Jack Mapanje

Jack Mapanje Poems

Jack Mapanje Biography

Jack Mapanje was born on March 25, 1944 in Mangochi, Malawi geboren. He studied Englisch and Education in Malawi and England and in 1983 received his PhD in Lingusitics from the University College London. In 1975, he joined the Department of English at Chancellor College, University of Malawi, where he later was appointed Head of the Department of English. His first collection of poems, Of Chameleons and Gods, was published in the U. K. in 1981 and where soon withdrawn from bookshops, libraries and all instutitions of learning in Malawi. Mapanje was imprisoned without trial or charge by the Malawian government in 1987, and although many writers, linguists and human rights activists campaigned for his release, he was not freed until 1991. Mapanje went into exile in Great Britain.)

The Best Poem Of Jack Mapanje

When This Carnival Finally Closes

When this frothful carnival finally closes, brother
When your drumming veins dry, these very officers
Will burn the scripts of the praises we sang to you
And shatter the calabashes you drank from. Your
Charms, these drums, and the effigies blazing will
Become the accomplices to your lie-achieved world!
Your bamboo hut on the beach they'll make a bonfire
Under the cover of giving their hero a true traditional
Burial, though in truth to rid themselves of another
Deadly spirit that might otherwise have haunted them,
And at the wake new mask dancers will quickly leap
Into the arena dancing to tighter skins, boasting
Other clans of calabashes as the undertakers jest:
What did he think he would become, a God? The devil!

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