Poetry
Highlife for Caliban
Lemuel Johnson · 1973
Synopsis
Poems in cycles, in which Shakespeare's Caliban, Tarzan, Saint Augustine, Ophelia, Jane and Shylock meet His Excellency the politician and the Freetown schools that want to be Eton or Harrow. The first cycle, an election, shows Caliban blinded by the white bone of immediate power thrown to him, a bone cut into dice and loaded. Elsewhere, poems of exorcism overturn the images and place at the centre those whom the West made its objects.
Context
Ardis published the collection in 1973 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in one hundred and fifty-six pages. Its author, born in Nigeria to Sierra Leonean parents, was then teaching comparative literature and had published three years earlier an essay on the figure of the Black as a metaphor in Western literatures. In 1995, Africa World Press reissued the volume as the first of a Sierra Leonean trilogy, with two later collections.
Who it is for
A little over a hundred pages, in English, never translated into French. It helps to know that highlife is a dance music of the coasts of the Gulf of Guinea, and that Caliban is the slave in The Tempest.
Prizes and reception
The author's first collection, reprinted twenty-two years later at the head of his Sierra Leonean trilogy.
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