Interview by Uche Umezurike
Teardrops on the Weser (2021) consists of poems elegantly crafted by practiced fingers, poems as luminous as they are liquid. Water imagery ripples through the rhythm of the poems, charting the poet’s itineraries far and wide. Migration, diaspora, belonging, and home recur throughout Amatoritsero Ede’s newest collection.
Uche Umezurike: Teardrops on the Weser revolves around the imagery of water. What attracted you to that imagery? What significance does it hold for you?
Amatoritsero Ede: What inspired the water imagery in this collection was, in fact, actual physical water! The Weser, the subject of the major part of the collection, is a river flowing through Bremen city in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is formed from two headstreams, the Fulda and the Werra, with their confluence in the town of Meunden. There is a famous peninsula of real estate on the river Weser. It is called the Teerhof, which in English means “tarring yard.” In a distant, medieval German past, it used to be part of a shipyard where hulls and ropes were, well, “tarred” for ship-building purposes. When the English Department at the University of Bremen invited me to be Writer-in-Residence in the summer of 2016, I did not expect to be housed in the scenic Teerhof peninsula. I was living on a half-Island—on this peninsula—in the middle of Bremen city. My windows opened onto the larger body of water on the West side of the peninsula; on the East flowed the “small Weser,” so-called because that body of water is narrower. The overall view on the West peninsula is breathtaking and idyllic for as far as the eye can see into the distant horizon. I had no choice but to make this idyll—and what it began to symbolize for me—into the subject of my summer creative writing project in 2016. In direct response to the second part of your question, the significance of the water imagery in the title poem is that the flow of different bodies of water becomes figurative for how Europe and Africa’s histories flowed differently, like their respective rivers: one untroubled, and the other tumultuous.
UU: In the poem titled “w,” the poet recalls “that trafficking of black souls / in rotten ship holds / across the cursed Atlantic.” What connections were you trying to make between these various waters?
AE: I invoke European and African rivers to signify the sharp differences in the historical experiences of their respective geographical regions. I note the physical similarities and properties between these rivers while also highlighting their metonymic qualities. In other words, I am comparing the relative peace of the European river to the historical trauma that African rivers symbolize. The Atlantic was, for example, the conduit for shipping Africans into slavery. Today, we know that the River Ethiope in Nigeria is polluted by Shell, Chevron, British Petroleum, and oil-prospecting European companies. Growing up in Sapele, Delta State, Nigeria, I went to bed aware of the gas flaring on the horizon. As a child, I was confused by that orange glare, and I only understood what the hellish glow on the horizon meant much later as an adult. Today, Nigerian rivers and their eco-systems are polluted, and sometimes permanently destroyed, by European capitalist activities. This environmental assault on African land can be seen in other parts of the continent, such as the Congo. The historical encounter between Europe and Africa has been very disastrous for the latter.
UU: Could you speak more about the significance of place and diaspora to your poetics?
AE: Migration as a modern, deliberate process of existential dispersal litters my poetics. This is connected to my own restlessness, my sense of exile, alienation, and cultural loneliness. I have lived and studied in Africa, Europe, and North America; have worked in Asia and the Caribbean, and now live and work in Canada. Since writing can only proceed mainly from lived experiences, my poetry reflects my travels as a subjective accompaniment, as in the long poem “Globetrotter” from my second poetry collection, Globetrotter & Hitler’s Children. Or as a motif for unpacking non-subjective migratory experiences in Teardrops on the Weser. So, the question of place and displacement naturally occurs in my poems either as subjective or non-subjective experiences, or as fictive background contexts into which I embed a poet persona. For example, the poet persona in another long poem, “Caribbean Blues,” from my first collection: A Writer’s Pains & Caribbean Blues.
UU: I’m struck by this image: “the air is still / big with poem / impregnated with / joy.” How do you decide on an image that best captures the sense of a poem for you?
AE: I do not decide on an image; the images insinuate themselves into my vision in the heat of writing, depending on the imaginative inner life/world generated by a topic. I am, of course, an imagist in the manner of the modernists. And I rarely fancy abstracta in poetry; you must communicate, and the image helps me do that unambiguously.
UU: If poetry is a way of seeing the world, how much has your vision of poetry changed, considering that your last poetry book was published over a decade ago and you have lived on several continents in the last few years?
AE: My vision has not changed. For the mature poet, positive ideological vision hardly changes except in rare instances. Style might indeed change—some technical changes occurred in my poetry in the 1990s. However, my ideological predilections are still the same. I see poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” as Percy Shelley writes in “In Defence of Poetry.” This means that, apart from writing idylls or love poems, etcetera, we must bear witness. That is what I do in Globetrotter & Hitler’s Children—beyond the idyll and subjectivity of “Globetrotter,” the long poem “Hitler’s Children” is a robust engagement of the rightwing in Germany at the time. Bearing witness to history is what I primarily do in Teardrops on the Weser, which probes the history of the injustices perpetrated against the oppressed. Poets must bear witness because, as Henry Miller says in Time of the Assassin, his study and critique of Rimbaud: “If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch.”
Uche Peter Umezurike holds a PhD in English from the University of Alberta, Canada. An alumnus of the International Writing Program (USA), Umezurike is a co-editor of Wreaths for Wayfarers, an anthology of poems. His books Wish Maker (a children’s book) and Double Wahala, Double Trouble (a short story collection) are forthcoming from Masobe Books, Nigeria and Griots Lounge Publishing, Canada, respectively, in fall 2021.
Amatoritsero Ede is an internationally award-winning poet born in Nigeria. He has two previous poetry collections, A Writer’s Pains & Caribbean Blues (1998) and Globetrotter & Hitler’s Children (2009). The first work won the prestigious 1998 All Africa Okigbo Prize for Literature; the second was nominated for the equally prestigious Nigeria Literature Prize in 2013. In 2004, he won second prize in the first May Ayim Award: International Black German Literary Prize. He appears in 14 poetry anthologies locally and internationally. Ede is also a literary scholar and Assistant Professor of English at Mount Allison University, New Brunswick. He is the Publisher and Managing Editor of the Maple Tree Literary Supplement, MTLS.