Momoh Sekou Dudu
Patricia Jabbeh-Wesley is as upbeat a person and writer as they come. In When the Wanderers Come Home, her most recent poetry collection, however, she is conspicuously less so as she, with solemnity, grieves for her country of nativity, Liberia. Professor Wesley, in this masterful and (in many places) heartrending book, catalogues the miasma of torment unleashed upon a nation and its people from within.
Right from the start, in the very first poem, So I stand Here, the professor warns of what is to come: an unvarnished reportage of suffering and of perseverance and of death from an eye witness who, herself, is shattered by the agony of the experience. So devastated she is, in fact, she leaves for parts unknown only to return many years later and discovers she’s now an outsider who’s unprepared to take in the full measure of savagery that had befallen her homeland.
She writes:
But everywhere I go, my people have become a different people. So, I stand here, an outsider, at the door post. Do not tell me these corrugated old dusty roads have emerged of themselves out of the war. Or that the new songs these strangers sing in this now strange country of ours are from the time before the bullets. I do not know these people who have so sadly emerged out of the womb of war after the termite’s feasting.
Then she follows with the real stuff, the hard stuff, the distressing realities of armed conflict. Professor Wesley paints a raw picture of war and the waste it lays upon humankind. “War is not a friend of the living. War is not your neighbor, coming with a box of cookies in welcome. War is an alien monster” she stresses in Coming Home. Perhaps, as a plea to avoid its occurrence at all cost, she laments, in Erecting Stones, the prolonged nature of the damage that war wreaks:
I’m picking up debris from twenty years ago. Some remnants of bombs and missile splinters, old pieces of shells from the unknown past. “I hear you’re back,” my once lost neighbor says, staring in awe that after so long, we’re still alive. “No, we’re not,” I say. “We’re only picking up the broken pieces of the years, erecting stones, so the future can live where we did not. This is a country of ghosts.”
As Professor Wesley journeys across the world because of the war (or maybe, now, despite the war), her creative mind roams even deeper, a consequence of the experiences she gleans along the way. She writes fluidly, if not longingly, of those experiences spanning continents. She does so with particularly haunting effect in In My Dream:
I’m on the road flying somewhere, stranded at an airport. Or I’m in the airport security line without my passport, a lone traveler without a country. So they want to know my country. They want to know my place of birth. They want to know the map that got me lost. They want to know the name of those who shattered my dream, shattered my lost country.
One thing is as clear as day light about this book: Whether writing about her experiences from airports in America, Colombia, Libya or Morocco, at its core, When the Wanderers Come Home, is a requiem to the author’s kinsmen and to her country, Liberia—a nation injured in ways unimaginable by years of civil strife; a nation whose recent history is a moonscape–rocky and barren.
From beginning to end, Professor Wesley’s pensive and emotional voice takes us through her own difficult experiences and those of her nation. Given this point of departure, it is impossible not to root for Liberia’s successful recovery and prosperity.
I recommend this book to you. It is a witty and fulfilling read!
Paperback: 126 pages; Publisher: University of Nebraska Press (November 1, 2016). Language: English; ISBN-10: 0803288573; ISBN-13: 978-0803288577.
Momoh Sekou Dudu is a writer and educator. He is the author of the memoir Harrowing December: A Journey of Sorrows & Triumphs (2014) and the novel Forgotten Legacy (2018). He resides, along with his family, in the Minneapolis, Minnesota suburb of Otsego.
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