The Leaving
Akashic Books
Cover art by Victor Ehikhamenor
Hope Wabuke’s The Leaving is a powerful examination of the African experience through the eyes of a new generation of African women poets living in the Diaspora. With her carefully arranged lyrical verse in vivid images, she tells the story of her life as a child, born in exile, and forced to live an exiled existence against the backdrop of biblical images of another exiled people. As if these were the stories again of the exodus of God’s people from slavery in search of the promised land, her strong, sometimes narrative voice is both haunting and engaging.
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, from the prefaceExcerpt
Hope Wabuke, from “if the center is to hold (lamentations)”send me home
grandmother saysafter one year in america.
i miss the orphansthe children of
my childrendisappeared in the war
send me home.grandmother says
i do not want to diein a foreign land.
send me home.