Refractive Africa

The latest from Alexander (The Sri Lankan Loxodrome) excavates a pan-African literary perspective in poems of celebration and defiance. Two of Alexander’s poems honor his African literary idols: “Based on the Bush of Ghosts” refers to the work of Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola, who Alexander venerates as one who “charted the dead as a perfect stenographer of ruin.” Similarly, in the poem “Eruption from the Compound of Living,” Alexander praises the Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo as a writer who “enunciated grace/ via endemic lingual styling” and whose work “continues to mine nutrients from interstellar rotation.” For Alexander, these writers illustrate an unapologetically African approach to language, emphasizing local vernaculars and traditions. Sandwiched between these poems is another long poem titled “The Congo,” in which the speaker takes on the persona of a “psychophysical” African healer surveying the historical exploitation of the central African country while envisioning the Congo as cradle of existence itself: “from this height/ I see the Congo as proto-condensation/ prior to incarcerated mass/ being precelestial in nature/ as sporulation from the cosmos.” Densely lyrical, Alexander’s expansive poetry captures the psychic toll of colonial barbarity while suggesting the possibility of spiritual renewal and transcendence. (Nov.)