Review: Connection and Legacy – Remembering ‘Before Them, We’ (2022)

By Africa in Words Guest on 29 February , 2024 • ( 0 )

AiW Guest: Virginia Kelly

Before Them, We (flipped eye, London, 2022) is a beautiful anthology of poems and collection of photographs curated by Ruth Sutoyé and Jacob Sam-La Rose. Part of a longer interdisciplinary project to excavate the lives and histories of older people of African descent living in the UK, elements of the creation and co-curation of that wider project – a photography exhibition, a long table panel, a poetry film screening, and an oral history workshop that ran throughout 2021 – are evident throughout. Highlighting the significance of joinedness, kin, and fellowship, this results in a book which utilises a variety of media to successfully express and capture the multifaceted, personal experiences of being part of a family within the African diaspora.

As Sutoyé’s foreword emphasises, the poetry of Before Them, We opens with an invitation to writers from a “community of UK based storytellers of African descent” (9) to write about the older generations within their community. Moving sequentially from more abstract constructions and musings to specific people, the poets – whose heritage spans from Nigeria and Ghana, to South Africa, Somalia, and beyond – actively pursue memory-making, honouring previous African generations throughout. Although many of the twenty-four poets choose specificity and so write about their own loved ones, the forty-eight poems, each pair presented with a first-person introductory note by each of their writers, also successfully piece together multitudes of experiences into a touching whole. Subjects, tone, style, and techniques vary as much as the histories and lived experiences that are gathered in, drawing us into the complex thoughts and emotions it collectively offers up, with the intensity that only poetry allows.

First and foremost, Before Them, We seeks to elevate the experiences of African elders, both to counteract the silences found in historical narratives and to honour their integral role in their communities. Tolu Agbelusi’s ‘Tell Me All The Stories’ (14-15), for example, centres around her grandfather’s personal sacrifice for her father’s education “at St Finbarr’s College, Lagos”; while in the single sentence prose-poem, ‘Ye Ye’, the dedication of which subtitles it “For mum” (62-3), Sarah Lasoye reflects on her own impressions as she watches her parents’ wedding video and celebrates her mother’s growth into “fullness”, “…the only way I ever wish to recognise you” (63). Each of the poets in this anthology not only acknowledges and honours the lives of their elders, but also seeks to discover what bearing their elders’ lives and culture has for their experiences in the twenty-first century.

Aside from remarking on the generosity, love and kindness of her grandmother, “matriarch of the Mvula’s” (84), ‘Praise Poem for Makhulu’, by South African writer and poet, Thembe Mvula, also continues the tradition of Xhosa praise poetry, where typically a male family member recites of sings poetry explaining familial relationships and histories. Her grandmother, along with her “army of mothers”, made sure there was “Always / an extra plate of food on the side for any stranger” and “raised your children’s children, spoiled us / slept beside us at night, taught us how to walk correctly” (84). It is a touching tribute that reflects on her grandmother’s boundless personal and cultural legacy, left to be taken up by her descendants.

Delving into their relatives’ lives and painting such intimate portraits, the poets all draw up a window into their family’s history; the poems are a space to explore what this history means for notions of selfhood as individuals within the African diaspora. As a consequence, Before Them, We invites its readers to broaden their cultural literacy by exploring the plethora of previous generations’ lived experiences laid out so carefully on the anthology’s pages, and to critically examine the impact of familial and cultural legacies on those generations to come.

Before Them, We *back cover – a selection of photographs featured in the project, taken by Ruth Sutoyé.*

The tone of Before Them, We is equally multifaceted and complex, mirroring the poets’ own intricate and varied feelings about their identity and shared past. It is impossible, however, to read this anthology without acknowledging the centrality of community and the personal love the poets have for theirs. Hodan Yusuf’s ‘No We Before You’, which cleverly echoes the anthology’s title as the book begins to draw to its close, uses such wordplay to touch on how our elders are responsible for our placement in the world. She opens the poem with “Without you, there is no me / Without you / Having been before me” (112), using the juxtaposition between pronouns to emphasise both the difference and interconnectedness of the generations. She asks us to be grateful for their youth and life before us, as it led to our existence: “And without you / It would be a long road / Leading / To no home” (113).

More than contemplating the nature of life as a succession of generations, in ‘Oghe’, London-raised Igbo actor and writer Tania Nwachukwu writes about work and labour. She draws a connection between her great-grandmother’s family trade as a potter – “Withstanding high heat was coded / into our DNA” (86) – to her role in shaping the lives of her descendants, from the timbre of their laughter to their “wear[ing]” (86) the shape of her face.

In Nigerian-British Yomi Sode’s ‘Pepe’, while “Grandma” – not unlike my own grandmother – has contradictory views about the role of women, he nonetheless portrays her with love and humour. His grandmother’s obsession with “‘Pepe’ – her Afro-lingua franca for sexy, pretty and confident” (105), leads her to both criticise women’s rights activist Florence Kunle for being “Pepe-less” (105) and remark that, “You must have plenty Pepe o, look good for your husband and cook for your husband, or else he will leave you for someone else” (107).

Pepe, you see has power; “Pepe doesn’t run for the bus, the bus runs for Pepe” (106). Here, Sode acknowledges his “western mouth” (106) but with the nuance that his grandma negotiated her priorities in different ways to him equally – “I think of Grandma, and wonder how she felt the day she locked her ambitions away in favour of love. A / different kind of security” (108).

In giving poets the opportunity to celebrate their ancestors and relatives in these ways, this anthology is as much for the poets’ own personal exploration and connection as much as for the audience’s reflection. While many poems actively acknowledge previous generations, a disconnect between the poet and their subject is often emphasised too, be it temporal, geographical, political, or cultural. Many poets in the collection explore their sense of personal loss in not knowing their ancestors or being distanced from the elders’ lives due to the “ambiguity and second-handedness” of constructed memories, as the Nigerian-British poet Gabriel Akamo suggests in his introductory note to poems which deal with the challenges of “before” with “no surviving grandparents” (17).

As is the case with Akamo’s journeying and seeking contributions, disconnections are remedied throughout, however, in the act of writing poetry that commemorates the elders, even in their absence. Be Manzini’s ‘Blessings’ and ‘Gogo’, written about her grandfather, who was a “Sangoma crowned” (a South African medical practitioner), and grandmother, respectively, transform her grandparents from the mere snippets of family stories, “jigsawed pieces … from fragmented retellings”, in her words (77). Mazini’s conscious use of Zulu, “trying to fit / all of you / into a chorus / Umkhulu ubuso bakho / esibhakabhakeni yenze line / ukuze ngikwazi ukuphola…”, and sensory imagery when her grandmother is said to be “Tsike, basket weaver, / your fingers turned / blood-berry. Eyes / of midnight”, makes them tangible (78-79). This new iteration of her relatives, who Manzini directly addresses in the poems as if in conversation, reduces the distance between herself and them, and consequently, their life experiences and hers.

Where the examples of Manzini and Akamo demonstrate how the collection envisages the intimacy that comes through collectives via lives previously unknown to them, Ghanaian-British producer and writer Nii Ayikewei Parkes recounts the lives of those familiar, playing with the tension this produces between the known and unknown in his memories. In ‘Grace’, he recounts both his loving memories of “Grandma” as an older woman, “she of silvered hair; / she of the resonant laugh that carried and carried”, contrasting them with the “history/ of fallen leaves” in her younger life which he was not privy to (100). Parkes’ grandmother is also the subject of ‘The Soviet Coat’, a poem juxtaposing her fun “nights criss-crossing London / to shake your Fattie at parties” (102) with stark racial discrimination when “Acts so cold that you […] should / find them difficult to stomach” (103), neither of which our child narrator is unable to fully comprehend. Writing as an adult looking back and “carry[ing] on the tradition” of “old men […] telling stories” (99) as he references in his introductory remarks, Parkes uses his imagination to create a full picture of her experience as a Ghanaian mother living in the UK in the late twentieth century, “catching the shrapnel from the constant fire the Black male body is subjected to” (99).

It is apparent that writing poetry as part of this anthology gives these poets a chance to meditate on their personal and often complex connection to their family, to Africa, and to their familial history. Before Them, We succeeds in amplifying the voices of African elders who have long been ignored in historical narratives, extending the archives in impactful ways. The collection is an important testament – to lived experience, long memory, and, significantly, the vital work of community-building. But more than a testament, it is a way for the poets to connect and conceive of generations long gone, and for us, the reader, to take action to actively remember these lives and experiences. It is a joy to read – and see, with the photographs enriching the visualisation and imagination of the stories – not just for those who identify as part of the Black UK-based African diaspora, but for all. This legacy work also shines an important light on what it means to be a person of colour in the UK: it encouraged me to reflect on my own family who left India in the 1960s, exchanging the busy streets of Calcutta for the factories of West London. We are all born into a family whether we are close to them or not, and subsequently, are all subject to the material forces of their legacies and the legends of their histories.

Reading this anthology in light of Britain’s colonial past extends its notion of legacy, relevant for those within the Black African diaspora, and to all who similarly continue to negotiate modern life with the shadow of Britain’s imperial history looming large. Although I am not part of the Black African diaspora, I was struck by the ways this anthology articulated my own feelings about my family and identity as a mixed-race woman living in the UK; it expressed the ineffable pride, sadness and curiosity of the people, places and times that are the reason I am here today, but which also remain fractured and inaccessible to me, apart from through an act of self, and my imagination.

The project of Before Them, We suggests vividly how we need to interact with these stories, legacies and feelings, how we must share them, excavate them, memorialise and rebuild them: that is the call to action that Sutoyé’s foreword makes, for all readers to understand the need to “fiercely protect the histories of their families” (9) in collective forms of imaginative archiving.

Virginia Kelly is a masters student studying the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine at the University of Cambridge. Following her exploration of modern African history through performance and literary sources during her bachelors degree at UCL, she is very interested in postcolonial history and uncovering the voices of those whom Western perspectives often overlook. She is currently researching how song, poems and performance articulated changing social attitudes to the female body during the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Before Them, We: An Anthology is edited by Ruth Sutoyé and Jacob Sam-La Rose, with photographs by Ruth Sutoyé, published by flipped eye (London).

With poems by:
Tolu Agbelusi Gabriel Akamo Asmaa Jama Siana Bangura Dzifa Benson Clementine Burnley Ola Elhassan Inua Ellams Ibrahim Hirsi Janet Kofi-Tsekpo Esther Kondo Sarah Lasoye Nick Makoha Be Manzini Thembe Mvula Tania Nwachukwu Gboyega Odubanjo Damilola Ogunrinde Hibaq Osman Nii Ayikwei Parkes Yomi Sode Michelle Tiwo Hodan Yusuf Belinda Zhawi

Before Them, We