The Poem is a Vessel for what cannot be carried in ordinary Speech
There is a moment every writer knows.
One evening, seated on your balcony, you are reading back your own poem, or someone else’s, and you catch it: a comma where there should be a full stop.
A sentence that begins with ….And….
A verb that refuses to agree with its subject.
A fragment, lone and unapologetic, sitting on the page like a single stone in a dry-season field.
And you hover. Red pen in hand, or cursor blinking.
Do I fix this?
There is a thin line between maintaining the integrity of artistic writing, especially poetry, with its so-called grammatical errors, and correcting those errors while still retaining the poetic art. This is, perhaps, the most important editorial sidenote a literary platform committed to African voices can have at the back of its mind.
This whole idea begins in the griot’s throat.
Why Grammar Exists
Grammar is not the enemy of expression. It never was. Grammar is, at its most essential, a social contract, the agreement we make with one another to be understood. A shared map for navigating the territory of language.
The more you write, the more you realise that subject follows verb, punctuation marks the pauses our breath would take in speech and sentences complete themselves so that the listener arrives somewhere, not stranded in syntactic wilderness.
But the more you write, AGAIN, you learn that there are rules of grammar that were never handed down from a pure, eternal source. They were described to us, but not prescribed from actual human usage.
If , especially, you are looking at the English Grammar, you will realise that these rules were observed, catalogued, and debated in another geographical location, then handed down to us, Africans.
For most of African literary history, literature that was written in this grammar that was not our own was mostly broken, then frowned upon, then rejected.
"When a Kikuyu poet breaks English grammar, she may be importing the syntax of Kikuyu, its rhythms, its pauses, its logic of relation. All this is imported into a borrowed tongue which is not error. That is architecture of poetry"
This is why the grammar question is especially alive on this continent. Our poets do not only break English grammar rules. They also bring other grammars to bear, the grammar of Kikuyu, Kiswahili, of Yoruba, of isiZulu, of Dholuo, and those grammars reshape the poem from the inside out.
African voices, African Syntax
To understand why grammatical “errors” in African poetry are often the most important parts of the poem, we need to sit with three poets whose work enacts this argument rather than merely stating it.
Later he
will wear out his temper
ploughing the vast acres
of heaven and take it
out of her in burning
darts of anger. Long
accustomed to such caprice
she waits patiently
for evening when thoughts
of another night will
restore his mellowness
and her power
over him.
Mother says there are locked rooms inside all women;
kitchen of lust,
bedroom of grief, bathroom of apathy.
Sometimes the men – they come with keys,
and sometimes, the men – they come with hammers.
Nin soo joog laga waayo, soo jiifso aa laga helaa,
I said Stop, I said No and he did not listen.
I see the wisdom of eternities
In ample thighs
Belying their presence as adornments
To the temples of my sisters
Old souls breathe
In the comfort of chocolate thickness
That suffocates Africa’s angels
Who dance to the rhythm
Of the universe’s womb
Though they cannot feel
Its origins in their veins
Achebe’s poetry, less celebrated than his fiction but equally precise, uses punctuation as power.
Shire’s signature is the lower-case beginnings of each stanza but carrying different weight in a Somali-British body. No capitals. No formal punctuation.
Mashile’s spoken-word roots mean her poems are scored for the body, not the page. Each line break is a breath, a beat, a moment of weight redistribution. Conventional sentence structure would compress these seven lines into two. That compression would destroy the cumulative physical effect, the felt sense of carrying something across generations. The “fragment” structure is not an error as it may seem, but a beautiful choreography.
Advice for Poets and Editors
On this continent, the question of intentionality is braided with the question of voice. African writers working in European languages are always already making decisions about whose grammar governs the poem.
When Ngugi wa Thiong’o argues for writing in African languages, he is making an argument about grammar at the deepest level, not punctuation, but the entire architecture of thought. When our poets bend English toward the cadences of their mother tongues, they are not failing English. They are enriching it.
For poets: know your rules before you break them. Grammatical knowledge gives you the baseline from which deviation becomes legible. Without the baseline, there is no tension, no music, no meaningful surprise.
Ask the poem what it needs. When you encounter a violation in your own draft, sit with it before correcting it. Does it do something? Does it create a sound, a rhythm, an ambiguity, a pause that a correct version would not?
For editors: the most dangerous editorial act is correcting everything toward an imagined standard of neutral correctness. Neutral correctness is the death of voice. And on a continent where our voices spent centuries being corrected toward colonial standards, the stakes of this are not merely aesthetic.
Distinguish between pattern and accident. One misplaced apostrophe may be a typo. Twenty of them, deployed consistently in moments of emotional intensity, may be a signature. Read the whole poem before you judge any single line.
Grammar and poetry are not at war. They never were. They are in dialogue, the oldest, most generative dialogue in human expression.
Grammar says: here is how we agree to be understood.
Poetry says: yes, and here is what happens in the space between agreements.
For African writers especially, the space between those agreements has always been where the most important things are said. In the break, the fragment, the unfinished sentence. In the lower-case i that refuses to make itself large. In the dash that holds open a wound the world would rather see sutured.
The best poems are not the ones that followed all the rules. They are the ones that made every choice with the full weight of craft, intention, and feeling behind them.
Rules, after all, are the grammar of what has been done before. A poem is the grammar of what needs to be said now.
When you read a poem that violates the rules and still moves you, still finds you in the dark and names something unnamed, what is it, exactly, that you are responding to? The violation itself? Or the intelligence, the awareness, the trust, behind the choice to violate?
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