First published in The Graveyard Also Has Teeth, “On Being a Poet in Sierra Leone” is an example of Syl Cheney-Coker’s self-referential—one might almost say egocentric—style. This 34-line free-verse poem—which contains minimal punctuation (only two exclamation points and six commas)—is deceptively casual looking and sounding.

Only upon closer inspection do the poetic devices emerge, and these are insistent and mostly aural: assonances and consonances that punctuate the lexical meanings by emphasizing certain words, as in the lines “I am seeking the verisimilitudes in life / the fire of metaphors the venom of verse” (ll. 2–3). The emphatic alliterations of verisimilitudes, venom, and verse and the long i-sounds of I, life, fire—not to mention the mirrored sound effects of life and fire—all contribute to the poem’s striking sonority, a quality long associated with lyrical poetry and sermonic discourse.

The poem is a convoluted apostrophe to “my country,” felt as an embodiment of the speaker’s driving force (“you are my heart”), but a heart “living like a devastated landscape” (l. 4). The poet confesses to having alternately “condemned and sold” and “loved and hated” his fatherland, but to have felt all the while “the poetry of being you / a colossus strangled by fratricidal parasites”—a country “betrayed” by his very own “hermetic poetry” and by his estranged language, considered “too ‘intellectual’ ” (ll. 12–13) for ordinary communication with his people (Sierra Leone’s students, farmers, fishermen).

The speaker says that he wants “to be the breakfast of the peasants who read / to help the fishermen bring in their catch / I want to be your national symbol of life” (ll. 21–23). But these desires, however “simple,” are not easy to fulfill in Sierra Leone, a “disastrous gloating python / in whose belly all my anger dies” (ll. 29–30).

The poem ends, nevertheless, with an expression of positive will: “I am going to be happy to stop carrying my pain / like a grenade in my heart, I want to be simple / if possible to live with you, and then one day die leaving / my poetry, an imperfect metaphor of life!” (ll. 31–34).

It is significant that in this poem Cheney-Coker calls his poetry, his entire oeuvre, “an imperfect metaphor of life,” thus asking readers and listeners to bear in mind that this poem is not an aesthetic manifesto or a patriotic ode (its title notwithstanding), but a sincere effort to speak to Sierra Leone directly and to capture in words the emotionally rocking realities of his homeland and the baffling torments of even the simplest existence there.

Categories: Literature, World Literature

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