TLY:  Today, at The Leaving Years, we welcome Patricia Jabbeh Wesley. Patricia is an acclaimed poet who holds a doctorate in English and Creative Writing.  She is a professor of Creative Writing at Penn State Altoona.  It is an honor and a pleasure to have her with us.

To begin with, Patricia, I have read that your family is from Maryland County, Liberia, in South Eastern Liberia, and that you are Grebo. What are some of your earliest memories of the region?

Patricia: My earliest memories of Maryland or Cape Palmas and mostly of my hometown of Tugbakeh and of my mother’s hometown of Dolokeh were of my Iyeeh (Grandma), a strong willed, powerful, tall and dark beauty, about six foot two, who may have developed her strength more because her husband became blind and she had to mostly take care of the farming and care of the family affairs. I was a city child until I was eleven, and at eleven, my father sent me and my siblings to a boarding school campus in his town of Tugbakeh. There, I spent three years between summers with my uncle and my maternal grandma, Iyeeh Juwie. My other powerful memory is of spending lots of time being taught our tradition by my paternal Bai (Grandfather) Duoju Jabbeh. I believe those two from each side of my families were important to my storytelling and my poetry today. I learned a lot about our culture and the Grebo people from my maternal grandma and my paternal grandpa. My Grandfather taught me everything from Grebo war history to stories of World War II, about Hitler, even standing up on his aging feet to demonstrate his hatred of Hitler and his war. Learning to speak the Grebo language and the importance of family and tradition were the most important memories of the years for me.

TLY:   You have said about your poetry: “I write in English, but some of them are very traditional, and you can tell that they are written from my Grebo brain.”  I took that to mean, while English is the vehicle for your poetry, the essence of your work comes from Grebo.

Patricia:  You are right. Yes, even though African literature may be written in the language of the colonizer, even though it may use English words, often, the syntax and the exploration of our experiences are filtered through the lens of our cultural traditions, the African oral tradition. That is why the most important memory I can recall in that first question refers to my grandparents, who were the storehouse of this oral tradition in my two families. I use English, but the way my words are ordered on a page, the mind of the poem, my world view and the things that intrigue me about language are all rooted in that oral tradition of the Africa that is not often seen in the west. I write about my homeland not with the patronizing or the condescending spirit so often used by non-African writers when they explore my people. I write as if I am the storehouse of that tradition, and I see myself as the storehouse of that tradition because that is what oral tradition teaches.

TLY:   In Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa, you write about the Liberian Civil War that took place in the 1990s. What is it you would like your readers—and particularly those of us who have never experienced war on our own soil—to take away from the collection?

Patricia: This is usually an interesting question that can never be answered with ease. Really, I do not want them to take away anything in particular. When I write, I hope my readers will first experience language, the language of one who is writing in a different mode of communication than their original mother tongue, and Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa has many poems written in an almost Grebo syntax. Despite that, I want them to see poetry for what it is first in my books, to experience the beauty of language, the power of a poem to say so much in fewer words and to enjoy the poems even though my subject matter may be entirely different from theirs. A poem, whether it is of war or of peace, love or hate, must first be a poem. So, if they can see that, that is great. Then, secondary is the message that the images show. I want them to experience war through the eye of a poet. To understand that there was this war that killed and destroyed so many of us in a world that did not pay attention or help or care until the entire country was destroyed. That book has many of my angriest poems, particularly, poems about the rape of women and young children, the use of children as soldiers, the devastation of an entire region while the world ignored us. I want them to see how the violence created by war lovers devastates the lives of ordinary people and sends them into forced exile, turns the world’s best into refugees. If they can read the book without prejudice, I am sure they will see what I am saying.

TLY:  You and your family lost everything in the war, and were forced to immigrate to the States to begin a new life.  Would you say that the United States is now your home?

Patricia: I have had to answer this question dozens of times over the years, but always, there is no simple answer to it. NO and YES! The U.S. is kind of a home for me, but not my home or rather, not my only home. I see Liberia as my home always, the place where I belong wholly, where my roots are, where I do not need to define myself. Yes, America has become a second homeland for me, a place that I love, its freedom loving people, its ability to hold a democracy in place against all odds, its ability to stand up to discrimination is fascinating and makes me want to forever own this home. Like all other countries, it is not a perfect place, but its ability to hold together the most diverse nation in the world is a great blessing. America is the place that took me in during my years as a refugee and a destitute, therefore, there is no other place outside of Liberia, like America to me. In a way, this is my home and in a way, Liberia is also my home.

TLY:  We hear a lot these days about how we are living in a “post racial” world.  What are your thoughts on the matter?

Patricia: This is only a white idea. We black people do not believe this myth of the “post racial world or America” or talk about their "post racial America" like white people wish to believe. We live in a racist country every day, deal with racism every day, and no other people than we can say to the world whether or not this is a post racial world. It is a myth that white people would love to believe, particularly, those who do not want to do anything to resist racism. It makes people feel good to pretend that they have achieved an end to racism. Whenever I hear someone say this, I wonder if they are the same people who discriminate against me at work and everywhere I go, folks who pretend that they are not racist, but are the very ones who keep black people away from opportunities by institutionalized policies. I wish we could all say that, but it’s a lie.

TLY:  You are a remarkably strong, hopeful spirit.  And, I say spirit because you convey such faith in your poems.  One poem I have returned to again and again is “When I Get to Heaven.”  And yet, in addition to devotion, there is defiance there too of a kind of faith that seeks to efface ethnic traditions and cultures. 

Patricia: You’re speaking of “When I Get to Heaven,” in Before the Palm Could Bloom.  I convey my faith because I was brought up Christian, but as an adult, I embraced my faith by accepting Christ and living in the faith as truthfully as possible and also because my faith was important in helping my family and me survive the war. And yet, in that poem, I am not really effacing my ethnic tradition, but decrying a Western culture that effaces our traditional ways of seeing God. So, in that poem, I am saying that yes, “When I Get to Heaven,” I’ll do these things which are my culture, and yes, there is a place in Heaven for us Africans to be true to our values and our traditions.

TLY:  Speaking of family, I so admire the poem “This is What I Tell My Daughter.”  You address a difficult subject:  teenage pregnancy.  What responses has the poem received?

Patricia: The poem is one of the most popular of my poems, written very long ago before my second book became a book, first published by The Cortland Review, (and you can listen to the audio on their site). In that poem, yes, I address the difficult years of raising teenagers, a kind of therapy for myself and to explore my experience of raising a strong willed young woman. I received very many great responses when I read any of those poems about my children, especially, from college young people. They would explode with clapping even before I began to read one of those first daughter poems about race, pregnancy, cultural clash, etc. The best response I got was from my late father who laughed so loud and hard on the phone after he read the poem. “I knew someone would pay my debt,” he said of my strong willed daughter. “You’re getting exactly what I got from you,” he concluded.

TLY:  Your poems are joyous and sobering, and also you bring a sense of humor to the table.  Laughter is a kind of medicine, they say.  Do you believe it to be true?

Patricia: Well, as you and I know, our voice comes through in our writing. I come from a very hilarious family. My mother’s line of family is a very humorous species. My mother was the most hilarious, bringing folks to their feet by her sense of humorous storytelling, her ability to capture a room by a mere statement. And her children can also be funny. My youngest on her side (she had me as a teenager, a single mother long before she got married and had four others), who was born 18 years later on my birthday and is very funny too. My children are funny as well as I am. But I also have that other side of me, the tough, hard, fierce, independent thinker, the critic and the fire starter, I would say, something I also got from my mother’s side, but mostly from my father. My father was a tough disciplinarian, a political independent thinker, a student activist in his day, and after college, he refused to work for the Liberian government in a day when they needed everyone. In 1958, he began working for USAID, where he remained out of the corruption of our politics in Liberia. So, I am a firm, hard person who has this other side of being funny. I think that helps me. My father was always feared and known as a hardliner by all his people while most do not know how to place me. One moment, I can be very funny, and at another, I can be hated for the stance I take. That is seen in my poems, as you can see.

TLY: Patricia, I can’t thank you enough for the taking the time. I know you are incredibly busy. Before we let you go, please tell us about any new projects you are working on so we can keep up with you and your work.

Patricia: Well, I would say old projects. I’m still seeking an agent for my memoir. I am still trying to recover from this climate in politics to get back to sending out inquiries. I’m editing a huge children’s book, working on a book of short stories and of course, a new book of poems is at 60 pages already. I can’t say which will be published first, but I’m trying to stay focused like everyone else in this strangely sad climate in the world. Thanks for opening my mouth to things I often neglect to think about.

More about Patricia: 

The author of several collections of poetry, including Where the Road Turns (2010), The River Is Rising (2007), Crab Orchard Series in Poetry–winner, Becoming Ebony (2003), and Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa (1998), her poems have also been featured in former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated newspaper column, “American Life in Poetry.”

Additional honors include the Victor E. Ward Foundation Crystal Award for Contributions to Liberian Literature, an Irving S. Gilmore Emerging Artist Grant from the Kalamazoo Foundation, an Art Fund Individual Artist Grant from the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo, and a World Bank Fellowship.

Editorial Reviews

“Wesley brings us frontline poetic reportage in Before the Palm Could Bloom, her first collection. Many of the voices in this book speak only here.”—Publishers Weekly


“Where the Road Turns is a rich and textured collection of poems interested in gender roles, issues of cultural identity, and migration. The book opens with the poem ‘Cheede, My Bride: A Grebo Man Laments—1985,’ a narrative poem from the perspective of a Grebo man who contemplates the role of his wife in society: ‘in Monrovia, women wear pants and a man / may walk around, twisting like a woman’ and ‘they say women fell trees and men walk / upon them like bridges.’”—Renee Emerson, New Pages



“The poems of Patricia Jabbeh Wesley are fearless, eye-opening, breathtaking, and compassionate. She writes of a homeland devastated by war and violence, of a culture's survival beneath the flames of that war, and of the everyday courage of people whose stories would be lost if not for these poems. Wesley writes of her Liberia with urgency and with artistry, in poems that remain in the mind and heart long after the reader has closed Becoming Ebony. These are political poems in the best sense of the word—wise, necessary, undeniable.”—Allison Joseph, author of Imitation of Life and In Every Seam

Pertinent Websites:

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley's International Blog on Poetry For Peace

Chicken Bones: A Journal

Poetry Foundation

The Cortland Review, Issue 19, February 2002 

The Open Wounds of Being: The Poetics of Testimony in the Works of Patricia Jabbeh Wesley by Chielozona Eze, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies,Vol. 16, No. 2 (2014), pp. 282-306

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley's Recording of the Tuobo Women (Grebo) Celebrating Our Great Mother

By the author:

For purchase at Becoming Ebony

For purchase Before the Palm Could Bloom

For purchase The River is Rising

For purchase In Monrovia, The River Visits the Sea

For purchase  When the Wanderers Come Home (African Poetry Book)

For purchase Where the Road Turns

We Are Being Guided and Protected

By

Jackie Lopez Lopez

We were twins lost in the cosmos of rebellions.
I shook off the dream of the world and fell in love with you.
I frequented the bus stops and stole your lollipops.
I was in the neighborhood of good behavior.
We were multiplying ourselves in secrets.
Why tell the sabotage entrepreneurs the truth?
I will ride in your car the same way I ride your drum.
I will take care of you in the heartland of the opium fields.
We have taken to heart the airplane of emancipation.
My kingdom can be found in a handbag with lipstick.
When I was taken to the bill collector,
I was harnessed with a horse.
I was pursued by officers in debate.
Never take please for an answer.
The mirror in your room haunts me.
Divine timing I am told knows about divine sex.
I am a mysterious opium of the masses,
because I love you with all my wherewithal.
My feet stomp the floor for you.
I dance the note before it hits.
I am told by the music of life that
we are being guided and protected
just as you have always protected me on the dance floor.

As poet: Jackie Lopez Lopez is based in California. She was a founding member of the legendary Cabin Twenty, a collective devoted to the very best writing the heart can muster. Her poetry has appeared in The Hummingbird Review and La bloga, among other venues.

My Mutter Moments
                                                                      
                                                                                                          Kathryn A. Kopple
                                                                             

In my teens, I suffered a grand mal seizure, an eruption that felt like the cranial version of Krakatoa. Later, in college, I awoke with a painful lump on my tailbone, near the cleft of my buttocks. It turned out of be a pilonidal cyst. The term "pilonidal," in Latin, means "a nest of hair," which is the common trait of these bizarre tumors. In 2001, an excruciating cramp on my right side sent me to the emergency room. Scans showed a growth of some sort, and with the ominous news that it might be ovarian cancer, I went under the knife. After the operation, my physician told me that I was lucky; it turned out to be a dermoid cyst, a benign but freakish tumor that sprouts hair, bone, thyroid glands, teeth--you name it. In 2010, I woke to find a large bald spot on my scalp. The diagnosis: alopecia areata. A rare autoimmune disorder, alopecia areata is an allergic reaction that can result in loss of all hair, including eyelashes. I could list other anomalies. Optical distortions I tried to describe to one doctor as "It's like seeing hundreds of lighning bugs going off at once." He told me he had no idea what I was talking about.

Given my medical history, it is no wonder that I have visited the Mütter Museum on more than one occasion. The museum is located on S. 22nd Street in Center City, in The College of Physicians. 'Just another medical school,' the causal passerby might think with a yawn. Why bother stopping? Far more eye-fetching monuments beckon around the corner. Not counting The Forum, a triple X movie theatre a block or two away, The College of Physicians is set in a sedate residential neighborhood, and then there is the name--so straightforward and institutional sounding. From the outside, it holds all the promise of a doctor's waiting room: wall-to-wall carpeting, cheap water-color prints, piles of dog-eared magazines, and the nose-wrinkling and pervasive odor of disinfectant.

The initiated know better, those who have made the trip to Philadelphia's famous anatomical institute and have climbed the worn steps leading to the college; those who have patiently waited in line to pay the $10.00 admission fee, where visitors exchange nervous glances--the marble foyer echoing with excited voices. I have wondered, as I waited, if many of them weren't experiencing second thoughts. Were any of them really prepared to see what lay beyond the vestibule furnished with reddish brown leather couches and dark oil paintings of scientists and doctors? What about the name of the museum's founder, Thomas Mütter? What did the word "mütter" mean in German anyway? Something incredibly gross, I imagined.

In 1858, Thomas Dent Mütter, Professor of Surgery at Jefferson Medical College, bequeathed his personal collection of anatomic and forensic materials to The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Over the years, the Mütter has garnered an obscure if sensational reputation. It has been nicknamed "the museum of death." Once inside, the Mütter presents the viewer with a strange series of paradoxes: the mahogany repose of a gentleman's library, where atrocities of every possible type are catalogued and exhibited; an institute devoted to medical progress that offers one lurid spectacle after the other. On public display is a fantastically enlarged colon; jars of fetuses in every stage of development preserved in formaldehyde; dozens of skulls and skeletons; a fully preserved corpse known as "the Soap Lady;" numerous shrunken heads. To call the collection unforgettable is an understatement. The museum will transform your ideas of what it means to be human. After leaving the Mütter, you will realize that the human body is capable of anything. Physicians refer to the body in terms of "systems" and "structures" but they do not come close to describing the chaos that ensues when, say, a human head begins to grow horns. It is impossible to look upon this wild proliferation without awe and terror. Not surprisingly, the men and women who have spent their lives working in close proximity to disease and death exhibit a fascination with the macabre that exceeds the purely clinical. However disturbing, the Mütter houses numerous "mementoes," among them physicians' notebooks and instrument cases bound in human skin.

Of course, knowing that my own medical records read like a scene from the Trilogy of Terror, I was already aware that the human body is capable of anything. During my visits, I have studied with interest the drawing of a pilonidal cyst the size of a basketball, or the sketch of an attractive woman missing half a head of hair. I confess to feeling an odd sense of loss when examining the various dermoid cysts, those monstrosities that that can spontaneously sprout inside of us, and are all the more creepy for their human qualities. I can't help but think that my odd anatomy merits a place among the medical mysteries housed there. It may come as no surprise that I have already made plans to donate my body to science.




Credits: This piece was originally published in the now defunct "Metropolis." http://www.phlmetropolis.com/2011/07/my-mutter-moments.php

Leaving

By

Jackie Lopez Lopez

The Underworld traveled me and gave me worthiness.

And, in the darkness he waited for me for 12 years.

I am leaving the forest of endings

and entering the sun and ocean of new beginnings.

I have startled a blue jay as I put on my shoes.

The butterflies write me an opus.

The Pepper trees guarding my room whisper their blessings.

The doves of my childhood are cooing.

And, my encyclopedias are coming back to me.

My Barbie dolls are organizing a rebellion.

My letter is already in the mail.

Oya gave me my wedding dress.

And Yemaya gave me my bathing suit.

Chango gave me my grammar skills.

Aliens are visiting to say goodbye.

Pumpkins from long ago Halloweens are smiling for me.

The faeries promise to give me away on my wedding day.

A volcano in Guatemala is erupting.

A bonfire in Puerto Rico is dancing.

I am leaving.

I am leaving.

I am getting married!

As poet: Jackie Lopez Lopez is based in California. She was a founding member of the legendary Cabin Twenty, a collective devoted to the very best writing the heart can muster. Her poetry has appeared in The Hummingbird Review and La bloga, among other venues.

Adam and Eve: A Love Story

Adam and Eve had all of paradise to themselves. They spent hours lounging in the sun, unaware that the burning orb above them had a name. When the stars appeared overhead they smiled, although why they couldn’t say. They had no experience with loss or yearning. They were in love without the faintest idea of what love meant. When they slept entwined in each other’s arms, no dreams disturbed their slumber. Nothing from above or below troubled them, not even the snake lurking under the rock, the one that showed up unannounced at dusk, his wings still smoldering from the descent. Adam and Eve weren’t afraid. The snake looked vaguely comical: half angel, half serpent. What did they know of demons or angels? Lacking in foresight, with no conception of time, they went about their days as lovers do— in a kind of divinely induced fog, blissfully oblivious of the serpent: its cunning nature, its appetite for revenge.  How it would wrap its slippery coils around her. How Adam would recognize too late his error. Why they would never be satisfied with anything anymore. Not a day passed in which they didn’t pine for a patch of sun a little brighter, a far-away vacation spot where pampered and no longer arthritic, they would be restored to their original selves—although that too seemed entirely mythical. But then, one night, after decades of marriage, after he had stood by her in childbirth and she had nursed him through a bout of flu, they stopped arguing and looked at each other, simply and honestly, and realized that, yes, they had squandered their happiness. And yet they had a roof over their heads and food on the table. And they had the children.  They made peace with their mistakes. Later that week, when Adam showed up with flowers, Eve finally forgave him for his selfishness, and he forgave her for getting fat. They took off all their clothes, every stitch, and they stood naked at the bedroom window, with the shades flung open and the Milky Way undulating above them. They made love—the way men and women do: in a strange tangle of limbs, kisses full of wet enjoyment, and miraculously blind to each other’s imperfections.

As Author:  Kathryn A. Kopple works in Spanish and English.  "Rubik's Cube: Six Twisted Paragraphs" is forthcoming in The Shell Game Anthology (Univ. of Nebraska Press).  She is the author of the novels Little Velasquez and The Leaving Year.  

The First Time I Left Home (to be continued)

by

Kathryn A. Kopple

Peter Doig

I grew up near a river.  In an old mill town.  Up north two hours from New York.  It was a mere cranny of a place, not so groomed as it is now--or crowded with antique dealers and drug stores.  A small town just far enough away from New York or Boston to make getting anywhere a journey.  It was a journey to see a movie or concert, forget about department stores.  Fact was that not much of anything a sixteen-year-old wanted--that I wanted--was easy to get with or without a car. The interstate ran along the coast while we were an hour to the west and inland. The inland highway would come finally, and with our very own designated exit, but not before I had my epiphany.  

Epiphany of leaving, that is. I had spent decades in rural exclusion, and naturally it made me feel utterly stuck.  How many of us who grew up in those years felt precisely as I did?  Stuck.  As in, not going anywhere, ever.  I could employ a bit of psycho-sociology here to further clarify why we--of that pre-techno revolutionary period--experienced stuck in its most acute form. The world had sped up, radically. We got wind of it via music and television.  Rock stars started singing about "space." The surge and flux of music about Aquarians and aliens reflected precisely the blast- off age. I remember my mother pulling me out of my crib and sitting me before the giant television to watch the first moon landing.  The words, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" are seared in my mind.  It was a clarion call.  And yet there I was, growing up American in a drop of a town with few roads and scant options.

Until I learned by sheer chance that I could go somewhere--and that somewhere would be farther away than imagined. 

Kathryn A. Kopple works in Spanish and English. She has published original poetry and prose in numerous publications, including The Threepenny Review, The Bellevue Review and The Shell Game (anthology, U of Nebraska Press). She is the author of Little Velásquez and The Leaving Year (Mirth Press).  

    

A House Under Wraps

By

 Peter Cowlam

Relics. They’re heaped, broken in the basement,

Suburban lumber, beachcomber flotsam

Left by the tides (the child grown to a man,

And home again on a halcyon sea).

Remembrance, here by an unlit casement:

A kneehole under sheets, drawers in a jam

On faded snaps, a girl’s unsteady hand,

Her coloured notelets headed with a P.

Instant recall, the clamour of voices

In an empty attic. Dormer curtains

Shed the years of dust in a salty breeze.

The silhouettes my lighted match has thrown

On a wall – these are student delusions

A creak on the stairs has me re-conceive.

Peter Cowlam is the author of literary fiction, plays and poetry. His second novel, New Suit for King Diamond, published in 2002, was nominated for the Booker Prize. A brief stint as a commissioning editor saw two issues of The Finger, a journal of politics, literature, and culture. His fiction, poems and reviews are published in a wide range of print and online journals.

About My Star Name (a short, short by Kathryn A. Kopple)

I am a Cancerian, born on the last day of June, in the northern hemisphere, under a petulant moon, of a meager constellation, beneath a proud sun, by a salt basin, next to a crab shack, just left of center, covered in kelp, moist inside and out, not without meanness, clumsy at cutting, double joined, puzzled by words, hard of reading, lost in space, unable to walk a straight line, happiest when alone, miserable when alone, stranger to extravagance, kind in kind, not particular, addicted to eavesdropping, given to the wind, a prisoner of dreams, sometimes mistaken for shrimp, fond of pastry, contrary to popular opinion, learned by sea, often run amuck, handy when in need of a pinch, canned at a supermarket near you.

Kathryn A. Kopple works in Spanish and English. She translates for TED in their outsourcing program. She has published original poetry and prose in numerous publications, including The Threepenny Review, The Bellevue Review and The Shell Game (anthology, U of Nebraska Press). She is the author of Little Velásquez (Mirth Press), a novel set in 15th century Spain, as well as The Leaving Year (Mirth Press), a coming-of-age story.

The First Time I Left Home

By

Kathryn A. Kopple

Sao Paulo Brasil

So, there I was, sitting in class listening to a fellow student talk about her year abroad. Paris, to be precise. She'd spent a year in Paris as an exchange student. A lovely year in every way, as she described the experience. She lived with a French family, and it had been great. She went to school, and it had been great. She learned French, and her French was great. By the time she finished her presentation, it was decided: I too would go to Paris. 

Except I never got to Paris. There was a glut of exchange students applying to France. My sponsors told me not to worry. They would find a host country for me. And they did: Brasil.

Back then, before the Internet, you didn't hear much about Brasil where I grew up. Honestly, I had no idea where I was going. But, I was going, and it was then that I learned the true meaning of "no turning back."

Kathryn A. Kopple works in Spanish and English. She has published original poetry and prose in numerous publications, including The Threepenny Review, The Bellevue Review and The Shell Game (anthology, U of Nebraska Press). She is the author of Little Velásquez (Mirth Press), a novel set in 15th century Spain.