As Long as Trees Take Root in the Earth and Other Poems Review by Katherine E. Young

As Long as Trees Take Root in the Earth and Other Poems 

Poems by Alain Mabanckou, translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson 

Review by Katherine E. Young

Seagull Books, 2021

$19.00

124 pp.

ISBN 978 0 8574 2 877 6

Alain Mabanckou’s As Long as Trees Take Root in the Earth and Other Poems, translated from the French by Nancy Naomi Carlson, is the long-overdue English-language debut of one of the world’s most prominent Francophone poets. Mabanckou was born in Congo, but he has lived much of his adult life in de facto exile in France and the United States. Mabanckou is best known in English for his prose, having twice been named a finalist for the Man Booker prize; however, he originally rose to prominence in the Francophone world thanks to his first collection of poetry, L’usure des lendemains, which won the 1995 Prix de la Société des poètes français. 

As Long as Trees Take Root in the Earth and Other Poems consists of three parts: two thematically linked collections of poetry and an essay, all originally published in French during the period between 2000 and 2004. The individual poems are invariably short, pithy, and sometimes aphoristic; they are almost exclusively lyric, although narrative strands run through both collections. The extremely short poem as a form derives its power from precise crafting of both word and image, and Mabanckou is adept at conjuring a complex physical and emotional landscape in just a few words, as in his description of childhood memories lugged around “like a shell scrubbed clean / by marine salts” (4). But Mabanckou’s palette extends beyond the merely personal and picturesque: within the confines of the short form, he also takes on the complexities of war, poverty, politics, exile, memory, loss, and prophesy. When the poems succeed, as they almost always do here, they can be breathtaking.

The first section of the book, “When the Rooster Announces the Dawn of Another Day,” brings together fifty-seven short, untitled poems in a single cycle. As its name implies, this sequence of poems is set primarily in the depths of night: the first poem commences at midnight, when “death is moaning in dens” (3); elsewhere, Mabanckou writes of “death-vigil nights” (6). Over the course of the poetic sequence, several distinct tragedies unfold: the death of the speaker’s mother, human conflict and its concomitant trauma on the land and its people, the speaker’s loss of a homeland, and the failure of words in the face of grief. “[G]od turns his back on us” begin several of the poems (27, 31). “[W]hat will we have left” asks the speaker at one point (9), and the extended answer offers a vivid portrait of a troubled place:

we’ll still have the dew
of a passionate morning 

congealed sap
the shadows’ song
in the screech owl’s throat 

the sneering of macaques 

in banana fields (10)

The final six poems in the sequence (55-60)—where we discover the origin of its title—serve as the last will and testament of the speaker’s illiterate mother, 

dying wishes wrested
from the night
to read when the common cranes 

take wing 

before the rooster proclaims 

the dawn of another day… (56)

Weaving together the themes of trauma and destruction from earlier in the series, the mother uses her last words to warn against yet more violence:

none of you will be able to read
the whispering of ancestors
on the faces of masks
if in each corner of a hut
I catch sight of the glare
of a gun (60)

As rendered in Nancy Naomi Carlson’s translation, Mabanckou’s line breaks generally correspond to syntax breaks in English. Like American poet W.S. Merwin, with whom he shares a number of thematic interests—most prominently, respect for the natural world—Mabanckou eschews punctuation in these poems. Also like Merwin, Mabanckou tends to freight simple words with as much meaning as they can bear, as in this near-aphorism on the inadequacies of language: 

somewhere
words collapse
stone is proud of the silence 

it protects (23)

Elsewhere, Mabanckou writes of “captive words…effaced in caves” (32). Still, words are the only tools a writer can wield, as he tacitly acknowledges in his tribute to Congolese poet Amélia Néné: “a poetess died / the echo of her song is still warm” (38).

The second series of poems in in this collection (and the one from which the book takes its name), “As Long as Trees Take Root in the Earth,” consists of thirty short, untitled poems. Although this sequence is only half the length of “When the Rooster Announces the Dawn of Another Day,” its thematic and narrative threads are more diffuse. Many of the poems revisit the subjects of grief, loss, migration, and homesickness from the earlier collection, while others branch out in new directions. One of the strongest themes here is the speaker’s stubborn insistence on the right to live, think, and write without conforming to limits or orthodoxies imposed by others. Nationalism, religion, and literary movements such as Negritude come in for explicit criticism:

shame on you for restricting me
to this plot of land
and handing me a tom-tom to beat

so take your hollowed-out Negritude 

carry it like a viaticum
make sure you don’t forget your assegai 

let alone your woven mat 

they expect you like this 

clad in leopard skin 

my only bonds
are the sum of all intersections 

the echoes of Babel (64)

Even more than in “When the Rooster Announces the Dawn of Another Day,” the speaker in “As Long as Trees Take Root in the Earth” seeks refuge in the natural, as opposed to the human-centered, world. Images of birds—particularly migratory birds, who often represent the speaker’s own flight into exile—fill these poems:

I adopt from the bird 

uncertainty about the next bush 

I don’t know what the weather will bring 

on migration’s other side
but the world opens to me
rich in crossroads 

let my wings carry me
carry me further away from the hue and cry 

away from the barn
away from the cocks trained to fight (66) 

The final poems in the sequence celebrate the richness and power of the natural world: “let’s ask the stone where to find Truth / it will tell us it’s in this earthly world / and only here” begins one of the poems (92). Mountains, the wind, and trees are listed among the guardians of a wisdom that humans have largely ceased to heed:

so here is the haughty mountain 

proud of its height 

here is the mountain of the soul 

silent keeper of boundlessness 

here is the mountain that hasn’t spoken in centuries 

it only asks for a bit of blue sky

grass forever green

morning dew

a herd grazing close by 

all kinds of birds

that sing (91)

It’s unfortunate that the publisher chose not to publish a bilingual edition of these poems: the extreme compression of Mabanckou’s writing style and the corresponding weight borne by each individual word in “As Long as Trees Take Root in the Earth” can leave one wishing to consult the original text. For example, it can be unclear where the speaker of a particular poem in the series is located in time and space and who, exactly, is being addressed. Is “this ancestral land” of deserted plantations and barbed wire the speaker’s homeland or the place to which the speaker has migrated (69)? References to “this side” and “the other world” can be similarly unclear (70). 

Although it could easily serve as an introduction to the book, Mabanckou’s 2004 prose essay “An Open Letter to Those Who are Killing Poetry” comes at the end of As Long as Trees Take Root in the Earth and Other Poems. While the essay focuses primarily on Francophone poetry, particularly poetry from Africa, its significance for readers of As Long as Trees Take Root in the Earth and Other Poems may well lie in what it reveals about Mabanckou as a poet. Mabanckou famously wrote his 1995 La légende de l’errance, a tribute to his late mother, in just three days and nights, convinced that the words were coming directly from his mother, and he published the work unrevised. True poetry, he argues in “An Open Letter,” is not a matter of the poet’s intent (let alone the dictates of form, function, or fashion)—poetry channels itself through the poet, who uses his or her gifts merely to transmit it. Much of the poetry in As Long as Trees Take Root in the Earth and Other Poems exhibits a muscular, incantatory power, as if it indeed is pouring forth from its sources, with Mabanckou as the conduit lightly shaping but not taming its flow.

Nancy Naomi Carlson’s sensitive and painstaking translations of this powerful, important writer are a boon to anyone interested in the world of Francophone letters. As in her other work, here Carlson deliberately seeks to mimic the music of the original French in her English renditions of the text. Very occasionally, she makes a false step, as in the syntax of the phrase “the umbilical cord’s agreement / only is binding to barnyard birds” (82). For those who don’t know French, however, Carlson’s translations are probably as close to the sound of the original poem as one is likely to come in English.

Katherine E. Young is the author of Woman Drinking Absinthe and Day of the Border Guards and editor of Written in Arlington. She is the translator of Anna Starobinets, Akram Aylisli, and numerous Russophone poets; she was named a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts translation fellow. From 2016-2018, she served as the inaugural poet laureate for Arlington, Virginia.

26 October 2021