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Author’s Note
- LANGAA RPCIG
- Chapter
- Additional Information
v Author’s Note These traveler’s expressions of impressions collected across cultural and psychological spaces portray the two sides of this coin called life, oftentimes belligerent toward each other. Like the dishonoured promise made to each freed African of America at Emancipation (of forty acres and a mule), these lines, put together, cast light on the dream of total freedom and the daunting contradictions inherent in its being and attainment. They represent a dialectic, the spoke in the wheels of our bicycle, as we engage in this seemingly unending journey toward the shadow only of the good life, ceaselessly jettisoning virtue against vice. At a level, they confront a certain tyranny of thought, in more ways than one, challenging us to go beyond the comfort of our thought and socialization and to dare to look at the world through prisms hitherto only dreamed of. For example, Downside Up, in an unassuming manner, turns the mundane perception of blackness on its head, revealing a refreshing (and positive) conception of that state of being. At yet another level, this challenge is portrayed in relation to not only language but also to the cannons of poetry (with sextroversy and sextination representing examples of the former). A too tight a reliance on ‘traditional’ verse and rhyme, for example, engenders the risk of blurring the message beyond any significance. Because literary writing in this so-called global society may rightfully be considered as war by other means, the reader will quickly observe the, literally, take-noprisoner approach embedded in many of these pieces – the generalized despondency on the ground and the unprecedented cacophony of voices in the ‘global village’ calling for nothing less. The general conclusion of this collection would, therefore, be the deferment of the promise of living even as vi these poems constitute a harkening for us to live beyond existence. Fonkeng E.f Odawa, November, 2012 ...