But Here Are Small Clear Refractions by Ed Pavlic (Kwani?)

Description

What if, Pavlic asks without asking, the War on Terror is also a war for America, between America, of America. What if this is the scream of a nation in psychic crisis, a scream that bounces back at itself, increasingly louder. We travel, with Ed on a boat, to Siu, on an island a few miles away from Somalia; an island where Fazul Mohammed, one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, once spent a few months. If, here, we have found ourselves in one geographical epicentre of a global war, we find no embers or fevers, no axis, no Weevils-we find a community, where “they bragged about the beautiful donkeys of Siu. Well-fed. Rested. Oiled. They said the donkeys of Lamu are more like flea-bitten dogs than donkeys.”

This book is not quite prose, not really a travel book. We move through this space, with photographs, in real boat-rowing, feet-walking time, in poetic and metaphysical space, the words create their own human country, and allow us to inhabit Pavlic’s question. The world he makes begs such a question, one of those giant dangerous worlds poets and writers sometimes forget it is our job to make. –Binyavanga Wainaina “But Here are Small Clear Refractions” challenges the reader long after it has been closed…

The natural moments of magical realism transport us to a landscape primarily shaped through deep feeling, and we don’t wish to exit this rough beauty. –Yusef Komunyakaa We learn much from Pavlic’s eye and ear… The poet as listener, camera as mind in respectful encounter with places and privacies. No clichés, no colonizing claims, no ego-indulgence. Here, depth-perception and beauty of language resist classification. This is a remarkable work, not a “travel book” but one that should travel far. –Adrienne Rich …lyrically and visually engaging, unraveling silent beats that unite rather than divide us. Ed Pavlic’s poems are rituals for awareness …a stunning contribution to international literature. –Nathalie Handal