I Have a Home, There Is a We: Voice of a Stranger in a Strange Land

I Have a Home, There Is a We, whose original Swahili edition was in 2015 the first book of poetry to win the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature, brings the acclaimed verse of prolific Zanzibari poet, journalist, and cultural changemaker Mohammed Khelef Ghassani to English-language readers for the first time. The book explores the poet’s life as a migrant in Germany: linguistic and cultural alienation, nostalgia, and longing for his homeland on the island of Pemba. These poems form a catalog of sorrow and love addressed to the family he left behind, to the children whose roots ＂he tore forcefully from the ground＂ in hopes of offering them a better life, and above all to the country he calls home, using the deeply resonant Swahili term ＂kwetu＂--our place--named over and over again as Zanzibar.

Utilizing the structured verse forms of traditional Swahili prosody, the collection is modern, unique, and innovative, speaking to a global diasporic experience even as it draws deeply on an idiom specific to the poet’s tiny island home. A ripple of political defiance suffuses the poems as Ghassani positions himself against layered forms of oppression and marginalization both at home and abroad in this synthesis of love song, lamentation, and freedom declaration.

Mohammed Khelef Ghassani was born in 1977 on the island of Pemba, Zanzibar. He studied translation at the Open University of Tanzania, where he received a master’s degree in 2014. He now works as a reporter and editor of the broadcasting company Deutsche Welle in Bonn, Germany. He is the author of seven previous collections of poetry in Swahili. Meg Arenberg is a scholar and translator with specializations in Anglophone African, Indian Ocean, and Swahili literatures. Her work has won recognition from the American Comparative Literature Association and the American Literary Translators Association.