Patricia Jabbeh Wesley – författare

Described by African scholar and literary critic Chielozona Eze as “one of the most prolific African poets of the twenty-first century,” Patricia Jabbeh Wesley composed When the Wanderers Come Home during a four-month visit to her homeland of Liberia in 2013. She gives powerful voice to the pain and inner turmoil of a homeland still reconciling itself in the aftermath of multiple wars and destruction.  Wesley, a native Liberian, calls on deeply rooted African motifs and proverbs, utilizing the poetics of both the West and Africa to convey her grief. Autobiographical in nature, the poems highlight the hardships of a diaspora African and the devastation of a country and continent struggling to recover.  When the Wanderers Come Home is a woman’s story about being an exile, a survivor, and an outsider in her own country; it is her cry for the Africa that is being lost in wars across the continent, creating more wanderers and world citizens.

Named a Notable African Book of 2023 by Brittle PaperBreaking the Silence is the first comprehensive collection of literature from Liberia since before the nation’s independence. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley has gathered work from the 1800s to the present, including poets and emerging young writers exploring contemporary literary traditions with African and African diaspora poetry that transcends borders. In this collection, Liberia’s founding settlers wrestle with their identity as African free slaves in the homeland from which their ancestors were captured, and writers of the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries find themselves navigating a landscape at odds with itself.From poets of Liberia’s past to young writers of the present, the contributors to this volume celebrate the beauty of their nation while mourning the devastation of a long, bloody civil war.

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is the first major poet out of Africa's oldest republic of Liberia since the nation's founding and remains one of the most important poets from Africa. Spanning two decades of work, the poems in this collection tell stories of Wesley's homeland that would have otherwise been forgotten. As she recounts her life as a refugee, mother, wife, and African woman, Wesley also remembers the Liberians who were killed in the fourteen-year civil war, the hundreds of thousands silenced and unable to tell their own stories.In conversation with Africa and her new homeland of America, Wesley's craft is imbued with Grebo oral tradition, bringing her language alive as she makes the reader cry out in anger or laughter. On one page you may find reason to mourn the brutality of war, and on the next, a reason to laugh about the beauty of family or at the small wonders of everyday life. Poetry, to Wesley, is not about words; it is about the story, the story of the living seeking to give new life to both the living and those she calls the dead living.