AR:RANGE:MENTS, the first collection by the Kenyan-German poet Esther Kondo Heller, exults in unsettledness. Swinging between English, Swahili and German, between pictures and text, between linguistics and memory, it is a startling accretion of the thoughts and memories that make a young person’s life.
A dense constellation of references, from the 1905 Maji Maji Rebellion against the German occupation of Tanzania to Martin Luther King’s 1964 visit to East Berlin and the Afrodeutsche poet and activist May Ayim, grounds Kondo Heller in a global, diasporic experience of Blackness.
The death of their mother stands at the heart of the text. For Kondo Heller, living between languages is an attempt, however alienating, at recuperation: “my mouth is a black hole, that I have tried / to speak through in whatever language is needed, since she died.”
This is a poetry not of images but of ideas – and especially ideas about speech and silence. The publisher, Fonograf Editions, is dedicated to the movement between poetry and music; on their website, you can listen to Kondo Heller reading, their voice making “the page a sound / space” – a Berliner*in speaking words into being.
- AR:RANGE:MENTS by Esther Kondo Heller is available now from Fonograf Editions, details.
