Jack Mapanje

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	Photo: © Brett Hambling

Biography

Malawian poet Jack Mapanje taught in Malawi Secondary Schools before he joined the Department of English at Chancellor College, University of Malawi, in 1975, first as a lecturer, then as Head of the Department of English. He has a BA and Diploma in Education from the University of Malawi, an M.Phil. in English and Education from The Institute of Education London, and a Ph.D. in linguistics from University College London in 1983.  His first collection of poems, Of Chameleons and Gods, was published in the UK in 1981 and withdrawn from bookshops, libraries and all instutitions of learning in Malawi in June 1985. He was imprisoned without trial or charge by the Malawian government in 1987, and although many writers, linguists and human rights activists, including Harold Pinter and Wole Soyinka, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky and others campaigned for his release, he was not freed until 1991. The poems in The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison (1993) were composed while he was imprisoned, as well as most of his third collection of poetry, Skipping without Ropes (1998). 

He has edited with introduction Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (2002), based on a degree course he taught at the Unviersity of Leeds, 1993-96, and has also selected and edited with introduction the poetry of David Rabadiri, An African Thunderstorm & Other Poems (2004).

Jack Mapanje lives in York, and is currently teaching Creative Writing and Literatures of Incarceration in the School of English, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His book, The Last of the Sweet Bananas: New & Selected Poems was published in 2004, and his latest poetry collection is Beasts of Nalunga (2007).

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Poetry

Bibliography

Of Chameleons and Gods   (African Writers Series)   Heinemann Educational, 1981

Oral Poetry from Africa   (editor with Landeg White)   Longman, 1983

Summer Fires: New Poetry of Africa   (editor with Angus Calder and Cosmo Pieterse, African Writers Series)   Heinemann Educational, 1983

The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison   (African Writers Series)   Heinemann Educational, 1993

Skipping without Ropes   Bloodaxe, 1998

The African Writers' Handbook   (editor with James Gibbs)   African Books Collective, 1999

Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing   (editor and introduction; African Writers Series)   Heinemann International, 2002

An African Thunderstorm & Other Poems   (editor and introduction)   East African Publishing House (Nairobi), 2004

The Last of the Sweet Bananas: New & Selected Poems   Bloodaxe, 2004

Beasts of Nalunga   Bloodaxe, 2007

Read about books by Jack Mapanje at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Jack Mapanje at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1988   The Rotterdam Poetry International Award

2002   African Literature Association Fonlon-Nichols Award (USA)

2007   Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year)   (shortlist)   Beasts of Nalunga

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Critical Perspective

Since his release from Malawi's Mikuyu prison in May 1991 after nearly four years as a political prisoner, Jack Mapanje has lived in northern England and become one of Africa's most highly regarded poets. His is an exemplary 'poetry of witness', whose integrity, sense of humour, humane solidarity and moments of vision have attracted readers and live audiences wherever he has read in Britain and Europe. 'Full of fine physical imagery, acute observation and a strong sense of his own roots and values' (London Magazine), his work's lyricism and polemical anger is also informed by African song and storytelling traditions. Mapanje has himself played an important role in the development of new African writing over the past two decades, having co-edited the anthologies of new writing in English, Oral Poetry from Africa and Summer Fires: New Poetry of Africa (both published in 1983), and The African Writers' Handbook (1999). The experience of imprisonment has clearly been pivotal to his work. One could compare him to the Russian poet Irina Ratushinskya, who suffered in the last years of the Soviet era within labour camps. In both their cases, oppressive regimes were eventually susceptible to successful pressures from Amnesty International and western governments. (A number of Mapanje's poems pay tribute to individuals who kept his spirits up in prison with postcards). His poetry was surely intensified by incarceration, being obliged to record the brave spirits of fellow detainees as well as 'the desperate voices of fractured souls'. He can also be seen as a latter-day Romantic nature poet, who alternates scenes from Malawi's economic devastation with consolatory celebrations of its landscapes and abundant bird life: swallows, herons, as well as his famously 'chattering wagtails'. 

Mapanje was among those who dared to speak out against the brutal rule of the dictator Hastings Banda in Malawi. The message was metaphoric though unmistakable: the monster-for-life had 'persistently blatantly wrung / And squelched nimble necks of sparrows /… dangled them in the sun / Until the last drop of truth has / Fallen' ('Where Dissent is Meat for Crocodiles'). Before his arrest, on 25 September 1987, Mapanje's work was necessarily oblique, conjuring up images of 'turbid top cockroaches', as well as chameleons, elephants, hyenas, crows, and vultures. In fact his offending first collection, Of Chameleons and Gods, was published in 1981 and only withdrawn from Malawian libraries and bookstores (by a directive from the Banda regime's Censorship Board) in June 1985. In 'April 1978, the Prisoners Quietly Back', about the release of political prisoners, the speaker, in a poetic spirit of 'gather ye rosebuds while ye may', urges enjoyment of 'the fruits of the evergreen landscape of / Zomba plateau', with its 'Luscious granadilla and gorgeous strawberries'. 'The Cheerful Girls at Smiller's Bar, 1971' describes a police raid on a bar where prostitutes are 'cheerfully swigging Carlsbergs and bouncing to / Rusty simonje-manje and rumba booming in the juke box'. 'When this Carnival Finally Closes' menacingly observes: 'When your drumming veins dry, these very officers / Will burn the scripts of the praises we sang to you / And shatter the calabashes you drank from. Your / Charms, these drums, and the effigies blazing will / Become the accomplices to your lie-achieved world! /…. as the undertakers jest'.

The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison (1993) reflects deeply upon his own exile and the condition of Malawi, with its scurvy children, a 'queue of skeletal hands', and 'our fat-necked custodians' ('Kandango Village, even Milimbo Lagoon is Dry'). It is a country of roadblocks, gun-point burials, and the relevance of a new verb, to 'accidentalize' (political killings represented as accidents). 'Smiller's Bar Revisited' is more upbeat, urging the authorities to 'give the girls / A break, let the coloured bulbs, drunken moths / & robot drums choke the bay'. Mapanje then takes us movingly behind Mikuyu's 'malaria infested and graffiti / Bespattered walls', in the long title poem, in which flocks of birds are an ironic daily reminder of freedom: 'These wagtails will follow to minister / To you, these are the only priests allowed here …' Infested with cockroaches, wasps, mosquitoes, dung beetles, scorpions and 'stinking bats', in prison even cleaning tasks take on a political significance:  'No, I will throw my water and mop / elsewhere. We have liquidated too many / brave names out of the nation's memory'. 'Watching from Mikuyu Prison' is a truly Wordsworthian invocation of 'The green acacias dancing to Lake Chilwa breeze, / The chickens pecking under the guard's granary, / The jacaranda trees purpling in the distance, / The deep red flamboyant flowers, until my heart / started …'  But the mood is generally sombre, recording the sufferings of inmates ('They unlock your leg-irons whose clump now / Numbs; they take off your handcuffs in blood'), and memorializing others. Finally comes 'The Release', after 'Three years, seven months, sixteen / Days and tweed jacket fungus-stinks, / Itching like ancient goat-skins'. A final poem, while looking forward to the nation's future, asks whether 'toxic mushrooms' won't burgeon 'Under those rotten logs of nightmares / That now threaten après moi, le deluge?' ('The Deluge after Our Gweru Prison Dreams').   

His collection, Skipping Without Ropes (1998), is again haunted by the memory of imprisonment. Mapanje explains its title in a note as 'the most harmless form of exercise tolerated' at Mikuyu, further observing that the 'notion of travel and exile [is] central to this volume'. Three sections of poems deal successively with the aftermath of his release, his family's adjustment to life in England, then his feelings on returning to Malawi in 1994 with a television film crew. The Bible being the only reading matter allowed in prison, some poems significantly invoke its language or characters to parallel his own life, as in 'When Release Began Like a Biblical Parable' and 'The Risen Lazarus at Very Tedious Last!' There is a strong sense in the book of Mapanje finally coming to terms with the profundity of his experience. He includes elegies for his fellow inmates and friends, notably his 'warm thoughts' for Ken Saro-Wiwa, the executed Nigerian author: 'let the rapture / Of gracious laughter shared, the memory of justice, / Succour you like a prayer …' Mapanje's mixed feelings on revisiting Malawi conclude with a powerful final poem. 'When the Watery Monsters Argued' returns to the Milimbo Lagoon of his childhood, finding only ghosts who tell him to 'think positive, think future', because 'people are now riding on the dreams / We denied them decades ago'. To which he replies: 'how / Could poetry forget the past when Africa still / Bleeds from forgetting its past; empower others / To forget your past - my struggle continues!'

Dr Jules Smith, 2003

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Bloodaxe Books Ltd Highgreen Tarset Northumberland  NE48 1RP England Tel: +44 (0)1434 240500 Fax: +44 (0)1434 240505 E-mail: publicity@bloodaxebooks.com http://www.bloodaxebooks.com

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