Mukoma Wa Ngugi, associate professor of literatures in English, offers commentary in The Conversation article, "Amanda Gorman’s poetry shows why spoken word belongs in school:"
"If a country were a classroom, even when a poem might not heal it, it can suture it. It can be balm, waiting to heal, if only we can listen. A good poem understands that is not going to happen today, it says – listen! And it regrets its necessity, that its hunger is both promise and regret. How does a poem hope, dream and speak to a country built on an original sin of slavery?"
Read the full article here.
Mukoma Wa Ngugi is Associate Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University and the author of The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity and Ownership, the novels Mrs. Shaw, Black Star Nairobi, Nairobi Heat, and two books of poetry, Logotherapy and Hurling Words at Consciousness. Unbury Our Dead With Song (a novel about competing Tizita musicians) is forthcoming from Cassava Republic Press (May of 2021). He is the co-founder of the Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature and co-director of the Global South Project – Cornell.
Amanda Gorman photo attribution: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from Washington D.C, United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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