Foreword by Aremu Adams Adebisi
"As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand." ―Ernest Hemingway
I like to think African literature today is sacrificial. No, I do not mean it unifies people. Neither does my statement imply that African literature influences humanity. By sacrificial, I mean African literature, regardless of geography, culture, and possibly heritage, has elements of integrated global ideologies. In tending towards becoming extensive, subtly wrapping into other literature, African literature has suffered concealed degrees of reorientation and disorientation due to the explosive globalization of culture and traditions. Literature, generally, indeed goes where language goes, and language today is inwardly gratifying, discreetly pointing to the West. Language today is selfish, mental, and the constant, albeit political, probing of self-identity.
Yet, to be African, I dare say, has never been to emphasize the love of the self or find the self as the case may be. On the contrary, to be African is to love and shamelessly drown in love letters that celebrate starving, beckoning nakedness, documenting courtship practices in lush words, and expounding the penchant for feasts, festivals, and merrymaking in the lovers' body; and history be thanked for my judgment. It is to have your depth in the nudity of your lover, exploring the profundity. As this very anthology has done, it is to borrow screams from the atmosphere to contemporarily mirror the archaeological primacy of African love poetry, from the Egyptian love poems in the New Kingdom to the Acoli love songs in South Sudan and Uganda, to the Malagasy poetry of Madagascar.
Reclaiming and reinstating into African literary discourse a genre that has long been overlooked and understated due to the individuation and politics of contemporary poetry, this anthology has extended sensually ancestral parameters. While the poems contained might have demonstrated to a very significant extent the essence of reasserting an important part of African literature that has long been missing from the mainstream, they are first and foremost a projection of love, emotions, and consensual sensuality. They testify to the nature and meaning of love in the African settings, the one many have come to identify with, the one about the discreteness of the beloved and the chicanery of the lover to try to subterfuge or win the beloved over with words, often to have sex with them or for physical union or just for the harmony of an expression driven by an intense desire for sanctity.
Such a sanctity is punctuated by stages and artful meanings that typify African eroticism. Powerfully erotic, the anthology opens its gaping arms with the first typical sanctity — a young lover who disappointedly expresses her love and feelings for a man whose boastful words do not match up to his sexual performance. But, of course, an offense such as that is unpardonable, and the poet boldly reflects how grave a crime it must be in Africa through words that are both worrying and subtly deriding.
"But I am here / In the rickety of your bed, counting the beads of sweat falling from your brows / Wondering where all your rigorous ramming is going / When I can still feel my legs"
— When All You Feel Is A Tingle (Roseline Mgbodichima)
The poem hinges on the perceived sexual prowess of the mystical African man and the flexible arousability of the female sex drive, which by all means is an indication of strength. In Africa, sex is first a test of strength before an act of worship. The pounding hips, wriggling waists, and reeling knees are true tests of sexual stamina. The consequence of which could be tragic if the beloved does not meet the predictability of the natural, sexually stimulating lovemaking, couched in strength and praises, establishing authority, and celebrated in extolling metaphorical references. Thus, if the love must be erotic, it must be crafted in memories wherein bodily feelings are suspended and unfelt. Frank and bold lovemaking that transcends beyond the physical is indispensable to African eroticism.
Closely working its way up to the first sanctity is love as an act of worship. The African erotic literature contains rich repositories of love songs that are ardently erotic and intensely spiritual. Fervent worship lies in this spirituality as in the poem "We Made Magic." A poem that worships through visceral lines the sexual and the sensual. It compares the body of the beloved with several symbols of which are elements (water, fire, and wind), nature (night, moon, and star), and music (guitar, chorus, and dance). Organizing a concerto for the beloved, attended by night, moon, and stars, then elevated by water, fire, and wind must be nothing short of magic and worship.
The star cackles, the moon blisters,
My fingers romp her nipples into the harmony of a guitar.
When people say: “we made magic”
I suppose it’s the sky breathing fire
— We Made Magic (Ajani Samuel Victor)
The magic of lovemaking is the trickery and illusion of words, floated to triumph over the romantic hurdles in its path, to establish a common ground where both the lover and the beloved could sate their most burning needs. This makes it an act of worship in which love songs call for relaxed morality blended with lasciviousness. To worship, therefore, means to exaggeratedly entice, bewitch, and cast a spell without throwing off your feelings, as shown in the poems " What Making Love to You Should Be," "Sky Burial," "A Lover's Torso in Eyes of Family. Hidden Kisses", "Wild Dance," "Incinerating the Cold," and "From Your Laughter We Fashioned a Child." A worship love poem would either compare the beloved with elements, music, or nature, just as the lover fetches symbols nearest to the imagination of the beloved.
I awoke—this morning, to you humming
in your sleep—wondering what song
ripples through your dreams. Lots
of violins in there, I hope, &
a piano pleated with feathers.
— From Your Laughter, We Fashioned a Child (Pamilerin Jacob)
Erotic sanctity may also be a form of sexual healing. But with all dialectical discourse or eclectic essences, sex, like truth, or morality, is needy. Sexual urges may be likened to other biological urges such as hunger, where the sexual is the food. It can be spontaneous or responsive, aroused through several means such as imagination and fantasies. The subjectivity of sexual urges has ensured that sex can be imagined, created, and recreated for sexual gratification. The sexual in literature, therefore, is often formalist or structuralist to reflect the concept of healing. However, as I know with competitions and poetic analysis, the sexual share a deep connection with the beautiful. One of the poets in the anthology, while describing sexual healing, says:
"Come in, don’t get cold feet now
Let the fairy lights guide your path
Come on, take off all your clothing
Let them slide down your body
Come over, lie still right here
Let your desires come to life"
— Sensual Healing (C.M Okonkwo)
Analyzing the poem has shown that sex, desires, life, and even beauty are all products of perception and subjectivity. All imagination. All could be fact and truth. And all could be either fact, truth, or none. The perception of the literary sexual is transient as its reality. It is defined by a consensus in time and of time. Our sexual perception is the result of our polarized myriad healing experiences. These experiences punctuate our sexual needs. But at what point does sexual subjectivity become sexual universalism? I say at the point of power, relief, and illusion. At the point where religion and ethics pretend to be absolute and decide the sexual not to be one of the biological ways to heal existential hunger, but as an invention against God.
Regardless, erotic sanctity remains a social experiment. African eroticism is dictated by desires, beauty, and experiences. Since the African village is a highly charged eroticized environment where love words are floated behind taboos and superstitions from the lover to the beloved, sexperimenting eroticism as a form of relief and illusion is necessary nourishment. In "Lewd Lords," Tukur Loba Ridwan's lover must submit the beloved to a state of intense sexual ecstasy where healing is both relief and illusion. The lover must admit the beloved into a fortress of ritual and worship where the beloved, serving as an illusory goddess, must be appeased. The essence of metaphors and other comparative references in crafting genuinely passionate African erotics that heal, relieve, and deceive offers African lovers the possibility of realizing sexual hunger and fleeting sexual completeness.
"I helped him to the bed, holding firm his hands
I laid at his feet like Ruth with Boaz
His touch was breath-taking
His fragrance enough for the lungs
He gave me a hug, and I reciprocated
I squeezed till I could not breathe"
— All a Dream (Omole Glory Deborah)
Words, mostly flowery, serve as a consent weapon for an African love poem, or as it would be said, the gatekeeper of the door to consensual intimacy. The concept of touch-and-rub-and-kiss, just as the literary orientation of writing about the self rather than the beloved, is alien to Africa. Africans first belief is in the word, whether spoken, written, or sung. Thus, this anthology's demonstration of the development of African love poetry through words, albeit contemporary, exploring the different ways that love can be interpreted — testifies to love poetry longevity and endurance. More importantly, the anthology has built on the gift-giving long songs of ancestral traditions to render an exemplary archival work that re-inaugurates the African erotic genre. At a time when the world is shredded apart from the explosiveness of integration, questing love, and its several forms of sanctity, here could be the answer to why Africans especially must do it right by borrowing ancestral screams from the atmosphere.
Aremu Adams Adebisi
Editor, Newfound, ARTmosterric