By Dr Ebrima Ceesay, UK
In the early nineties, while I was a reporter at the Daily Observer newspaper in the Gambia, I wrote a profile article, published in its 1 October 1993 issue titled, “The Poetic Dreams of Tijan M. Sallah” — on one of the Gambia’s most internationally famous and consequential writers since Dr. Lenrie Peters.
I have continued to follow Dr. Tijan M. Sallah’s literary career with interest. Sallah’s writings have received many accolades from Gambian and non-Gambian critics. Dr. Siga Jagne, in her entry on her jointly edited 1998 book, Postcolonial African Writers described Sallah, “The Gambia has yet again produced another genius for the literary world.” Prof. Charles Larson, veteran critic of African Literature, described in the World Literature Today, Winter issue, 1981 review article, “there is little question about Sallah’s talent.” Mr. Nana Grey-Johnson, the accomplished journalist and writer, noted in his profile- article on Sallah in Topic Magazine of 4 May 1991: “Tijan M. Sallah impresses one first of all as timid, perhaps over-cautious. But three breaths into the conversation and it becomes clear one is faced with one of the finest young minds The Gambia has produced in years.”
Nigerian critic Prof. Oyekan Owomoyela, in his reference book, The Columbia Guide to West African Literature in English Since 1945 (Columbia University Press, 2008), notes: “Sallah’s books… speak eloquently of his Gambian and African attachments, and in which he sometimes ventures into metaphysical and mystical explorations. His poetry bears witness to a deep commitment to the welfare and well-being of Africans struggling with the prolonged aftermath of colonization. …Whatever his subject, the poetry has an easy grace; it is sonorous and lucid, and free of the self-consciousness that sometimes interposes itself between some poets and their audiences.”
Compared to Lenrie Peters, or any other Gambian literary writer, Tijan Sallah has written more culturally relevant material in wide ranging genres, covering poetry, short stories, biography, ethnography and literary criticism. He also has published several technical articles in economics/political economy and also in literary criticism in refereed journals, like Journal of Modern African Studies (Cambridge University Press), African Economic History (University of Wisconsin Press) and Research in African Literatures (Indiana University Press). He credits Peters, however, as his early mentor. As he noted, “In the early seventies, I would scribble poems, imitating Wordsworth and Yeats, and take it to the Westfield Clinic in Kanifing. Outside of the margins of his practice, Dr. Peters will review and offer critical advice. He was most helpful and became a friend. Virtually, every time I visited Gambia, I would spend time with him at his Cape Point House, chatting about the country and literature.” Another mentor was the late Howard University Professor, Dr. Sulayman Nyang. “He was a scholar and intellectual of considerable versatility, brilliant in range and depth,” Sallah noted. “Before Dr. Nyang, “he continued, “one could never be intellectually bored. He was an intellectual powerhouse, a brilliant generator of ideas. Moments spent with him and the late Dr. Jabez Ayodele Langley, when he moved to Washington, DC, were among the most intellectually satisfying.”
Sallah credits his venture into writing to Father Joseph Gough at St. Augustine’s High School. “He encouraged and magnified our talents. He used to tell me, someday your work will appear in Ulli Beier’s and Gerald Moore’s classic anthology of African poetry, which we used at St. Augustine’s.” Prophetically, Gough was right; Sallah is the only other Gambian poet, other than Lenrie Peters, featured in that highly selective classic anthology called The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry published by Penguin, which features Leopold Senghor, Wole Soyinka, Dennis Brutus and Okot p’Bitek among other prominent African poets. While at St. Augustine’s in the early seventies, Sallah published his first poem— “The African Redeemer”—in the then campus publication, “Sunu Kibaro.” This gave him school-recognition—and, he continued writing and rose to national recognition when Bemba Tambedou interviewed him on 5 August 1976 over Radio Gambia in that nascent program, “Writers of The Gambia,” which gave him national publicity.
Around the mid-1970s, Sallah moved to the US and spent a year at Rabun Gap Nacoochee School in Georgia, home of the Foxfire magazine, where he studied under the Oklahoma poet, the late Harry Loyd Van Brunt at the Hambidge Center for the Performing of Arts. Van Brunt introduced him into the Imagist school of poetry. “He used to tell me, poetry is what needs to be said,” Sallah recalled. “Of course, poetry is more than that. Poetry involves style and theme, mastery of technique and brevity of messaging. It is a minimalist art form compared to the novel, which is a maximalist art form.”
While at Rabun Gap, he published his first poem, “Wormeaters” in the Atlanta Gazette of February 17, 1978. He also edited the school newspaper, The Silent Runner. When he transitioned to Berea College, Sallah did all kinds of manual and also mental work to pay for his college education: dish-washing, land-mowing, and tutoring students at the college’s writing lab. Sallah also was very active in the student anti-apartheid movement, pressuring colleges to divest from apartheid.
At Berea, despite being gifted in the humanities, he opted for studies in economics, mathematics and business. He graduated at the top his class, as the most outstanding senior student in the college that year, with a B.A. in Economics and B.S. in Business. He edited several student publications on campus (such as Onyx—the black students journal, Cosmorama—the international student journal, and Linear B—the English Department journal) while pursuing his full-time college studies, and received the Francis Hutchins Award in literature and Ching Wang prize in economics. As if these accolades were not enough, Sallah published his first book of poems, When Africa was a Young Woman in 1980 with Writers Workshop of India, while still an undergraduate in college, which became an instant campus bestseller. The book was reviewed favourably by the late Florence Akst in the BBC program “Africa Book of the Day.”
It was also reviewed in the 15 June 1980 issue of Amrita Bazar Patrika, Calcutta, India’s oldest and most widely circulated daily. The reviewer noted, “Mr. Sallah’s poems on people, places, and things are technically mature. …. The promise of the first book of Mr. Sallah is rich and one should wait for him bring out his second collection of verse.” When he published his second book of poems, Kora Land, Sallah’s talent and poetic maturity was amply demonstrated. That collection was richly rooted in The Gambia. Prof. David Dorsey, reviewing it in the Winter 1990 issue of World Literature Today, concluded that, “For this unaffected grace of feeling and expression, hackneyed images are put to original allusions: the baobab as a perch for scavenging hawks, kola nuts causing reddened teeth and smelly breath, the weaverbird as model of conjugal harmony. …. Whether light satire, lyric, encomium, portrait, or pensive reflection, Sallah’s poems are strong and welcome additions to the accessible corpus of Senegambian verse in English.”
Even before getting his Ph.D., in October 1984, Sallah was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by the Taiwan-based World Academy of Arts and the India-based World Poetry Society, which met that year in Marrakech, Morocco, and the event was hosted by the late poet-president, Leopold Senghor of Senegal and the late King Hassan II in Morocco. Sallah was the youngest to receive that honour. He notes of his encounter with Senghor, “He was a man of disarming humility. One morning, at the Hotel Le Marrakech, as we headed for breakfast, I wanted to open the lobby door for him, if nothing as a show of respect to this man who was close to two generations my elder—an Octogenarian then–and also a world-class intellectual, but he insisted on opening the door for me. That gesture stuck in my mind. I said then to myself, such is greatness.” At the event were other Senegalese writers such as Maroubra Fall and Ahmadou Lamine Sall.
After Sallah graduated from Berea College, he continued with economics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech), where he received the Masters and Ph.D. in economics in 1987. At Virginia Tech, he studied in a department which included the Public Choice Center and featured some world-class economists, many of whom had studied at the University of Chicago, and became known as the Virginia School of Economics. He studied under famous economists, such as T. Nicholas Tideman, James Buchanan (Nobel Laureate in Economics), Gordon Tullock, etc, many of whom were conservative free marketeers and were key advisers to the conservative Reagan Administration. He quipped, “I learned a lot of mathematics and economics technique there, for Virginia Tech was an engineering school, but was sceptical about free market religion. At Tech, public choice professors taught politics and public policy in terms of markets, that political man was no different from economic man. That political man was not about maximizing the public good as naive political theory would have it, but about pursuing self-interest. That political man pursued political “pork” and other rent-seeking and were only concerned about getting re-elected.” Sallah thought this was a cynical view of the world.
After graduate school, Sallah then took on teaching appointments as an Assistant Professor of economics at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania and North Carolina A&T University before joining the World Bank’s Young Professional (YP) program, a highly competitive program in which, out of over 2,000 applicants worldwide, he was among the final 30 chosen. In 1988, prior to joining the World bank, Sallah received a Social Science Research Council grant to study migrant labour in West Africa and spent time in the UK at the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham and St. Antony’s College, Oxford. After joining the World Bank, Sallah rose through the ranks as a Young Professional, then economist, senior economist, Principal Operations officer, and then finally as Sector Manager for Agriculture and Rural Development, in which he managed some 30 high caliber professionals and a portfolio of about US1.5 billion, combining analytical work and lending, covering the agriculture and rural development of all of Eastern and some Southern African countries.
Sallah has served on the editorial board of several publications. To name a few, he served on the editorial board of Poet (1985-1992)—an international monthly, ran by the late Krishna Srinivas of Madras, India. He served on the editorial board of African Mirror from 1992-94 edited by Fabian Malhani. In 1989, his friend, the late Chinua Achebe, Africa’s foremost novelist, asked him to serve on the editorial board of a journal he had started, African Commentary—A Journal of People of African Descent, out of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The magazine featured many of Africa’s and the African Diaspora’s intellectual heavyweights on its board and its contributions, from Ali Mazrui, A.M. Babu to Nadine Gordimer, from Toni Morrison to Gloria Naylor, from political practitioners like Olusegun Obasanjo to a rebel artist like Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Sallah contributed to it as well as strategized with Achebe and other core members of the Board on the magazine’s direction. The magazine survived for two years and was pitched at such a high-quality level of journalism that it was compared to the New Yorker. But it subsequently went defunct because of funding problems.
Sallah is a prolific writer and his continued productivity is still unrelieved. He has, to date, written or edited ten (10) books as follows:
When Africa Was a Young Woman (poems, Writers Workshop, India, 1980);
Before the New Earth (African Short Stories, Writers Workshop, India, 1988);
Kora Land (poems, Three Continents Press, US, 1989);
Dreams of Dusty Roads (poems, Three Continents Press, 1993);
New Poets of West Africa (editor, Anthology, Malthouse Press, Nigeria, 1995);
Wolof (ethnography, Rosen Publishing, 1996);
The New African Poetry (Co-editor, Lynne Rienner Publishers, US, 1999);
Chinua Achebe: Teacher of Light (Biography, Africa World Press, 2003)
Harrow: London Poems of Convalescence (Global Hands Publishing, 2014);
A World Assembly of Poets (Guest Editor, Re-Markings, India, 2017)
He has also published short stories and poems in various periodicals: West Africa (UK), New African (UK), Presence Africaine (France), African Woman (UK), Poet (India), Okike (Nigeria), Callaloo (US), Appalachian Journal (US), Wind Literary Journal (US), Re-Markings (India), Ufahamu (US), Obsidian (US), The Black Scholar (US), Poetry Wales (UK), Kentucky Poetry Review (US), BaShiru (US), Wasafiri (UK), to name a few.
His short stories have been widely anthologized in such classic anthologies as The Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Short Stories (edited by Chinua Achebe and C.L. Innes, 1992), Encounters from Africa: Anthology of A Short Stories (Macmillan Kenya, 2000), Under African Skies: Modern Stories (edited by Charles Larson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997) and his poetry, in addition to appearing in the classic Beier and Moore Penguin Anthology, have appeared in African New Voices ( edited by Stewart Brown, Longman African Writers, 1997) and in Nelson Mandela Amandla (edited by Amelia Blossom House and Cosmo Pieterse, Three Continents Press, 1989), which was an anthology of poems by several prominent poets including Dennis Brutus, Amiri Baraka, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Oswald Mtshali, and Zinziswa Mandela (Mandela’s poet-daughter) in commemoration of the release of Mandela as a political prisoner. From the Mandela anthology, Sallah penned these lines, culled from his poem “Mandela” naturally in honour of his hero:
Now the moon has glazed over kraals,
And stars flash their eyes for the septuagenarian:
It is the cockcrow of unrelieved celebration.
Dreams have long been nurtured, hopes tended:
It is time to celebrate the immanent possibility.
Though thorns have lurked to impede youthful impatience,
And wives have waited in the solemnity of their huts,
And the tender gardeners have raked the ground
For the longed-for coming, there is still for you
The unrelieved waiting.
Let them speak in tongues of un-sculptured stone.
They have become edifices of wrong, monuments
To a sacred myopia. They have dragged their
Crocodile- backs with the holiness of vultures.
They hover over a lush terrain
With the conscience of a Dark Age.
In addition to his extensive publications, Sallah has been active on many other literary fronts. On 9 November 2012, Sallah gave a reading and discussion at the US Library of Congress as part of their Africa and Middle East Department program and series, “Conversation with African Poets and Writers.” In the audience, when Sallah gave his presentation was a “who’s who” of Gambians in Washington, DC then: Prof. Sulayman Nyang, Dr. Sidi Jammeh, Prof. Mbye Cham, Dr. Jabez Ayodele Langley, Ms. Mary Langley, and the then Gambian Ambassador to the USA, Honourable Alieu Ngum, who was also at some point Secretary-General and Head of Gambia’s Civil Service. Sallah’s presentation was engaging and generated a lively discussion on themes in African literature and the language question. An audio-visual of the Library of Congress series is in in the Internet and the series has featured major African writers, starting with Chinua Achebe, Ali Mazrui, and a few others.
Sallah has several anecdotes about his literary encounters. After September 11, 2001, when terrorists dastardly attacked the USA, the Bush administration resorted to indiscriminate profiling which affected Muslims, the overwhelming majority of whom were innocent. The year was 2007, some 6 years after the attacks. Sallah had travelled on a World Bank mission to Malawi and Zambia and, on his return, was asked to extend it to Mozambique to attend a retreat there. As a result– and forgetting to check, his visa had expired while he was transiting in Johannesburg. He went to the American Embassy for a visa, and they promised it the next day. Sallah was glad, “such is American efficiency!” he concluded. But, boy, was he wrong. When he called the Embassy the next day, they told him they had to do detailed background checks. Sallah had to involuntarily spend two more weeks in Johannesburg before his visa was finally renewed.
During that moment of despair, Sallah saw the absurdity of the “war on terror” and its mindless and indiscriminate profiling—how innocent individuals were caught in its web, simply because they had “Muslim” names. During that period, the silver lining was Sallah’s Johannesburg friends. He called his friend, Nobel Laureate novelist Nadine Gordimer and told her about his predicament. Gordimer sympathized but funnily mocked at him. “You know I am very famous and important. So, I called the Americans to deny you a visa so you can attend our ceremony in Pretoria. The French Embassy is honouring me with a Legion d’honneur. So, I am inviting you to the event.” Sallah recoiled with laughter. Nadine then arranged for Raks Sekhoa and Chabi Mphahlele, the son of South Africa’s famous writer, Ezekiel Mphahlele to pick Sallah up from his Sandton hotel; so Sallah was able to attend the event with them and get some friendly laughs about his then desperate condition.
Another episode Sallah told me was that, on October 12, 2000, he was hit by a car as a pedestrian in London, near Sheraton Heathrow, while he was on a World Bank mission to Yemen. He ended up with extensive fractures on his femur. He noted, “I came to near brush with death.” Despite the harrowing experience, which made Sallah to spend one month at the Clementine-Churchill hospital in the UK recovering and another nine months of physical therapy in the US to learn to walk again, Sallah, with his optimistic self, used his time in hospital in London to craft a full book of poems– all in rhymes– to capture his experience. Those poems, among his most beautiful, are in a collection titled, Harrow: London Poems of Convalescence, published by Global Hands.
The Nigerian critic Enajite E. Ojaruega notes in his article on Sallah’s poems, “Poetry as Therapy,” “The “Harrow” poems will remain unique in Tijan M. Sallah’s poetic career. It is poetry geared towards a private function, quite unlike his other poems….” On November 29, 2000, Professor Ali Mazrui, one of Sallah’s friends, sent Sallah an email humorously titled, “On Literature and Limbs.” Mazrui noted, “After Chinua Achebe’s own catastrophic car accident, your car accident alarmed me about this unfolding motor war threatening our best writers: I am so sorry to hear about your London accident. How terrible for you and your family! May Allah look after you even more protectively in the future.” In 2001, Kaye Whiteman, former editor of West Africa magazine, also sent him an email. He noted that, maybe unbeknown to Sallah, his works were getting global recognition. He further noted that a UK Parliamentarian, Paul Boateng, had read one of Sallah’s poems at the Commonwealth Carols. Sallah, of course, felt amused by the news.
In the 1 April 2000 issue of the Library Journal, Sallah’s The New African Poetry (a continental poetry anthology which he co-edited) was listed among the Library Journal’s poetry best sellers in the United States. Sallah has continued to write and has just completed a new book of literary criticism, which is forthcoming. In that book, he tells me, he even explores fascinating topics such as Wolof metaphysics and such questions as whether there is a Jola literature and orature, and comes up with some valuable insights. He tells me he is also editing a book of the panel papers delivered at Chinua Achebe’s 70th birthday, which including several major intellectuals from Africa and the diaspora, including Ali Mazrui, Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, and Ngugi Wa Thiongo, which the Achebe family endorsed that he undertakes. “It is painstakingly tedious work, that requires focus and knowledge of the African world, but I am making significant progress,” he notes. He is also embarked on writing a novel and completing another book of poems.
One of the amazing things about Sallah’s works is that interest and attention to it has continued to grow. Over 7 doctoral dissertations and/or masters theses have been written about Tijan Sallah’s works at the University of The Gambia, Sana’a University in Yemen, University of Limoges, France and Brjeit University in Belgium. The latest master’s thesis on his works (2019) is a post-colonial reading of his first book of poems by Mr. Momodou Lamin Demba at the University of The Gambia under the supervision of Professor Pierre Gomez. In 2014, Professor Wumi Raji of Obafemi Awolowo University (formerly University of Ife) published the first book of critical perspectives on the works of Sallah titled, Tijan M. Sallah and Literary Works of The Gambia (published by Cambria Press), which brought together an impressive group of scholars globally to evaluate Sallah’s works, and included Professors Charles Larson, R. Victoria Arana, Stewart Brown, Samuel Garrren, etc and included two University of The Gambia scholars, Professor Pierre Gomez and Dr Sylvie Coly.
When I talk to him, Sallah bristles with ideas– and our discussions can range from problems of contemporary Gambia to the Abrahamic religions to philosophy, economics and politics. When I asked him about his views about corruption, ethnicity and other problems plaguing the Gambia, he states:
“Corruption is a growing cancer; so are ethnicity, caste, and religious prejudice problems. A colleague observed that, in the Gambia, under Jammeh, corruption was monopolized at the top, but now it has become democratized. I don’t have any compelling evidence to refute or support this claim, but I get a lot of anecdotal evidence from Gambians that point in that direction. For this cancer to be arrested, it would require accountable leadership– at critical levels of government, from the very top all the way down. We need to grow a culture of seeing and acting in the interest of the public good. As an economist with development experience, I know that is not easy. But we have to make a strong start to build anti-corruption awareness and strengthen systems and processes, strengthen checks and balances, from legal systems to accounting systems to auditing systems, to strengthening the press, including responsible social media, and parliamentary oversight of public budgets. This is where skills and ethics are important, where those who serve in these roles are so important. We also have to be willing to enforce anti-corruption laws effectively, to ensure that the culture of impunity is diminished.”
When I ask him his views on ethnicity, he notes:
On ethnicity, I believe it should be celebrated and not turned into chauvinistic enterprise. There is a lot that is rich in our ethnic cultures– our stories, the richness of our languages, our music, our dress, our textiles, our food and that should be celebrated and shared across ethnic groups. I love kora music, for example. I think it is a brilliant and edifying musical instrument and musical tradition. But ethnicity should not be used to discriminate others from jobs or promotion or any opportunity or from practicing basic civility. We should emphasize merit and competence, and not a culture of ethnic chauvinism and “tribal” connections when it comes to public service or to any other aspect of our civic life. Crude “tribalism”–or for that matter– all kinds of hereditary prejudices– can spell national ruin if they are not checked and arrested. This is why I have confidence in our younger generations of Gambians. I think many of the older generation were “brain-scarred” by tribal and other forms of prejudices, and sadly, some seem to be spreading that ‘disease’ among the young. We need to counter that, at every instant.
The older generation were also damaged by caste and religious prejudice– even among the schooled. But such inherited loyalties can fall flat when subjected to hard tests. Many of our families have in them people from various ethnic, religious and caste groups through marriage, and so how can people champion a false hereditary purity? For example, I am married to a Malian woman. I am Tukulor– if you go by my father, who is a direct line from Yellibanah Musa Sall (ah), the Lamtorro (ruler) of Gedeh, Futa Torro, but my mother was Wolof and Serer, linked to the Mboge and Njie clans of Saloum. Then what am I? The mother of my Tukulor grandfather, Musa Jojo Sall, was Jojo Badjan, who was the sister to the wife of Nyiramasang Jammeh (i.e., Jabou Badjan), the mother of Jatta Selung, who is the father of Mama Tamba Jammeh of Baddibu. So, Mama Tamba’s grandmother (Jabou Badjan) and my great grandmother (Jojo Badjan) were the same mother and father.
So where does that leave me, when I meet my Baddibunka friends? I leave that for the “tribalists” of the Gambia to fathom. I also have Christian relatives, even though I was brought up Muslim. So where does that leave me when I meet my Christian Gambian brothers and sisters? I leave that for the religious fanatics to fathom. I look at Britain, for example, how it is a quilt-work of several ethnicities: English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh– the British “tribes”– so to speak. You have the Germanic nationalities and the Celtic ones. Despite some latent micro-nationalisms, they have managed to intermarry across ethnic groups and forge one nation, speaking English as their lingua-franca. Why is that also not feasible for us in the Gambia? In a sense, it is feasible and has been happening. Therefore, I think we should continue to widen that space for the celebration and intermixing of identities without weaponizing them. We should avoid turning differences into wedge issues. We should all do our best to push for greater social cohesiveness and stability in our tiny country.”
“I am also quite concerned about climate change and how we manage our natural wealth in the Gambia. We are a coastal country, and coastal erosion is happening at a rapid space without our corresponding efforts to plant trees and erect barriers to manage it. Much of the mangroves in the wetlands which used to help with coastal erosion are being cut. Some of the palm trees are also being cut and sand from beaches dug to build houses, which is worsening coastal erosion. Also, large areas of forest land are being cleared and fenced, the soils eroded with huge loss of top soils and soil organic matter, and much of our species biodiversity is being lost. One thing we should know is that hungry soils breed hungry people.
I remember, as a child growing up in Sere Kunda in the fifties and sixties, how lush green Sere Kunda was, with so much wildlife, even near the main market area. I remember plenty of bushfowls, monitor lizards, Komodo dragons, monkies, hares, hyenas and a plethora of colourful birds, from parrots to finches, not to mention their abundant songs. Wild fruits, like ditakh, sedem, kaba ndomboh, and toll were plenty. Much of these seem to be disappearing. I was watching a documentary by a BBC journalist, Umaru Fofana, of how large areas of rose wood trees are being cut in the Casamance and sold to the Chinese for premium prices through the Gambia for use in making high-priced furniture for the Chinese. The denuded areas are then being left as wastelands for the local population– where there is no tree cover and where all the game that used to provide local protein is lost with that. The BBC journalist was already making the case that the Gambia has already devastated its rosewood stock and is now aiding and abetting the destruction of the Casamance forests. The forests and bush and the game in them are our natural wealth. If it disappears, we would have lost a vital part of our livelihoods and ecosystem. Government needs to take all necessary measures to arrest this illegal logging (and engage in programs of reforestation) before it is too late. Climate change is real, and the country risks its very survival if it does not take it seriously. Our best guard against natural degradation risks is to continue to plant trees and restock our bush with native fauna and, overall, invest in managing our natural resources better.”
Before I end this extended profile, I present below a poem that Sallah has written about the Gambia titled, “I Come from a Country,” which reflects his patriotic tendencies:
“I Come From a Country”
by Tijan M. Sallah
I come from a country where the land is small,
But our hearts are big.
Where we greet everyone by name in the morning.
Blessed is the country where everyone knows your name.
And when the sun rises and burns hot over our brows,
And the ocean rocks the shores hurling memories and dreams,
We squint and open our arms with hope.
Blessed is the country where hope rises daily with the sun.
I come from a country where the river is our soul.
It transports our dreams and swallows our refuse.
It meanders like a snake, but is not hateful with venom.
At its head is brine; at its tail is sweet water.
Blessed is the country where you can eat barracuda at its head
And tilapia at its tail.
And the canoes come and go.
The ferries and boats traverse the frothy hill of waves.
And the fishermen spread their nests
To harvest wild colonies of mullets and bonga fish.
I come from a country where the land is small,
But our hearts are big.
Where poverty gnaws at our heels,
But we have not given hope.
We continue to work.
And if resilience were a person,
She will live in my country.
She will be a calloused-handed woman
In sun-drenched rice-fields,
With a child strapped on her back;
But with a love enormous as the sea.
