There are a thousand genres a person can write in. Wiser men and women than me have filled the libraries of the world with all of them. So when I sat down to write these poems, I made a small, stubborn decision. I would write about the one subject I know better than any other. Myself. Past, present, and future. OUT NOW ON AMAZON:
That is how My Foolish Fantasies began, one poem at a time, between 2016 and 2021, some written in Italy, many written at home in The Gambia, where the book itself came together. I did not set out to write a hundred and nine of them. I set out to write one honest thing, and then another, until the years had passed and there was a book.
if you prefer reading books written for brains short and can be read in one sitting, read THIS BLOG POST: The Little Book of Afrocanos
Why the poems are short
People ask why the poems are so short. The truth is that I write the way my elders talked, the way a griot talks, quickly, because there is not much time, and because a small thing said well can carry a large thing inside it. A tree that loses her fruit and does not cry. A happy cat. A marijuana seed a mouse keeps digging up—a town crier who spends his life delivering other people’s deaths. I turn the small things over until they show me something about love, or grief, or God, or freedom, and then I stop. I never wanted to explain a feeling to death. I wanted to hand it to you whole.
The tavern, the wine, and the Beloved
You will notice, quickly, that I get drunk in these poems and talk to God like an old friend. That is not really about wine. It is the oldest image in the poetry I love: Rumi, Hafez, the tavern, the cup, and the Beloved. The tavern is where the soul goes to lose its manners and tell the truth. “The key to a good life is in the goblet,” one poem says, “and the tavern-man knows where it is.” I mean that the good life is closer, and cheaper, and more forbidden than they told you.
The poems that cost me
Some of these poems cost me more than others. There is a daughter in this book named Dalanda, whom I only ever met in a dream and lost in the same dream: “a thousand summers in a single night.” An old widow is crying by a telephone pole, and a wind that tells me to tell her the one line I most believe: do not die while you are alive. There is Africa, whom I could only describe as a mother with so many children she cannot keep track of them all, the mother who never raised her children. And there is my own language, which a teacher once beat me for speaking, and which I will say plainly, here, is not vernacular.
All we are is words
If there is a thesis under all one hundred and nine, it is four words, and they are the title of one of the poems: all we are is words. I believe you can lift a stranger off the ground with a sentence. I believe that when you tell a defeated man, “life is minus, then addition,” and mean it, you have moved a motionless being into motion, and that this is the whole of what poetry is for—the Word.
So this is a book to read slowly. One poem a night, if you can. Carry it in a bag. Let it fall open. It will not always agree with you, and it is not supposed to. But somewhere in it is a line you needed today, and I wrote it for you before I knew your name.
If a line here finds you, I would love to know which one. There is a country called The Gambia, and this is one of its songs.
What is My Foolish Fantasies about? It is a collection of 109 short prose poems and meditations by Gambian writer Lamin Ceesay, on love and aloneness, faith and doubt, grief and God, the town and the tavern.
Who will enjoy it? Readers of Rumi and Hafez, Rupi Kaur, Nayyirah Waheed and Warsan Shire, and anyone who loves African literature and short poems with a long echo.
How should I read it? Slowly. One poem a night. It is made to be carried and reopened, not finished in a sitting.
My Foolish Fantasies, 109 prose poems and meditations, is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.
OUT NOW ON AMAZON: (out August 1).
If a poem moves you, an honest review on Amazon is the kindest thing you can leave a poet.
Follow me for one poem a night: Instagram and X @writerlamin, and at laminceesay.com.
