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Stephen Derwent
Partington’s How to Euthanise a Cactus
By
Keguro Macharia, University of Maryland, College Park
How to
Euthanise a Cactus
opens with the word “Nightmare” and ends with the word
“war.” For a collection that takes Kenya as its focus, this
strategy is risky. Risky because it could appear to
replicate popular discourses on Africa: a place where
nightmares are realized in wars. Taking Kenya’s 2008
post-election violence as its point of departure, the
collection takes another risk. It dares to be a poetry of
witness. By now, it is a cliché that poems focused on
African locations witness and discuss war and violence. A
poet-scholar, especially well versed in Africanist and
postcolonial thinking, Stephen Derwent Partington is aware
of the risks he takes, and subverts clichéd
(mis)representations. And, as he proves throughout the
collection, the risks he takes are worth taking. How to
Euthanise a Cactus is sensitive to the histories it
invokes and attuned to the politics it engages, respectful,
but never diffident or shy.
“Lethe”
is the first in a category of media-focused poems that
sputter at TV images, yell at newspaper headlines, grieve at
the unsaid, and create counter-memories. “Media Framing,
Eldoret IDP Camp” affirms that we can choose to read
media-circulated images against the grain. Although “Some
producer was determined we should weep,”
It
seems one toothless homeless woman
wasn’t
briefed: top left, off focus
she was
doubled up with laughter
like a
woman half her age,
her
bright tears streaming. (16)
Such
“off-focus” figures texture our views of history and contest
the affectively simplistic memories offered by official,
media-framed narratives.
While
Kenya remains the scene for most of the poems, it also
serves as a standpoint from which to engage the world. “The
Troubles” reaches back to a British childhood that is
unfamiliar to Kenyan readers. Partington’s childhood poem
features “the grammar of partition” and “the politics of
bowler hats,” distinctions between Northern Ireland’s
Catholics and Protestants, their clean shaven and bearded
chins, and plastic bullets that kill. Directing our gaze to
global practices of violence, “The Troubles” refuses to
spectacularize Kenyan violence as somehow unique, as
expressing an African propensity for destruction.
Note:
while containing official information, the publisher,
Cinnamon Press UK,
is not responsible for this release.
This review has been
edited to remove comments that were not to do with the
publication.
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