Tuesday, 19 October 2010 00:00 | Written by Prof. Tej N Dhar |
Charles Cantalupo, American poet and critic, is best known for his critical work on African writing, including Eritrean poetry. In fact, to him goes the credit of making Eritrean poetry known to the western world. It all started with his meeting with Reesom Haile in 1998, in Asmara, which led him to translate his poems into English, and publish them in two volumes, in 2000 and 2002.
After that, he collaborated with Ghirmai Negash, the best known critic of Eritrean writings, to produce a volume of English translation of the best poems written in the three of the nine Eritrean languages: Who Needs a Story?: Contemporary Eritrean Poetry in Tigrinya, Tigre and Arabic ,which was published in 2005. When I wrote in my review of the book that it “will stimulate discussion and critical comment … about the chosen poems and their quality” (Journal of Eritrean Studies, 5, 2005), I hardly knew that he had decided to do this job as well.
War and Peace in Contemporary Eritrean Poetry is a companion piece to the earlier volume, what he himself calls “a kind of reader’s guide to the poems in Who Needs a Story?” For this, Cantalupo took the help of his collaborator of the earlier volume and several other distinguished Eritrean writers, who, to use his own words, “revealed contexts for these poems which I could never have imagined or discovered on my own.”
The opening and closing chapters of the book combine narration with discussion. The first chapter provides an account of the making of the earlier anthology: the main impulse behind it, the work needed to produce it, and the problems faced by the editors to get it published in Eritrea. An engaging and heart-warming story, indeed! The last chapter is another narrative of his meeting with Reesom Haile, followed by a discussion on his poetic theory and several of his known poems. The two provide the frame for its three main chapters: one each on war, war and peace, and peace, the three major themes that dominate the poems in the anthology. The analysis of each of the chosen poems begins with a short biographical detail about its writer.
The chapter on war provides a close reading of the poems on war from all the three languages, which include poems of Fessahazion’s Michael, Solomon Drar, Mussa Mohammed Adem, and Mohammed Osman Kajerai. It is widely known that most of the poems on war have been written by poets who took part in the long-drawn war against the Ethiopian occupation of the country. Cantalupo’s methodology for discussing these poems can be illustrated by the manner in which he deals with Solomon Drar’s “Who Said Merhawi is Dead?” Explicating it part by part, even line by line, he puts it in its immediate local context, by insisting that it arises from the Eritrean mindset of war, of people in a perpetual readiness for war. He also puts the poem in the larger context of the “traditional and hallowed” mindset that has descended down from the Greeks. This procedure helps the readers to understand that each poem is an independent entity, the product of a specific time and place, which can also be read in a larger and broader literary frame. This not only provides a rich context to the efforts of a poet but also helps the readers to see that placing poems in a larger poetic tradition helps in a better appreciation of the efforts of the poets.
Another group of poets, including Meles Negusse, Issayas Tsegai, Solomon Tsehaye, Angessom Issak, Ribka Schbatu, Paulos Netabay, Mohammed Mahmoud El-Shiekh and others mixes moments of war and peace in their poems, Each of the poems is subjected to a close analysis, with extended focus on images and objects, their association with the local landscape as well as with their ancient setting, to make us see that in each one of them war either creates or suggests peace. The quality of analysis is truly of a high order, proving Eliot’s assertion that poet-critics are the best critics of poetry. Cantalupo also shows how some of the chosen poets have used the elegiac form, almost like the poets of conventional elegies, to end their poems on a note of hope, and how many others “transform specific incidents of war or its immediate aftermath into moments of illumination.”
Moving away from the myth of Eritrea at war, the poems of peace envision life itself—the everyday realities of postwar Eritrea. The struggle that had a specific purpose during the times of war takes on a new coloration, for it now deals with children, love, unwed mothers, national pride, even the very process of writing. It could be Kidane’s problems about the growing up of children, or simply about going crazy with love: experiences that seem routine and familiar, but quite striking in a war-dominated psyche of Eritrea. Or it could be Hailemariam’s poem about “Let’s Divorce and Get Married Again,” in which we witness the birth, break up, and rebirth of a relationship. Or it could be Reesom Haile writing about national affirmation. All the poems are full of wit, humour, and feelings of joyous well being.
In the final chapter on Reesom Haile, we are not only introduced to a distinguished poet and his work but also made to understand why he is a typical Eritrean poet. Cantalupo writes about meeting him in a setting that he had “never experienced before, ” for Haile was not just reading but actually performing his poem among the public, which consisted of people from all strata of society, including women and children. He also quotes extensively from Haile’s views on poetry and poets. A few one-liners: “Or poetry is participatory”; “Our traditional poetry form is ad hoc”; “Poetry is not a special activity of poet, for everyone is a potential poet.” Cantalupo makes us see that the Eritean poet is truly a bard, a voice of the people with whom he lives and of whom he is a part. Commenting on his poems, he shows how, to combat successive waves of colonization, Haile crafts poetry of resistance that “is inseparable from the life of the poet and of his country.” And yet, as can be seen in the two translated volumes—We Have our Voice and We Invented the Wheel—Haile also manages to write on “a myriad of subjects.” Cantalupo also assesses his achievement in the context of the Asmara Declaration that was signed in Asmara in the famous conference “Against All Odds,” which pleaded that African writers should write in their own languages.
The Appendix provides the bilingual text of some of the poems taken from Who Needs a Story? that have been analyzed in the book. Like the earlier anthology of translated poems, War and Peace in Contemporary Eritrean Poetry is truly a path-breaking work. It will not only help the non-Eritrean readers to get the right kind of perspective on the creation of poems in Eritrea and their proper appreciation but also provide a model of critical reading of poems to the budding Eritrean critics. A very welcome book, indeed!
Last Updated (Saturday, 23 October 2010 15:07)
Source: http://www.shaebia.org/
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