THE RECOIL FROM ROMANTICISM 220in imagery and remarkable for its vividness and vitality, Some of these poems,
such as 'Sorrows of the Black City' or 'He Died Tomorrow' (which describes
the death of a black political victim), express a profound feeling of anger
and bitterness:
He died
Not a drop of rain wept for him,
Not a handful of faces looked sad.
The moon never looked benignly upon his grave at night,
Not even a lazy worm turned round
Or a stone cracked.
He died tomorrow,
A soiled corpse and a forgotten shroud,
Like a bad dream
— And then the people awoke
Or an unwholesome storm
Passing over the fields of roses at the hour of dawn.He died.
And his black burning soul was full to the brim
Of a past overlaid with the blood of gallows,
The screams of the rebels confined in prisons,
The painful and cracked faces of old women
Raising to heaven, in helpless sorrow,
Crooked, scythe-like arms,
And eyes in which was buried deep the shadow of the gallows.
(pp. lOlff.)Faituri pursued the theme of Black Africa in further collections entitled
A Lover from Africa (1964) and Remember Me, Africa (1968). Writing about his
experience as poet he once said, 'In 19481 wrote my poem "To a White Face",
which is my first poetic experiment in which my little self was fused into a
larger self, namely the African' (p. 22). In 'Voice of Africa', a poem from the
collection A Lover from Africa, he claims that the voice of Africa is the poet's
own voice as well as the voice of God; in it we find a complete identification
between the poet and his political cause and an intimation of the way the
appeal of the cause operates on three levels: the personal, the political and
the religious.
In Faituri's latest collection, Musk for an Itinerant Dervish (1970), the poet
turns to mysticism. This change he defends by saying that the mystical ex-
perience was not at all a new thing to him, but on the contrary it was 'part of
his being', since he was brought up on mysticism (p. 34).
Whatever the early history of Faituri the man, there seems to be a con-
nection between the resurgence of religious feeling and the vogue of mysti-