By Dr. Justus Wanjohi Makokha
Who are we who are poets and Black in this new century upon this mother continent of ours?
To me, a Black poet is the tongue and ears of society. His mind is the pulse of the community. His third eye is the portal to the metaverse of things.
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As the planet revolves endlessly around the Sun and spins upon its axis, it is never a bad time to ponder poetry, the oldest literary genre, and the function of the poet in our precarious times. What is a poet? What is society? And what happens when the two meet through spirit, language, perception and vision?
To call the poet a tongue is to place them at the site where thought becomes utterance. The tongue does not generate thought. However, it gives thought a body in sound. Without the tongue, the mind remains private and inert. The poet, then, is the organ through which a community externalises its inner life.
The tongue is never neutral. It selects, shapes, distorts and elevates. In articulating what others feel but cannot say, the poet performs a function akin to what Plato called divine madness: a possession by a force greater than the individual that speaks through them. Yet, unlike Plato’s suspicion of poets as imitators twice removed from truth, this formulation treats the poet as a conduit for truth that would otherwise remain mute.
To call the poet the ears of society is to recognise that utterance requires reception. Hearing is the first ethical act. Before one can speak justly, one must listen truthfully. The poet’s ear is tuned to the explicit words of the marketplace and the courtroom. It is also attuned to the percolation of subtext, silence, unspoken grief and half-formed hope criss-crossing everyday life.
In parts of our rural landscapes, the poet-griot, the mganga of language, serves as the archive of our peoples precisely because they listen and preserve what the world is saying for posterity. In urban spaces, the Gen Z poet listens to the noise of postmodernity and distils it into form.
This dual function reveals a philosophical anthropology. It persuades us to reason that human beings are more than rational animals. We are the only listening-speaking beings on the planet. Society exists because we can give and receive meaning through symbols. When that circuit breaks, when people stop listening or stop speaking truthfully, the social body falls ill. The poet, as tongue and ears, becomes both diagnostician and healer. They articulate the symptoms and prescribe the rhythm that can restore coherence.
This function demands a language that is both precise and resonant. The poet cannot rely upon the jargon of administration or the noise of propaganda. They must use language that carries the weight of lived experience, language that compels the ear to attend. This is why metaphor, metre and rhythm remain essential: they are the means by which language becomes memorable and capable of travelling across time. The tongue of society must be a tongue that can still be understood by the ears of future generations.
To say that the mind of the poet is the pulse of the community is to say that the poet registers the living state of the collective body. The pulse is not the mind itself. Rather, it is its sign of life. A pulse is rhythmic. It is involuntary. It is indispensable. Without it, life ceases to circulate. A pulse tells us whether the body is calm or distressed, healthy or dying.
This reasoning moves us from language as structure to consciousness as vitality. The poet is the most immediate manifestation of the spirit of a people because poetry is the least mediated art form. A painting needs paint, a building needs stone, a drama needs movement and action. What does a poem need? I believe a poem needs only breath and meaning. In that immediacy, the consciousness of the poet becomes a seismograph for the health of the social organism that surrounds them.
As the world shifts beneath our feet, the pulse of the poet cannot remain still. In times of peace, poetic works may be celebratory and playful. In times of precarity, as in much of our beloved motherland today, the pulse quickens and grows erratic. Anger, satire, lamentation, revelation, elegy and prophecy rise to the surface. This is why those who fear dissent often fear poets first. It is not that poets command armies or police forces. It is because they feel the true temperature of the people before the people themselves know it.
It is for this reason that I demand of myself and of other poets the right to refuse numbness. Cynicism and careerism deaden the pulse. The poet must cultivate empathy, attention, compassion and courage because the community feels what the poet feels long before it can name it. The poem must breathe with the body it inhabits. When the pulse is alive, the community knows that it, too, is alive.
What do we mean when we say that the writer is the eye of society, the watchdog? When we say that the poet’s third eye is the portal to the metaverse of things, we move from the social to the metaphysical.
The third eye appears across many traditions of the world. We are familiar with the inner eye of the mystics of ancient Africa. As Muslims and Christians, we know the prophetic vision of the prophets of the Middle East. We understand the special sight of those who look beyond the obvious. The third eye sees patterns, connections, archetypes and possibilities that ordinary sight misses.
In our time, as this swift century unfolds before us, the phrase “metaverse of things” is often used as digital jargon. Here, however, I ask you to understand it as the realm of meaning that lies beyond what is spoken and measured.
A chair is made of wood and nails, certainly. Yet the chair also signifies the labour that made it, the hands that used it, and the absence of the person who no longer sits in it, like my late father’s makuti armchair, which none of us could bear to inherit.
The poet sees these layers and brings them into language. The nuances, comrades. The nuances of the essences of things and the many levels at which those essences reside.
This is a refusal to reduce the world to objects without meaning. The poet restores things to their place within a living web of relations. This requires a poetics of defamiliarisation. The poem must make the familiar strange enough for us to see it anew. When the reader encounters such a poem, their own third eye opens briefly. They glimpse the web of meaning in which they are enmeshed.
The third eye sees what official history omits: the lives of the marginalised, the violence concealed behind progress, the potholes on the proverbial road to Singapore in our country under its youngest-ever leader, the memory of my grandfather squatting inside a concentration camp near Hola by the mighty River Tana, counting the silvery broken wings of mosquitoes and hating colonialism. The memory that refuses to die.
In this sense, the vision of the poet resists every attempt to flatten the world into data, spectacle, commodity or mere sensation.
It is public knowledge that the Black poet in Africa remains close to the spirit of A Luta Continua. The belief is that the struggle continues towards the total liberation of our people, our lands and our minds.
This phrase, born in the marshes outside Maputo during the anti-colonial era, reminds us that justice and meaning are never finally achieved within a single lifetime. They are processes. We should abandon the habit of imagining them as permanent states. Liberation, too.
This slogan of hope and determination reframes everything. The poet, and the business of poetry itself, is not a finished identity but a role within an unending existential struggle. This struggle is against forgetting. It is against silence, against mockery, and against the reduction of human life to mere function.
Poets, we are what we do. The poet constitutes both self and community through the acts of speaking, touching, listening, feeling and seeing. This means that form must remain open. The poem cannot claim finality. It must remain provisional and interrogative, capable of being answered, contradicted, lampooned and extended by others.
This demands humility. The poet ought not to claim possession of Truth. Rather, the poet claims only to be engaged in the struggle towards it. That, methinks, is what poetry is all about. The authority of the poet comes not from certainty. It arises from fidelity to the process of seeking.
Taken together, these four claims form a model of the poet as a living system within a larger living system. The tongue and ears describe the communicative interface. The pulse describes the vital bond that makes communication meaningful. The third eye describes the capacity to perceive deeper structures of reality. The perpetual commitment encapsulated in the slogan A Luta Continua describes the temporal condition: unfinished, existential, disruptive, historical and demanding.
Perhaps here is a model that can be tested by the crises of globalisation and technology. Our third poetic eye must now see into digital networks and virtual environments without being seduced by them. We must call them what they are and stare them directly in the eye.
The challenge before the poet today is to create forms capable of holding the analogue and the digital, the physical and the metaphysical, the local and the global, the human and the post-human.
The scope of contemporary poetry should be expanded to encompass the percolation of the more-than-human world. Here, the poet aligns with systems of knowledge that have always recognised personhood in rivers and agency in mountains. The task is to develop a poetics that does not speak about nature as an object but from within the web of relations that constitutes life.
If we take this seriously, and I believe, friends, that we should, the poet becomes what older traditions elsewhere called fiducia. Think of this as belief, trust, a ahandi, a pledge, a holding open of possibility.
The poet holds in trust the language of the people, the vitality of the community and the vision of what could be. The poet is not above the community. That is old thinking. The poet is not separate from the community. That is privilege speaking. The poet is within the community. Ndani. Ndaani. Ndaaani.
The poet is the central nerve within the body. When the nerve is severed, the body cannot feel. Likewise, when the poet is silenced, the community loses a mode of self-knowledge. I submit.
This trust is not static. It must be renewed in every place, in every generation, in every language, in every medium and in every aesthetic context. I submit.
The struggle continues because the human project remains unfinished. We are still deciding what it means to be human, and the poet is among those who keep the question alive. I submit.
Comrades, permit me to sign off by saying:
In a world of noise, our world, our here and now, the poet listens.
In a world of numbness, our numbness, here and now, the poet feels.
In a world of surfaces, our world, here and now, the poet sees through.
And in a world of endings, unforeseen wars and artificial calamities, the poet of today must never cease to insist, in the accent of the fallen Comrade Samora, son of Machel, from Maputo in good old Msumbiji, that heartland of Black revolutions:
A luta continua.
– Dr. Makokha is the Secretary General, Literature and Performing Arts Society of Kenya (LPASK).
