The Discipline of the Kwansaba

Abstract

Created in 1995 by Eugene B. Redmond in concert with the Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club, the kwansaba is one of the more noteworthy fixed forms in contemporary poetry. Like haiku or the sonnet, the kwansaba imposes a stern discipline upon its practitioners. The definition is simple enough. A kwansaba is a poem “consisting of seven lines, of seven words each, with no word containing more than seven letters” (Redmond, Arkansippi Memwars 235). Redmond allows proper nouns, foreign terms, and quoted passages to be “exceptions to the seven letter rule” (235). When we consider that the rigid form of the kwansaba is historically linked to the invention of Kwanzaa, we might want to contemplate its interpretative possibilities in American cultural spaces. We can ask loaded questions about word games, poetry, and indeterminacy. We might ask whether kwansabas invite multi-layered interpretations which expose meaningful disconnection between “subjective” ethnic authenticity and delusions promoted by belief in the “objective” neutrality of formal or structural critical practice. Does the kwansaba encourage poets to maximize experiments in orality and defy efforts to minimize the power of language to denote or reveal ethnic identity? This paper explores those questions through multi-layered readings of Treasure Shield Redmond’s “justice,” Eugene B. Redmond’s “kwansaba: yo maya! yo day?” and Michael Castro’s “Kali-ma/Kwansaba for Jayne Cortez.”