There Where It's So Bright in Me

Tanella Boni, Todd Fredson

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781496230560
• eBook ISBN: 9781496233837
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Literature

There Where It’s So Bright in Me pries at the complexities of difference—race, religion, gender, nationality—that shape twenty-first-century geopolitical conditions. With work spanning more than thirty-five years and as one of the most prominent figures in contemporary African literature, Tanella Boni is uniquely positioned to test the distinctions of self, other, and belonging. Two twenty-first-century civil wars have made her West African home country of Côte d’Ivoire unstable. Abroad in the United States, Boni confronts the racialized violence that accompanies the idea of Blackness; in France, a second home since her university days, Boni encounters the nationalism roiling much of Europe as the consequences of (neo)colonialism shift the continent’s ethnic and racial profile.

What would it mean for the borders that segregate—for these social, political, cultural, personal, and historicizing forces that enshroud us—to lose their dominion? In a body under constant threat, how does the human spirit stay afloat? Boni’s poetry is characterized by a hard-earned buoyancy, given her subject matter. Her empathy, insight, and plainspoken address are crucial contributions to the many difficult contemporary conversations we must engage.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword by Chris Abani
• Translator’s Note
• Words Are My Preferred Weapons
• The Path of Ephemeral Lives
• Memory of a Woman
• What Needs to Be Said
• Might Take the Dreams as Well
• Those Who Are Afraid of Naked Women
• The Ladder and the Spark
• About Tanella Boni
• About Todd Fredson
• About Chris Abani
• Series List