Becoming Ebony (Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry) [Paperback]

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley (Author)

Book Description

Series: Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry | Publication Date: March 12, 2003

Recapturing the celebratory voice of Africa in poems that are both contemporary and traditional, Liberian-born Patricia Jabbeh Wesley weaves lyrical storytelling with oral history and images of Africa and America, revealing powerful insights about the relationship between strength and tragedy—and finding reason to celebrate even in the presence of war, difficulties, and death. Rooted in myths that can be traced to the Grebo tradition, Becoming Ebony portrays Liberian-born Wesley’s experiences of village talk and civil war as well as her experiences of the pain of her mother’s death and the difficulties of rearing a family away from home in the United States, and explores the questions of living in the African Diaspora. Turning on the African proverb of “the wandering child” and the metaphor of the ebony tree—which is beautiful in life and death— these poems delve into issues of human suffering and survival, plainly and beautifully chronicling what happens “after the sap is gone.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Wesley lived in Monrovia throughout Liberia's bloody six-year civil war, and many of her poems take as their themes war's atrocities: murder, rape, exile, loss, poverty. They confront the reader first of all with a toughness that is less confrontational than a kind of documentary reportage. But this second book also has something of the incantatory nature of Celan's poetics, in which the sheer repetition of certain phrases and ideas points out the irresolution in the mind of a survivor. Wesley works most often with aphorism and narrative: In one poem, "The child that wanders comes home only to graves" is transformed (in a later poem) to "The child that wanders will not know her mother's grave." Part of the strength of this collection is that it does not allow itself to wallow in the bleakness of this sentiment, but instead confronts and examines the power of death and suffering: "The mysteries of this world are not in the living./ The mysteries of this world are in the dead cold of/ death, in the weathered things of this world, in/ the silence that the dead refuse to take along when/ the dead leave." Wesley's speaker is powerful enough to proclaim that "all of us are now concubines of war" and, elsewhere, that "to be alive still is such a matter for dancing." In almost every section of the book, the reader is faced both with the brutal realities of life in parts of the world, and the lyric's possibilities for delineating a space that can act against them.
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Wesley focuses ardently on the little things--palm butter, lipstick, bony fish--to build a pathway to the overwhelming facets of life, the ruptures and terrors of war and exile, the ever-lastingness of death. Born and raised in Liberia, Wesley was forced into exile by that land's horrendous civil war, and ultimately found sanctuary in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she teaches creative writing and African literature at Western Michigan University. Wesley writes with clear-eyed lyricism about her ruthless and beleaguered homeland, and the bittersweet relief and loss of the diaspora. Her poems are scintillating and vivid, quickly sketched fables shaped by recollections of childhood playmates, moonlight and ocean surf, hibiscus hedges, and big pots of boiling soup. But these paeans to home blend with percussive visions of falling rockets and murdered children, sharp recollections of hunger and mourning, and a survivor's careful gratitude in a land of cold winds and rationed sunlight, her carefully measured memories and cherished dreams of return. Donna Seaman
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Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press; 1st edition (March 12, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809325179
• ISBN-13: 978-0809325177
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,185,109 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful voice and eye, May 17, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Becoming Ebony (Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry) (Paperback)

These poems, sited in Kalamazoo MI (and a few other midwestern towns) and in Liberia (Africa) are beautiful. Her voice and her eye, noticing small things, juxtaposing them with surprising things, are lilting and engaging. Perhaps it's because I just heard her read from this and an earlier collection last week; perhaps her spoken voice lingers in my ear. But even on the page, there is a lightness and fundamental optimism, or hope, in the way this woman sees her wide-ranging world. I most love the poems in which she calls up her far-flung friends and family, calling on London, Accra, Chicago, Jersey City... and the ones in which she notices the small things in her yard, in her memory of home. This is very much a trans-cultural sensibility and vision.