“[In this collection] Ahmed asks us to know ourselves between the fixity of what we want, and the placelessness of where we are: to wander in a diaspora full of meaning, looking at ourselves in all our inarticulateness:

 To know the donkey’s opinion

One must--

            Would you not say?—

Consult with the donkey’s bray

To read these poems, then, is a long consultation with the donkey’s bray.  And as they reverberate back to us, we are reminded of the thing that we cannot see, and reminded that the horizon of the imagination is not our ultimate goal, but what we live with: the necessary conversation that we must have with ourselves:

 The dawn

Is conceived in the dream of the night before

What did you dream, brother, the night before?

What did you dream, sister, the night before?”

—Noam Scheindlin, Ph.D., City University of New York

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ali Jimale Ahmed (Ph.D., UCLA) is Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Queens College of the City University of New York. He is also on the Comparative Literature faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. His poetry and short stories have been translated into several languages. His books include The Invention of Somalia (1995), Daybreak Is Near: Literature, Clans, and the Nation-State in Somalia (1996), Fear Is a Cow (2002), Diaspora Blues (2005), and The Road Less Traveled: Reflections on the Literatures of the Horn of Africa (co-edited with the late Taddesse Adera) (2008). 

CATEGORY

Poetry/AFRICA