Bird from Africa

included in Eight New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set

Akashic Books

In every poem it seems the poet is returning and leaving, a kind of perpetual dialectic limbo that is the key to how this collection returns to this trope in a fresh way. The notion of a perpetual loss, that one is always caught in the leaving for and the returning to and yet never arriving at either. Yet for all its scope, African, Diaspora, Cosmopolitan, Allo’s collection centers around a very specific Cameroonian self— the Anglophone Cameroonian

Chris Abani, from the preface

What to Wear

In my dreams
I’m a girl again
and I return
to Cameroon.

There’s nothing new
about this.
The thing to note:

Almost always
I wear
the same clothes—

sandals
black with shoe polish
and my cornflower-blue
school uniform.

Viola Allo, “What to Wear”