The New Carthaginians

Winner of the Poetry London Prize for “Hollywood Africans”
Finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Finalist for the Forward Prize for “Codex©”
Finalist for the Jhalak Prize
Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize
A Financial Times Best Summer Book of Poetry

“Like Dante entering hell through a rip in the universe, Makoha enters history, accompanied not by Virgil but by a Black Icarus with a microchip for a mouth, and the shade of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.”—The Guardian

In The New Carthaginians, time—and with it the world—is out of joint. A hijacked plane lands at Entebbe International Airport in 1976, triggering the crisis that will lead to Idi Amin’s Uganda becoming a pariah state and, within a few years, to the young Nick Makoha’s flight from the country.

A mysterious writer daubs poetic slogans in the walls of late-’70s New York City, signing them SAMO©. Three characters who are also one-the Poet, a Black Icarus, and a resurrected Jean-Michel Basquiat-journey through a time that is both our own and not, watching TV, discussing art and literature, and tucking their wings into their jackets on the way to airport security.

Concerned throughout with flight and falling, the sample and the loop, The New Carthaginians is a poetry collection of staggering originality, in which the familiar Western canons of art, history, and philosophy are taken apart and reassembled in a new configuration. Drawing on Basquiat’s technique of the ‘exploded’ collage, our heroes’ odyssey gathers symbols of a new mythos, through which the othering of Black life might be undone and the stage set for some fresh emergence, some transfigured understanding of myth and life. “Hold that note,” writes the poet. “In this place you are no longer the chorus… . In any future, remember: you are a New Carthaginian.”