Described by African scholar and literary critic Chielozona Eze as “one of the most prolific African poets of the twenty-first century,” Patricia Jabbeh Wesley composed When the Wanderers Come Home during a four-month visit to her homeland of Liberia in 2013. She gives powerful voice to the pain and inner turmoil of a homeland still reconciling itself in the aftermath of multiple wars and destruction.
Wesley, a native Liberian, calls on deeply rooted African motifs and proverbs, utilizing the poetics of both the West and Africa to convey her grief. Autobiographical in nature, the poems highlight the hardships of a diaspora African and the devastation of a country and continent struggling to recover.
When the Wanderers Come Home is a woman’s story about being an exile, a survivor, and an outsider in her own country; it is her cry for the Africa that is being lost in wars across the continent, creating more wanderers and world citizens.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Acknowledgments
Book I. Coming Home
So I Stand Here
What Took Us to War
Erecting Stones: January 2013
Looters of War 2011
Coming Home: A Poem for MT
Send Me Some Black Clothes
I Need Two Bodies
The Creation
And You Tell Me This Is a Funeral?
Loss
If You Have Never Been Married
Becoming Ghost
The Killed Ones
The Cities We Lost
A City of Ghosts
July Rain
I Go Home
Song for Mariam Makeba
When Monrovia Rises
This Is the Real Leaving
Book II. Colliding Worlds
In My Dream
Sometimes, I Close My Eyes
Sandy: Love Song for the Hurricane Woman
Tsunami: A Song for an Unknown Young Man
For My Children, Growing Up in America
You Wouldn’t Let Me Adopt My Dog: A Poem for Ade-Juah
When I Grow Up
The Inequality of Dogs
Medellin from My Hotel Room Balcony
Morocco, on the Way to London
To Libya: February 2011
Sometimes I Wonder
The Deer on My Lawn
Leaves Are Leaving Us Again
Book III. World (Un)/Breakable
I Want to Be the Woman
This Morning
When I Was a Girl
I’m Afraid of Emptiness
Silence
I Want Everything
Finally, the Allergist
I Dreamed
On the Midnight Train
First Class
This Is Facebook
A Room with a View
Braiding Hair
Losing Hair
Hair
2014, My Mamma Never Knew You
