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.

Recapturing the celebratory voice of Africa in poems that are both contemporary and traditional, Liberian-born Patricia Jabbeh Wesley weaves lyrical storytelling with oral history and images of Africa and America, revealing powerful insights about the relationship between strength and tragedy. Rooted in myths that can be traced to the Grebo tradition, Becoming Ebony portrays Wesley's childhood experiences of village talk and civil war, as well as her adult experiences of the pain of her mother's death and the difficulties of rearing a family away from home in the United States. Turning on the African proverb of ""the wandering child"" and the metaphor of the ebony tree - beautiful in life and death - these poems delve into issues of human suffering and survival, chronicling what happens ""after the sap is gone.

In Before the Palm Could Bloom, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley writes poems of the Liberian civil war and of the devastation it has wrought: 2000,000 dead including 50,000 children and 750,000 citizens forced to take refuge in neighbouring countries. And in poems of village life and customs, the city life of Monrovia, the rites of childhood and adolescence, Wesley records for the reader a world that has been forever changed. Wesley's poems incorporate many African voices, and range in tone from sorrow and longing, to humour and ironic wit.

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.