Online ReporterElliot Ziwira
At the Bookstore
If there is ever a bold poetic expedition into the uneasy intersections of culture, language and power, it is David Kerr’s “Tangled Tongues”.
The collection dares to walk the blurred line between belonging and alienation, and between speech and silence. With deft artistry, Kerr explores how intercultural existence in a so-called global village often leaves its inhabitants gasping for authentic expression as they are trapped in echoes of foreign tongues.
Cultural integration, long romanticised under the banner of globalisation, emerges in Kerr’s poetry as a historical continuum of displacement and erasure. Its roots stretch back to slavery and colonisation, which redefined human relations and silenced indigenous voices.
The casualties of this long, turbulent process are many, chief among them the languages and cultures of those at the receiving end of imperial expansion.
Kerr, a British poet, scholar and filmmaker, brings to “Tangled Tongues” the depth of one who has lived and listened across African spaces: Malawi, Zambia, Botswana and beyond.
His voice carries the weight of witness; that of one who has seen how the colonial footprint lingers long after the lowering of the flag. His sympathies lie with the voiceless and displaced African, whose independence often remains a mirage, compromised by neo-colonial structures still entrenched in the administrative, economic and educational systems of postcolonial states.
Indeed, when cultures converge under unequal power relations, language, which is the vessel of culture, inevitably suffers. In the African experience, European languages continue to dominate education, governance and commerce, while indigenous tongues are relegated to the margins.
As language wanes, so too does culture, and with it, the worldview, humour and heritage it encodes. Some languages, Kerr suggests, may never recover having been swallowed by the machinery of industrialisation and the glitter of modernity.
When tongues are tangled, words lose their potency, and meanings blur. The ability to express joy, betrayal, hope or despair becomes compromised. Kerr’s poetic concern, therefore, is not only linguistic but existential, for the erosion of language is also the erosion of being.
The question that persists is: What is humanity without the rhythm and cadence of its own speech?
Stylistically, Kerr fractures conventional poetic boundaries. He weaves aural, visual, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory imagery, often rooted in African symbols and storytelling traditions.
The result is multi-sensory and immersive, pulling the reader into landscapes both familiar and unsettling. His flexible use of form mirrors the dynamism of oral traditions, where poetry is as much heard and felt as it is read.
The poems are rich with layered meanings, cutting across political, cultural and spiritual realms. They can be read from multiple angles, offering diverse interpretations depending on the reader’s vantage point.
Kerr’s thematic terrain is broad yet specific. He explores affliction, hypocrisy, civil strife, displacement and the enduring quest for identity and freedom. Each poem becomes a lens through which the African postcolonial experience is interrogated with both tenderness and outrage.
Through a partly autobiographical lens, the poet’s nomadic persona wanders between continents and cultures, juxtaposing affluence with squalor, illusion with reality.
He exposes the absurdities of a world where progress is measured by destruction, and belonging often demands the betrayal of one’s roots. The poems trace the struggles of those caught between two worlds; those who must speak foreign words to express native pain.
Kerr’s contempt for cultural erosion through industrialisation and technology is most vivid in “Prayer Rock” and “Uprooted,” two poignant explorations of faith and loss.
In “Prayer Rock,” the poet follows a Zionist apostle who seeks solace in her sacred place of prayer: a rock where she pours out her burdens before God. Her struggles mirror those of many African women at social, economic and spiritual levels.
She prays for her wayward 17-year-old daughter, Lebogang, who has already made her a grandmother, and for her plump grandson, Thabo, who “squeals and stuffs insects into his mouth.”
Her prayer is both lament and hope, a plea for deliverance in a world that has robbed her of control. Yet her sacred refuge is destroyed by the bulldozers of “technological progress” as “machines guillotine the earth, which puffs back with clanking dread.”
Similarly, “Uprooted” mourns the spiritual dislocation brought by war and displacement.
The persona, a grieving widow, finds comfort in visiting the graves of her husband and grandfather, pouring beer and scattering flour in acts of remembrance and communion.
When war erupts, she is forced to flee, leaving behind the graves, the rituals and the solace they offer.
“The priests who claim to know,” she observes bitterly, “say Satan is uprooting the whole world, and spirits are howling around neglected graves.”
Kerr captures the desolation of a people torn from their roots, their ancestors and their gods.
In “Return of the Linguist,” “Tongues” and “Other Languages,” the poet laments the extinction of indigenous languages and the rise of hybrid idioms that dilute meaning. His critique is sharp and mournful, insisting that language, once the heartbeat of identity, now gasps under the weight of borrowed syntax and imported metaphors.
His indictment of neo-colonial entanglement deepens in poems like “Afro-canned,” “Gaborone,” “Furnace” and “IMF Consultant.”
Here, he dissects the paradox of African independence as political sovereignty without economic liberation. Western consultants, aid agencies and multinational corporations appear as new colonisers cloaked in benevolence. Their interventions promise progress but deliver dependency.
The contrast between poverty and privilege is starkly rendered in “Lifestyles” and “Children at Play (Leeds/Harare).” The juxtaposition of playgrounds; one lush and ordered, and the other dusty and chaotic, lays bare the global inequities that define the postcolonial condition.
Kerr’s satire bites, yet his compassion tempers it. He understands that the African child’s laughter, even in deprivation, is both defiance and endurance.
The disillusioned persona in “The Continuing Search” sums up the mood of “Tangled Tongues” with poignant irony.
When she declares that she is “looking for Uhuru,” she is met with suspicion from a bemused policeman. The scene encapsulates the tragedy of post-independence Africa in which freedom is sought but never fully realised, for the very language of liberation has been appropriated and distorted.
Through “Tangled Tongues”, Kerr confronts the rea…
