For all its lyrical elegance, there is no hiding the anger and defiance in this debut collection
‘Eminem ruined everything,” laments the speaker of “Self-Portrait as a Garage Emcee”, a playfully candid narrative poem in Kumukanda, Kayo Chingonyi’s debut collection. Ostensibly a hymn to the poet’s teenage love of mixtape assembly, R&B and modern rap, “slick lyrics I could earn stripes by reciting”, the nostalgic story soon morphs into a barbed reflection on racial difference and societal prejudice. “In time, I could rattle off The Slim Shady LP line for line”, boasts the poet, “though no amount of practice could conjure the pale skin / and blue eyes that made Marshall a poet and me / just another brother who could rhyme”.
Kumukanda, we learn, is the name given to the tribal rites of passage that young Zambian boys must undergo before they become men (Chingonyi, born in 1987, moved to the UK from Zambia aged six). The book emerges as being about memory and identity in the best and broadest sense. But it also challenges our preconceptions around culture as it is both made and received, and the tensions between art and the self. “If my alternate self, who never left, could see me” questions the title poem, “what would he make of these literary pretensions, / this need to speak with a tongue that isn’t mine?”
The poems are as adept at conjuring Larry Levan spinning records as they are at delivering sentimental intrigue
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