Think of Lampedusa

A collection of serial poems, Think of Lampedusa addresses the 2013 shipwreck that killed 366 Africans attempting to migrate secretly to Lampedusa, an Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea. The crossing from North Africa to this island and other Mediterranean way stations has become the most dangerous migrant route in the world. Interested in what is producing such epic displacement, Josué Guébo’s poems combine elements of history and mythology.

Guébo considers the Mediterranean not only as a literal space but also as a space of expectation, anxiety, hope, and anguish for migrants. He meditates on the long history of narratives and bodies trafficked across the Mediterranean Sea. What did it—and what does it—connect and separate? Whose sea is it? Ultimately he is searching for what motivates a person to become part of what he calls a “seasonal suicide epidemic.”

This translation of Guébo’s Songe à Lampedusa, winner of the Tchicaya U Tam’si Prize for African Poetry, is a searing work from a major African poet.

Josué Guébo is an Ivorian poet and the author of seven poetry collections. He is a professor at the University of Félix Houphouët–Boigny of Cocody in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. He served as president of the Ivorian Writers’ Association from 2011 to 2016. Todd Fredson is a translator of Francophone West African literature and translated Guébo’s poetry collection My country, tonight.He is the author of the poetry collectionThe Crucifix-Blocks. John Keene is an associate professor and the chair of African American and African studies at Rutgers. He is the author of the poetry collection Seismosis and the novel Annotations.