Forty years after his country's independence from the British, Jack
Mapanje has returned to his concern for ordinary people in Africa and in
the world at large. These were the themes that made his first collection
Of Chameleons and Gods an inspirational book in Malawi and throughout
Africa. The new poems in Beasts of Nalunga are boldly lyrical narratives
cunningly crafted in mesmerising spirals. His voice is still ironically
cheerful, his tone impotently angry - but confidently measured with wit
and humour, however bleak. He fears the saying 'once a prisoner always a
prisoner', and questions why prisons refuse to go away. Jack Mapanje was
imprisoned without trial or charge by the dictator Hastings Banda for
nearly four years, and chronicled his prison experiences in many of the
poems of The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison (1993), Skipping
Without Ropes (1998) and The Last of the Sweet Bananas: New & Selected
Poems (2004). In Beasts of Nalunga the soul is still skipping without
rope, and the landscape the soul traverses provides memorable and fresh
metaphors and symbols. Read Beasts of Nalunga as the soul struggling to
liberate itself, and fighting against the beasts of silences that were
once rampant in the African despotic regime under which Mapanje matured,
silences that threaten to continue today, even in distant homes and
variegated exiles. Beasts of Nalunga was shortlisted for the Forward
Prize for Best Collection.
