I have been reading and analysing every text by Ismael Teta since 2017, the year Réminiscences first appeared. It is fair to say that I know his poetic gesture well, so much so that I often see it coming before it has fully unfolded. This time it comes in the shape of an excerpt from his ongoing project, Reliquescences, a long road poem titled « How I Drove to the Beginning of the World », dated from Ileret, in Marsabit County, Kenya, on 17 July 2026.
A Reading That Takes Shape As The Poems Are Born
There is a particular pleasure in reading Ismael Teta not only once a full collection has appeared, but almost as each poem is produced, and this is very much the case with this new project, Reliquescences. That pleasure comes first from the fact that the text arrives still warm, almost unsettled, so that it falls to me to try to translate, as closely as possible, the feeling it produces before critical distance has had time to set in. This is a different exercise from the one I carried out on Réminiscences and Reviviscences, where the passage of time had already done its work. Here, by contrast, I am reading a fragment of a whole that is still taking shape, which means I have to write about a movement rather than about a settled work.
I admit I can see where this is heading, since knowing the author and the coherence of his body of work, I can fairly easily anticipate where the title Reliquescences wants to take us. And yet I choose to read it this way regardless, fragment by fragment, even if it means returning to it at greater length once the full collection is published. This choice is not critical laziness. It is, rather, a way of treating the reading as a companionship, not as a verdict delivered after the fact.
What strikes me immediately about this third word coined by Teta, after Reminiscence and Reviviscence, is its lexical and semantic coherence. Reminiscence is the memory that resurfaces. Reviviscence is life that resumes after an apparent halt, a term also found in biology to describe an organism returning to activity after a period of dormancy. Reliquescence, a less common neologism, evokes the relic in turn, that is to say what remains, what survives of a body, a time, a civilisation. By linking these three notions across the successive titles of his collections, Teta builds, without ever stating it outright, a trilogy of human time, in which memory returns to the mind, life resumes, and something endures once everything else has faded away. The poem I am reading today, which leads the reader to a site known for its human fossils, confirms that this third term is no accident of publishing.
A Geography That Becomes An Inner Journey
The text follows faithfully the road linking Nairobi to Ileret, in northern Kenya, crossing the high plateaus of Murang’a and Nyeri at the foot of Mount Kenya, then the plains of Laikipia, the town of Nanyuki, and finally Isiolo, the gateway to the country’s arid and semi-arid lands. This first stretch of the journey passes within sight of Kirinyaga, the sacred peak that Jomo Kenyatta, in Facing Mount Kenya, described as the dwelling place of Ngai, and the poem seems to register, if only in passing, that it is crossing consecrated ground before ever naming it as such. Teta deploys here a skill we already know from Réminiscences, that of letting everyday irony and sacred gravity coexist, often within the same sentence.
The matatu drivers are sketched with a delicious causticity, presented as self-crowned kings of chaos whose licence seems to have been granted only after an exam in incompetence. In this alternation between mockery and reverence, the poem quietly extends a lineage that runs through East African verse at least since Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino, where satire and lament likewise share the same breath. This satirical energy is never gratuitous, however, since it serves as a comic counterpoint to the gradual elevation of tone that runs through the whole poem. The stop in Timau for a meal of grilled goat, or the police harassment mentioned along the Nanyuki road, ground the text in a lived, physical reality, far removed from any touristic abstraction.
Very quickly, though, the same text shifts toward a more contemplative tone as the road pushes deeper into Samburu land, where singing wells still echo beneath a beaded sky. Teta writes that if the whole Earth resembled this Kenyan basin, the climate summits would never have been necessary, so much does nature there still seem to keep to its own seasons. This recalls a method the poet had already tested in Reviviscences when addressing the security and climate crises running through the continent, that of turning the landscape crossed into a mirror of the world’s disorders rather than a mere backdrop. I recognise here the same capacity, already noted in my earlier readings of his work, to load the real with symbolic weight without ever losing sight of it. The line stating that here, the climate still remembers its manners is, in this respect, one of the densest in the text, since it condenses into an almost proverbial formula an entire relationship to time that the rest of the poem goes on to develop.
Isiolo, with its dust and its poorly kept streets, is described without indulgence, yet immediately redeemed by the beauty of the women who live there, whose colours, in the poet’s words, hold together the blood of the Meru, Maasai, Samburu, Borana, Rendille and Gabra. It is worth recalling, if only briefly, that several of these communities, the Borana and the wider Somali speaking world among them, carry their own centuries old traditions of oral poetry, the gabay and its kindred forms, in which land and lineage are sung rather than merely stated. This scene points to a constant in Teta’s work, namely his attachment to a cosmopolitan and fraternal vision of humanity, already visible in Reviviscences when he wrote of borders and currencies invented by others to divide what had not originally been divided. The poet spins here a pictorial image, that of a sky which had painted a rainbow and breathed it into living souls, which extends, through the register of the sacred; the praise the text pays to mixture and kinship.
One detail deserves mention, and it is not merely biographical. Réminiscences and Reviviscences were both published in French, by Afrolivresque in Berlin, in 2018 and 2022 respectively. This fragment of Reliquescences, by contrast, is written in English. This shift in language comes with a shift in vantage point, I think, since the author, who now lives and works in Nairobi, no longer treats West Africa and Europe as the sole compass points of his writing. He now writes from East Africa, in the language of the region he is crossing, which gives this new project a texture different from that of the two previous collections, one that sits even closer to the ground it describes.
Toward Koobi Fora, The Relic As The Outcome Of A Poetic Cycle
Before reaching this final point, the text marks a first high point at Marsabit, described as a black mountain raised out of the sand, a forested island afloat on a sea of fire. This is where the crater of Lake Paradise lies, at the heart of the national park, where the great tuskers still come down to drink. This passage works as an intermediate stage between the inhabited world, still crossed by roads and trade, and the mineral world of the Chalbi Desert that follows soon after, where tarmac gives way to dust and only the doum palms still mark the way. The poem then reaches its symbolic peak as the road, turned track and then salt desert, opens onto Lake Turkana, which early European explorers had nicknamed the Jade Sea. It is there, on the eastern shores of that lake, that Sibiloi and Koobi Fora are found, one of the most important paleoanthropological sites in the world, where researchers, notably under the direction of Richard Leakey from 1968 onward, uncovered several hominid fossils that proved decisive for our understanding of human evolution. Teta writes that the fossil bones there whisper a story older than every myth, and that the first human footsteps still echo through that place.
In this, the poem joins, at a distance, a much older East African preoccupation with what remains and what founds, the same question that animates the Kebra Nagast in Ethiopia, though here the archive is not a royal genealogy but the bones themselves. This is exactly the point at which the title Reliquescences takes on its full meaning, since the relic is no longer only a literary metaphor here. It becomes a scientific and geological fact, anchored in a real and documented place, which gives the poem a grounding that image alone could not have provided.
This ending strikes me as the key to reading the collection still to come. Where Réminiscences questioned affective memory and Reviviscences the subject’s capacity to come back to life after rupture, Reliquescences thus seems to ask what survives beyond individual memory, namely the biological and collective trace of the species itself. The poem closes, moreover, on a wish, that every African should make this pilgrimage before dying, if only to remember the place where humanity first opened its eyes, before ending on a note of weary irony about the continent’s governance, one that deliberately breaks with the solemnity of the rest of the text and reminds us, once again, that Teta never sublimates without also looking the real in the eye.
I close this first reading with the conviction, already present in outline since Réminiscences and Reviviscences, that Teta is building a body of work in which each title answers the one before it, like the strata of a single inner excavation. It remains for me to follow the rest of this project as it is produced, poem after poem, before offering, in due course, a fuller reading equal to what this third instalment seems to be announcing.
Par Baltazar Atangana
