We Are Still in the Fort is a curated selection of about seventy poems by Muyaka bin Haji al-Ghassaniy divided into three sections spanning the quotidian, the amorous, and the political. The first part, “I Swipe Their String of Fish: Poems of Mombasan Society,” features his often satirical commentary on daily life in Mombasa. The second part, “Take Your Misery With You: Poems of Love and Marriage,” focuses on his psychologically sensitive observations on the volatility of love, marriage, and illicit affairs. The last part, “We Are Still in the Fort: Poems of War and State,” includes epigrammatic critiques of local political leaders and a series of anti-imperialist poems defending Mombasa’s independence against the invading Omani Empire. The volume also features contextual materials on Muyaka and the context of Swahili poetry, a translator’s note, and introductions for each of the three sections.

Muyaka bin Haji al-Ghassaniy (1776–1840) was the earliest secular Swahili poet whose identity is known. He has been credited with bringing Swahili verse “out of the mosque and into the marketplace” with his commentary on daily life in Mombasa and its frequent battles defending its independence against the Omani Empire. He also popularized the mashairi quatrain form that serves to this day as the predominant form of Swahili verse.

Richard Prins is a lifelong New Yorker who has lived, worked, studied, and recorded music in Dar es Salaam. He currently teaches creative and expository writing at Queens College. His own poetry has appeared in dozens of publications such as Gulf Coast, jubilat, and Ploughshares, and his creative nonfiction was selected for inclusion in The Best American Essays 2024. He is the author of the Birdhouse Prize–winning chapbook We May Eat Fruit and Brain Flavor: A Lyric History of Swahili Hip Hop, as well as the translator of the Africanfuturist novel They Are Us, for which he received a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship.

A Note on Muyaka and his Poetry

A Note on the Translation

Part I: I Swipe Their String of Fish—Poems of Mombasan Society
Introduction
a fraying rope
ukuukuu wa kamba
everything would be scattered
truly your friend
they walk around with axes
what counts is how you share it
rise!
stick up for a scoundrel
gossipers are gossiping
Tima and Ima
Mwana Kauwa and Bule
if I was looking classy
I wish
yet some of them go naked
a poor man's hen
don't be a donkey breeder
destitution, get thee gone
Jinga
poetry
don't get attached
a man ran away from fate
when they happen to unite

Part II: Take Your Misery With You—Poems of Love and Marriage
Introduction
oa
oa
Bwana Muyaka is here
my heart
what we're tied to
and what will you be wearing?
when half a love
what's mine is yours
my old dinghy
have you come for me, Sorrow
love
Mwamkasi
minnow, lion of the sea
would that I were a sparrow
no grass grows
there is a road
to meet again with you
if love was but a mirror
two paths
that thief who stole my stuff
give me back my shawl
there's nothing that can't happen
take your misery with you

Part III: We Are Still in the Fort—Poems of War and State
Introduction
if you know it, you know nothing
mtambuzwa hatambuli
the world is a brittle tree
you might walk on land, hippo
diving into the earth
go beat on the hive
Pate's men are free
who builds a house won't sleep there
two big fish
Lamu vs. Mombasa
we are manly lions
the fort
meow, kitty, meow
no stranger to patience
quiet
that ancient rumbling drumbeat
when you're in Zanzibar
dance of the spinning top
the ponds ran out of water
what would you do for a treat?
days of eating junk
even in dead of night
the dead leaf said to the green
the world is nothing but ash
let it all die inside you
o the world is a carcass
the dead are dead already

Sources Cited