scripts or, as in the Gambia proverbial quotations and storytelling.
In his poem “Generations,” there runs the call for the restoration of African values. He draws a comparison between two generations. Sallah uses simple language and direct statements to convey to the reader how the Gambia lived before the intervention of western culture. He starts with the house of his grandfather and tells us how his grandfather, grandmother and aunt used to eat. They, as well as the old Gambians, used to eat by using hands; they never used forks and spoons. Sallah then moves to his father’s house where spoons and forks were used, that is, when the foreign intervention began. He then tells us what he does in his house. He follows his grandfather’s way. He eats with bare hands. He loves the way Africa was before foreign intervention. He finally tells us about the new generations, the generations of today.
Today, the people of the Gambia are divided into groups. One prefers following one’s ancestors’ way of living and the other follows the western way:
In my grandfather’s house
We eat with brown fingers...
In my father’s house
We span our mouths with silver...
In my house, I prefer
The dark, raw road of my grandpa
But my children branch-
One follows fingers and mats
The other spoons and tablecloths
Both groups should congregate by adopting and returning to the ancestors values. Sallah gives a simple example to illustrate the notion of unity and the idea of disintegration. There must be unity and sameness among the people of the same land. There ought to be protest against the blind imitation of western values.
Dreams of Dusty Roads, 1993, is the third poetry book in which Sallah’s poetic maturity has been fully realized. The book expresses the personal experiences of the African intellectual abroad. This collection presents the immigrant’s sense of loss in a world not his own. There is the lack of the sense of belonging in this part of the world. Sallah discusses the theme of displacement, which increases by the sense of loss. The book is divided into three sections. The first section “Roots” contains 17 poems and deals with the poet’s experiences in the Gambia, in particular, and his experiences in Africa in general. The second section “Branches” contains seven poems and deals mainly with his experiences in America. The third “Dream-clouds” (In The Mind) has ten poems and deals with the hidden meanings and spiritual powers that initiate that feeling of awe and wander. It “deals with my metaphysical experiences with the mystical,” Sallah comments in the preface of the book. It is the experience of displacement, the new and different environment in the United States, that constitutes the source for most of the poems in this collection. The collection also contains some love poems as well as poems that deal with metaphysical questions: the relationship between the finite and the eternal, the relationship between us and the land. Again the language is simple and in the form of direct statements that express facts which are well-known to our hearts.
The first section “Roots” starts with the poem “Prayer for Roots.” In this poem, Sallah shows loyalty to roots, to the place of his birth, the Gambia. His Gambia inheritance is his identity. He feels as if he is unidentified without it, is oppressed and in need for relief.
When we are confronted
By pressures of place,
We seek solace
His residence in exile, the U.S. has not provided him with the sense of belonging, the sense of home. He also expresses the feeling of disappointment when he discovers that the fame and success he has achieved in exile are like skies without pillars. They are not real and amount to nothing:
For Skies without pillars
Crumble like ancient roofs
Skies without pillars
Crush to the dust of earth
To Sallah there is a strong bond between the individual and the land. The sense of settlement and belonging comes from one’s strong ties with the land, which is the roots and the final destination. If such bonds are weakened, the individual loses a sense of direction and identity and therefore crumbles like “ancient roofs.” He also believes that we have to stick to our roots in order to learn from our experienced ancestors and learn more about ourselves. Sallah, in an indirect way, says that sticking to our roots will not be positively received by the Western World whose benefit lies in uprooting those roots; therefore, we should firmly stick to them despite all threats.
So we must dig deep,
No matter for cyclones
Disturbing our place-bearing
We must preserve memory
As the Kora player in his Kora
Another call for return from exile is presented in the “Land Comes To Consciousness.” In this poem, Sallah smartly starts with words that tend to mock and belittle their addressee. Expressions like “Listen to” in “Listen to the wind-beaten traveler,” and “Look at his feet, soar,” somehow present the addressee in the state of doing something wrong. They function as a plea for exiles to return home. In this poem, Sallah also adds mockery to comedy in such a way that the final message is strongly conveyed to the reader. A comic line like “His face wrinkled as the buttocks of an old woman” expresses the most in the least. The poet suddenly stops the mode of mockery and comedy in such a way that seriousness is reserved.
“Branches,” the second section of his Dreams Of Dusty Roads, (America) involves memories of his childhood in the Gambia. The poet uses humor, sarcasm, and wit to portray America. In this section, there are also poems on love and aging. More important is that Sallah gives a very significant contrast between the west and the east in general. He compares one of the most important customs that exist in the East and ought to be in the West but is not there, i.e. the family ties. In his poem “Watching,” Sallah portrays the bitter feeling he gets when he sees his old grandmother beaten by time. It is faith combined with “propelling will” that keeps his grandmother alive. He also shows no respect for time which takes away our beloved ones.
Watching her rub her shriveled ears
With ngalam oil, I mourn
The degenerative mathematics
Of the body
He attempts at revealing the difference between an African and an American by showing us his big African heart, his fine deep concern for his old relative. His sorrow for his aging grandmother is a reflection of African family closeness and ties, which seem to disappear in American Society. The feeling of the bitterness toward a decaying lady by a young man is rarely experienced by an American.
Another poem that portrays the poet's view of America is “Television As God.” Here the poet tells us about the American Society, the American people who prefer watching TV to having a family conversation. They spend a lot of time in front of the TV but run short of time when it comes to family matters. This poem is an illustration of the difference between Americans and Africans in the family matters.
In America, television is a special god
With its priests and priestesses.
No one has time for conversations, or
For each other.
Sallah smartly uses TV as a medium through which he can criticize the American society. He says that Americans worship TV and consider it a special god; but TV is a dangerous discovery that could destroy people's values and ruin societies. In America, TV stars are thought to be sacred and both young and old Americans are so highly impressed by them. TV, the product of Western civilization, is one of the main causes of American society's moral offenses. He also adds that children learn vulgarity from TV. The poet writes:
And the young pour libations
To the sacred ancestors in Hollywood,
And the babies learn their words
Even before they know how to crawl.
Children are so busy keeping up with the latest on music and movies that they do not have the time for their school.
And mothers wonder
Why their kids are doing poorly in school
And their grammar is as good as chimpanzees'.
“Meditation on America” is a continuation of Sallah's sarcasm on America. In this poem, Sallah criticizes black Americans who seem lost and unaware of their cause. Blacks have forgotten their roots, their African originality and values. They are too busy with the lure of America, music and drugs to consider establishing themselves in the American society:
And a brother comes playing rap music, imitating
The fat boys. He carries a big black Panasonic radio
On the high contours of his steroid schedules.
He musics with his lips. He musies like a street jester.
The third section, “Dream-Clouds (In the Mind),” contains ten poems. In the preface of his poetry book Dreams of Dusty Roads, Sallah comments on this section by saying, “the last section ‘Dreams’ deals with my metaphysical experience with the mystical.” He also talks about this section by saying, “Dream kingdom, to me, is nothing more than that mystical world which casts intrusive light even on the most trivial of our every day experiences. Call it ‘God encounter,’ interphase it with the ‘god force,’ ‘transcendental experiences’ or ‘feelings of absolute dependency’-- it is that feeling of ‘awe’/ ‘wonder’ which points at something beyond our vulgar finiteness.”
Another poem that expresses his experience in the U.S. is “The Evaded Moon.” In the poem, Sallah shows the feeling of superiority of the West on the East. He is being observed as a creature coming from another planet. There is also an implication of the untutored American mind for Africa. Sallah is invited by a host-family to thanksgiving dinner. He bitterly writes saying:
And it seems as if history reenacted
Around the cherrywood table.
And I am suddenly the exotic mine
For Anthropological excavations.
As one go through this poem, one finds that each stanza starts with “And it seems,” a deliberate attempt that shows his frustration. Here, Sallah conveys to us the way Americans view Africans. Sallah is being questioned by everyone around that cherrywood table. To them, he symbolizes primitiveness, i.e. Africa. He goes on to say:
And it seems Africa is never
Ancient Egypt, or Benin;Timbuktu, or Kilwa
It seems Africa is perpetually
Cheap stable for the touristic media,
Censored only to the famine and ruin.
The poet attempts to present a different viewpoint of others about his homeland. There is an insistence on correcting the Western's stereotype image of Africa. He also says that Africans know this incorrect view. There is a sharp sarcasm of American's insufficient knowledge of the real Africa.
Sallah's poetry is famous for a number of poetic forms: form, here, means the linguistic competency, figurative language and the structure of the poem. The language of most of his poems is simple and to the point. This is based on his belief that poetry is a means of teaching and conducting and, therefore, must convey its message in the simplest form. Most of his lines follow a simple or a complex sentential structure. For example the following line is easy to understand. “When we are confronted / By pressures of place / We seek solace.” The simplicity of this verse line taps on an important human feature: any human being will desperately search for his own comfort when he faces the dilemmas of his environment. This feeling exists in the heart of every living creature.
His poetry takes the form of free verse. It sometimes takes the form of regular stanzas. The poem “The Evaded Moon” illustrates this feature. He displays his great frustration in this poem by starting most of the stanzas with “And it seems.” Sallah enhances this theme by elaborate description of the invitation to a thanksgiving dinner. He further uses a hierarchical structure. In his Dreams of Dusty Roads, the structure of the book is the most attractive feature. The structure is in the form of an upside down pyramid. The first section is named “Roots,” the second “Branches,” the third “Dream Clouds.” Primarily, it is a tree-wise structure. The structure illustrates the contrast between Africa and America. The former is the genesis. The latter is the branches. The third is the human mind which judges the soundness of each symbol.
Another technical aspect of his works is the movement from the particular to the universal. In “Generations,” as in most of his poems, Sallah starts with the particular and, through its development, links it with the universal. His grandfather's house stands for the whole of Africa. All the persons eat with their fingers in his grandfather's house as all Africans eat using their brown fingers.
The most striking and outstanding feature of his works is the explicit use of figurative language. He uses symbols, images, ...etc. which are related to his own culture and to other cultures. The figurative language forms a comparison between the East and the West and brings Sallah’s point home. The contrast between the East and the West is shown by different kinds of images. In “If You Ask Me Why My Teeth Are Ivory White,” the title presents the most important symbol that is, ivory. Ivory is of the contrastive nature with “Candy.” It presents the naturalness of Africa which has not been affected by modern destructive civilization. There is a protest against the use of chemicals which actually destroy nature. The poet shows that the sweets, a product introduced by western cultures, is harmful for our teeth. Africans eat fresh fruits unlike westerns who get their fruits in cans. The ivory whiteness of his teeth reflects the intact naturalness of Africa. One cannot say that Africans are deprived from good things just because they do not have candy. Of course candy represents the “outcome of civilization” which is more damaging to humanity. More and more products of other cultures are being infused into the African society on a daily basis, and it ought to be stopped. Cigarettes are another harmful product of the West. They are a symbol of the western aggressive greed. Africa is being polluted by these products.
The above symbols show the poet's pride in his homeland. To present the deep rooted African history, the poet designs his collection of poems Dreams of Dusty Roads as a tree whose roots are planted in Africa. The general symbol is a tree. The first section is titled “Roots” which deals with the poet's experience in Africa. The second section “Branches” deals with the poet's experiences in the United States. If America is the branches, Africa is the origin of the branches. In other words, the western civilization is the result of the African civilization. It has grown on the shoulders of the African civilization. Each symbols present the genuine African culture. The third “Dream-Clouds” symbolizes the mind’s ability to form a judgment out of the trustworthiness of each symbol.
In addition, Sallah also taps on one of the most important human attributes, this is, the family ties. In his poem “Television As God,” he presents a contrast between the eastern world and the western one. TV occupies the hearts and minds of the Americans. They spend most of their time watching TV. It is just like an idol worshipped by its watchers. It keeps them too busy to talk over family problems, which is essential in strengthening family bonds. This results in the lack of mutual family concerns. In other words, an American will not feel any regret or bitterness toward any member of the family. In contrast to this western symptom, Sallah's poem “Watching” displays the bitter feeling for his decaying grandmother. This is because family bond is very strong and essential in the existence of an eastern individual. This belief has been inherited, taught, and developed among family members of the East. The grandmother is the remaining image of the past's great values and a source of great knowledge. She is the symbol of family congregation. The symbols of both poems illustrate the poet's contempt for the West and his reverence of the East. His contempt for the West is presented in the use of “cherrywood table” as a symbol of the intentional destruction of nature. In “The Evaded Moon,” the poet describes his invitation to dinner. He had his dinner on a table made of cherrywood. Cherry trees are cut for the sake of making luxurious items. Such actions reflect the carelessness of the Western people. In contrast to the West, a tree is a symbol of life in Africa. They value the tree as sacred but the Western people do not.
Sallah employs history and epic figures in his poetry. He says, “To me history is an elaboration of collective memory: the ambitions, the dreams, the hopes, the frustrations of both ordinary people and elite. History can be comic or tragic or a combination of both. In my poetry, I have invoked epic figures, such as a Kochi Brama that ubiquitous sage in Wolof folklore, to discuss contemporary issues such as the changing roles of women in Senegambian Society.” History is used frequently as symbol of revival against the sordid present. He tries to compare the glories of the past with the catastrophies of the present. It is also a direct indication to the Africans’ thorough culture and tradition. The poet uses history as a means to inform others of the Africans’ rooted origin. He also uses epic figures as images representing the power, authority and dignity of Africa. Such images directly indicate that Africa can be protected from any invasion and can put an end to the western illegal intervention.
Sallah's concern for his home is highly realized in most of his poems. Images of Africa always characterize Sallah's work. In his poem “Love,” one of the poems of Dreams of Dusty Roads, African images, like hyena, giraffe, elephant, firewood, the bentenki tree, and the use of words like “A spear should be thrust into my heart,” are used as decorating words that add the sense of naturalness, the sense of the Gambia, of Africa. In The Kora Land, the title demonstrates The “Kora” as a symbol of literary form in Senegambia. It is that instrument through which Senegambian literature is transmitted from one generation to another. This instrument is the symbol of a great rooted culture, oral literature and tradition. It stands for the preservation of Senegambian tradition and customs. He also uses the color of African skins as a symbol of the conflict between different cultures. In “Generation,” the brown color of fingers represents pure Africans who are not affected by the western ideas. But the silver color of spoons is the color of the western. The idea is that Africans eat with their bare hands, which is the basic traditional habit. Those who eat with silver are no longer pure Africans and, therefore, should return to their origin. Brown fingers and spoons display the same idea. The symbols show the poet's call for the restoration of African values.
Conclusion
It can be concluded that every part of this discussion has its own benefit in facilitating the comprehension of Sallah's poetry. Sallah discusses almost everything relevant to human life. His life in his homeland has developed some of the themes he deals with. The colonial education made him write defensive and rebellious poetry. Most of his work is a protest against the western intervention in Africa's internal affairs. His life in exile has its own kind of poetic manifestation. Sallah deals in more than one work with the theme of displacement. This subject is embodied in his discussion of the causes and results of immigration. The use of history is a way of reviving African tradition and culture and an affirmation of the existence of African literature. His poetry is characterized by its continual presentation of advice, entertainment and teaching. His poetry is very largely a poetry of revolt but his attitude of revolt is of aesthetic and not of political orientation. Sallah’s poetic language is simple and frank, for he believes that it is simplicity that can have more a profound and enduring influence and impact on the general public readers. A poet who uses a very simple language runs a great risk. The risk of his simplicity degenerating into barrow ness and sterility. But Sallah never allows his language to degenerate. His language is simple but never lifeless or insipid. At its best, his poetry acquires a gorgeous simplicity. But even at its worst, it is never utterly lifeless.
His figurative language is taken from ordinary life. It is a variation of native and non-native objects. It mostly establishes the contrast between the West and the East. One of the main sources of charm in his poetry is the use of his judiciously selected homely images. His poetry will survive not only because of its quality of ideas and emotions but also because of the quality of its images.
Bibliography
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First Hand Look": Greensboro News and Record. North Carolina. May 18, 1989.
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Dunton, Chris. “Experience of Displacement, A review of T.M. Sallah's Dreams of Dusty Roads”: West Africa. Jan. 31-Feb. 6, 1994. pp. 191.
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Larson, Charles R. "Writing from the Third World": World Literature Today. Winter 1981.
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-----" A poetic Journey into Experience:" Daily Times. (A Nigerian Newspaper). August 15, 1990.
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22-23.
Appendix I: An Interview with Mr. Tijan Sallah
The following is an edited interview with Mr. Sallah conducted by the researcher and Prof. Thakur on May 4, 1999.
Ali: Mr. Tijan Sallah, I would like you to tell us more about the first sort of education you got in the Gambia; what was it, and how was the atmosphere, what did you study, as I did not find much information?
Sallah: I think, in some of the materials, you will find some about my early education. It is very difficult. Until the age of five or six, a lot of the early influences, basically, were within the family, you know. That’s a sort of education in a way; is like, groping with the environment, knowing relatives, learning names of places and things. That was the early form of education, but the sort of first conscious form of education I had was Koranic education; I was sent to Koranic school; but, there, much of what I did was memorizing things in Arabic, but I did not know really what they meant. But, what it taught me was root memorization, you know, there was the process of memorizing and also the ability to read a script; being able to distill onto an undisciplined sort of mind a formal sort of script. That’s the first transition. But then this was around the age of five/six. And then, around six I started formal western education where I went to a primary school called Sere Kunda Primary School—
Ali: Yah, where was that based?
Sallah: It was in my hometown Sere Kunda. It was a school which had six different levels basically; call it primary one to six. And we had to go through this, and then take an exam which was called “The West-African Examination Council” in order to get to high school. They had to weed students very early in order to determine those who are eligible to go to high school and those who would leave school and find themselves alternative careers. So, in primary school, that’s where I began to learn, of course, basic things.
Ali: Was it in English?
Sallah: Yes, it was all in English.
Ali: All in English-- the primary school.
Prof. Thakur: And the teachers were all your countrymen?
Sallah: Yeah, mostly, we had a few who were foreign; but the majority were my own countrymen.
Prof. Thakur: Were the teachers there of a certain nationality? And what was the nationality of those teachers?
Sallah: Mostly we had Irish teachers/Irish priests and so on—
Ali: Up to this stage, you had not been to Saint. Augustine High School yet?
Sallah: No, this was in primary school. And in primary school, of course, you learn the basic things. We learn the English alphabet; we learnt nursery rhymes also like, you know, “Humpty Dumty,” the typical sort of the British Colonial Education. This was all over the Empire. In India—it was all the same. In Hong Kong, and in all the countries that were under the British colonialism. You had a whole repertoire of nursery rhymes you learn, you know, “Jack and Jill went up the hill,” / “to fetch a pale of water,” I don’t know if you know about these nursery rhymes.
Ali: Yeah.
Sallah: Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall/Humpty Dumpty had a great fall/All the kings horses/All the kings men, could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. I mean all sorts of nursery rhymes that we learnt. And, of course, at the time I was in primary school, we were still under a colonial rule. Because, Gambia did not get independence until 1965. And I started primary schooling around the years 1962-63 … 63-64. So we were still under colonialism.
Ali: Aha!—Great Britain was there!
Sallah: Yeah, we were a British colony, small tiny colony; though, not one of the controversial colonies because we did not have much of resources. I mean we did not have resources like those countries which had huge national resources. Gambia has only peanuts, groundnuts; and, a river which allowed the British to get into the hinterland.
Ali: Yeah, I see.
Sallah: So much of my early schooling…ah…we were exposed to lots of British imperial nursery. Of course, we learnt the alphabet, we numbers, basic arithmetic, and so on.
Ali: Yes.
Sallah: you learn to read beginning with the alphabet, and then the English script. And, from one class to the other there was a filtering process, a process of screening to make sure that you are competent to move to the next level. That’s, you had basic skill of reading, writing, and arithmetic basically before you move to the next level. And, there were exercises, tests, and exams that you took. And as you progressed, you were introduced to a more elaborate subjects like basic general science where you learn about your immediate environment, you learn about trees, you learn about birds categories and so on—
Ali: Was poetry there?
Sallah: ha?
Ali: Was poetry any part of that?
Sallah: The only exposure to poetry in those years was nursery rhymes. We learnt a lot of
English nursery rhymes. Some of the more enterprising teachers used to introduce local nursery rhymes where we would sing songs in our own native language and then it gets closer to your heart. But, many of the teachers tried to discourage that because they wanted us to speak English, good English.
Prof. Thakur: When you look back, what kind of feeling do you have towards your teachers in that primary school?
Sallah: It was is a feeling of nostalgia, I would say; a certain feeling of a lost world, a world never to be retrieved again, you know. But, somehow, it was a very inspiring world, because you were introduced a lot of new vistas, in the early years, a whole world of learning including a new script. Being able to read books is one of the most amazing things that a human being can go through. Being able to read a script, it is a movement from a world of sound to a world of basically a visual exercise of the mental faculty; from visual to mental, you know; it is a different transition.
Prof. Thakur: When you look back, does the image of any one of the teachers in that school come to you more vividly than the other teachers?
Sallah: Yeah, yes, there were two types of teachers; there were teachers whom I remember because of the enormous amount of learning you got from them which was done in a very open atmosphere of nurturing and trying to pull out whatever is stored in you;—that learning was not, across the world only taking in, you know but also giving out, you know, that there is something in you which is untapped and this to be brought out: there were teachers like that. And, I found that teachers who brought that most were the young teachers. You know, when I was in primary school, we had a teachers-training institute where they used to teach and train people who finished their high school or college and needed the teaching skill to come back and teach in primary school. They were subjected upto six months of training on how to bring, teach little kids, teach them in primary school. Teaching in primary school was not that easy; you know, teaching kids of five, six years, seven years old is almost a difficult…so we had a teacher training college called “YUNDM Training College”… Y, U, N, D, M where some of the teachers who were being trained had a period of internship where they’d come and do actual teaching of kids in primary schools. So, these teachers, when they came, were the most exciting teachers for us kids at the time. There were the regular teachers we had, who were already trained, but, somehow, it was routine to them. But the new teachers, who were coming on internship—
Ali: Yeah.
Sallah: The reason why we liked them at the time was that they used to teach us a lot of songs. The regular teachers were too formal in teaching the basics and the rigors of basic education. These teachers used to come and tell us stories, they would teach us songs, you know, they would treat us nicely while the other teachers used to flog us if you did not learn your vocabulary, if you did not know how to spell and so on—
Ali: If you don’t do your homework, hah!
Sallah: Yeah, you know what they call, “spare the rod and spoil the kid” or something like that—
Ali: “Spare the rod and spoil the kid.”
Sallah: Yeah. So, this sort of tremendous enthusiasm we had for the new teachers, and the sort of routine thing that you have with your old teachers—was a very strange combination. There was the headmaster of the school at the time; in fact, it was a headmistress. A woman was the head of the primary school, and she was called Mrs. Hariette Ndow, the last name was N, D, O ,W: Mrs. Ndow. She was one of the most amazing headmistresses or headmasters available in any school, even when I went to high school. And she was a Gambian…and she was very interested in grooming young kids to prosper and then eventually to move into high school and then eventually to become the pioneers of the society—
Ali: leaders. Yes—
Sallah: yeah, leaders of the society. And she used to sacrifice an enormous amount of her time for us in terms of…even after regular hours of teaching by coming back in weekends to have classes with us on basics. She was very strict so for that reason she was feared. For me, she had a tremendous influence on our education because she went beyond, you know, her own responsibility as a headmistress to actual teaching. It was one of those basically the best primary schools when compared with other primary schools in… the town and also in the country. You know. And she put a lot of emphasis on work. So we had a garden in the school where we grew carrots, we grew vegetables also.
Khalid: Cucumbers.
Sallah: cucumbers … a … lettuce … am—
Khalid: Radish.
Sallah: Radish, exactly, we grew radishes; I mean all kinds in this garden. And we used to prepare the beds in the garden. First, we would prepare the soil, and then put manure, cow manure.
Ali: Well, did you like that work?
Sallah: Well, it was another side to our education, because she emphasized not only the formal classroom, but also the work aspect of schooling. We would grow our own vegetables. You would come every evening and water the thing and let them grow. And then, when the vegetables grew, we would sell them to people outside and the money went to the school. So there was this element of learning that she brought up.
Khalid: Self-independence! Would you call it, she was trying to develop in you those things: self-independence—
Sallah: Self-independence and also the dignity of work. She taught us the importance of work and dignity of work. There is another dimension to this sort of learning, which is interaction with nature, and natural things. It is the earth itself. So, we spent a lot of time, growing these vegetables and at the end we harvest them, you know, and we let the soil fall for a while until sometime…we grew crops again.
Prof. Thakur: Do you think that in addition to independence and commercial aspect that kind of exercise brought you closer to the motherland? Do you think, when you look back, there is some sort of influence on your poetry?
Sallah: Certainly, I use a lot of plant imagery, you can see, a lot of natural plants, birds and natural things. And in a sense, it relates back to the flora and the fauna of the earth, our roots. It is a sort of agrarian image, the image of living in rural or semi-rural setting. Sere Kunda, the town I grew in, was 8 mile from the capital city Banjul. But at that time, in the sixties, it was still semi-rural. In all the surrounding part of the town, people had farms and grew crops. And, in fact, in the town itself, even though in the city, they have banned people having animals. In the town I grew in, we used to have goats and sheep wandering around. In fact, my father has a small farm and we kept a small cattle, sheep and goats and I used to go and tie them on stumps so that they can graze and in the evening bring them back home. But certainly there was, going back to your question, the element of walking in the garden and cultivating all kinds of vegetables, you know, working with the soil. For me, the exciting part was it linked me to my learning in the classroom, because I was studying general science where we were taught about what you call photosynthesis. You know, when you study these things you do not really learn because they are all theoretical and abstract. But when you go and put the seeds in the soil and you see the potentiality which comes out of this tiny little seed growing this big. You know, these were some of the wonders of the earth.
Prof. Thakur: As it was a primary school, there must have been children of all the sexes, small kids, boys and girls. At that stage generally it is a mixed education. Do you think that some of the children are still vividly present in your memory?
Sallah: There were two types of kids. There were the kids who were smart, who did very well in the class, were at the top of the class; and they formed a sort of elite. They socialized among themselves. But there were also the bullies who were the stronger kids and were muscular; they learnt skills of wrestling, and beating other kids. And you learnt to fear them. I was timid. Ha, ha! Basically, I was not, you know, I was not sport-oriented at all. There were some who used to play soccer. I was not really soccer-oriented; I was more oriented towards exams, arts, and that sort of thing. So there were the kids that stick in your mind, who were the bullies in the school and you feared them. But, now when you look at them, it was sort of consequential… because it was might at the time that was considered; you know even though, physical strength is important, but that’s not my choice. There are much more important values in life.
Ali: You said you were interested in books and arts instead of getting in touch with these people. What sort of books did read other than the school curriculum?
Sallah: Well…am—
Prof. Thakur: At that primary stage?
Sallah: yeah…I read a lot of books but I do not remember specific texts that I read at that time. I will have to go back and research; I remember some books with pictures in them—.
Ali: Like short stories for kids and teenagers?
Sallah: Yes, yes. And, and books that teach you the alphabet. I remember a book we used to call…we used to have, “Marry, Marry, come here. Is Marry here? She is not here? She is not here?” There was a lot of repetition for effect; and teaching the sense of space and time. And something like that, you know, conversations. And, then, animals also in the book, I remember something about the donkey and sheep in the book. But, it was more trying to relate language with the environment. And, I do not remember specific texts at that time.
Prof. Thakur: Is there any touching event, touching incident from primary school that still vividly present in your memory ?
Sallah: Touching incident? You mean school-related ?
Prof. Thakur: Primary school days.
Sallah: I remember one time we were supposed to go to school, and I remember being very naughty, and going with a number of my other colleagues. There was a stream, a bond in the surrounding areas of the town. We decided not to go to school; and, went to explore this bond. And I did not how to swim and this was a bond in an area which was called Eypo Town. And my parents thought I was at school at the time. And as we strayed away and went to this bond, the colleagues I had were good swimmers. I went to the water with them in a boat, and the boat strayed in the middle of the bond. And this was a bond with fish and some other creatures. I don’t know whether it was a crocodile or something, (ha, ha). And we strayed to the middle of the bond. And it was at the last day of the school, and here, I was in the middle, in the boat, you know. And all others had swum and come back to shore, and I was wandering what my parents would think. It was the biggest dilemma; I thought I was going to die because I almost jumped into the water—
Khalid: You were going to drown! Ha, ha.
Sallah: Yeah! So, luckily one of the eldest of my colleagues, he could swim. He decided to come to the boat and decided to pull the boat to the shore; and that’s how he saved my life. I remember he was called Malik Cesay. So there were this sort of incidents. But this was more a survival incident. In Primary school, one book I remember was a book called “Student Companion”. This was a book, really I liked that book, filled with a lot of clichés, English clichés. But, we used it to help us, guide us more. Well, I was very advanced in primary school. I was at primary five; primary six, about to take the “West-African Examination Council” to get into high school. And this book had all kinds of English…old English expressions like, for example, it was a red-letter day, red-letter day…for all the intense purposes. These are the expressions you learn there. There were many of these type of expressions; very common English usage. They are also now considered clichés. But, and we used them in English composition because there was a lot of emphasis on writing essays when I was in primary school. They would ask you “write a letter to a friend in some other part of the town telling them about your town”—
Ali: Ah, yes.
Sallah: “Suppose you had to travel to some place, write a letter to your parents, you know telling them about your experience. And so on, you know, “what do you like most about your school”. You know, there were these sort of essays which are comprehensive.
Prof. Thakur: That was a bout the primary school days.
Sallah: Yeah.
Ali: There was also…I believe Sallah you went to the Reverend Saint Augustine High school you may please describe the things that you used to study and you used to like more there.
Sallah: See when I went to high school. First I had to take an examination and I had to pass it. And then went to high school. And when I went to high school the education became much more structured and formalized. Am… we had to take the basic courses like English. Initially like mathematics, science, became more and more. But the first few years we had general science. But as you went to third, fourth, and fifth year, you had to now specialize in chemistry, biology, physics, you know—
Ali: Yes.
Sallah: Then we have to study English literature. We studied Bible because it was a Catholic high school. It was all male. My primary school education was co-education. I was in a high school, this high school was all male school run by an Irish priest and we had to study all the old testament and the new testament of the Bible. You to memorize… Literature, we had to study works of Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, etc.
Ali: Hamlet.
Sallah: Hamlet and so on. And in the first two years we had to learn Latin also because at that time Latin was still in school curriculum. Later, it was learned as an old language. But, during the year I started high school, we studied Latin, and if you did not remember your Latin vocabulary you were flogged. Particularlly, it was a good Irish priest by the name of Father Comma who had this Scotland belt. And he used to flag you if you did not know your Latin vocabulary, or when you came late to school. So there were these things, ha.
Ali: If I say there is still something that you still remember, keep remembering every now and then. Based on your experience in that school, what was that thing, or things?
Ali: Well, certainly I remember this influence of this particular teacher named Father Jhon Gough. Because my whole world of literature, in some sense, was shaped by this teacher. We used to study literature with other teachers, but he began interested in essays I wrote. And he began asking me, “why don’t you try your hand at poetry?” He had detected something poetic in the things I write. And he was teaching classical English literature, you know, William Wordsworth, and these poets you know. So, I started reading, I started experimenting with poetry. But I thought poetry was rhyme initially—
Ali: Given rhyme is poetry so –
Sallah: Yeah, I began in fact imitating all English. And I was writing in English. The first poem I wrote was a tribute to Kwame Nkrumah. He was the first president of Ghana. He was very interested in uniting Africa: Nehro, Tito, Nasa, you know these were the early non-aligned leaders. Very powerful leader; the founding father of Ghana. So I wrote this poem, I said, because Kwame was widely… because of his national western proclamations and. So I wrote this poem called “The African Redeemer” and it was published in the High school paper. A lot of my colleagues said, “O, we didn’t know you are a poet”—
Ali: That was the first published poem?
Sallah: Yes, the first published poem, exactly. So, I kept on writing. That encounter with John Gough, kept on. I kept on writing. And he would occasionally sit with me, read my things, and encourage me further and so on. And he told me, “Maybe one day, kids at the school will be reading your work you know in some of our anthologies,” and I thought it was a joke at the time, you know. And I just kept on writing, but it is very important to have that early influence, to have that early encouragement. Teachers can make a difference, you know, all by the way the push you, encourage you
Ali: Yeah, motivate you more and more.
Sallah: Yeah.
Prof. Thakur: Where was that poem published?
Sallah: It was published in the school paper. The school paper—
Prof. Thakur: a magazine?
Sallah: Yeah, school magazine. It was called Suno Kibaro: S, U, N, O, Suno; Kibaro, K, I, B, A, R, O. Suno means our, Kibaro means, basically our news.
Ali: yes.
Sallah: It is a word in—
Ali: Gambian language.
Sallah: Yeah. I mentioned it in some of the interviews. I talked about this particular word.
Ali: Yes, yes.
Sallah: Yeah.
Ali: Other than this teacher… Can we say that he also helped you in shaping the elementary understanding of poetry, in terms of guiding you how to write that?
Sallah: Yeah, certainly he gave me the first inspiration. I kept writing. I think in 1975 or 76, you will get the dates in then, they had a program over Radio Gambia, our national radio, called “Writers of the Gambia” in which I was invited and then interviewed. But that time, we did not have really major writers; it was only one internationally known writer. His name was Lenrie Beters; he was a medical doctor. He studied in Cambridge, England and he came back and practiced in Gambia. That was the only internationally known writer we had. He had published two books of poetry and a novel. In fact I used to go to his clinic and bring my sheets of poetry and then he would read it and say “remove these old English words, remove them,” you know. So he helped me, as you will see in some of the biographical information you have in “Lenrie Beters.” He gave me my first national publicity, you know, the interview with radio Gambia.
Ali: So you used to share your poems with him?
Sallah: Yes, with the medical doctor, yeah. But my first national publicity was over the radio, and they asked me about how I did start writing, and all the sorts of questions about a beginning of a writer. Then, I left the Gambia in 1977 to the U.S. and while I was in the U.S., I went for one year to high school. See, I was interested in getting into university in the States. But there were no university in my country, so I decided to work for one year as an audit clerk in the Gambia and I saved some money to be able to make my fare to the U.S. And, luckily a high school accepted me. I was accepted at some colleges also but I had no money. My idea was only to go to US, And luckily, there was this high school in Georgia called Rabun Gap Nacoochee School that accepted me with a work-studying program, i.e. do find work and pay my school. So I went there and did find some work and finished my last year and then, applied to certain colleges and universities. And while I was at Rabun Gap, there was an American poet. He was a well-known American national poet called H.L. Van Brunt. And Van Brunt had a program in high school where he used to bring young experimenting writers from the southern part of the United States. They used to meet in Georgia in the summer. And he used to hold creative writing classes where you will write some poetry or a critique of each other and hold poetry reading in front of the audience; and, this would go for the entire summer. And if there were some good pieces, then he would suggest some places to sent them for publication. So, I participated in the writers workshop at the Center for the performing of arts in Georgia. And, he became very interested in my writings, particularly images and so on and kept on encouraging me.
Ali: Did you get any of your poems, which you used to send, published? I mean you told me, when Brunt found any good writings he’d send them for publication?
Sallah: Yes. In fact, the first thing I published in the U.S. was in 1978 or 77, and it was called “Wormeaters”. And, it was published at the Atlanta Gazette and was basically a social satire about people who give in public one image and in private altogether different. And I see these people as worms.
Ali: You continued your study in that Rabun?
Sallah: Yeah, I finished high school there and I went to Berea College, Kentucky. And there, I kept on writing, I edited a number of campus publications. I was hired to work…I started studying economics and then liked it, even though I had a lot of contacts with people in the English department. In fact, the head of the English department was one of my first teachers and he liked my English, I mean my knowledge of English so he recommended me to work as a tutor in the writing lab. They had a laboratory for American kids with writing problems. So I worked at the lab for the next four years. And I was very easy with work and campus as a tutor, but I studied economics mainly and mathematics and these sorts of things…science. But economics was my specialty. And it was when I was at Berea that I began to publish in U.S., England, India, and Nigeria, I mean across the world basically. And at one point I was invited to Eastern Kentucky University to do a reading of my work. And in the audience was a very distinguished professor from India called “Prof. Pushio Tablal” and he was the publisher of the Writers Workshop books. And he liked my writing so much, and he told me why don’t you send me your manuscript. And I sent him the manuscript, and he looked at it, and he told me that he was going to publish it as part of the Writers Workshop series. So I got it first work published in 1980 with Writers Workshop and he sent it out to the largest daily Calcutta which was called Amerit Bazar Patrika. And it was reviewed, a small short review in it which he sent me. And that gave me my first publicity and then it was reviewed also in the BBC by Florance Ax. So that was my early sort of adventure to publishing.
Ali: And the first book you wrote; it was poetry. It was When Africa Was a Young Woman. When did you write all of the poems. Were there something that was written when you were in the Gambia? Or most of them in the United States?
Sallah: The majority I wrote when I was in the States. Before I came to the States, I had already written a collection of poems. But what happens with lots of poets is you begin to repeat your work and then you say, “Oh, should never have published that. I should never,” (ha, ha!) But you know, you have to have a beginning at some point. But at that stage good poets have a perfection syndrome that on a piece of poem you have to keep working on it until you really know it were.perfect.” So in a sense, when I look at some of my earliest works, I say, Oh, I wish I could take them out from the market and revise them or something”. But it has happed; there have been poets who revised their work: take Eliot in his “The Waste Land.” The early version of “The Waste Land” is not what has been published as “The Waste Land.” It was Ezra Bound who cut down a lot.
Ali: Of the three books of poetry: Kora Land, Dreams of Dusty Roads, and When Africa Was a Young Woman. Which one you like most?
Sallah: Which I do like most?
Ali: Yes.
Sallah: It is very difficult to choose in a way, but I tend to think Kora Land. Kora Land is a collection of poems dealing with the Gambia. If you know the Gambia and the culture, it is a world perfectly rooted in place. So that’s what I call it “Kora.”; “Kora” is a string instrument—
Ali: A twenty-one string—
Sallah: Yeah, used by the oral historians to tell the history of families going back to generations. And in that work I saw myself basically as going back to narrate the history of this land. Yes, because many writers write out of exile. It seems as if when you are distant, your culture, your society, you are able to see it much better than when you are within in a way. And it seems your imagination is able to run more freely back than when you’re within with the drudgery of everyday life. I mean, may be I can not be certain of all writers; There are some writers who can be within and can alienate their mind: can go outside of the society and see it better. But there are many writers who write out of exile. I found myself almost utilizing enormous powers of memory than my imagination to get that. But I like Kora Land because I think in it I tried to wrestle with various aspects of the society. If you get the book itself, I can show you specific texts on things I tried to do.
Ali: Yes, we have the book here.
Sallah: Yes, I will read, some on tradition, some on…
Khalid: Use a pencil.
Sallah: Use a sticker; I use paper sticker, that you can take away. Pencil also so you can wipe part … . Eliot, that’s why, you are studying Eliot’s I mean there are a lot of references in my poetry; I mean a sort of Eliot’s approach to poetry. In fact, I had a friend, a very distinguished accountant from India called Ihab Majenda. And he used to hang his poetry at his house. He thought that T.S. Eliot was extremely good. “the only poets who write good poetry are those who write in Eliot’s tradition.” He was really a sort of Eliot’s fan. He used to take “The Waste Land” and read and then read taboo, (ha, ha ha!)
Ali: So what is the most significant poem of these Kora Land poems?
Sallah: It is a very difficult to choose, I liked this poem—because—
Ali: Yeah, when I said which poem of the three you liked most, you said: The Kora Land. Probably, there is something you liked most even in the Kora Land.
Sallah: This poem is about a person who comes to visit you in the wrong hour, unexpected. Just the wrong hour, it is very common in our society.
And this one is called “Dawn Visit:”
You came at dawn.
Cocks have not yet crowed.
How can I open the door.
You are a stranger.
And even if I know you,
The night is not meant
For visiting.
This you must know—
There is a cockcrow
For everything.
My ancestors loved strangers,
But not one at dawn.
Not one who vies with the moon and stars.
Not one who like a scavenger,
Eats the green of the night.
We are day people.
If you come by daylight
When the afternoon dangles yellow
On the cactus and grass,
I will spread my tablecloth.
Everything for you—
Salmon, bread, shrimp,
Lemon, water, ginger drink.
Eat, drink to satisfaction.
But now you come at dawn
When early birds
Are drunk asleep in guava trees,
When the rats that wrestle in darkness
Gnow brown cassavas,
And you want me to open
The door for you.
How can I
When grey-bearded nights
Are not meant for visiting?
Ali: It is about expecting somebody, I mean not expecting somebody, and then he comes.
Sallah: Yea it is a form of socially convenient poems. You can stick over it in all kind of meanings.
Prof. Thakur: Before you tell us about one of your poems. Two questions from early experiences: you had your early invisible influence of Islam in your home; and you were exposed to the Bible and—Likewise, there might be some other beliefs. Is there any significance of these towards eastern beliefs? Or do you think they still persist somehow in your poetry and can be seen there?
Sallah: It is a very tough question? But it is a very profound in a sense. I think these trances of influences in a way for me have led to a widening of views in the sense of growing up. You can not help it, that limited world of the village or the town itself, that parochial world of my mother soap is always the best; because you can not test it; whenever you taste some other soap, you compare it to your own mother soap. That limited world, in itself has its own limitation. I mean it has its own restriction and that the experience of Islam and Moslems world, and the experience of the bible under Christian influence. These influences expanded the world of view and enlarged it. In fact, it created a world to me of… powers because I think there is a danger always when you are limited within particular canons, particular world of views, you do not have an understanding. In fact, to me it created a vista to see the world much larger. And I remember, just going to a Koranic school and I learnt to read the Koran and so I learnt all the Islamic ethics and teachings that you go through. But then I saw that people who, they do not understand; I don’t have my experience of my high school reading of the Bible and so on, did not see what were the links between Islam and Christianity. In fact, they thought Islam and Christianity was a pagan world of view it self, was not accepted. And they do not see that, in fact, these traditions in which I lived, preach some universal message of peace, the respect for humanity and for the universe. I mean there is a certain universal messages of treating people well, treating the universe well, being at peace when you, which, you find all these traditions. But there are differences also you see. I mean, I think the emphasis there is on the monotheistic emphasis on a one God, there is no emphasis on the different prophetic traditions and so one stops with one prophetic tradition There is a monopolistic tendency in some of these faiths also, but I think that monopolistic come from lack of understanding of the other faiths. And how has that influenced my writings? In a sense, I think it has because at some points I began reading Marxism and about secularism. And I reached a point in which I used to discuss issues of God. And I could have easily slipped away, in fact, say there is no god. But there was a lot of injustice in the world. There is a lot of current things that happen and how could we really understand. How could we really say “there is a god when, for example, a baby is born today, and that day he got nothing whatsoever, and dies over an earthquake or finds himself in the middle of a war or something. How do we explain this? How could a god that is merciful allow these things. Yeah, yeah these puzzles that come. But somehow I think, the experience of being a part of these religious traditions in some sense, when there are a lot of things on this earth which are created by god, that these are not good, is like a Hegelian statement that god is a dialectical being, but he embodies in himself what he is not.
Prof. Thakur: Reality in its ultimate analysis is essentially a contradiction. Now in your case, for example, the early visible influence of Islam, and then Christianity, and then the east and the west interacting with each other. In this poem, for example, the way I would try to understand this poem is there is a golden east skipping the language of the modern west, people of the west being formal, “why do you come at this time?” and the east being essentially like saying “home is the place where they have to take you in even wherever you go” it is your own credit…so it seems to me that there is that kind of contradiction—
Sallah: Well, it is an interesting observation, may be I can ? this reality.
Prof. Thakur: So, we would interpret your poem in our own way. But the point is as far as—
Sallah: Sure. Sure.
Prof. Thakur: you look at it, at these two opposite forces east and the west, Christianity and Islam led to your thinking, to some kind of a perception that “it is all right but reality is a contradiction” East and the West. ? It is said that the East and the West will never meet. Some people’s thinking they meet. The other people’s thinking they meet and they do not meet.
Sallah: I think I was saying that’s what I was is that implicit sense of, you certain commonality but then you see a certain diversion. It is a paradox almost. There is a contradiction, but the contradiction almost considered a truth in itself. It is a dialectic, so you have a synthesis. And the synthesis has this on the currents of tension. You see, I find myself in the need to explain because you see you find yourself a child of many worlds and there are people who are children of one world. And how do you explain many worlds to people who live in one world?
Prof. Thakur: Do you ever get the impression that you were, and we are still children in many respects, that you are a child of two worlds, each of the two worlds trying to grab each other and assimilate it to the extent of completely destroying it? Do you think that you are a child in a world in which there are two worlds trying to grab each other and swallow each other completely?
Sallah: Yeah, I do almost reveal those tensions. I see a lot of great things in the west in terms of technological and material respect and I see also the spiritual poverty. A sort of transcendental poverty, because it is a world of time and space, you know, the restriction, a world of restriction, a world of barriers and fences and so on. Even before a person comes to visit his friends: to make a phone call and say is it o.k. Is this the right time, you know.?
Prof. Thakur: Is dawn the right time?!
All: ha! Ha ha.
Sallah: and then at the same time, you say, that you function in this world because if you let that fluidity, that…spontaneity operate, then you will became disfunctional in this world because things move by time. I have to go to my office at a certain time, and if I do not do my boss will complain. There is this need for a companion, but the west is very secluded, you know. Most of the time in your apartment in front of your TV. You meet people in the street and you say “Hi” to them and they do not say “Hi” back, what you think? You say “Hello”, they even feel offended that you said “Hello”. So you learn to move without saying “Hallo” to people unless you know them and so on.
Ali: Complications of modernity.
Sallah: Yeah. It is an existential…what you call it anomaly. You are in the state of a certain anxiety or so.
Ali: Can I assume that when you read this poem “Dawn” you liked it more than any other one in the book?
Sallah: I liked it? No, I just read it. Whether I like it is just like being asked of which of your children you like most.
Ali: But, usually you write a lot of things, and then you feel like “O in this one, I think I did a good job; and that one…”
Sallah: Here is a poem which is influenced by Islam in a sense this “Pilgrims to the Magal.” Now Magal is in Senegal which is next to my country which have these religious leaders, they’re called “sheikhs” but they called them Marabout. These are supposed to be men of God, and they have followers in the entire region who annually they come during the “Mawlid Nabi” (Prophet Mohammed Birth Occasion) for celebration. Now there is a group in Senegal called the Mouride. The Mouride followed this leader to the extent that some of them did not pray. Whenever you ask them “Have you prayed today?”, they’d say that their leader has done everything so no need for prayer. You know, that’s the ethnic life, the leader Serere; Marabout has done every thing. So, they don’t need to pray, he has done the work; perfection with God has been done, so we just need to follow and do our “nsk”, i.e. bring our alms and support. So, now, and there was a particular leader, the founder of the faith called “Bamba,” he was a well known religious Koranic scholar and he had followers from all over west Africa. During the 18th century he had the following, the gathering of followers; he came into direct conflict with the French, because the French were establishing colonial control, and they said who was this person diverting administrative attention from colonial government to them. So they saw him as a direct challenge. And so the French decided to capture him and to exile him to Capon. And on their way on the ship, he was with one of his followers, and it was time for prayer and he told the follower, “I want to pray.” But the follower said, “No, you can not.” Well, the follower said, “I also want to pray with you, you’re my leader, my Marabout; but the French said you can not pray.” “I Bamba, I the spiritual Bamba, I have to pray because it is time for prayer.” . So, he told the follower to throw a goat-skin mat which he had on the water, into the ocean. The follower threw goat-skin mat, and he also followed and they stood there; they prayed on the water. And he told the follower to close the eyes and they closed their eyes, and they were back to Senegal…to Touba.. So, the French were mystified. So, to this date, there now in Senegambian legends, there is this legend about Bamba. And the story here “Pilgrims to the Magal” is really very interesting because it is about this one. Now, listen to it:
Pilgrims to the Magal
Pilgrims to the Magal, Adrift
On a spiritual quest in this moon
Of reconciliations, heart-cleansing,
And cryptic yearnings.
Your gift-filled pockets:
Gold, teller notes, silver rings,
Fluffy cockerels, woven baskets,
And embroidered batik-clothes.
The wealth of the Marabout—that’s the spiritual leader—
Communal partings,—what people give, ha—bridal love
For the hereafter.
You shield your hearts, shell them
In the spiritual runnels
Of unknown tomorrow.
Pilgrims adrift, quiet-faced,
Feeble with earthly scum.
Mean, women, children, wearing
The trappings of spirituality,
Awaiting the redemptive cleansing.
Veiled women and khaftan-draped
Immersed in the baptism of chants,
Suffused by a cryptic Calling,
Amused by the Endpoint Promise.
Peace, peace, peace,
Jama implanted in their hearts,
Like baobab roots caked in earth.
Pilgrims with waiting hearts,
Eager with the waiting hearts,
Waiting for tomorrow, journeying
To the Holy Land,—this is the place where the Marabout lives in Touba—where hearts,
Laden with dirt, get bleached
In the sea of repentance.
Your occasional silence, stretched
Like a dream on the surface
Of the Gambia river.
Aye, pilgrims, absorbed in Hope.
The ferry-driver, captain of the vessel,
Knows neither your hearts nor your haste,
He sees only Barra.
But you know Marabout prayer,
God’s petals, never fails
The wish of the faithful.
You believe in Bamba, the Mysterious One,
Holly Visionary, Champion of Faith.
Absent French cavalcades of power,
The vigor of Bamba made
The earth quake, plunged into awe,
Perfumed it with a Presence.
For Bamba is no passive saint,
But mystic of apocalyptic distances.
Bamba, the Holy Lip of an Age,
Fearless, fenceless, but faithful.
Bamba said, he must pray.
He, Bamba, must pray.—you know—
Pilgrims, with ferry-boats to Touba,
Bamba’s place. For Bamba is Alive,
Blessed by a sacred Light,
Incensed by an incendiary Grace,
Eclipsed from boundary to boundary.
And Bamba’s place, the center of Faith,
Summons all the faithful to its midst.—I mean this is a long poem…but…there is an article I gave you there we came to national geography would talks about this.
Ali: The Magal?
Sallah: The Magal. So that’s what this about. So there are these sort of influences and even though I am not a follower of Bamba, but when I was a kid I could see lots of people trying to go to Senegal to follow this man—
Ali: It was like a spiritual example to be followed.
Sallah: If you read that article, it’d tell you about Bamba—
Ali: The Magal People?
Sallah: Yeah.
Sallah: Then I have poems which I have written which like, it sort of…it deals with the generation of Gambia.
Ali: Generations?
Sallah: Yeah, like “The Elders Are Gods”. This is the first. At home, the elders use all kinds of superstitions to protect their social privileges, like when you say, for example, “If you drink coconut juice, you will turn stupid.” And they drink coconut juice!
Ali: Like fathers say do not do this thing or else you will get a certain hurt. but they do it themselves.
Prof. Thakur: These days, they talk about the native speaker’s feel for the language. I am one of those who often get the feeling that this is some kind of linguistic…. You know that the English is not the language of England or America; it is the language of the whole world. But still in books, articles, and seminars there are some books that ask similar questions. Some of these people keep emphasizing the native speaker’s feel for the language giving the impression that the others are secondary writers. And you know they said about Mark Twin that once he, when was alive, they started spreading the news that he is dead. And when Mark Twain came to hear of it, he said “the news of my death is slightly exaggerated.” There are people who feel, I am being one of them, that this concept of the native speaker’s feeling for the language in this respect of English is slightly exaggerated. How do you react to this point of view? Given your experiments with the English language, your experiments with the potential, creative potential of the English language?
Sallah: I would say that’s true. That the native speaker’s feel for the language is slightly exaggerated. In fact, I think some of the best writings in good English at the moment are coming from outside England, outside Britain. That’s the people, the most daring in their use of English language, are not native speakers. There may have been a time they were, during the time of Shakespeare and so on. But in recent years, if you look at the writings of William from Nigeria, If you look at the writing of Salman Rushdi, and so on.
Sallah: Yeah. But given his linguistic capability in English, you should look at who are people in recent years, winning the book prize? The main most important literary prize in Britain. Many of them have been writers from outside England.
Khalid: Edward Saeed?
Sallah: No, Edward Saeed is a critic. Yea certainly, He is a critic, yeah, he is a native critic.
Prof. Thakur: Nageeb Mahfooz.
Sallah: Nageeb Mahfooz, you know, although Nageeb Mahfooz writes in Arabic or something and then translates his works. …So the power of imagination and the cultural wealth that non-native speakers of English bring to English is enormous, is incalculable. Yes, I mean contemporarily English would have been enormously deprived, hadn’t these people have written, indeed, very dull. You can see that in European languages which have not had a history of empire or colonies, where they did not have non-native speakers, many of them are dying. They do not have the imaginative experts that you find in English. You could take Portuguese, Italian, …Italian even had some few territories in Atria. But Portuguese, those have songs. There are some of these European Swedish or Norwegian or some of these very languages in a way …. They do not have nothing compared to English or French, for example, English in particular. So, I agree with you that this is exaggerated. I think this is still what I call the “empyreal nostalgia,” there are people who still believe that to really write and speak in English, you have to be English. This is absurd, in many languages of the earth, you find non-native speakers, better than the native speakers…In fact, they learn the writings in their language, you know.
Ali: You say “If you ask me why my teeth are ivory white”?
Sallah: You see, what I try to do is to draw images from my immediate environment because I think one of the great contributions of writers around the world, particularly in cultures which have been neglected or, is for them to bring in their own cultural resources from their immediate environment and share with the rest of the world, you know. I mean what sense is telling me about the “snow falling, falling” and I have never seen the snow. You know, “The snow flirts falling, falling, gently, gently, down some,” you know, and I have never seen the snow. Obviously, he is drawing a cultural reference which is not immediately relevant to me. So when I talk about mangoes, guava, and elephants—
Ali: bentenki trees.
Sallah: Yeah, these are my most immediate…so, what I am doing basically is taking cultural resources from…and sharing it externally which is what great literary do. Of course, if you read James Joyce’s, he tries to capture Irish, the immediate Irish society, the odd in that society.
Khalid: As a symbol, you were using the saying “hyena”.
Sallah: because in nature, you also have contradictions. The things that, I mean, there are more powerful creatures that feed on the others.
Ali: it is very apt., I mean the similarity between the hyena and corrupt political figures?
Sallah: The hyena for me is a symbol which I use usually in political environment of terrible leaders, dictators, people who abuse their populations. All other creatures are much more mild.
Ali: Did you find the exiled people in the States from Ghana from Africa, shouldn’t they go into their own country and do something for the prosperity and so on?
Sallah: Ideally, that is what I expect. But, the world that it is now, I mean the problems in some of the societies which we come from, you know the political environment where there have been a lot of pressure. It depends; there are people who come from few countries in Africa, they return. You know, and economics basically, is…it is a world labor market, people move to wherever they feel comfortable. The Americans make this sort of argument, what you are saying. They say, “If you do not like America, why don’t you go home?” and things like that—…. I do not take that seriously because the world is one world now. I mean, certainly, if people…I’ve written about immigrants. Even in my society we have immigrants…If immigrants are involved in criminal activity……
Ali: What about the negritude movement in America? Did you—
Sallah: Negritude movement was in Fran. This was more, you know, the African Americans who were trying to romanticize Africa, trying to deal with their own problem of slaving. But there was a group that was called Negritude which was a group of African and Caribbean those from Manthenic, Francophone. Mainly: Francophone African and Francophone Caribbean who studied in France at the time and they started this movement because France, French policy in Africa was called “?,” they basically wanted to acculturate Africans into the mainstream of French culture; so the French people would say “Do they became basically African French,” speak French … . And there were a number of students in 1920s, 30s and 40s who included people like Leopold Sedar Senghor who became president of Senegal, Aimee’ from Martinique, Leon Damas from French Guiana, at the time they were very active, they had this sort of intellectual book in France to protest French cultural assimilation in their colonies. And they are appointed “Negritude” from the word “Negro” to try to assert their culture and their Africanness and so. And they wrote also some of the most beautiful poetry in Africa at the time. In fact, in African, was written at the time by the Negritude poet Leopold Sedar Senghor, talking about the glories of African Empires, and say “Early Timbukto,” you know, and Egypt being glorified always. And, in fact, I was very much involved with them The first introduction to the anthology that was published by the Negritude poets. If you read my New Poets of West Africa, this anthology which I edited, if you read the introduction, you will get a full sense about the Negritude, about what they are trying to do. The English-speaking Africa was not popular because I said, “a tiger does not talk about his tiger-ness in Frances, but about his actions where he is” These are frenchified African who come from the Caribbean…
Ali: I was trying to ask also whether you wrote something about this?
Sallah: Well, in the beginning it influenced me. I liked that style of poetry because it is very much influenced by the French symbolists. They were very much influenced by the French symbolists. And so if you look at their lines, their poetic lines are very long in the Negritude poetry. They try to evoke historical events and heroic figures and so on. But it was a poetry of glorification of the past—
Ali: And trying to revive history—
Sallah: yeah, by invoking great empires and great heroes of history and so on. I really thought it was really a reaction to the French colonial policy, it was an attempt to try to prove that, “look you say we’re not civilized, you know we had this before.” In fact, this was what he said. He said, “Negritude is antiracist racism”; they were fighting against French colonial, but at the same they began to glorify themselves. The French put one thesis, and they put the antithesis, and then from these they are going to create this civilization of the universal.
Ali: I also recall from your Dust Roads sometimes, yes, you also have this call for the past, for the glory of the past, nostalgia, and you call for its beauty and revival; but sometimes you are skeptical about whether this past can do anything.
Sallah: singing the past and the glories of the past.
Ali: Your skepticism comes from the fact that “O.k. True we have this past, but what do we have at present. Can we do something? Can we make a change? Can we do like this?” So I feel this in most of your poems especially this poem “A Puzzle of History”:
If the violence of white tribes
On your crumbled laughter were dissected
With the true scribe’s scalpel,
Will history’s doctors diagnose you
For having drunk and smoked
Too much of their tobacco and rum?
I mean this is so beautiful? So I like this skepticism. Skeptical and sometimes sarcastic. If you would like to comment on this regard, what would you say?
Sallah: Well, I will let you interpret this…
Appendix II: Selected Poems:
1.When Africa Was a Young Woman
1.1. WHEN AFRICA WAS A YOUNG WOMAN
When Africa was a young woman,
I loved the succulent breasts.
She was so sweet.
I planted yams on her feet;
Watched the pigeons fly over her head
And nest on the furrows of her arms.
Then Africa was a virgin,
Nude, plump, and wild
As the fruits of the baobab;
Innocent of the intercourse
With western civilization.
When Africa was a virgin,
Many suitors came to visit her.
She refused their marriage requests.
They called her the dark continent.
When Africa was a rich young woman,
She wore golden beads on her neck;
Ivory bangles on her hands
And a diamond smile on her dark lips.
But strangers came
Raped the celibate Africa
Prostituted her body;
Let her children speak in tongues
The tongues of foreign lands.
Now Africa so wrinkled and weak.
Her own children follow
That dragon called revolution,
Devastating her flesh;
Leaving her barren, a broken calabash.
1.2. BIRDS
birds
do not kiss,
but they peck
on your lips
like Europeans
scrambling
for Africa.
1.3. IF YOU ASK ME WHY MY TEETH ARE IVORY WHITE
If you ask me why my teeth are ivory white
I will tell you I come from Africa
Not that we do not have confectionaries
Just that I have not joined the candy revolution
When I was young my mama
Used to buy me toffee and chewing gum
But I went to St. Augustine’s High School
And studied health science
And my Irish teacher would say, “sweets are bad
For your teeth” (he was talking from experience
For his teeth were rusty with plaque)
I stopped eating sweets
But then I needed something to eat leisurely
I started smoking Benson & Hedges cigarettes
And then I heard a surgeon say, “cigarette smoking
is dangerous for your health”
I quit smoking and decided to visit grandma
She gave me fresh milk, coconuts, fish,
And then juicy, juicy Sierra Leonean mangoes
Oh I how good they tasted
Since then I became grandma’s leisure-customer
And if you ask me why my teeth are ivory white
I will tell you I come from grandma’s Africa
1.4. TARAZAN NEVER LIVED IN MY AFRICA
My world is a rich world
The safety tank of western
Locomotion
I do not blame the world
I do not blame the world
If all the media teaches
Ignorance
The whole world learns
Ignorance
How can Africa be the theatre of
The world
To be seen only as a vast jungle
Of elephants, lions and hyenas
Or to be seen only as land of
The pygmies, Dinkas and Masai;
Is Africa not land of diamonds,
Gold, ivories, oil and raw materials
Land of great people and rich culture
The second largest continent in
The world
The origin of mankind
Let us be genuine in facing truth
With truth in giving Africa
Its true image
Let us not live in
Phantasmagoria:
Tarzan never lived in my Africa
1.5.CRY NOT
cry not young woman cry not
let your turns turn
to gourds of laughter
i see your plight
pity your sadness
but he will come back
from the outside world
i cannot bear it sir
cannot bear it
our husbands nowadays
are car tires
they roll here bounce there
gather the dust of different soils
leave us here to erode
with the wind of time
weep not young woman weep not
your husband will return
after four rainy season
he will be learned
as the whiteman
to build your schools
teach you western ways
forget it sir forget it
say my sweetheart
will return , a whiteman
but know that
i will continue to live
in this simple hut
rear my chickens
harvest my groundnuts
and do my batik
whatever he becomes
my palm-wine mind
will suffice this africa
1.6. WORMEATERS
Come, we will eat baked worms.
At night, we will walk down the streets
Like two Mongolian soldiers
In the regime of Kublai Khan.
We will feed on the fresh midnight air
And empty our lungs of the day’s pollution.
While we head to see our girlfriends,
Let us stop by Cherokee canteens
And buy lemons to freshen our lips.
So that when we meet them
They will not even know we are wormeaters.
1.7. THE TENANT FARMER
They say it is hard to live in Basse
But I say it is not.
I come as a tenant farmer
From the Futa Jallon Highlands.
I come with nothing but strength,
Wisdom and obedience.
After six rainy seasons
I built four mud houses,
Married two wives, fought with a tribesman,
Produced three children (who now, so well fed,
Will be my social security for old age).
1.8. THE PLOWMAN
He lives in a log house
Near the silent hills.
He is sixty five
Single since twenty five.
He has never been a father;
All his world is an axe, plow,
And a bold cornfield.
Only patience can describe
His loneliness.
If you ask him whether
He wants a neighbor,
He yawns
And offers you corn-meal.
1.9. COUNTRYFOLKS LET US GO BACK
Countryfolks let us go back to the simple village life
Let us return to the rice, millet, and peanut fields
Let us chant as we go, chant with the pigeons in the bush
Conutryfolks we are the architects of the Gambia
We are carefully to design this motherland
Countryfolks we have fresh blue river Gambia in our midst
We have the mango trees, cattle dung, and the azure sky
We have the midday sun in its primal youth
Countryfolks whether you are farmer, fisherman, trades-man.
Craftsman, or professional
Come out with your tools, weapons, or knowledge
Came out and work in the clean village air
Let the old folks rear the children
But you come out. Help us restore the village harmony
1.10. TONIGHT
tonight
the moon
a huge white cookies
a hemisphere behind
the Kentucky hills
feeds us with light
and we graze
our way like cattle
1.11. WHY DO YOU COME YAADICONE
Why do you come in endless cycles
Invading our mother like a tapeworm.
We know you come before
For the mark is still with you
Ugly as a scar a machete will make
On an outcast’s skin.
We have called a medicine-man
To cast off your evil spirit
But you keep on coming.
Still I do not understand.
Why do you come?
2. Kora Land
2.1 DISTANT MY LAND
Distant my land, my lingering love.
My childhood, fresh as chamomile,
Tempting as the tamarind-fruit.
No time for distance, the enemy
That mixes mud to memory.
Let mangoes grow, arms and limbs,
To preserve the earth of heritage.
Every night, the sorrow of a week
Grips my peaceful soul.
The same sorrow that nags
My city of memory.
Prodigal in my despair,
I can not escape the house
Of my childhood. Absence
Is no gate to the gin
Of forgetfulness.
Distant my land, but
Pure is my fixation.
My heart-and-vein land,
My diastole and systole.
My mind soars daily
To your peanut fields.
Your green terraces,
Burying promise in
The wonder of a seed.
I dream of my childhood-
Ah, like the songs of a thousand
Cheerful herons in congregation
Under the sun.
2.2. DIALOGUE WITH MY DEAD GRANDFATHER
There are several ways
To have a dialogue with a dead man.
Say, my grandfather,
Whom I have never met
But who believed that fertility
Paved the stream of the future.
My grandfather, who believed
In neither sport nor idleness,
Whose hands sing the music of the earth.
There are several ways
To talk to him.
But I can not talk to him;
That is too impolite.
You can not talk to your grandfather,
Or he will send you hellbound
Till your rudeness turns to respect.
One way is to reach
Deep into one’s bones
And feel the grace of generations.
There, my grandfather
Will dialogue quietly
Of fallen teeth.
He will send me
A marrow-telegram
To watch out for all
The evils of modernity
Which are disguised as civilization.
But modernity, to me, is elephants
Languishing behind computers.
And children hatching out of eggs
Into efficiency apartments.
Another way to reach
My grandfather is to
Kneel by the solemn graveyard,
And speak to him
In the silence of spirit.
There, he will inquire
Why my age has forgotten the dead,
Wasting our emotions
In basketball and soccer fields,
Screaming at each other,
As if tormented by the devil.
But, of course,
I shall not agree.
The dead have their fences,
It is they and us.
And life has changed
Faster than the color of the clouds.
And modern man lives
In the hurry and worry
Of blue chip stocks
And sluggish bread loaves.
There are several ways
To dialogue with my dead grandfather.
One way is for me
To tell my father,
Who tells his father;
At the limit, my grandfather
Will get the message.
And to get back to me,
My grandfather can do likewise.
But what if my grandfather
Does not speak our
Modern lingua franca,
Will my father suffice,
As a translator?
If so, will he agree
To carry the message
Of a lost generation deaf
From modernity?
I do not know.
What I do know is
That to dialogue with a dead man
You have to die somehow_
Learn the language of death,
Or keep communion with the dead.
And in this our age
So obsessed with youthful living,
Death is a word obscene.
2.3. GENERATIONS
In my grandfather’s house,
We eat with brown fingers.
Grandma licks her slender fingers;
Aunt Bintu chews the chicken bones.
In my father’s house,
We spoon our mouths with silver.
Mother forks the half-cooked mutton,
And brother Mawdo Knifes the soft cassava.
In my house, I prefer
The dark, raw road of my grandpa.
But my children branch_
One follows fingers and mats.
The other spoons and tablecloths.
2.4. MY POOR GRANDFATHER MADE HISTORY
My poor grandfather made history
In his own way. He knew
The speech of birds disturbed
By village hunters. He knew
How to make compromises
With pregnant birds that turtle
On the branches of the bentenki trees,
Or with baby robins plummeting
With their pimento beaks.
He knew why the guerrilla-hawks
Descend like fallen devils
On the chicken empire,
Or why the sluggish ducks
Wave their dainty tails
Like Mandingo brooms
Swaying in the wind.
My poor grandfather made history
Near the river Gambia.
He always said:
History is the record
Of birds in action.
It is the squawk and squeak
Of birds when they are
Attacked by the human race,
When they current into the evening,
Returning shit-blows in self-defense.
2.5. THE ELDERS ARE GODS
In my hometown, there is rust
And shine and kinfolks
Who use the privilege of age
To guarantee their ear of corn.
The old folks say that
If you eat fish-heads, or
Drink coconut juice, you would
Turn stupid. But the elders
Eat everything and
Get wiser everyday.
They set ambiguous rules.
They wall us from corn-filled places.
They say sex is bad for children;
Yet do it in the dark confines
Of their isolated bedrooms.
They say that courtesy is
Good for youth, and palmwine
Bad for their livers.
The elders are gods.
They sit on top of everything.
They tell us that farmwork
Is a good discipline for youth,
That dragging ignorant sheep flocks
To meandering windfields
And tying them on the guava-stumps
Is a good endurance-test.
The elders are gods.
They sit on top of the branches.
They have eyes wide as owls’.
They rotate them to every corner.
They want us to follow
Their bygone norms.
They want us never
To put up a fight.
The elders are gods.
They sit on top of everything.
2.6. SO STRANGE
So strange is the language
Of the weaverbird.
My mind wanders
To the upper twig
Of our guava tree.
Husband and wife sit
Under crackle of sunlight
And fuse the wordless sounds
Of their beaks.
2.7. DAWN VISIT
You came at dawn.
Cocks have not yet crowed.
How can I open the door.
You are a stranger.
And even if I know you,
The night is not meant
For visiting.
This you must know—
There is a cockcrow
For everything.
My ancestors loved strangers,
But not one at dawn.
Not one who vies with the moon and stars.
Not one who like a scavenger,
Eats the green of the night.
We are day people.
If you come by daylight
When the afternoon dangles yellow
On the cactus and grass,
I will spread my tablecloth.
Everything for you—
Salmon, bread, shrimp,
Lemon, water, ginger drink.
Eat, drink to satisfaction.
But now you come at dawn
When early birds
Are drunk asleep in guava trees,
When the rats that wrestle in darkness
Gnow brown cassavas,
And you want me to open
The door for you.
How can I
When grey-bearded nights
Are not meant for visiting?
2.8. PILGRIMS TO THE MAGAL
Pilgrims to the Magal, Adrift
On a spiritual quest in this moon
Of reconciliations, heart-cleansing,
And cryptic yearnings.
Your gift-filled pockets:
Gold, teller notes, silver rings,
Fluffy cockerels, woven baskets,
And embroidered batik-clothes.
The wealth of the Marabout
Communal partings,
For the hereafter.
You shield your hearts, shell them
In the spiritual runnels
Of unknown tomorrow.
Pilgrims adrift, quiet-faced,
Feeble with earthly scum.
Mean, women, children, wearing
The trappings of spirituality,
Awaiting the redemptive cleansing.
Veiled women and khaftan-draped
Immersed in the baptism of chants,
Suffused by a cryptic Calling,
Amused by the Endpoint Promise.
Peace, peace, peace,
Jama implanted in their hearts,
Like baobab roots caked in earth.
Pilgrims with waiting hearts,
Eager with the waiting hearts,
Waiting for tomorrow, journeying
To the Holy Land , where hearts,
Laden with dirt, get bleached
In the sea of repentance.
Your occasional silence, stretched
Like a dream on the surface
Of the Gambia river.
Aye, pilgrims, absorbed in Hope.
The ferry-driver, captain of the vessel,
Knows neither your hearts nor your haste,
He sees only Barra.
But you know Marabout prayer,
God’s petals, never fails
The wish of the faithful.
You believe in Bamba , the Mysterious One,
Holly Visionary, Champion of Faith.
Absent French cavalcades of power,
The vigor of Bamba made
The earth quake, plunged into awe,
Perfumed it with a Presence.
For Bamba is no passive saint,
But mystic of apocalyptic distances.
Bamba, the Holy Lip of an Age,
Fearless, fenceless, but faithful.
Bamba said, he must pray.
He, Bamba, must pray.
Pilgrims, with ferry-boats to Touba ,
Bamba’s place. For Bamba is Alive,
Blessed by a sacred Light,
Incensed by an incendiary Grace,
Eclipsed from boundary to boundary.
And Bamba’s place, the center of Faith,
Summons all the faithful to its midst.
Pilgrims, your veiled women,
Teeth red with kolanuts;
Forehead creased to elemental simplicity.
May they reach their destination,
May they cap their wishes with Grace.
Your gown-draped men with
Dangling prayer-beads and
Patients prayer-whispers.
For the Magal, congregation of confessions,
Assembly of believers is an in-gathering.
The near rooted mingled with the up-rooted
And the far-rooted, all converge
To the spiritual core.
All come welcome by Bamba’s spirit,
The daring spirit of faith.
Pilgrims in procession, submit.
The waiting gendarmes, Khaki-uniformed,
Cudgels in pockets, hand-grip on rifle,
Even they, caught in the drama of mob-control.
Have Bamba’s grace.
And you pilgrims, the fervent followers,
Mystical violators of the Carnal Order,
Self-body beater, rasta-haired,
Absorbed in the ceremony of the Spirit.
The drummers’ ecstasy, and the followers’ entasy.
Pilgrims,
May the Peace of Bamba,
Radiant as the Savannah sun,
Engulf you upon arrival.
2.9. NO ARGUMENT TONIGHT
I would not argue with you tonight
Over salty food and half-cooked rice
For the moon is too hostile,
And I do not want to add
To the madness of this hour.
I would just eat cassava
And fried plantain
And watch the geckos
Wriggle on the cinder-coated walls
Of our patient kitchen,
While the glittering fireflies
Teach you
The silent grace of marriage
2.10. AN AFRICA
I have been sitting here
Since harvest season,
Waiting for the young Mandingo woman
To walk past with fresh green produce
On their cottony head-ties.
My stomach has been crying all along,
Anticipating the moon when plenty marks
The flight-steps of the raucous weaver birds
I have been waiting here
Learning the terrible lessons of laziness.
My stomach irritated by nicotine
And excess of coffee.
I have been quietly waiting here
On a couch in our school veranda,
Watching street-dogs squabble over
A meat-bone dragged from behind
The butcher’s counter, listening
To them howl at each other
In the mournful tone
Of outraged bastards.
I have been sitting and waiting.
Anticipating the promises
Of the full moon.
2.11. ON DENTON BRIDGE
As you watch the jaws of the afternoon,
The gulls accumulate their fortune
Between their beaks. The rushing wind
Pulls the smoke-emissions towards you.
And darkness envelops your love
For these oil mills.
You start to wonder how brave
These gulls are flying in
And out of the Gambia river, raping
The bony fishes like sea-pirates, nipping
The thin flesh out of them, disappearing
Into the sky like judas-angels.
Somehow, as you watch, miracles increase.
The hawks, stiff-necked on the baobab,
Await for fallen plunder.
For every fallen prey, tension builds.
From the bush-distances, you hear
A spectator crow, chanting slowly, slowly.
Its voice watered with a predator’s song.
3. Dreams of Dusty Roads
3.1. ROOTS
I
When we are confronted
By pressures of place,
We seek solace
In those tiny kingdoms of the heart
Which keep the memory of place.
The roots hold, tethered
To the silos of the heart.
Our minds hold firmly
To the gravity of place.
Come pray with me.
Come pray.
May we have roots.
May we have.
For stems must have roots.
Dreams must seek tenacity
In lumps of savage earth.
For skies without pillars
Crumble like ancient roofs.
Skies without pillars
Crash to the dust of earth.
So we must dig deep,
No matter for cyclones
Disturbing our place-bearing.
We must preserve memory
As the kora player in his kora.
For all this insane drift,
Journey to distances
Hostile to our souls, listening
To children pointing
Accusatory fingers at
Our timid pride, emasculating
Our jackhammered humanity,
For all this, we know the folly
Of parochial minds.
How they can shout
Behind-the-market words
To foul our ears.
How they can tell us,
“Hey, stranger go back to…
II
Birds soar cloud-high,
But they must return
To bask in suns of hospitable earth.
Hawks glide with wings suspended
On bored currents of air,
But their eyes must turn downwards
To place of ultimate rest.
We should think of Rome,
Think of dust to that dream kingdom.
Walking through its streets
Is like walking through some ancient excitement.
The walls are tall and buried in some ancient memory.
Cameras only touch the surface; reality goes deeper
To drums and cymbals that accompanied Caesar.
We should think of the flames
At the place of the missing soldier,
The two guarding rifle-men frozen in an ancient rite.
Elegant structures of white and rust stands behind them,
Usurping the freedom of space.
The tremor of trains, the rumble to Magliana
The forward and backward drift of camera lenses,
The huckster invasion of ancient landscapes.
We should open the shutters of the mind
To those hidden spaces of dusty kingdoms.
For memory is roots; dreams are branches.
We should steep our restless feet
In the wisdom of trees, perhaps learn to have roots
As memories to our savage origins.
For branches are only extensions of roots;
And fruits are only branches returning to roots.
Roots must spring. They pulse from a primitive wonder.
They pulse from the osier expression of seeds.
And earth is always the witness.
Osculating lumps are always witnessed.
For despite our gyrations and searching hearts,
Our for-footed explorations and exploits
Of distant founts and climes;
Despite our flares of instinct
To break our umbilical cords, or
Our self-flagellation;
Despite our imitations, our plunge into transient fads,
Our run-away desires to pull-away
From egg and nest, only roots endure.
So come pray with me. Come pray.
May we be blessed with roots.
May we be blessed.
May we know roots grow on earth.
May we know. So may we be blessed with roots on earth.
May we be blessed.
3.2. LOVE
I have often loved you, you
With the sweet grace of a giraffe.
My heart’s room gathers warmth
From your firewood-presence.
You have been my pillar;
Erect stem to lean my trust.
You have been my bentenki tree,
And l, the elephant, leaning
On your back.
But now it seems
You feed on my blemishes.
You see, love needs a new skin,
A new talk. Otherwise, love finds
Comfort in petty faults.
You stand now under the sun;
Your eyes collect nightmares
From the sight of me.
You grin the mixed smile
Of a hyena. You smile,
When you mean the opposite.
You laugh, when you mean
A spear should be thrust
In to my heart.
But you still remind me
Of those days in Brikama ,
When you were a young girl
With some dandruff in your hair.
Those days when you were you,
Not some magazine photo model;
When success has not carved
A musky pride in your head.
You see, it seems
Time trims the genuine
Out of love
If the two bean-lobes
Of love
Are not careful.
You stand there, sullen
As the sky before a rain.
Root of my heart, l want you
To rain happiness
And drift to that old earth
Where the old self dwells
In the naked love of giraffes.
I want you to wear those waist beads
And move with the tender waist-shake
Of a laubeh . I want you to come,
Perfuming the air with gonga.
For I do not care
How much money you make now,
Or the type of prestige-car you drive;
Our love has never been
About benzes or jaguars.
I do not care about
How many cities you travel to,
Or men you put in their place;
Out love has never been
About your success against mine.
All I know is that
Our love has been about love,
The sweet, earth-goddess love
Of tubers. And about
Our children and
The seeds they should gather
To plant trees of the future.
And if things should intervene,
They should only be treated as things.
And love should still be love,
And make-ups still make-ups,
Before we lose ourselves
In this mad harvest of city lights.
3.3. THE LAND COMES TO CONSCIOUSNESS
The land comes to consciousness
The freckled landscape and muddy water
Its rolling hills gently seated
In silent communication
With the season-weary sky.
The sun howls by day
In the silence of its heat.
Listen to the wind-beaten traveler;
His face wrinkled as the buttocks of old woman.
Look at his feet, sore
From years of abandoning the land.
He trudges Western roads
In search of cowries.
Though his head is loaded
With the flicker of traffic lights
And his heart is segmented
Between Africa and Europe,
No violets grow in his hands.
The Land Comes to Consciousness.
We must not be like the blue-eyed traveler
Running in and out of nowhere
Forever doped in the excitement of self
Forever adjusting to the fickleness of place
We must follow rainbow signs
That lead us back to ourselves
Back to being one with the land,
We must take advice from the rainbird
Listen to its gospel coming
From the scarcity of seeds
In her deserted stomach
It is the hour of warning
When the land comes to consciousness
It is no longer the clocks of loitering
It is the cock’s–crow of homecoming-
Bush-fowls drifting back to their nests
Fathers returning to parent
What they begot in the farmhouses.
And clumsy children, await
Like thorns, to hang on their overcoats.
3.4. FREE SKY FOR ALL
Our earth is a vast plot
With trees for each bird.
Our earth is a vast plot
Let a multitude of ideas blossom.
No books should be burnt.
No mind caged in fascist fear.
The sky is free for all;
Only books can save our souls.
Our earth is a vast plot
Each one of us should be free to dream.
No mind should be strangled
By executioners of the brain.
For a vast plot we have here
With trees that can flower
And minds that can fly.
This landscape is ours to explore.
There are no limits to its wonders.
Only ideas can save our souls.
3.5. SIMPLICITY
Our old folks often said—
What is simple in the violet is great.
What is great in the violet is simple.
My grandmother once said:
Life is delicate as a violet.
Cherish it in simplicity, and it is great.
And thrive it in complexity, and it is hell.
The sepals of life, fragmented,
Colorful with choices, vary
With the temperature of human desire.
And the petals of being, eternal and fathomless,
Are man’s simplicity in the eye of the Great Unknown.
What is simple in the violet is, in essence,
Innocence.
Its beauty is silent truth.
What is great in the violet
Is the logic of agape
Fused in the foliage of time.
And man hidden
In the silent simplicity of space.
3.6. WATCHING
Watching my grandma watch
Pigeons beak through the
Green condensed mango trees.
Coo-coo songs descend, like
The mellow notes of silent rain
Watching her rub her shriveled ears
With ngalam oil, I mourn
The degenerative mathematics
Of the body. How the body falls
From October moons of mini-skirt giggles
To yawing valleys of
Betraying muscles and bones.
How it loses its juice,
Drying slowly like fig.
She smiles at me
With ravenous grace.
Her wisdom exuding tenderness
Of a gardeners patience.
All her pains of birth,
Now withered in her memories.
All her struggles for survival,
Now only unwritten history
Of her cowpeas garden.
She smiles
With no hint of bitterness in her mouth.
No wish to roll back
The carpet of life.
She only moves with a proud propelling will,
A tortoise’s tenacious hope,
Pushing the world with slow force.
She stands quietly, pondering ,
As if on a journey
Through the stiles of yesterday.
Giggling, grinning,
Grinding the absurdities
Of childhood
On the mortar of old age.
She weaves the thread
Of being a village beauty
Against the loom of time.
“Everything green and fresh
Finally reduces to nothing,”
She said. “Life is running water,
Dining on street-dirt, moving
Crookedly, settling underground.”
So startled by the blood of youth,
She looks at me with eyes
Of familiar unfamiliarity.
Her lips pulsate words of silence;
Her memory climbs dusty roads.
3.7. THE EVADED MOON
Thus it seems, America is a promise, a star,
Twinkling lights locked with the
Multifarious lights of the world.
And it seems, it fathoms its heart on
An archaic swindling of fathers
From the peacock head of Chief Big Eagle.
Every season, my host-family invites me
For the feast of Thankfulness .
And generations would come, near and far,
By wheel or wing,
And perform the rites of the pilgrims
Before television-baseball
And clinical hum of computers.
And it seems, as if history is reenacted
Around the cherywood table.
And I am suddenly the exotic mine
For anthropological excavation:
Questions sequentially bubbling
Like single-intent pickaxes.
And it seems Africa feeds into
The untutored spaces of the American mind.
Its jungle lions and cubs;
Elephants uprooting trees
Amidst long-legged Masai-tribesmen;
Or gazelles running randomly and valiantly
On the thorn-matted safari landscape.
And it seems Africa is never
Ancient Egypt, or Benin;
Timbuktu, or Kilwa.
And it seems Africa is perpetually
Cheap stable for the touristic media
A giant languishing behind the curtain,
Censored only to the famine and ruin.
And it seems America is a stage,
A landscape of clashing lights,
Populated by lovers of fiction.
Information overload leading to
Secondary grabbing of unfiltered half-truths.
And it seems Africa wallows in neglect
Like America’s own father-natives.
Or like Africa’s diaspora-seeds trapped
In wolfish nets like the proverbial lamb.
And it seems to me that the
Feast of Thankfulness should
Be time to rethink the promise,
Remove cobwebs in parochial minds
Approach the truth of the evaded moon
3.8. TELEVISION AS GOD
In America, television is a special god
With its priests and priestesses.
No one has time for conversations, or
For each other. Television works
In the remote crania of
Every high-class pleasure.
And the daisies by my apartment-window,
Tall, yellow, as the fingers of the sun,
Why are they so sad from neglect?
They perhaps lost the competition.
Television has trapped everyone
In its shrine.
And the young pour libations
To the sacred ancestors in Hollywood,
And the babies learn their words
Even before they know how to crawl.
And television has its lull, its lilt,
And its lure, and the elders
Seat themselves comfortably.
The sedentary god accumulates lard
Between their immobile hips.
And the children say_
How about Eddie Murphy,
Ain’t he great?
And sweet Madonna,
Ain’t she sexy?
And the mothers wonder
Why their kids are doing poorly in school
And their grammar is as good as chimpanzees’.
And, of course, television is a special god
And gods have their sacred abode
In the hearts of their humble servants.
And television is a god that speaks
And smiles and acts
And emotions are fortified
As starch to ironed clothes.
And the truth of the world is accessed
Through the superficial words
Of the interpreters.
And it is no wonder,
The holy highs of television
Are good friendly waiters, catering
To the standard heart
Of the empire of faith-seekers.
And the thrill is always there
In the ecstasy of Hollywood-preachers.
As the catholic television-watcher put it_
Pope Johnny Carson,
How loaded be thy name.
Did KingKong come.
Thy wisdom be done on earth,
As it is in high-vision.
And its priests and priestesses
Glint with gold and diamonds.
Then the gospels follow,
Sermons to arch-god of Epicurus.
In America, television is a god,
Therapeutic to ailing hearts
As happiness, redemptive
To the eyes as an apocalypse.
3.9. MEDITATION ON AMERICA
Solitude is like princely date palm
Sitting on earth-throne in the Sahara.
It distills one’s sensibility to things.
I sit quietly in my room,
Listening to reggae, admiring the genius Marley,
Admiring his unhurrying voice,
Forever tender like rainwater,
Forever immense as the sea,
Always unforgettable as Carnival.
I drink chamomile tea
In lazy sips, enjoying the lemon
And the sugar. Such a theater, I said,
This voice of Marley. I sit in my room
In stylized western isolation, fingering buttons
Through alternative channels to quench boredom.
I sieve through the images.
The tv flashes screen-fulls of cheap stars.
Popular images appear with vulgar exactitude,
Distilling amateurism in celebrated accents.
O America, and its marriage to celebrities!
Lean starts with lean looks appear,
Their pride suspended on lacquered frames.
O I love Americans
And their self-congratulatory dare;
Their self-claim to the Fixed Point,
In the subdued rotation of the world.
I love Americans and their mind-graft
On technique. Plugs and pliers aflame;
Their minds directed to create a placid island.
In solitude I twist and turn to sordid channels.
Nude girls with breast clustered like melons.
Walk and play on the nude beaches, clustering beer
Between their pencil fingers, protecting long nails
From the envy of others.
O I love Americans and their etiquettes and conduct.
Their mind and heart perpetually soaked
In the pursuit of epicurean sunshines.
Plentitudes of beer, half-frozen in iceboxes;
Hotdogs and burgers flushed through the mouth
To quench the boredom of deep thought.
French fries and mind-blazers followed
By tiresome jokes. O I love Americans!
And a brother comes playing rap music, imitating
The fat boys. He carries a big black Panasonic radio
On the high contours of his steroid shoulders.
He musics with his lips. He musics like a street jester.
O I love Americans, and their fascination with Cosby.
Poor Billy Cosby had a farm-
Iyah, Iyah, Oh.
And on the farm he had many children.
Iyah, Iyah, Oh.
And the children will comedy here.
And the children will comedy there,
While the real brothers trail
The blood-soaked crack streets.
Old Billy Cosby had a farm-
Iyah, Iyah, Oh.
The golden girls appear, fingering the rivers of youth,
Dangling cottony blonde hairs
In juvenile acts of nostalgia.
Poor golden girls had a farm-
Iyah, Iyah, Oh.
And on the farm they had many squeaking bones.
Iyah, Iyah, Oh.
And squeaking bones will comedy here,
And squeaking bones will comedy there.
Rear unintended undernourished babies.
Poor golden girls had a farm-
Iyah, Iyah, Oh.
3.10. AMERICA (Or Piano-notes for the Immigrant)
In this sweet land of Lincoln and Dreams,
The postponed laughter of the Negro
Haunts the chrysanthemums of cottony-landscapes.
Place is sacrosanct; it keeps
A relentless memory: the glimmer
From tarnished light. Humanity
Drenched in waters of restitution;
Sad tales of a barbarous past.
Laughter still remains as residue
In the flannel dreams of crows.
The Sweet Girl from Georgia knows this.
She wakes up, toothbrush poised on teeth,
And mind fixed to the drama of the kitchen.
She expects me to bail hay, like
A yeoman from Texas,
And pile them on the truck,
And listen to Nashville Country Music,
While bulky cows mouth through
The green fields of appetite.
It is all a custom in this sweet land.
The slave south doles out morality
To the world. Ask all those
Bawdy planter skeletons
In the furnaces of their graves.
If they have not calcified into trees,
Or perhaps rocks and hills.
The Sweet Girl knows that
Even though l am from Africa,
It does not really matter.
It is just a matter of late arrival.
The rough crop of the South
Is the savage root of America.
For who can forget cotton and cane?
Cauliflower, cabbage, and carrot?
In Georgia, no one can forget peanuts,
Just like no one can forget tobacco
In Virginia and Kentucky.
It is all a matter of which shoulder
Of the mountain you stand on,
Whether you see fox behind the maples,
Or trout in the creek,
Or deer in the rib-cage of the pines,
Or cows trail-grazing the meadows,
Or rabbits on flight along the Appalachian Trail
Like Mississippi Negroes
Fleeing the shadows of a cottony past,
Deer-hopping with ease past the Mason Dixon line.
It is all an affair of memory,
And a matter of the heart.
The Sweet Girl wakes up, eyes
Barely welcoming the sunlight
And remarks with stylized poise:
“How ya’ all doing?”
And commands the noisy kids,
Exchanging idle blows on the yard.
“Go down yonder, up dem hills.
Spot the littl’ boy hunt fa deer
Or something.” And I know
Language is the trailblazer of tradition.
In the North, there is the rush
With the rush-hour.
The fled Negroes in the unhappy cities.
They rap about the police
And other assorted symbols
Of tyranny and order.
And the Puerto Ricans dream of rum.
The Mexicans, green bucks,
After a harsh escape as wet-backs.
The Chinese dream of ginseng.
The Italians, pasta.
They all mingle into callaloo.
The sad tales of their dreams,
How it is all a search for silver.
How rarely a search for wisdom.
And how some only find their dreams
Brutally dashed down
Wretched wintry streets.
And how some join the Mafia
And robin hood the yankee streets.
O America, l sing your name!
I sing of the Empire state Building,
Wall street, and Burger King!
O, yes, Burger King! For who can
Forget the civilization
Which makes inner city kids into kings?
O America, I sing your name!
So much wealth and wisdom
And wretchedness on your streets,
And deadly men in middle-class robes,
Undoing the little heavens
Of the Guardian Angels.
The Lady of Liberty stands,
Glazed with ocean-breeze,
Holding the torch of optimism
And pessimism. And the bad girls
On Forty Second Street
And the homeless and heartless and hopeless
And the Trump Plaza and other assorted triumphs,
And the Haitians and Korean vendors,
Selling wares and wears
In sweet accents of a huckster culture.
And the Hassidic Jews with dark cowboy hats,
And bushy beards, move slowly
In their robes like the Amish.
And the tinkling-bell Buddhists
And white-robed Hare Krishnas,
Immaculate in their dreams,
A narrow strip of hair dangling
On their bald-shaven roundheads.
The Black Moslems in loose white robes,
Carrying colognes and incense, proselytizing
The curious narcissistic streets.
And the heart-wrenching atheists
Handout Marxian Pamphlets and other
Gospels of secular humanism, yammering
With zeal and zest in the Bohemian culture
Of Greenich Village.
In America, region exerts a leverage.
The fun-loving head to California and Florida
Where the sun never betrays its course,
And where cheap Hollywood stars dramatize
Their lucrative unhappiness
In alimony fist-fights and who is on whose girl.
It is all a matter of a country in search
Of the world in itself. In the Midwest,
Farmers search for their roots
Beyond the seas, into Viking isles,
Africa, and the Soviet republics.
In Alaska, Eskimos trail into
Soviet turfs to rediscover
The chants of their separated dance.
In North Carolina, the Cherokee dance
In sorrowful feather-flakes
Under the nimbi of moon and stars.
And l am reminded of the Iroquois and Algonquins;
Mohawks, Cayuga, and Mohicans,
Singing like frogs in a waterpond
With their hands clustered
Behind their backs. Their voices, gurgling
Tam-tam drums. They surround campfires,
As if laying wreaths for a dead neighbor.
It is all a matter of how
You read America: its nightmares and dreams;
Its delusions and illusions.
And how you think God blesses America
And how wealth curses America.
And how it does not matter
Whether you eat scrambled egg for breakfast,
Or cereal and milk,
Bacon and eggs and orange juice,
Or just plain coffee and sugar.
It does not matter. America is a landscape
For daring go-getters.
It does not matter whether past moons
Endow you with prince-blood, or princess-beauty,
Just drive over the barricades and discover
The world of gain and loss
Buried in its corners.
3.11. THE COMING TURNING
The coming is the turning,
Weep not like birds
With scattered nestlings.
We know it
By the silence of our children
And the unsettled of our fishy selves.
The coming is in the morning,
Not like herds of cattle
Heading through appetite-gates,
Or like gazelles, running wildly
Into tangled bushpath, forgetting
The route they came through.
The coming approaches
Through the patient anticipation
Of children. It comes, comess,
Quietly to meet our anxious desires.
We will know the when turning.
The moonlight will reveal
The erratic flashes of our past,
The kingly betrayals, the
Tumultous sufferings.
We know the coming is the turning,
When the fences crumble
On the grasshoppers and locusts,
When we handshake with
The warmth of our hearts.
3.12. BEFORE THE BREAKING OF THE FAST
The disquiet in waking up, heaving subsiding.
Grace suddenly abandoned. Desires awaken
To the temptations of the sun.
The dreams the night before, carved out
In my conscience, transported me
Through the radiance of beauty, showed me
The reigns and raptures of Timbuktu.
Mansa Kankang Musa, Sunni Ali,
The weight of a past rich as embroidery.
The revelation on the pillow, a heaven
Squinting through our shortness of memory
And exaggeration of vision.
Exquisite empires, kingdoms of gold,
Iron and bronze. The goldsmiths’ hands,
The blacksmiths’ patience, the glow
Of fire and dust.
Time leaves no scrolls for memory;
The wand of the future marches
To cover expired heavens.
Griots should rise, pluck
The fiery strings, evoke the roots,
And leave us with memory-scrolls.
For who should forget,
Empires, rare as mermaids,
Profuse with Grace?
Griots should rise,
With batik-cloth worn as mantle,
And a voice fresher than honey.
Our branches, civilized comforts,
Are only desolate cages.
We need a calabash of dreams
To feed us into the Green Age.
O gods, the disquiet in waking up,
And be engulfed in redemptive memory.
Hunger biting my entrails,
But absorbed in meditative thirst.
My mind soars backward to Kingdoms-of-Grace
Before the Breaking of the Fast.
Appendix III: Some Selected Biographical & Professional Details
Education:
Ph.D. (Economics, August 1987), Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech), Blacksburg. Va (Fields of Specialization comprised: Economic Growth and Development, Public Finance and Public Choice).
M.A. (Economics, Fall 1984), Virginia Tech.
B.A. (Economics, Spring 1982), Berea College, Kentucky.
B.S. (Business Management, Spring 1982), Berea College.
Awards and Honors:
Virginia Polytechnic Institute Graduate School Nominee as Outstanding Graduate Student (1987).
Doctor of Literature (Honoris Causa), World Academy of Arts and Culture, Taipei, Taiwan (1984).
Berea College Student Nominee for the Carnegie Endowment for Peace Internship(1982).
Berea College Most Outstanding Student of the Year and Scholarship Day Speaker (May, 1982).
Berea College Senior Award in Economics (1981, 1982).
Dissertation Topic:
“Agricultural Tenancy and Contracts: An Economic Analysis of the Strange Farmer (Migrant Labor) System in the Gambia”.
Professional Experience:
Senior Economist, Natural Resources, Water and Environment Division, MENA, World Bank (covering Egypt, Jordan, and Yemen, 1993-present).
Economist, Agriculture Division, West Africa Department, World Bank (covering Nigeria and Ghana, 1990-1993).
Economist (Young Professional), Onchocerchiasis Unit, World Bank (covering Burkina Faso, Guinea Bissau as well as the remaining Onchocerchiasis endemic countries, 1989).
Economist (Young Professional), Agriculture Division, South Asia Department, World Bank (covering Bangladesh, 1989).
Assistant Professor of Economics, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, North Carolina (1988-89).
Assistant Professor of Economics, Kutztown, University of Pennsylvania, Kutztown, Pennsylvania (1987-88).
Instructor, Microeconomics and Macroeconomics, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Summer Terms (1982-86).
Teaching Assistant in Economics, Berea College, (1981-82).
Audit Clerk, Customs and General Post Office, The Gambia Government Civil Service (1975-77).
Published Books:
Wolof (Cultural Anthropology, 1996) New York Rosen Publishing Group, Inc.).
New Poets of West Africa (Poetry Anthology, 1995, edited by him) (Lagos/Oxford: Malthouse Press Ltd.).
Dreams of Dusty Roads (Poems, 1993) (Colorado: Three Continents Press; now of Lynne Rienner Publishers).
Kora Land (Poems, 1989) (Colorado: Three Continents Press).
Before the New Earth (Short Stories, 1988) (India, Calcutta: Writers Workshop and Three Continents Press).
When Africa Was a Young Woman (Poems, 1980) (India, Calcutta: Writers Workshop).
Anthologies In Which His Work Appeared:
“Innocent Terror” (short story) in Under African Skies: Modern African Stories edited by Charles R. Larson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).
“Mandella” (poem) in Nelson Mandela Amandla (poems in honor of the life and work of Nelson Mandela) edited by Amelia Blossom House and Cosmo Pieterse (Colorado: Three Continents Press, 1989).
“Weaverdom” (short story) in Contemporary African Short Stories edited by Chinua Achebe and C.L. Innes (Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1992).
“Why Do You Come Yaadicone?” (poem) in 7th Biennial Anthology of Premier Poets (1979-1980) (Madras, India).
“Sometimes” in Premier Poets, 6th Biennial Anthology, (Madras, India).
“Freedom in the New Air,” in Poetry Americas (Madras, India).
“A Way of Counting Time,” in Poetry Africa (Madras, India).
Literary Criticism/Essays:
“Srinivasque Poetic World,” New Literary Horizons (Amravati, India: January, 1988), vol.3, no.1., pp. 1-4.
“Phillis Wheatley: A Brief Survey of the Life and Works of a Gambian Slave/Poet in New England, America,” Wasafiri—Caribbean, African, Asian and Associated Literatures in English (Canterbury, Kent, U.K.: Spring 1992), No. 15, pp.27-31.
“The Eagles Vision: The Poetry of Tanure Ojaide,” Research in African Literatures (India: Spring 1995), vol. 26, pp.20-29.
“My Approach and Relation to Language,” Washington Review (Washington, D.C.), vol.xvi, no. 2, August/September 1990, p.29.
“Words or Rice,” The Observer, (Banjul, the Ghambia), October 8, 1993
Book Reviews Done By Mr. Tijan Sallah:
War Stories and Other Poems, by Rundy Thomas, reviewed in Wind Literary Journal, vol. 11, no. 43, 1981.
The Tragedy of Platitudinous Piety, by Bill Best, reviewed in Appalachian Journal, Winter 1983, vol. 10, no.2.
Summer of Pure Ice, by William White, reviewed in Wind Literary Journal, January, 1985.
Gem Within, by Rosemary Wilkinson, reviewed in Writers Market, Massachusetts, vol. 2, no. 12, December 1986.
Readings & Lectures Given By Mr. Tijan Sallah At The Following Places:
Eastern Kentucky University (October, 1980).
The Claremont Colleges, California (April, 1981).
Appalachian State University, North Carolina (November, 1981).
Howard University, Washington, D.C. (1982).
Michigan State University, Pennsylvania (1987).
Gaston College, North Carolina (November, 1981).
Virginia Tech, Virginia (1984).
Radford University, Virginia (May, 1986).
Bentley College, Massachusetts (March 12, 1997).
International Monetary Fund (IMF) Visitors’ Center, Washington, D.C., International Poetry Readings, June 1990.
Martin Luther King Memorial Library (D.C. Public Library), Lunchtime Authors Series (September 14, 1993-1994).
Chapters Bookstore, Literary Series, Washington, D.C.
The Associated Writing Programs, 30th anniversary Conference, Washington, D.C., April 3-5, 1997.
Reviews of His Books:
“Self-pity and Satire: A review of T.M. Sallah’s When Africa Was a Young Woman” in Amrita Bazar Patrika (Calcutta’s largest daily news paper and India’s oldest one), Sunday, 15 June, 1980.
“A review of T.M. Sallah’s When Africa Was a Young Woman” by Florence Akst in B.B.C. African Service (England) Africa Book of the Day, Sunday, 10th of August 1980 and Monday, 11th of August , 1980.
“For a New Earth: Writer Harps on the Need to Restructure Society” a review of T.M. Sallah’s short stories collection Before the New Earth in The African Guardian (May 22, 1989, p. 35) by Ezenwa-Ohaeto.
“A review of T.M. Sallah’s Before the New Earth” by Peter Nazareth in World Literature Today, Summer 1989, pp. 521-522.
“A review of T.M. Sallah’s Kora Lan” in Afram Newsletter, University of Sorbonne, France Numero 30, November 1989, p.10.
“A Poetic Journey Into Experience: A review of T.M. Sallah’s Kora Land” in Daily Times of Nigeria (Wednesday, August 15, 1990) by Ezenwa-Ohaeto.
“A review of Kora Land,” by David Dorsey in World Literature Today, vol. 64, no. 1, Winter 1990, pp. 177-178.”
“A review of Dreams of Dusty Roads,” by Tanure Ojaide in World Literature Today, Winter 1994.
“Experience of Displacement, A review of T.M. Sallah’s Dreams of Dusty Roads,” by Chris Dunton in West Africa, 31st of January-6th of February, 1994, p. 191.
Features and Articles on Mr. Sallah’s works:
“Gambia Inspires Poet,” by Lisa Backus, Berea Citizen (Kuntucky), July 31, 1982.
“Exile and Return: The Poetry and Fiction of Tijan Sallah” by Samuel Baity Garren in Wasafiri, Caribbean, African, Asian and Associated Literatures in English (Canterbury, Kent), no.15, Spring 1992, pp.9-14..
“The Poetic Dreams of Tijan M. Sallah” by Ebrima Ceesay in Daily Observer (Banjul, the Gambia), Friday, October 1, 1993.
“Poets, Prozes and Police” in International Programs Newsletter, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, vol.7, issue 1, March 1, 1985.
“Writing from the Third World” by Charles R. Larson in World Literature Today, Winter, 1981.
“The Human Side of Economics: World Bank to Give A&T Professor First Hand Look,” by Meredith Barkley, Greensboro News and Record, Greensboro, North Carolina, May 18, 1989.
“Gambian Fiction” by Stewart Brown in Wasafiri, no. 15, Spring, 1992.
“Book Report” by David Streitfeld in Washington Post Book World (Washington, D.C.), July 11, 1993.
“Tijan, Poet In His Own Right,” by Siga Fatima Jagne in The Gambia Weekly, no.33, Friday, 17th of August, 1994.
“Tijan M. Sallah, Writer, Economist,” by Nana Grey Johnson in Topic Magazine (Banjul, the Gambia), vol.3, no.5, May, 1991, pp. 24-25.
“An African Poet: Tijan M. Sallah” by Nancy L. Lee-Riffe in Eastern Kentucky University International Magazine, Summer 1985.
“The Meaning and Status of International Studies in West African Schools” by Irene Assiba d’ Almeida in Theory and Practice (Ohio), Summer 1982, see pp. 197-198.
“The Gambia” in Africa: Traveler’s Literary Companion by Oona Strathern (Illinois: Passport Books, 1995), pp. 32-40.