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Neighboring Witness
Becoming Ebony
by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
Southern Illinois University Press, 2003.
80 pages.
Reviewed by David Wright
In her important anthology, Against Forgetting, Carolyn Forché identifies “poetry of witness” as writing that “reclaims the social from the political and in so doing defends the individual against illegitimate forms of coercion.” In a time when reports of political brutality and terror ricochet across American television screens, it is important to encounter such poetry, to be reminded that violent upheavals and the wounds they inflict are not new. And it is just as important to open ourselves to less frenetic (but no less potent) ways of encountering the damaging immediacy and ongoing legacy of such violence. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s often haunting, sometimes wry, and always energetic new collection, Becoming Ebony, extends such an offer.
As the best poets do, Wesley slows down the pace of frantic living (both in her native Liberia and in the U. S.). She bears witness through her sharp-eyed lyric poems with cumulative imagery and slices of narrative that patiently yet powerfully vibrate our attentions, giving us a generous vision of human beings who, though affected by political strife, are, somehow, not reduced to or defined by these experiences.
People, like poems, writes Wesley, are too tough, too kind, too wicked, too complex to be defined simply. In “These are the Reasons the Living Live,” the poet writes about her laughing daughter:
You can write a poem on her foreface tonight--
let it linger in her eyes, hang a poem from a strand
of her thick, black hair.
To hold laughter in a line of a poem is like
capturing my daughter in a poem. It will be easier
to catch a bird with my left hand, easier to pull
out a lion’s tooth, to hold a line of a poem down to the level of Adam’s wife.
Yet, despite this poetic difficulty, Wesley tries again and again to clarify and investigate her memories of Liberia’s bloody civil war and its legacy, as well as her academic and family life in the U. S. Often juxtaposing the two settings as she does at the end of “These are the Reasons”:
Some days I thank my mother for bringing me here.
Some days I thank my children for keeping me here.
When I am ninety, before I die,
I'll count my children’s toes and fingers again.
Will they still have legs and eyes and arms then?
These last several lines could easily be from Wesley’s first collection, Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa, which told of her experiences in the Liberian civil war in a more straightforward, narrative fashion. But Becoming Ebony extends Wesley’s earlier meditation, experimenting with a more imagistically dense and linguistically musical style of writing. She relies often on aphorisms, anaphora, and parallelism within poems to give an incantatory feel. Textured within tactile, descriptive detail come lines like these in “Requiem for Auntie,” lines that feel almost biblical:
The mysteries of this world are not in the living.
The mysteries of this world are in the dead cold of death, in the weathered things of this world, in
the silence that the dead refuse to take along when the dead leave.
Wesley also builds a musical, incantatory sense between poems. Throughout the book place names (“Jallah Town,” “Slip Way,” “Cape Palmas”) and telling objects (“nut palm”) recur in poem after poem. Often these are Grebo phrases or words that, though defined in a glossary at the book’s end, need no real explanation in context. Iyeeh, the word for grandmother or valued older woman, appears several times, always with a sense of melancholy, humor, and reverence. In a poem that begins “I am coming home so Iyeeh will die,” Wesley elegizes with such particularity that the poem aches while at the same time avoiding sentimentalism:
Iyeeh will not want anyone
taking up her time and her funeral or wake-keeping uselessly
fretting over their own knees or joints, shoes or heels.
This poem, and many of the others, show just how vividly Liberia abides in Wesley’s consciousness, something she demonstrates often in this collection by focusing on her new life in the U. S. as it lays across her landscape of Liberian memory. In “A Letter to My Brother Coming to America,” Wesley quips: “We just extended our daylight hours -- so we can / shop the malls, pay our bills, shovel out snow, / take the garbage out. We still have twenty four hours / in a day.” Despite her incisive eye, Wesley seems to like parts of American life, but, as she considers the houses “in silent rows here in Kalamazoo. / When I can almost hear the breeze pass, I wonder, / did a neighbor die, move away? / . . . ‘Do I have a neighbor?’”
This consistent, honest wondering about neighbors and their losses (both to the viciousness of civil war and to the artificial distances of suburban life) is what distinguishes Becoming Ebony and holds its four sections of poems together. While at times a reader might find herself wishing for tighter lines, Wesley manages, somehow, to take the lyric and make it social, broader than so much American first person poetry.
At times, though, Wesley reaches out of the first person and toward the collective “we” that marks so much poetry of witness. Poetry, when pushed out of its mere meditative or personal uses, can be a map of how a whole community might makes its way home. In a biting and bitter “Dirge for Charles Taylor,” the former revolutionary leader and violent president of Liberia, Wesley insists: “We will find our way back home by the imprints of your bloody claws, Ghankay.” Her ironic use the term for “warrior,” a label often used by Taylor’s supporters, shows just how aware Wesley is that such a path will be fraught with dangers and multiple deceptions.
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s poems occupy a version of the vibrant social space described above by Forché, showing us that between the often inhumane violence of political power and the selfish myopia of the individual in retreat, people find ways to wonder about and love their neighbors, practice friendship, cultivate family, celebrate and witness to the desire, that, even if just in memory: “we will return home someday, trust me.”
David Wright’s poems, essays, and reviews have appeared widely online and in print, in such places as The New Pantagruel, Mars Hill Review, Books and Culture, and The Christian Century, among others. His latest collection of poems is A Liturgy for Stones (Cascadia, 2003).
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