A DAY IN MEXICO CITY

Outraged, sorrowful and occasionally hopeful post-colonial free verse that gives voice to the oppressed.

In his unflinching debut, Hagher seeks to redeem the struggling African continent through the power of myth, song and poetry, but he finds it a rough go, even from the outset. Entertaining Homeric aspirations, he begins, “How can I write the epic / To celebrate your long forgotten history / And a new song of your heroes?” After cataloging his nation’s ills, though, he finds that both country and poetry are helplessly “[y]earning for lost unity.” “How then can I sing you a new song?” he asks. Hagher discovers challenges so deeply and systemically entrenched that neither action nor poetry seems to register amid the disastrous cacophony. With incredulity, he records the social pathologies that plague African countries, as in “Ballad of the Widow,” which personalizes cycles of self-defeating behavior by describing two men viciously and counterproductively fighting for the affections of a widow: “The quarrel was small / Their hate was big, bitter and strong / And now they sought to die / And double the widow’s plight.” Hagher both mocks and mourns the absurd fatalism of such cycles in the linguistic tautologies of “Dying in Africa’s Sudan” and the paradoxes of “Gbeji and Zaki-Biam.” Yet the problems are bigger than Africa. Economic and social inequalities afflict Mexican maids, too, who rank below even their hotel guests’ dogs: “Maids pray to Guadalupe for a miracle / To heal collapsed shoulder bags and heated muscles / Dogs see their doctors weekly for a fee.” Further, Africa is handicapped by the world’s gaze, symbolized by “wicked cameras” that “[s]ee nothing except flies sucking moisture / On mucus drenched nostrils of starving children.” Optimism is fleeting, and when it does appear, “hope flutters on the wing of a butterfly.” The epic of celebration and heroism is not fulfilled here, but the seeds of resurrection are sown in some of Hagher’s longer, more explicitly African pieces like “Ode to Gbaaiko Iyol” and “Predators of the Savannah,” in which the long arcs of African histories are revealed and celebrated. Ambitious yet aware of its own futility, Hagher’s project necessarily means poetry that is, by turns, bombastic, messy and opaque, but it can be remarkably powerful, too.

Meaningful, edifying verse that tells of a beleaguered people.