Every week, a look at the latest poetry news. Today, the “angry poetry with everyone” of the Afrofeminist poet and essayist.
Every week, a look at the latest poetry news. Find all the articles from this meeting ici.
“Here, we’re dying.” Imagine a book as a fury room, these strange places where, for a fee, you come to break everything, methodically destroy everything. Douce Dibondo holds the mass in this piece of paper where she can pass her nerves. A book “rage in my stomach” that we open serenely and close feverishly, because anger, this restlessness, jumps from host to host.
Douce Dibondo, 31, is a journalist, essayist, and afrofeminist poet. Of Congolese origin, she is “a child of war”, “a child of silence”, “a child of destruction”. She is also, among other things, the author of a noted essay, the racial charge, and a first poetic collection published by Blast, Metacures. His second is called infra/seum, very well subtitled “a poetry that is angry with everyone”. She jumps at the throat of her desires and her chaos, playing with the verses in all directions, stretching the syllables or the typographic spaces, cutting the words into pieces. (“head full of dreams flying/can”), also sometimes scribbling drawings like scratches.
“Black in white reality”, Douce Dibondo sharpens her angry and militant pen as if to exorcise the world. “I’m fed up with my furious neurosis” ; “My embittered body is a tube that vomits reality” ; “Why can’t anyone hear me/I’m pissing blood/in your ears”, writes the poet, who becomes fierce, insulting the reader: “Look down when you read me.” This second collection, she says, “this is the anger stage on the healing journey.” Bring out all the rage to rebuild on its ruins. From explosions to explosions, we can’t help but wonder: through this collection, is Douce Dibondo also exorcising her first name?
“infra/seum” by Douce Dibondo, Blast editions, 136 pp., €13.
The extract
I don’t give a damn about the social question
I don’t give a damn about the racial issue
I just wonder
how to bone them from my flesh society
the inheritance of my trash DNA
in the shade of the baobabs
the brilliance of the ancestors roars behind my enclosures
busy rebuilding a world that I hate,
undoing it puts knots in my bones
the illusion of direct action
they say: is violence necessary?
who still has time
for this question of boloss
I Wanda: What time does our violence take place?
