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Books by
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
Before the Palm Could Bloom
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Becoming Ebony /
The River Is Rising /
Where the Road Turns
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After All
the Flame
Patricia
Jabbeh Wesley Is Survivor
&
Witness to War in Liberia
By Randy Wells
Patricia
Jabbeh Wesley doubts that anyone ever wrote a poem immediately
after winning a lottery.
“But
when people are going through deep trouble and they’re very
distraught, they’ll go in their room in a quiet place and they
express their deep emotion on a piece of paper,” she said.
Wesley
speaks from experience. Much of her poetry expressing her
emotions was forged in the deep trouble of Liberia’s civil
war. The fourteen-year conflict has wasted her homeland and
devastated her family, friends, and neighbors.
“I
have seen my poetry heal me. Writing heals,” she said.
Wesley
is continuing her recuperation at IUP, where she joined the
faculty last fall and this spring is teaching poetry and
creative writing.
Wesley
grew up in Monrovia, Liberia’s capital, but also experienced
village life while attending boarding school at age eleven. She
came to America in 1983, earned a master’s in English
Education at Indiana University at Bloomington, and returned to
Liberia in 1985.
“Before
the war, Liberia was the pacific place to be in Africa because
of stability of government and strong ties to America,” she
said. “I grew up not rich, but not really needy.
“The
economy began to fall after the mid-’80s as the Samuel Doe
government had problems managing the country,” she said. “By
1989, we knew the war was just a matter of time. The country was
at the brink of a breakdown because of all the anger and the
rivalry between government people and politicians.”
Her
family heard of massacres elsewhere in the country. “Fighting
began to engulf county after county,” she said. The fighting
killed some of her neighbors.
On
July 2, 1990, the rebels entered Monrovia’s suburbs, and her
family realized they would have to flee their home.
The
war will come and pass, and we will get a president and we will
go back to our regular lives—that’s what we thought,” she
said. “When the rockets were falling in my backyard and my
house was shaking, that was the time we knew that everything we
had was going to be blown up.”
One
of the most disturbing images to come out of Liberia’s civil
war was the widespread use of children as soldiers.
“A
kid held me at gunpoint,” Wesley said. “A nine-year-old
kid!”
Another
child-soldier pulled her mother aside in a refugee camp and
threatened to shoot her because he thought she was speaking the
language of the enemy group. Patricia intervened and convinced
him that her mother was speaking Grebo—an ethnic tongue of the
people in southeastern Liberia.
The
children were recruited by former president Charles Taylor’s
forces, “and given drugs,” Wesley said.
“I
saw daily… kids in a camp, carrying their weapons and
arresting people and killing people,” she said.
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Mothers dragged their
young along Duport
looking for a decent
burial ground.
there is no burial ground
anymore.
In their shallow graves
the corpses
dance Liberia's cradles empty
(from "War Children" in Before
the Palm Could Bloom) |
The
Wesleys fled their home, taking only what they could carry on
foot, and stayed in refugee camps for four months. Peacekeeping
forces eventually drove the rebels out of the city, but sporadic
fighting continued.
In
1991, Wesley, her husband, and children emigrated to America,
settling in Grand Rapids, Mich.
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I bent down,
stooping.
Stepped aside.
Crawled
like a crab.
Snailed
into a shell.
I hid, a leech
under a green leaf.
I quit talking
quit breathing
quit laughing.
I waited
for the storm to pass.
(from "The Storm" in Before
the Palm Could Bloom) |
Wesley
taught at colleges and earned a doctorate in English before
coming to IUP last year. She remembers starting to write as a
child and becoming a poet at fourteen.
“Poetry
became more significant for me during the war,” she said.
“One time I was writing in a camp while they were bombing, and
people would say, ‘Oh, this woman! You’re writing poetry
while they are bombing?’ ”
Her
poetry, and prayer, helped get her through the war years.
“I
found it was easier for me to write a poem about a gruesome
experience than to write prose about a gruesome experience,”
she said.
Some
of her poems have been collected into two books. Before
the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa was
published in 1998 by New Issues Press of Western Michigan
University, and Becoming
Ebony was published in 2003 by Crab Orchard
Review and Southern Illinois University Press.
Often
her poetry takes final shape after midnight. “Most of my work
is done when everybody is sleeping,” she said. “But one
thing I encourage my creative writing students to do is to write
whenever the idea comes… So I write whenever I have an idea.
“I
write in English, but some of them are very traditional, and you
can tell that they are written from my Grebo brain.”
Both
of her published collections contain glossaries. “The books
have some words directly from my language, words that are not
translatable,” she said. “English should have to bear my
language, as well as my language bears English.”
She
cannot choose a favorite among her poems. “Writing is like
having five children—and trying to pick a favorite one,” she
said. “‘Becoming Ebony’ is a poem that I love because of
its closeness to my memory of my mother… Sometimes I love my
poetry that speaks to my tradition, and actually is written out
of my ethnicity.”
She
feels no guilt over leaving her homeland. “If everybody
remained in Liberia, it’s possible that everybody would be
killed,” she said. “And then nobody would be there to help
the others who will survive. I see myself as one of those people
who is set aside to live so that life will go on in the future.
“Having
left gave me the opportunity to be in America, where I was safe
and could have the opportunity of publishing my books and using
my anger and my bitterness, putting my anger and bitterness into
poetry, and helping the Liberian people get recognition... I
felt blessed that I had the opportunity of existing in both
worlds,” Wesley said.
“There
are Liberians who fled before the war reached the towns, so they
do not have a sense of the history of the violence. I and my
family stayed until the entire country was overrun. I saw myself
as being privileged to have seen the evil that war can bring. I
saw my neighbors killed. I saw my neighbors kill neighbors. I
saw the worst. And then I saw the best. I saw how people can
live together in a tight space with nothing—and still care
about each other.”
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Today you
looked at me, and said how
beautiful I had become
in the war. And when the
night came, we fell asleep
listening to the shooting
outside. You said you loved me
even though you saw what I
did not see. And sitting
in the crowded camp, we held
hands tight, waiting,
praying . . .
laughing at ourselves over
and over, our new eating
habits, our new bathing habits,
our new songs, days handed
to us in brief interrupted
installments . . .
(from "For My Husband") |
But,
Wesley is not obsessed with war. In her poetry she also observes
and celebrates the small details of everyday life, in Liberia
and America.
“It’s going to take twenty to thirty years to
reconstruct Liberia,” she said. “I see myself going back to
live” there, and perhaps leading groups of Christian students
to work there.
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I know the feeling
after all the flame and the
smoke, after a long rainy night,
at dawn, the burnt shells of
snails, the charred corpses
of scorpions, the forest
fire, now quenched.
Trust me -- we will return home someday, trust me.
(from "I Am Acquainted with
Waiting") |
Randy Well '84 is a reporter at the Indiana
Gazette / Photography by Barry Reeger
Source: IUP Magazine (Volume XXII, No. 1,
pp. 2-3, 22-23)
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Where the Road Turns
By
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
In this her
fourth volume, I witness Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
courageously dipping her pen into her own wound and
splashing vivid imagery upon the canvas of her own
skin. That is an illusion, for that pen is really a
scalpel cutting the gangrenous and the rotten out of
her nation's violated flesh. But that too is an
illusion. That scalpel is a steel tongue in a
powerful Grebo woman's mouth weaving a fine gauze
from dirges, love songs, praise songs, fragments of
aphoristic wisdom, fables, new myths, narrative and
lyrical dialogues in order to bind our own wounded
psyches.
Proud Grebo
women's voices burst through her mouth to chastise
depraved men who harvest babies to stoke diamond
wars as they blaze through forests of dry human
bones in their imported death chariots. Beyond
celebrating these fiery taboo-breaking warrior women
who are passionate about peace, justice, their right
to forbidden fantasies, she also claims her place,
though exiled, in the lineage. Condemned to bear
upon her back her home, she is the strong earthen
vessel that safeguards the essential spiritual Grebo
values bequeathed to her by the village elders in a
circle. Because moving is never a leaving, memories
of home constantly surge through the poet's wry
humor and wit that serve as balm for the
ever-nagging pain. |
To honor her ancestors' memories Wesley has planted
these enduring trees whose fruits must nourish us all if
we are willing to avail ourselves of her poetic gifts.
These are brave and fearless poems in a harsh dark
season, yet necessary for the witness they bear to human
folly while insisting on our capacity to love. With each
new volume, her voice grows stronger as it blends with
those of Ama Ata Aidoo, Alda do Espirito Santo, and Jeni
Couzyn. She is without doubt among the most powerful of
the younger generation of African poets.—Frank
M. Chipasula, editor,
Bending the Bow: An Anthology of African Poetry/
co-editor of
The Heinemann Book of African Women's Poetry
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Pray the Devil Back to Hell
A film directed by Gini
Reticker
Pray the Devil Back to Hell
is a captivating new film by director Gini Reticker.
It exposes a different story angle for the largely
forgotten recent events of the women of Liberia
uniting to bring the end to their nation's civil
war. This film is amazing in the way it captivates
your attention from the earliest frames. It doesn't
shy away from showing footage of the violent events
that took place during the Liberian civil war. But
the main story of the film is that of
Leymah Gbowee
and the other women uniting, despite their religious
differences, to force action on the stalled peace
talks in their country. Using entirely nonviolent
methods, not only are the peace talks successful,
but Charles Taylor, the president of Liberia, is
forced into exile leading to the first election of a
female head of state in Africa. The women of this
film are truly an inspiration and no one can fail to
be moved by the message of hope that comes through
clearly in this film. These are heroes that deserve
to be remembered and with Pray the Devil we are able
to do that, gaining both a knowledge of the history
we are ignorant of through archival footage and an
understanding of the leaders of this movement
through close-up interviews with the many women who
lead it. The film also offers a great soundtrack &
inspirational song- "Djoyigbe" by Angelique Kidjo &
Blake Leyh.—Amazon
Reviewer |
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Mighty Be Our Powers
How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War
By Leymah Gbowee
As a young woman, Leymah Gbowee was broken by the Liberian civil war, a brutal conflict that tore apart her life and claimed the lives of countless relatives and friends. Years of fighting destroyed her country—and shattered Gbowee’s girlhood hopes and dreams. As a young mother trapped in a nightmare of domestic abuse, she found the courage to turn her bitterness into action, propelled by her realization that it is women who suffer most during conflicts—and that the power of women working together can create an unstoppable force. In 2003, the passionate and charismatic Gbowee helped organize and then led the Liberian Mass Action for Peace, a coalition of Christian and Muslim women who sat in public protest, confronting Liberia’s ruthless president and rebel warlords, and even held a sex strike. With an army of women, Gbowee helped lead her nation to peace—in the process emerging as an international leader who changed history. Mighty Be Our Powers is the gripping chronicle of a journey from hopelessness to empowerment that will touch all who dream of a better world.—Beast Books / Pray the Devil Back to Hell |
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Ellen
Johnson-Sirleaf (video)* *
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 4 October 2008
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