4 Poems by Tsitsi Ella Jaji
from LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2017
Summary
The Not-Jobbing Blues
I am jasper to your Cheops.
Peace be upon you. And also with us.
Hoisting her voice onto the screen, she squalls:
“I passed GCSE in 1986. My small boy
is now old enough to marry,
and I have never held a job.”
No sphinx before onions, I squint like pity. I sleep in Tunisia but I wake with the sun.
The world is all a-twitter but the schism is the form. Dear Lion of Alexandria. Dear Desert, o dear Ra.
The land of immolation, o the rising stench of garbage. The placard's dilemma remains: I AM A MAN, and yet,
what always ends as it begins?
I ask you this: Ain't I a woman?
Academe
It always comes
as a surprise
that I am
here.
Manual for Initiation into the Zebra Sisterhood
Try to avoid the fool
who mistakes a zebra
for a pack mule. That fool
is probably a jack ass.
Get too close and you may
get a kick in your nuts.
(So: grow a pair,
and join the tribe).
Benin Bronze
After Elisabeth Frink
Our face is one thick
gild, old metal screens
our here. Our now
reflects your now: an
oily light besmears us
all. Live matter slicks our
temples: we are sheened. We
take umbrage, bronze it. We,
this brazen bloc. Night flares to
light our way and sear our nostrils.
Unthrown, we chase our golden-
blinkered lover. Justice stares
as if to meet our purple gaze.
Clavicle to clavicle, we
shall overcome one day.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- ALT 34 Diaspora & Returns in FictionAfrican Literature Today, pp. 229 - 230Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2016