Zanzibari Poet Mohammed Ghassani: Voice of a Stranger in a Strange Land
Continuing RBC's celebration of East African writing, Meg Arenberg speaks with Swahili poet and journalist Mohammed Ghassani. They chat about how fellow Zanzibaris have received the news of Abdulrazak Gurnah's Nobel prize, Ghassani's experience living abroad, and how the themes of alienation and longing in Gurnah's novels overlap with Ghassani's poetry, in particular his collection N'na Kwetu (I Have a Home, There is a We), which won him the first Mabati Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature in 2015.
At the close of the interview, Ghassani and Meg read together from the collection, a poem titled "Kama Wewe," interspersing the Swahili original with Meg's English translation titled, "Your Equal."
