Traditional Swahili Poetry

Stray Truths is a stirring introduction to the poetry of Euphrase Kezilahabi, one of Africa’s major living authors, published here for the first time in English. Born in 1944 on Ukerewe Island in Tanzania (then the Territory of Tanganyika), Kezilahabi came of age in the newly independent nation. His poetry confronts the task of postcolonial nation building and its conundrums, and explores personal loss in parallel with nationwide disappointments. Kezilahabi sparked controversy when he published his first poetry collection in 1974, introducing free verse into Swahili. His next two volumes of poetry (published in 1988 and 2008) confirmed his status as a pioneering and modernizing literary force. Stray Truths draws on each of those landmark collections, allowing readers to encounter the myriad forms and themes significant to this poet over a span of more than three decades. Even as these poems jettison the constraints of traditional Swahili forms, their use of metaphor connects them to traditional Swahili poetics, and their representational strategies link them to indigenous African arts more broadly. To date, translations of Swahili poetry have been focused on scholarly interpretations. This literary translation, in contrast, invites a wide audience of readers to appreciate the verbal art of this seminal modernist writer.

Africa is a marriage of cultures: African and Asian, Islamic and Euro-Christian. Nowhere is this fusion more evident than in the formation of Swahili, Eastern Africa's lingua franca, and its cultures. Swahili Beyond the Boundaries: Literature, Language, and Identity addresses the moving frontiers of Swahili literature under the impetus of new waves of globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These momentous changes have generated much theoretical debate on several literary fronts, as Swahili literature continues to undergo transformation in the mill of human creativity. Swahili literature is a hybrid that is being reconfigured by a conjuncture of global and local forces. As the interweaving of elements of the colonizer and the colonized, this hybrid formation provides a representation of cultural difference that is said to constitute a "third space," blurring existing boundaries and calling into question established identitarian categorizations. This cultural dialectic is clearly evident in the Swahili literary experience as it has evolved in the crucible of the politics of African cultural production. However, Swahili Beyond the Boundaries demonstrates that, from the point of view of Swahili literature, while hybridity evokes endless openness on questions of home and identity, it can simultaneously put closure on specific forms of subjectivity. In the process of this contestation, a new synthesis may be emerging that is poised to subject Swahili literature to new kinds of challenges in the politics of identity, compounded by the dynamics and counterdynamics of post-Cold War globalization.