More Fiya

More Fiya brings together nearly 100 poems by 34 Black British poets in a work envisioned as a sequel to the 1998 anthology The Fire People, edited by celebrated polymath Lemn Sissay. This collection, edited by Zambian-born, British poet Kayo Chingonyi, draws on English sociologist Paul Gilroy’s concept of the “Black Atlantic,” which identifies a “culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new.” This approach makes for an eye-opening collection, particularly for those of us taught to view the dehumanizing triangle of transatlantic trade through the prism of US imperialism. The fact that I didn’t recognize the names of most poets included made me interrogate my own particularly US-centric perspective.

More Fiya includes poems that touch on universally accessible themes as well as those that attest to the unique experiences of poets of African ancestry. On the one hand, we encounter the wrenching reflections on surrogate fatherhood in “Signet” by Dean Atta, a poet of Greek Cypriot and Caribbean descent (“I wanted to crush and crumple you – screaming / ‘I would trade a million uncles for just one father –’”); on the other, Eric Ngalle Charles, a Cameroonian poet, transcribes “a war song in the language of the Bakweri/Bantu people from the foothills of Mount Cameroon.”

While every poet included in this anthology deserves time and attention, I found myself especially drawn to poems marked by formal departures and experimental inventiveness, such as “Slow Whine” by Safiya Kamaria Kinsasha, which is comprised entirely of sparse, scattered punctuation marks, or “Auntiehood,” a visual poem with sharp angles by Vanessa Kisuule (“There’s aunts and there’s aunties / Diaspora kids heed the difference”). Nick Makoha’s “Pythagoras Theorem” employs that famous equation as a framing device that mirrors the frustrating and clever numerical substitutions of Keisha Thompson’s “Number 2020” (“th1nk 6ack t0 5ch007, a77 the math5 y0u w0u7d f1ght”). If The Fire People sought to make space for lyrics inspired by roots, reggae, and hip hop, then this revitalizing anthology continues that legacy by inviting readers to explore contemporary transatlantic Black poetics.