REVIEWED BY OUDARJYA PRAMANIK

Among the post-colonial African writing voices, perhaps the one that distinctly stands out and discusses matters pertaining to identity, geography, memory, and language with wit is that of Abdourahman A. Waberi. The manner in which Naming the Dawn explores the fractured histories of both Africa and its diaspora places it deep in what it means to be exiled and yet remain searching within these dreams for selfhood. Waberi’s work is deeply rooted in the geography of Djibouti, the Horn of Africa, and the larger African continent. However, his poetic exploration transcends the borders of his birthplace, embracing a broader diasporic identity that connects Africa to the Western world, particularly Europe and the United States.

Naming the Dawn is not a work bound by geography but a remapping of diasporic geography that is at one and the same time born from historical trauma in colonialism and personal experience in exile. Geography is not just a backdrop for Waberi; it has a dynamic presence in helping define identities. In many of his works, African terrain maps side by side with the Western world, tension and dislocation an intrinsic part of the contrasts. This is remarkably evident in his reimagining of spaces-from the literal deserts of Djibouti to the metaphorical deserts of alienation in Western urban centers.

Through the imagery of his poetry, Waberi develops a “geographical consciousness” that speaks to the dislocation and fragmentation of the African diaspora. His notion of space is hybrid; neither fully African nor Western but an in-between space that echoes Homi Bhabha’s conception of the “third space,” where new identities are forged through the encounter of cultures. Naming the Dawn is an anthology by Abdourahman A. Waberi, whose title impresses a zone between two sides it creates an impression of light created but not brightness enough, pair of opposites in that one gets a sense of fear as well as understanding. Since it needs to be defined as a phenomenon, the dawn suggests promise of something new and change. In this volume, Waberi makes good use of it to grapple with deep issues of conflict, desire, and self-creation. The title speaks to those aspects well, but it even focuses the readers’ attention on the underlying grief within much of the poems, namely inner conflict the speaker faces when the upsurge of despair collides with the moments of emergent understanding of life’s enigmas.

In many ways, this title Naming the Dawn is very symbolic in the context of the poems in the collection: the experience between suffering and hope, ignorance and enlightenment, or life and death. The act of “naming” the dawn would suggest the urge to capture, define, and understand something inherently fleeting and transitional. In short, each of the poems in this collection might be regarded as an attempt to name, or make sense of, a moment of existential or spiritual awakening, which may be evanescent or partial but that now registers as meaningful.

For example, in “Of a Salvo in Its Shrine,” the speaker grapples with existential thirst, not for worldly pleasures but for spiritual fulfillment. The thirst for the divine and transcendent mirrors the yearning for dawn—a breaking away from the darkness of ignorance or despair into the light of understanding or divine connection. The pursuit of Thuraya’s stars, the image of the spire cutting the light, and the union of heaven with blood all signify this liminal experience. The dawn here is not just a metaphor for enlightenment, but also for the spiritual quest that never fully resolves, making each small step or revelation as vital as the destination.

In “At the Botanical Garden,” the external vision of snow and wild boars is placed against the inner fight to contain “self-concern” and suppress inner devils. The tension between nature’s peace and inner commotion reflects the state of mind right at dawn—a place of tension and transition, where one’s own demons must be faced before any kind of awakening or peace can be reached. The path measured “step by step” echoes the metaphor in the title, as one small moment at a time moves toward the coming of dawn. Another poem that also speaks to the same notion of being in motion toward dawn, but in a more poignant sense, is “Chasing After Death”. Even here, a sense of being alienated from themselves by the speaker, inability to connect to nature or surroundings, can be a state of existential darkness. Yet it is the relentless dream “to grow in time” that speaks also to the latent hope for dawn—a hope that even in the darkest moments, there will be a turning point or a moment of clarity. The very concept of a dawn embodies not only hope but the acceptance of mortality and the ultimate realization that growth and life are cyclical.

An interruption from the past, from darkness, literal and symbolic, the dawn is obviously a synonym for moments of spiritual insight and rebirth and even reconciliation between mortal and divine. This dawn is always in a process of becoming, never fully defined or static, like the spiritual and existential journeys of the speakers of the poems.

In “Language of Birds,” using the word “iqra,” an imperative to read from the Quran, places the reader right at the beginning of spiritual discovery, much as it is an appropriate metaphor for dawn as the first light of knowledge. Here, the dawn is the point when the past, present, and future mingle to make a timeless moment of spiritual awakening. All of these birds, messengers of this transcendental experience, represent the fact that everything, creation and destruction, life and death, is already there, waiting to be discerned. It, under these lights, becomes not a physical affair but a spiritual insight that all things are intertwined and circular.

The distance between man and God is also indicated here by “Daily Awakening,” based on all things still in Adam’s blindness in the mud and the lotus blooms in manure. Here, the dawn does not only speak of spiritual redemption but also brings to a slow realization the beauty of life, even in suffering. For, as a classic symbol of enlightenment, the lotus might carry the undertone that this dawn is one of gradual awakening-even in the morass of existence, there is potential for growth and beauty. In this way, then, the idea that “the divine is far and yet near” goes well with the title’s theme, which says “that dawn is something to be hoped for and wished, but yet just at hand”. The title Naming the Dawn is aptly romantic for a collection of poems, since it captures the collective sense of the spaces that these poems traverse-between darkness and light, ignorance and knowledge, despair and hope. The act of naming something as ephemeral and elusive as dawn speaks volumes of the human urge to grasp some meaning of life’s shadowy experiences.

Naming the Dawn is a ground for systematic investigation of the transference of cultural and linguistic nuances from French to English. In other words, what is translation here but a political and cultural technique? Waberi writes in French, the mother tongue of the colonizer, but infuses it with African rhythms, expressions, and worldviews. All these elements, when translated into English, require precautions not to lose the cultural weight of Waberi’s hybrid linguistic identity. The translation exercise then becomes a navigation between languages and cultures. Tension is now within Waberi’s use of French as a device for both resistance and appropriation and the urge to render that depth of meaning in English. The translator has to face the multiplicity of voices in Waberi’s work: voices of exile, of colony, of African, and diaspora. They bring different textual individuality: formal and proper registers of French colonialism and informal, oral regimes of African storytelling.

One of the central concerns in translation studies is the question of “fidelity”—whether the translation remains faithful to the original. However, in the case of Waberi’s work, fidelity must be understood in a broader sense. It is not just about replicating the words and structures of the original text but about capturing the essence of Waberi’s transcultural identity. This means that the translator must engage with the cultural and historical contexts embedded in the text, ensuring that the translation reflects the diasporic tensions and hybrid identities that Waberi so masterfully portrays.

Nancy Naomi Carlson’s translation is notable for its ability to capture the lyrical and thematic essence of Waberi’s original French text. Carlson’s careful choice of words and phrases preserves the rhythm and tone of Waberi’s poetry, ensuring that the emotional and intellectual nuances are effectively conveyed in English. Her translation of Naming the Dawn maintains the original’s lyrical quality and thematic complexity, providing English-speaking readers with an authentic experience of Waberi’s work:

“I call it a missed glance / the one that fails to touch the passer-by / I leave mind games behind / wanting to grasp smoke”

This, in itself, is a political statement-the choice of writing in French. French is the language of colonizers in Djibouti; there was always an accompanying legacy of dominance and suppression of indigenous languages. In such a scenario, Waberi appropriates the colonizer’s tongue to speak the story of the colonized, turning it into a tool for African consciousness.

As interpreted in the English version, Waberi’s shift of language carries political overtones. English is itself a colonial language but plays a different role in the world power politics than French. In reflecting global colonial change here, where English is now the master tongue of globalization and international rhetoric, the writer translates from French to English. Therefore, the translation of Naming the Dawn into English is not only a linguistic performance but also a gesture of recontextualization that reads Waberi’s work against the greater tapestry of global post-colonialism.

One of the most dominant themes in Naming the Dawn is the theme of exile. Waberi himself is part of the African diaspora and well captures the deep sense of loss, dislocation, and yearning that accompanies such an experience of being uprooted from one’s homeland. But the poetic voice of Waberi transcends the personal; it voices the collective experience of exile that has shaped the history of Africa and its peoples. From the compulsorily migrated transatlantic slave trade to the current flow of refugees and migrants, exile is an integral part of African diasporic identity.

Memory is fundamental to the poetics of displacement. For Waberi, memory is not linear but fragmented, very much like the lives of those who are in exile. His poems are fluid in moving between past and present, often blurring the boundaries between the two. In this respect, he fully captures the ways in which the past lingers to condition the present for exiled people. Memory is both something that wounds and sustains the existence of a piece of exile. It is through memory that the diaspora exile holds on to the past and nurtures a relationship with his homeland even as he finds himself making his way through a topsy-turvy landscape in an alien land.

Waberi’s poetry is deeply rooted in spiritual and existential inquiry. The poems reflect a profound engagement with themes of loss, memory, and transcendence. In “O Mother,” for instance, the speaker’s reflections on maternal loss evoke a sense of longing and remembrance:

“Mother, you’re no longer here / except in the yesterday and tears of my song / none will restore your life’s salt / your smile’s gold your line’s blood”

This elegiac tone captures the enduring influence of the maternal figure on the speaker’s sense of identity and spirituality.

The collection also addresses postcolonial themes, particularly the complexities of identity and cultural dislocation. Waberi’s background as a Djiboutian expatriate informs his exploration of these themes, as seen in poems like “Bees” and “Faerie.” “Bees” employs the imagery of Majnun and Layla, legendary figures from Arabic literature, to convey the sense of dislocation and longing experienced by individuals navigating between different cultural contexts:

“Majnun’s lonely eyes trace all of Layla’s tracks / the wolf dozing in me sleeps with only one eye”

This imagery underscores the tension between personal desires and the broader cultural forces shaping the speaker’s experience.

The search for meaning and understanding is a central motif throughout the collection. In “Axis” and “Wager,” Waberi reflects on existential themes, using metaphors such as the axis to symbolize the central pivot of human experience. In “Axis,” the imagery of cells and sunlight serves as a metaphor for the search for existential clarity:

“Just a cluster of cells / set upright again by the sun of a glance / forcing open the lock of living things”

These reflections highlight the poet’s engagement with the nature of existence and the quest for purpose.

Waberi’s poetry is characterized by rich imagery and symbolism. The collection frequently employs celestial and natural imagery to convey spiritual and existential themes. For example, in “O Rising Sun” and “Ascension,” the use of light and dawn as symbols of enlightenment and renewal reinforces the themes of spiritual awakening and transcendence:

“I leave mind games behind / wanting to grasp smoke / you exhaust yourself in vain / wanting to swallow the moon”

Memory is also a form of recovery of history in the post-colonial African literature. In the very process of colonizing Africa, it was not only the physical taking of the continent, but also erasure of its historical and cultural heritage that happened. Such lost history, most specifically that of the voiceless and the forgotten, is one that Waberi’s poetry attempts to restore. His work, therefore, becomes a cultural form of memory which contests the dominant narratives of Western modernity and colonialism.

In Naming the Dawn, memory serves as a bridge connecting the personal to the collective, the individual to the community. Waberi’s poems are peopled with figures from both his own past and from the collective history of Africa. These figures function as reminders of cultural and historical continuities over ruptures created by colonialism and exile. Through his poetry, Wabericalls readers to participate in these memories, to partake in the act of remembering and, in so doing, to join in the perdurable act of cultural recovery. Indeed, Abdourahman A. Waberi’sNaming the Dawn echoes with Indian and South Asian readers even if it never mentions the region directly. The themes represented by this collection – diasporic identity, spiritual yearning, and existential struggle – sound just in tune with the shared colonial histories, postcolonial displacement, and migration experience that connects South Asia. Exploring the conditions of spiritual exile and a search for meaning within a rich philosophical apparatus of the region, Waberi finds an echoing reverberation with his readers in the South Asian world. Being fundamental to Indian and South Asian literature, the themes of exile, migration, and identity resonate well with Waberi’s work and thus connect universally to readers experiencing the same challenges in the globalized postcolonial world. Indian readers connect with Naming the Dawnnot directly because of cultural references but because of general human struggles, spiritual quests, and belonging, since it has been liked and acclaimed well in literary and academic circles within the region.

Hybrids are at the heart of Waberi’s work. For the poet himself was a product of an intermingling of multiple cultures, languages and identities, as a transnational writer. In the postcolonial context, the concept of hybridity has been critically conceptualized to be the product of new identity and cultural forms born out of an alliance of different cultures. In Waberi’s Naming the Dawn, this hybridity is developed in his poetry as he brings together African as well as Western traditions into a poetic voice.

The use of language by Waberi becomes, in itself, something of a hybridity. His poems revolve at each point between different linguistic registers, moving fluidly from French, African vernaculars, and English. That is the linguistic fluidity you find in the borderlands, where identities are constantly negotiated and redefined. In this sense, Waberi’s poetry can very well be grasped as a form of “borderland poetics” characterized by porous borders among cultures, languages, and identities.

Naming the Dawn is the strongest attempt at dealing with exile complexities, memory, and the post-colonial identity. His poetry produces for the African diaspora a complex picture, a result of trauma from uprootedness and resilience of cultural memory. Waberi’s writing rescripts space and place from a literary-geographical perspective, offering a view of the diaspora that transcends geography to challenge traditional functions of geography: in a world where migration, displacement, and cultural hybridity are becoming central to the human experience, Naming the Dawn provides an important poetic map for navigating the complexity of the new terrains.

Also, read A Book Review of Afsar Mohammad’s ‘Evening With a sufi’ by Oudarjya Pramanik , published in The Antonym:

A Book Review of Afsar Mohammad’s “Evening with a Sufi”— Oudarjya Pramanik

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