We must not force our poets to limit the world any further. That is a crime against life itself. If the poet begins to speak only of narrow things, of things that we can effortlessly digest

and recognise, of things that do not disturb, frighten, stir, or annoy us, or make us restless for more, make us cry for greater justice, make us want to set sail and explore inklings murdered in our youths, if the poet sings only of our restricted angles and in restricted terms and in restricted language, then what hope is there for any of us in this world?

Those of us who want this are cowards, in flesh and in spirit. We fear heroic heights. We dread the recombining of the world, dread a greater harvest of being. We sit lazily and demand that our poets draw the horizon closer. We therefore become separated from our true selves. Then even beauty can seem repugnant. Then, we no longer recognise who we are, and we forget what we used to be, what states we sometimes inhabited, what extended moments of awareness.

Chapter 2: ‘His Poems Are Seditious in Nature’: The Man Who Connected Them All

“Over the years, I have heard my uncles and aunts talk about the poetry my dad used to write. It had assumed a kind of legendary status in our family, but reading these documents was the first time I had actually seen it. I was surprised at how much it read, to me, like what it is — the writing of someone barely out of their teens. An intelligent person, with a great command of English, for sure. But words that could bring down a state? I still can’t get my head around it. I suppose that is the thing with repressive regimes. Any dissent must be totally stamped out. Even the words of someone as young as my dad. They say that you manifest what you fear, and the government did just that with my dad. He wasn't actively planning a revolution before his banning but he would do so afterwards.

Language has always been a battlefield of ideas. It is a war zone in the struggle between enslavement and empowerment, between the dominated and the dominating, the colonized and the colonizing. The history of a language, Tom Paulin has written, is often a story of possession and dispossession, territorial struggle, and the establishment or imposition of a culture. Language has been as much the tool of conquest and resistance as the sword. Indeed some of the fiercest battles have been fought and continue to be fought in this zone.

The modern university should be the great refueling center for that oxygen. Perhaps Aimé Césaire put it even better in his great poem Return to My Native Land, where he wrote that:

. . . it is not true that the work of man is finished,
That man has nothing more to do in the world
But be a parasite in the world
That all we now need is to keep in step with the world
But the work of man is only just beginning
And it remains to man to conquer all of the violence embedded in the recesses of his passion

And no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of freedom
There is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory.

Poets are the last heretics of the world. We flung our country, our trodden, deeply divided land, open like a delightful carpet at our feet. The many colours shot out across the floor and a newborn land slipped from its membrane of languages. And it lay down. Our country lay down among us, translated into parables palpable with light.