Voices from Kibuli Country: Poems by Dannabang Kuwabong (review)

Ghanaian Canadian Dannabang Kuwabong’s latest poetry collection, Voices from Kibuli Country is a book that invites us to look beyond, to see what lies beneath. It is a meditation on remembrance, an ode to those not spoken of, to those that have been forgotten, those that have “stepped into shadow.” Author of four preceding works: Konga and other Dagaaba Folktales, Visions of Venom, Echoes from Dusty Rivers, and Caribbean Blues and Love’s Genealogy, Kuwabong’s categorical imperative in this collection is to remember the stories of diverse peoples from diverse places. From Canada and the streets of Toronto to Kibuli Country in Dominica, there is a poet on the run that is not a fugitive, but a seeker, a seeker of stories, memories and bridges that link Kibuli hill in Uganda with Kibuli Beer in Dominica. The poet/traveler strings together tales of exile, birth, death, love, history, and memory from the eyes of a transient wanderer who lives in between America, Africa and the Caribbean. Voices from Kibuli Country lets us see the Caribbean from an outsider’s perspective that in turn is our ancestors’ descendant returning to shed new light on the region on the places that his foremothers and forefathers eventually called home.

Divided into two main parts, each with subsections that although not identified can be mapped out, Part I, titled Those Who Step into Shadows, is based on the experiences of diverse voices that have come from Ghana to Hamilton, Canada. One cannot help at times but to believe that these are the actual experiences of the poet himself, although the occasional poem reminds one that this is a combination of the autobiographical and the communal. The poems in this section echo the stories of emigrants and their attempts to feel at home despite the fact that they are thousands of miles of away from their beloved lands. They work hard to find comrades in these new cold lands, seeking refuge in shops where their favorite delicacies from home fill their nostrils and their hearts reminding one of novels such as George Lamming’s The Emigrants and Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners. In these two foundational Caribbean texts a multiplicity of ballads and narratives of different characters from across the West Indies are told with the streets of London as the new space that must be “colonized in reverse.” In the case of Voices from Kibuli Country the space for meditation is Canada. If one is familiar with Torontonian areas such as King West, Kuwabong brings these to such life that one is clearly transported to the places he says. Holding hands in freezing weather on New Year’s Eve striving to find a sense of place is something all emigrants from warm climates can relate to. With these poems in the streets of Canada one is connected, perhaps gloomily, to the overall Caribbean experience of diaspora beautifully reminding us that the poet is not as far as those voices from distant countries seem to suggest.

Part II, Massacre, takes the reader from hearing of Kuwabong’s travels as a roaming scholar and his time spent in Athens, Ohio to the Caribbean where he greets us with what seems to be the core of his book:

For those who travel together and moan together with passionThe spiritual is the magic of their experience of groundingThe simpatico of their understanding bonds their painWith energies of unity in their journeys of artistic resurrections (37)

“While listening to Kwame Dawes speak of healing poetry—Day 1” is the opening poem of this second section of the book where the speaker urges the reader to never forget about the stories that have never been told. The collection sings praises to those who lie beneath rubble in Haiti after the earthquake in the sequence: “After the Quake”, “After the Quake, Floods (Mami Cèlesté)”, “For Those Singed in Fear”, and “A Voice Cries on the Mountain Top...