Named by The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry (2017) as “the first major poet to emerge from Liberia in decades,” Dr Patricia Jabbeh Wesley was born in her mother’s hometown of Dolokeh, Maryland County, southeastern Liberia, and raised in Monrovia, the capital city of Liberia. She then emigrated from there to the United States with her family during the First Liberian Civil War (1989-1997). With six critically-acclaimed poetry collections under her belt, Nigerian historian Ayodeji Olukoju has called her “a rising Liberian female literary star who has made a mark as a poet of note”, and she has been named Chee Dawanyeno by her people, the Grebo. Dr Patricia believes in the poetic moral imperative to bear witness on the brutalities—such as war, settler-colonialism, carnage, and genocide—perpetrated by those with structural power against the common people. In the words of Zimbabwean poet Tsitsi Jaji, from her panegyric “Praise Song for Patricia Jabbeh Wesley”: “But you look death in the eye and it looks down.”
In this interview, I spoke with Dr Patricia, recently proclaimed the Republic of Liberia’s inaugural Poet Laureate, on Liberian poetry as literature of witness and its poetic topography de nos jours; the presence of African orality and indigenous storytelling in Anglophone African writings; and the anthology she edited from the University of Nebraska Press, Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): As a survivor to the First Liberian Civil War, your activism involves documentation of and fact-finding on Liberian women’s stories of trauma as well as speaking your truth as an expert witness (such as during the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Hearings in Minnesota in 2008 as commissioned by The Advocates of Human Rights). You once spoke of enshrining the war through words and of literature as testimony. Is that, for you, the role of the poet in times of lawlessness and monstrosities—a witness?
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley (PJW): Yes. I believe that the role of an artist and poet is to be the town crier of her people, the voice of the voiceless, the preserver of tradition and history of her people’s sensibility. In our African tradition, the artist belongs to the people, to the community, to the village, and to the clan. As a survivor of the brutal Liberian civil war, I must keep alive our families, friends, and all the people who were silenced in the fourteen-year-long series of civil wars. I have always used my poetry and writing as a tool for activism. One of our mother authors, the late Ama Ata Aidoo of Ghana once said, rightly, that, “For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.”
AMMD: In Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), you historicised Liberian poetry, finding its roots as early as the 1800s in the time of statesmen Hilary Teage and Daniel Bashiel Warner—the anthology’s impetus being that “the silence [of Liberian literature at the global level] was deafening.” Can you speak more about this silence and how this anthology is speaking against it?
PJW: The anthology does not speak against the silence, though. It ends the silence. Liberian literature, art, and culture have been suppressed since the country’s founding. The founding fathers who were freed slaves from the South of America built a country fashioned after their former slave masters, where those who had always owned, lived on, and tended to the land were made the subordinates and those from outside were the lone leaders. They relegated the Africans who owned the land at the country’s establishment to a near second-class citizenship, not allowing indigenous Africans in what is now our country to help determine the direction of our country. That lasted for one hundred and thirty-nine years until the first military coup in 1980. The only other time an indigenous African was anywhere near the top of the country’s leadership was when Himie-Too Wesley, or H. Too Wesley, my husband’s great uncle, was made the Vice President in 1924 when the League of Nations charged the Liberian leadership with the enslavement of Krus and Grebo people, H. T. Wesley’s ethnic group. And for historical context, the newcomers, or Americo-Liberians, the freed slaves who founded the nation, were a very tiny minority, ruling the nation for 139 years while indigenous Africans were the huge majority and continue to be today.
During those years, all things African were shunned, frowned on, and sidelined, including our culture, our art and music, our literature, our way of dress, and our traditions, and the leaders promoted all things American or western. Their intent was to “civilize” the so-called “pagans,” like European colonizers, and take over the region. For more than a century, Liberian artists struggled to survive, and those poets and writers with the most talent either became part of the government or let their talent die. Even musicians could not thrive in a country with one purpose, to build a nation that relegated its indigenous majority to second-class citizenship.
Though there were writers who became well-known in Liberia, these fine authors, like Bai T. Moore and Roland T. Dempster, did not become known around the world, because Liberia lacked much of what a nation’s writers need to thrive and become well known. We did not have our own renowned African poets or writers like other African countries that were colonized by Europeans, as Liberia focused on a one-party rule and discrimination against indigenous people. Of course, the many who enjoyed that kind of government do not like to hear these things, but that is our history.
As a young child, I was a good reader and writer, and wanted to be that one Liberian that would break through this lack of representation within the African and the global literary landscape. I wanted Liberia placed on the literary map of the world. And my life’s goal was to be that write—which I humbly admit, I finally became. I do not believe I could have achieved that goal in Liberia as it was before the war or the coup, but maybe that is where tragedy has a twisted eye—I became a refugee of war in the United States, where I had already studied, and through that horrible experience of war, I found a place where I could become that poet I always wanted to be. America afforded me the opportunities Liberian writers before me did not have. I do not say this lightly. After six books of poetry, however, I needed to bring in more of our other writers. I wanted to put together an anthology that would draw in not only contemporary writers like me, but also those from the 1800s, even Teage, who is part of our literary history, even though, as founding father, he believed that he and the early Americo-Liberian settlers came to this part of Africa “to civilize the savages,”—who, of course, were my people, the indigenous African people. So, I researched; taught poetry writing to young, emerging writers; and collected uncollected work that has become the anthology, Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry.
The book is the most comprehensive volume of Liberian works since before independence, bringing together all the relevant voices of our people. The first section draws on the very earliest of writers, and it moves through time until, finally, the last section that contains work by emerging and aspiring Liberian writers. Each section brings the sensibility of the nation at that specific time to life. The last section is mostly by young poets, many of them college students whom I began teaching in writing workshops five years ago—some were even in high school then. They are the generation of children who did not experience the war firsthand, but have been living in the ruins of the war and the resulting lack of opportunities, and their poetry cries out against that inherited pain.
AMMD: While some poems from The River Is Rising (2007) allude to Grebo sea legends and Liberian rituals, traces of West African proverbs abound in Before the Palms Could Bloom: Poems of Africa (1998). In “All Dirges Have Ceased” (first published in The American Journal of Nursing twenty years ago)—which is my favourite among all your poems so far—you wielded folk African imageries to embody the lives lost in the war:
A snail shell, half burnt, a rattlesnake, coiled,
after the fire has eaten away its flesh.
A scorpion and her entire family, as if smoked
or parched hard for the ground.
And animals that used to run wild
in the jungles are all dead.
Can you speak to the use of folk tales and traditional legends in your work?
PJW: African poetry, Anglophone or Francophone, has always been a vessel for our African oral tradition, having been influenced by the great oral traditions of our diverse languages. There is no African poetry that is not deeply rooted in the ancient tradition of our storytelling, our languages, our sing-song traditions, our tales and legends, our grandmother’s stories, our praise songs, and our praise names. An African writer who is removed from this culture is not truly able to explore what it is to think and write African. Many of our young poets across the continent and world today are being influenced by the confusion of a world where many of us are becoming global citizens, abandoning their own cultural nuances, or forgetting them, and seeking to imitate other traditions. I am an Africanist, and I know what it means to carry your voice into the void of a world seeking to find its voice. I have only succeeded when I explored what is mine.
AMMD: Halima Buhari has theorised that your poetry collection Becoming Ebony (2003) finds tension in drawing the connection between the civil war and a woman’s body. Chielozona Eze, on the other hand, classifies your oeuvre as a “poetics of testimony.” What do you think about these labels, these attempts at canon-making, that come with the critical attention towards your poetry?
PJW: I cannot be labeled in one way. I am a very simple, but very complex person, and I have eaten from many pots of life. Having said that, I must say how grateful I am that African scholars and researchers are examining what I have done and am doing. Chielozona Eze and Halima Buhari know me well, and they have each written about only a certain portion of my poetics. It is possible to examine, from one angle, how my poetry is a “poetics of testimony,” or how a certain collection, as in Buhari’s examination of Becoming Ebony, is a book that draws connections between the civil war and a woman’s body, because my poetry explores the vast gulf of my world, from family to the plight of woman, war, surviving war, the longing for home, the poet as witness, etc. I think as I continue to write, scholars will one day understand that I cannot be labeled as any one thing, and perhaps, will begin to explore the deeper things I am seeking to bring to the surface. One of my dreams is to see scholars begin to examine the heaviness of African tradition in my poetics, the understanding of the African literary motifs I have celebrated, the traditions of my Grebo people, which are connected to other traditions across West Africa, and our folklore which is common across the continent. Most Western reviewers do not understand those motifs or the traditions my poetry celebrates, and do not research them in order to bring them under the microscope of literary analysis. I hope someone will pick that up before I leave this earth.
AMMD: In 1987, Northeastern University’s Joyce H. Scott probed the works of Liberian poets—Bai Tamia Moore’s Voices from Grassroots (1974) and Ebony Dust (1962), Althea Romeo-Mark’s Two Faces, Two Phases (1984), and the works of Sylvannus A.L. Tucker, Fatu Masallie, and Gamu Woiwor in the Liberian Association of Writers’ anthology The Word. She portrays the modern Liberian poet as someone who is “grappling with the emotional subtleties and ambivalences that typify a nation struggling to reconcile itself to the external demands of the technological encroachments of the international community and the human plight of socio-cultural change.”
Scott further argues that the thematics “of anguish and loss of spiritual integrity as the individual is besieged by desires for the material goods of western culture.” Can you weigh in on this?
PJW: I was in the little pamphlet that we published that year, but Ms. Scott did not seek to look at my poems in that piece. Perhaps, she miscalculated what I was or would be. By then, I was already writing significant poems, and the poem, “Monrovia Women” was already written. I do not agree with her analysis, nor do I believe that she explored Liberian literature for what it is or Liberian writers for who they are with accuracy. Also, Althea Romeo Mark, an expatriate then, was not one she should have explored, but I can see how she, being American, would have included her instead of me. I am not often interested in being in leadership in any organization; therefore, I was not one of those who fought for attention during the years we were members of the Liberian Association of Writers (LAW). I was in the background, writing stories and poems, a young woman then. So, Ms. Scott focused on works she wanted to explore. Yes, Althea is Liberian in a sense of her years of living and writing in Liberia, but to classify her in that way with all of us was unfair and wrong. I do not believe Scott’s statement in any way clearly defines anything Liberian or relates to where we were as a nation, or as poets seeking to write us.
AMMD: In Prairie Schooner and later published in the poetry collection Beating the Graves (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), the Zimbabwean poet Tsitsi Ella Jaji pens “Praise Song for Patricia Jabbeh Wesley” where she describes you as the “Motherpoet . . . asking for Liberian womanspeak poetry,” writing this from a point of view of a younger woman poet “standing / on your shadow.” Given that your 2003 poetry collection Becoming Ebony was dedicated to your mother Hne Dahtedor, who also went by the English name Mary Williams (and was called Wlansu Dahtedor when your grandmother “sang praise songs” to her), how vital are intergenerational solidarities like this among women poets?
PJW: It is always an honor when such an important scholar and poet—a fellow woman of the African Diaspora, and one younger than me—pays me a tribute. I think this happens across gender. There is, however, a powerful connection between African women through which we pass on our traditions and culture to the next generation. I have known Tsitsi for a long time now, but I first met her when she was much younger, during my years as one of the leaders of the African Literature Division of the Modern Language Association (MLA). I was pleasantly surprised when the poem came out since I did not know that she knew me like that. I guess I have become the “Motherpoet” for many young African Diaspora writers in the US since I was the one writing and publishing in the 1990s when many of these young people were still in grade school, in college, or not yet writing. We as Africans in the US are a special group of people, not fully American, not fully welcome, and not fully African anymore. It is a peculiar place to be, but maybe, this is why we hold on to one another. You also bring in my mother, my grandmother, who is known as “Iyeeh,” a name for any old mother in the Grebo tradition, and me, that connectivity of us women as in my connection to Tsitsi, or to great authors like Ama Ata Aidoo, or to the African American mother poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, and Maya Angelou, or even to white American women poets, all of these older poets, who influenced me, and to whom I felt connected. Those intergenerational solidarities are essential among poets. Community is essential because, as I said earlier, the artist belongs to the community.
AMMD: When we speak of the scholarship surrounding Liberian literature, who are the influences—Global Majority, African, and Liberian scholars, writers, and thinkers—whose works shaped your philosophy, creative-critical writing, and practise? And in what ways have these people been influential to you?
PJW: I have always loved Bai T. Moore’s love of culture in his poetics, and spent much time studying him during my college and early years as a professor at the University of Liberia. I even spent much time visiting his office when he was Deputy Minister of Culture in Liberia, listening to him talk about his writing and his advocacy for Liberian culture. I also was influenced by the late H. Henry Cordor, who later became better known as Dr. Similih Henry Cordor, a Liberian writer who was both my tutor in sixth grade, hired by my father, and my high school teacher. He encouraged me for years and published my first poems while I was in grade school. I have also been influenced by African writers like J. P. Clark and Wole Soyinka of Nigeria, and by Okot p’bitek of Uganda’s poetry—especially the orality of his works, including his Song of Lawino. Ghanaian poet Kofi Anyidoho continues to inspire me; I consider him an older brother, a mentor who continues to support my work. He has been extremely influential on how I see myself as a poet and my use of African oral traditional devices to write my poetry. I cannot name most of my influences, but Kwame Dawes, a poet who crosses many borders—Jamaican, Ghanaian, and American poet, and founder of African Poetry Book Series and Fund—has been of tremendous influence on me, though younger. His work as publisher of dozens of African poets, his passion, and his poetics have benefited me as I navigate the American literary landscape. He writes with the passion of a global, but Africanist, perspective, born in the Bob Marley era. In him, I see all of us, the global citizens we are today.
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, PhD, born in Maryland County of southeastern Liberia, is currently a professor of English, creative writing, and literature at The Pennsylvania State University in Altoona. She is the editor of Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry (University of Nebraska Press, 2023); author of poetry collections Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems (Autumn House Press, 2020), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, When the Wanderers Come Home (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), Where the Road Turns (Autumn House Press, 2010), The River is Rising (Autumn House Press, 2007), Becoming Ebony (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa (New Issues Press, 1998); and author of a children’s book, In Monrovia, the River Visits the Sea (One Moore Book, 2012). She has read her poetry at The Smithsonian, The Library of Congress, PEN International, Ford Foundation; been featured in PBS; and taught at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and Western Michigan University where she took her PhD in English and Creative Writing. Her works have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Harvard Review, Transition, Crab Orchard Review, Harvard Divinity Review, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Nursing, Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), and have been translated into the Spanish, Italian, Finnish, and Hebrew. Her website is patriciajabbehwesley.com.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: forthcoming), In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (Canada: Wrong Publishing, 2023), and Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021). Published from South Africa to Japan, France to Australia, and translated into Chinese and Swedish, they’ve appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the University of Alabama Press anthology Infinite Constellations. Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’ve been nominated to The Best Literary Translations and twice to the Pushcart Prize. (Website: https://linktr.ee/samdapanas)
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