African Writing Online; Many Literatures, One Voice; JKS Makokha, Tongues of Flame

PlaceNames

with Vamba Sherif

I was returning home after 20 years, and the man who was driving me there turned out to be an ex-rebel. The last time I saw Kolahun, my birthplace in Liberia, was in 1990 ...

Poetry

Fiction

Cover Interview

J.K.S. Makokha

J.K.S. Makokha is a Kenyan writer living in Berlin, Germany. He is the author of Reading M.G. Vassanji: A Contextual Approach to Asian African Fiction (2009). He teaches courses in African and South Asian literatures at the Institut für Englische Philologie at Freie Universität Berlin.

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Tongues of Flame

from our tongues of flame
the heat of tribal tempers
grow as from embers,
tiny sparks of orange furies.

from our tongues of flame
tempers become liquid words
words that turn gaseous later
and fuse with oxygen all around.

from our tongues of flame
this portent oxygen stirs
a red, green, white and black
explosion of furious nations

that diffuses swiftly like toxic
gaseous lava from the holy Mt. Lengai,
whose easterly land poisoned by tribalism
eats its own down tongues full of blame.