a nutshell: as a pair, these evocative poems juxtapose Tsibinda’s memories of village life in Congo-Brazzaville – both the beauty and the brutality
a line: “Do you feel how the daytime air vibrates | and feel the shudder of lush land | when the rushing train rattles the silence of mountains?” – ‘The Village’ (the first poem)
an image: in the second (darker) poem, ‘In My Village’, Tsibinda portrays the more sinister elements of village life, for instance how each brother becomes an enemy, each laugh an arrow, each word a shoal – these images are particularly powerful with the knowledge that Tsibinda fled her homeland in 1997 due to ongoing conflict and was ultimately resettled in Canada with her family
a thought: I enjoyed reading the translator’s note in which Carlson describes her process of first creating sound maps to highlight Tsibinda’s patterns of assonance, alliteration & rhythm to try to honour the music infused in these lyrical poems, e.g. imitating the pattern of repeated sibilants around snakes (“hirsutes où se tissent des serpents”) with “thickets where snakes intertwist”
a fact: until reading these poems I’d never heard of a ‘pirogue’ and had to look it up – Merriam-Webster records the same definition as for the word ‘dugout’, that is, a boat made by hollowing out a large log
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