Author Description

Review "a book-length combination of free-verse and poetic prose... flights of erotic lyricism... stream-of-consciousness surrealism" -- The Sunday Independent, 18 June 2000 an overwhelming sense of displacement... searching struggle... resistance. [...] Sitas constructs... the globalised landscape of now -- Mail & Guardian, 9-14 June, 2000 From the Publisher In 1874, aged 20, the visionary poet Arthur Rimbaud abandoned poetry and left France for Africa. He spent some years in Cyprus and Aden before settling in Ethiopia during the reign of kings Menelek and Makonnen. He became a trader in coffee, guns and hides, and toyed with the idea of trading in slaves. Blending the personal with historical narratives and contemporary consciousness, Slave Trades avoids the descent into parochial irrelevance and instead, situates itself in broader continental narratives and concerns of post-colonialism. Of the movement of the text, Sitas puts it this way in his Preface: "The sense that a new type of Hamesan wind was stirring up the 'desert' was everywhere. The sense that Habesh or Abesh (thus, the word Abyssinia!) was changing radically, was deeply debated. That world was not the place of 'nothingness', the 'desert of the soul' where 'genius' like Rimbaud crashed. It was a complex, changing world, like 'tej', intoxicating and lethal, a place that resonated through our lives during the last century." Slave Trades is an attempt to express the voice of a cynical Rimbaud, his Ethiopian "wives", the voices of the marketplace, priests, poets and kings. These voices form a fugue of vivid images of early colonial brutality and African resistance, both political and spiritual: "I hope still, therefore I am". "Slave Trades attempts to peg-mark and create a territory of feeling which hopefully is accessible to most. At first, this territory was written as an absence by the few poets that had shaped me - Pindar, Homer, Baudelaire, Rim