A Review of My country, tonight

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This distrust, often manifested as ire, is a driving force in the book, and Guébo is not shy about his feelings that the United States and the UN are “Drowning the April Fool’s pledge / Of good old universal equality.” Bringing into question issues surrounding globalization, Guébo assesses the United States and UN entanglement with Ivorian political affairs, their taking of cacao and oil, their destruction of the land and displacement of its people for financial profit, and asks, “Detention / Deportation? / Where is the slightest ounce / Of Justice?” Perhaps justice is blood squeezed from a stone.

In his introduction Fredson calls attention the importance of silence in Guébo’s work, noting that the collection is constructed of vanished voices, particularly highlighting “African independence leaders who were assassinated with the support of or directly by the European and US governments.” If silence is a kind of death then My country, tonight is a shouting affirmation of life. Taking up the mantle of revolutionaries before him, Guébo’s book even further manifests “the social,” defined in detail by Forché as “a place of resistance and struggle,” where protest is disseminated. “It is the sphere in which claims against the political order are made in the name of justice.” Though not openly quoted, the DNA of these independence leaders, their resistance and struggle, is all over this book. In his angry pleas for freedom Guébo revives the voices of Thomas Sankara, Patrice Émery Lumumba, and Toussaint Louverture, military leaders and revolutionaries assassinated or killed with U.S. involvement. He asserts that

Guébo harnesses these leaders and their mission and encourages his people that they “… are the fist / Made from all the pain / Of trampled centuries / Standing in the pubescent field / Of Truth.”

James Baldwin once suggested that poets are the only ones who know the truth. He also claimed that something terrible happens when a society ceases to produce poets, but worse, when we stop believing in the report that only poets can make. Guébo knows the truth and we’d be foolish not to believe in the report he makes. Where social media and news outlets have failed the poem always seems to succeed, to remind us of who we are and what we encounter and live through.

As we work to accept our own bloody histories, both on a micro and macro level, further questioning our place as citizens, a number of the book’s themes seem resonant and reflective of recent events here in the US. Guébo grapples heavily with reconciling the effects of the Atlantic slave trade. When contemplating Gorée (a former slave port on the coast of Senegal) he states that it “… will become / A place of worship / Only by the measure / Of [his] caesura / At last sewn shut.” Popularized as the home of The House of Slaves, a museum and memorial, Gorée has become a tourist attraction, a historical monument. It is a reminder that “Brother still sells brother.” It’s difficult to read this today and not see shades of recent events in Charlottesville, but Guébo’s work is not about Charlottesville, it is about loving one’s country, about rebellion and resistance. We are all wrestling with the issue of memorialization. What should we commemorate and how? Why? Why should we commemorate? As Forché notes, we are fortunate in North America — war is fought in far away countries, bombs dropped on schools are an abstraction, simply a thing we encounter on the news or via social media, we accept or own pain but ignore the pain of our neighbors, we don’t live under tyranny. My country, tonight is a book that feels achingly intimate and simultaneously expansive in its questioning and its arrival in America couldn’t be more timely; while Guébo’s topic is becoming ever more universal, the greatest gift he gives to readers in the West is the reminder that the whole world is hurting and everyone hunting for an identity. Perhaps identity is found outside of the self, where empathy is built.