A Brief Introduction to Liberian Writers: Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s Work

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s literary corpus speaks to the breadth and significance of not only Liberian and African poetry, but also the very art of poetics. It re-emphasizes the urgency of telling and retelling our stories, leaving for us both a historical record of the beautiful and rich past, as well as the one devastated by war and political lust for power. Her works also provide for us a blueprint of the new country she wishes to erect in place of “a broken city, where the heart has forgotten how to mend”  (When the Wanderers Come Home, 2016).

Wesley’s works are mementoes to generations of Liberian and African-diaspora children, bearing the testimony of a long-buried literary heritage, excavating themes that haunt the memory as well as the places (Liberia & America) she calls home. Her works include six books of poetry, namely: When the Wanderers Come Home, Where the Road Turns, The River is Rising, Becoming Ebony, Before the Palm Could Bloom, and the sixth book, Praise Song for My Children, which is a conglomeration of new and selected poems from her masterfully crafted collections. Wesley also has to her credit a children’s book titled In Monrovia, the River Visits the Sea; and have served as editor of two anthologies DoveTales Anthology: One World, One People (2019), and the most comprehensive anthology of Liberian poetry, titled Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry, from the 1800s to present.

The works of Wesley serve as a hors d’oeuvre, spurring us to dive deep into the depths of the long-hidden Liberian literary culture. They are imbued with a certain indescribable character that invokes a myriad of emotions and themes. She conveys her art as a triune-persona: a storyteller, praise singer, and town crier; masterfully sculpting Liberian weltanschauung into poetry. Wesley’s poetry is both an individual and a collective lamentation of a country. In ‘When the Wanderers Come Home’, she questions, 

“how much death does it take for God to wake 

 up an evil people? How many plagues? 

 Why does a flower rise out of a petal at dawn 

 just to die before it unfolds itself?” 

But that is not all to Wesley’s poetry, it is as well a testament to struggles and resilience “like the warrior woman I was made to be, I rose, upright, the way a farmer woman grabs her hoe and her other tools around her to capture the horrors of farming, the way a newly widowed girl calculates the farm work only she must do.” (When the Wanderers Come Home, 2016)

Coming from a world that reeked of brokenness and despair, Wesley embalms her readers with hope. In “One day love song for the newly divorced,” she assures, “one day you will awake from your covering and that heart of yours will be mended, and there will be no more burning within. The owl, calling in the setting of the sun, and the deer path, all erased.” (Where the Road Turns, 2010) 

As a praise singer, she carefully wields the Grebo (Liberian) traditional style in contemporary poetry, exploring themes of loss and identity as portrayed in these lines:

“let me sing to you, my daughters, you who have

 never known where we come from. 

You who will never know your mother’s tongue, 

you who have become a metaphor of lost

 warriors, who were captured by war. 

Let me be your songwriter, the song you sing, 

the dirge you do not know how to sing.”(Praise Song for My Children,2017-2019)

In his foreword to the revered Praise Song for My Children, New and Selected Poems, Shenoda asserts that “in many ways, Wesley has become the poetic ‘keeper of the homestead’ without whom there’s no home. Her remembering of Liberia and her keeping of it through her verse is a kind of nation-work that exemplifies for us the necessity of story-keepers and the possibilities of consequential connections regardless of geography;” so that through her works, the Liberian/African-Diaspora kid can live in Africa and Africa in him. 

Another theme that resonates throughout Wesley’s works is the ‘gospel of feminism’ preached unapologetically, re-emphasizing the roles of women in the historicity of her people. In ‘Where the Road Turns’, Wesley gives us a neo-genesis—unlike the male-dominated biblical version. In the beginning, 

...God took the sun

And he took the moon 

And he took the earth

And placed them all

on a flat plate.

Then he called the woman 

And the man, and in the presence 

of the man and the woman

he took the plate,

holding the moon

and the sun and the earth,

and handed them all to the woman. (Where the Road Turns, 2010)

In praise of the literary genius Wesley is, the renowned and revered African poet Kwame Dawes asserted “Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is unequivocal about the uses of poetry, of her poetry-she is determined to trade in truth, in the power of experience, in the beauty of language to alarm and delight, and in the challenge, she willingly bears to be an instrument of witness and articulation for her people—for Africa, for women, for the lovers of poetry.” And in continuation, he refers to her as “a poet at the height of her skills and at the height of her clarity about the world and what things must be spoken into it.” This same clarity and uniqueness is what Wesley requires and demands from her children (her poetic sons and daughters). In her words she “..wish they will learn what it is I am [she is] doing and how to be inspired by my [her] writing. ( We Write Liberia, 2021)

Where do we even begin with our admiration for the poetic genius that Wesley is? How do we even begin with our plaudits for the wit and value she has added to the corpus of Liberian and African Literature? It is an indubitable fact that with the quality and great significance of her works, she has skillfully carved out for herself a lieu de memoir in the history of Liberian and African-Diaspora literature; proving to be the ‘mother of Liberian poetry’ as she is already called “Ade” literally translated as ‘our mother’ by her emerging and promising poetic children in Liberia, for birthing quality Liberian literature to the world stage and for committing her time to nurture the next generation of Liberian and young writers worldwide through her group “Young Scholars of Liberia”.  

E.K. Boateng, previously published under the pen name Eduardo de Bosco, is an emerging Liberian writer, critic, Lecturer of African Literature, Mentor of SpringNG Writing Fellowship, and aspiring diplomat who writes from somewhere around the world. His works have appeared in Cutthroat journal, Rigorous magazine, Ngiga Review, & elsewhere. He holds a C-Certificate in Elementary Education, Certificate in Creative Writing, a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy, a Master of Arts degree in International Relations and Diplomatic Studies.