SMS & Face to Face

SMS & Face to Face - an exciting new collection of Kenyan-themed poems

by Stephen Derwent Partington

Published by Phoenix, and costing a paltry 240 shillings, this stunning collection has been described by various folk as 'mind blowing' and 'the best collection of poems this decade'. Some short sample poems appear at the end of this posting. Enjoy them!

**From the Blurb:

'With this sensational first collection, SDP has established himself as a poet of repute. Refusing to patronisingly romanticise the Kenyan landscape and people in the way that many expatriate writers have done, he focuses primarily on personal and social issues that affect us all in the region - subtly, intelligently and uncompromisingly. Youthful, muscular, well-crafted and often critical of a blind status-quo, these new generation poems are sure to stimulate all readers.' Er, and some of 'em are funny!

**About the Author:

SDP is a thritysomething who has been widely published in reputable literary journals in the UK and Ireland, and who a record twice won his Oxford college's prize for Creative Writing. A former lecturer, he now lives permanently in Ukambani, where he teaches with his Kenyan wife. He is an occasional, fresh and sometimes controversial young contributor to Kenyan literary debates in the national press, and is becoming increasingly well-known for his defences of other young Kenyan writers through the papers.

**From Just One of the Reviews:

EVAN MWANGI: National Newspapers; University of Ohio, formerly UoN

This is a collection of poetry that comprehensively and candidly examines modern Kenya in a poetic mode that ushers in a fresh beginning in Kenyan art...

A naturalised expatriate, SDP looks at Kenyan society in a refreshing way, successfully mixing cynicism and hope. He is able to see in our practices and attitudes subtleties that indigenous Kenyans would take for granted, but he avoids and even mocks the patronizing attitude of many expatriates. How good poetry should be written.

**A Few Poems!

Absent Valentine

For Mutheu

There, you keep your privacy of sleep.

I imagine that equator

where your eyelids join,

the pressing of your cheek

against the pillow.

If I could, I'd melt my body into air

and let the currents bear me

southerly to Kenya,

where I'd catch a gentle thermal

of your sleeping inhalation.

Once inside you, I would curl,

and sleep, and hibernate for ever.

I'm About to Become a Stepfather

How will I hold you?

Will you cry? Will I?

Will something in us

cleave together, tributary-like?

Forget the ones who spread

the Gospel; it is Joseph

who's the hero of the piece.

He did his best, spent hours

of carpentry with Jesus;

loved him dearly, so I guess,

and got a mention.

Passed the test.

'Miscegenation'

For the Taban Lo Liyong of 'The Marriage of Black and White', and for Mutheu

'My old man's a white old man

And my old mother's black' - Langston Hughes, 'Cross'

Our children will be...sepia.

Like old daguerreotypes,

but snapshots of the future.

They'll enjoy a cocktail genotype:

their mother will ensure

that one part's Tusker;

I'll pour East-of-England cider

in the cocktail shaker.

Yum! They'll chat in Sheng.

They'll grow, in time, to eat ugali

with hint-of-light-crisp-lemon-

luscious Chardonnay.

No doubt they'll translate Ngugi

into English as a neat Shakespearean

Sonnet sequence. Surely they'll be

multi-skilful Ubermenschen,

fluent in a thousand tongues or...

Cut the crap! Our children

will be children. Simply that. For

when the shit's all said and done

they'll be, not pioneers nor symbols,

but our daughters and our sons.

Ancestor

My grandad died before I left for Kenya.

I suspect he would have thought my going odd,

my leaving health, wealth, education all behind.

He would have said, but not objected, It's

peculiar! Would certainly have pointed out

the 'dangers' and the rumours and the myths -

his generation wasn't strong on finding facts

about 'the colonies' or 'natives'. Strange, quite

strange, he would have said. But would have

given me his blessing, nonetheless. And if I

told him now the way to get his blessing in my

new-found land's to pour out beer and ask for some

small sign, he'd surely laugh in that ancestral voice,

boom Really, this is weird. Still, he'd be flattered

if it wasn't (his first thoughts, I bet) for all that wasted beer.

Paternal

When he bought this land

from no-one in particular,

Old Colman moved the Maasai on

and told his Kamba workers

This is your land now

your dust

your sky

your rocks

your soil

your cacti,

mountain, trees…

They smiled their thanks.

Of course,

Old Colman kept the deeds.

The Nyayo Torture Chambers

For all the victims: those tortured, the low-ranking torturers, and you

This poem's a necessity, though written out of

empty speculation, not experience. Thank god.

I can't imagine - but I'll try to, and I think we all

can nightmare-guess - what happened in those

dungeons in the eighties. Having tourist-trailed

through dingy London Dungeons where the info-

cards explained the forms of torture from a former

age, I'd say that there were thumbscrews, sharp

unpeelings of the eyelids, something twisting

done to testicles; not tweakings, no, but wrenchings,

like the strenous removal of a jam-jar's stubborn lid.

To bolshy women, maybe rapes and - this a modern twist -

electrodes on the clitoris. Or hungry rats, or...

That I can imagine it, is sick, is in itself some proof,

indicative of how, if I were low-down in the Special

Force and ordered by my conscience-cruel superiors

to torture free-voiced prisoners, I'd easily comply

and quickly improvise - as all of us, I'm certain, could -

a regime-saving repertoire of terrors; in the horror-

play of strongarm/halfwit power, we are all weak

and would act. And, yes, we did. But not for others:

palmed a copper 'something small', or took it; loved

to sing those awful Nyayo anthems back at school; got

jobs for family or cousins in our clan; did not fight slums...

Yes, this sad poem's a necessity; is written from experience.

SMS & Face to Face,
'the best collection of poems this decade',
can be bought or ordered from all good
bookshops: Text Book Centre, Savani's, Prestige,
Westland Sundries, etc. Enjoy it!

SDP can be Emailed at '[email protected]'

June Wanjiru
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Kwani Trust

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