Tsitsi Jajii: Beating the Graves

HUMA Book Lunch Series

Author: Tsitsi Jaji (Duke University, United States) 

Introduction: The title Beating the Graves is a literal translation of the Shona memorial ceremony ‘kurova guva’.The poems in the collection are arranged in three thematic sections – “Ankestral,” “Botanical,” and “Carnaval,” – reflecting three personal obsessions: family lore, our relation to the environment, and music. I was interested in finding a lyric voice that could investigate my own history in a deeply personal idiom that would still resonate with other readers. Born to parents of different ethnic backgrounds, my black Zezuru father and white mother from Ohio have gifted me with the challenge of writing about our dual heritage. My family sits on the fault lines of racialization and colonization so writing our histories is necessarily a political act. And those politics are complicated because I write from the vantage point of diaspora. I have lived in the U.S. since 1993, and so there are things I can and cannot see from this vantage point. Poetry offers idioms in which we can reckon with such timely and yet timeless questions as origins, language, migration, and our responsibility reaching beyond scholarly discourse. In this talk, I will share poems from both Beating the Graves and a more recent collection, Mother Tongues, and discuss how my work as poet and scholar fits within the context of emerging trends in recent African poetry. See the book: Beating the Graves (University of Nebraska Press, 2017).

Read article: The poet speaks about her book (Poetry International Archives, 17 September 2018)

About the author: Tsitsi Jaji has given readings at the United Nations headquarters, UNESCO, and the U.S. Library of Congress, among others. Her most recent volume of poetry, Mother Tongues, received the Cave Canem Second Book Prize and was published by Northwestern University Press in 2019. She is also the author of Beating the Graves (2017) and a chapbook, Carnaval (2014), published in the first New Generation African Poets box set, both from the African Poetry Book Fund. Jaji was born and raised in Zimbabwe, and many of her poems dwell on origins, music, the sacred, and migrancy.
 
She earns her living as an Associate Professor at Duke University. Her academic book, Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and Pan-African Solidarity, is based on research in Ghana, Senegal and South Africa. It received the African Literature Association’s First Book Award and an honourable mention from the Association of Comparative Literature and Society for Ethnomusicology.