Think of Lampedusa

Josué Guébo, Todd Fredson

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781496200426
• eBook ISBN: 9781496204714
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Poetry
• Index: Literature

A collection of serial poems, Think of Lampedusa addresses the 2013 shipwreck that killed 366 Africans attempting to migrate secretly to Lampedusa, an Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea. The crossing from North Africa to this island and other Mediterranean way stations has become the most dangerous migrant route in the world. Interested in what is producing such epic displacement, Josué Guébo's poems combineelements of history and mythology. Guéboconsiders the Mediterranean not only as a literal space but also as a space of expectation, anxiety, hope, and anguish for migrants. Hemeditates onthe long history of narratives and bodies trafficked across the Mediterranean Sea. What did it—and what does it—connect and separate? Whose sea is it? Ultimately he is searchingfor what motivates a person to become part of what he calls a "seasonal suicide epidemic." This translation of Guébo's Songe à Lampedusa, winner of the Tchicaya U Tam'si Prize for African Poetry, is a searing work from a majorAfricanpoet.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction by John Keene
• Translator’s Note
• Think of Lampedusa
• Even what the blinds bar
• And I would light neither
• The earth’s mood
• The earth’s dour mood
• I’d say happy birthday
• Sometime with my sketching pencil
• My dream
• Free of my land
• And we’d rise on that seasick
• And the art of antiquity
• The oil spill would advance
• The spill would approach
• The white bread resumes its pose in the front window
• They would have needed just a sign
• Then on a drop of the bitter sea
• Life’s sentences hold themselves
• Life would speak of the deaths
• Its own wrongs wouldn’t be enough anymore
• But a cathedral all the same
• Life reminds me also of the Djiboua Woods
• There in the Djiboua Woods far from the waves of my new home
• A rattlesnake is not like a slide trombone
• O Eritrea I’d fill the horn
• The wind would fly straight from the city
• Again on this night like the previous at Lampedusa
• And along our coasts full of remorse
• With abandon
• Turn the page
• More than the words of sedition
• Stop the fire brigade
• Harraga
• It’s only to this battered hull
• And there would be five hundred such pieces of shit
• Because mama holds her humanities dear
• The abundance of any god
• The wave of memories crashes inside me
• I’d live a quiet life with my two cats
• The newcomer in this water finds
• At times my dream would turn narrow
• And even a roiling sea
• The Trojan War as it would’ve really happened
• Les sans papiers
• October 3
• The boat offered in flames held women
• The same lovely war
• In leaving Libya in rags
• The ship’s bridge would be compromised
• Before the spark
• A cat with no other role
• The men play cat and mouse with people’s lives
• They are of the same vineyard
• Don’t lose sight of the people of Lampedusa
• The ground is nothing but the sea’s fossil
• We’d be five sheets of seaweed
• More than six hundred meters
• I went to town to find blue ink
• Now time would reveal
• Lampedusa
• Shrouded within its verb
• At the back of the raft
• I’d be a man defying the fence
• Sometimes it would be an order
• I’d know the seditious words
• Notes
• About Josué Guébo
• About Todd Fredson
• About John Keene
• Series List