Refractive Africa: Ballet of the Forgotten(Granta Poetry)

Refractive Africa is a set of three poems ruminating on diasporic witness, colonialism, invasion, and political resistance. This 'pas de trois' of poems begins paying homage to Amos Tutuola, innovative Nigerian-Yoruban author, and ends with a speech towards modernist Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo.

The collection turns around the long middle poem, using the geographical site of the Congo river as a lens for considering the pillaging and dislocation of societies through history, honing-in on the specific colonial and post-colonial histories of the area. He welds these to contemporary instances of ecological damage through mining for tin and cobalt.

Fierce, compelling, and full of astrological reckoning, this book is a 'savage enunciation':

'this is the Congo
vertiginous with derangement
with its foul & delimited hygiene
with its "weaver bird nests"
with its sprawling grasslands
with its "ghostly voltage" as flares from old oil rigs

thus our intelligence forcibly blunted
our thought stream injured as culpable integument
within this compound negation
terror persists
snaking its way through interior suppression'

About the Author :
Will Alexander is a critically acclaimed, LA-based poet, philosopher, visual artist and poet. He has won a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry, a California Arts Council Fellowship, and a 2016 Jackson Poetry Prize. He has published numerous collections with various publishers in the US, Refractive Africa will be his first UK publication.

Review :
Will Alexander's Refractive Africa is a diasporic invocation of world-historical and cosmological dimensions. Lumumba. Tutuola. Rabearivelo. Each long poem swelters, pulling a dense constellation of national heroes, ruptured worlds, hauntings, and sensory frequencies into its orbit. Through a glissade of luminous dexterity and precision, Alexander maps out a lexical cartography of Africas, real and imagined, lost and recovered. Since the 1980s, the Los Angeles-based Alexander has mixed politics with mesmeric, oracular lines. Here, three long poems evoke colonial Africa Will Alexander's Refractive Africa crackles with the assurance of a worldview that eschews the studs of "foreign domination'. Referencing African icons, ideologies and injuries, Alexander draws us into a feast of definition and redefinition, with a revelry in language, "alive with ferocious embellishment" There is likely no poetry more propulsive, visually kinetic, and intricately layered than that composed by Will Alexander... an imaginative realm that is entirely unlike any other, one in which we are immersed in sheer, coruscating energy This visionary act of "transpersonal witness" to a continent is an Afromodernist epic in the tradition of Kamau Brathwaite's The Arrivants... An incantation against "Eurocentric stultification", Refractive Africa embraces an aesthetic of sprawl and overreach, summoning free-flowing visions of grandeur and desolation ...powerful and visionary...The collection sings from the page; it celebrates, it prophecises, and it revels in the great spirits of Africa's national heroes and literary giants. Alexander's writing is awash with innovation, ably straddling a world which is all too familiar, and a sparkling one of imagination... Refractive Africa is a bold and dazzling culmination of his contemporary thinking, and is an astonishing leap into the UK market A powerful meditation on the colonial ravagings of the continent and the modern quest for resources that continues to tax its wilderness... An electrifying display of narrative power through chiselled poetic lines. Alexander's diegesis is one of chimerical fission and transformation... Everything is volatile and alchemical here ... Displaying great lexical elasticity and riverine agility, he choreographs a masterful 'ballet of the forgotten' ('The Congo'), revealing a lexical cartography of incorruptible reclamation