Good Trouble
Zakia Carpenter-Hall reviews Chaotic Good by Isabelle Baafi and the New Carthaginians by Nick Makoha
Review by Zakia Carpenter-Hall | Originally published in the print edition, April 25th 2025
When considering Isabelle Baafi’s debut Chaotic Good, I think of someone attempting to wrench herself from an enmeshed unity, the kind that occurs when a partner is subsumed in a marriage or by a sense of duty. ‘The Mpemba Effect’ (whose title refers to the phenomenon whereby hot water freezes faster than cold) begins with a relationship on the verge of boiling over. Jagged line breaks give the impression of a situation off-kilter, reaching a tipping point; the poem hinges – literally and figuratively – on “[eating] around the rot”. The experiences being conveyed in this collection go beyond the dissolution of a marriage and likely could not be relayed without an exploration of ‘the rot’. Baafi has a palate for what decays; she leads with the gut. The result is a fermented beauty.
In ‘Reader, I Married Him’ Baafi’s speaker says in the opening lines, “If you asked me why I made myself so small, I’d / show you the river; the one that would rather / gorge itself on sewage than be clean.” Later in the same poem, the speaker claims “I was never that attached to me anyway.” A pulling away from what Baafi’s speaker has previously adhered to – while asserting herself as complex and multiple – is apparent everywhere, especially in the use of received and innovative forms: there are poems that mirror, contain couplets or dual columns, and others which twist and undulate.
Baafi’s speaker often finds herself on both sides of a divide: both victim and culprit, guardian and adversary. ‘Janus’, named for the dual- faced Roman god, becomes emblematic of this conjoined duality and moral ambivalence. As she acknowledges in ‘Ahead Only’, “There are no good guys here”. In ‘Sankofa’, a brilliantly realised sestina, Baafi goes back and risks the rescue of her younger selves.
In Baafi’s work, words and time zones inosculate and become indivisible. ‘Pen’ sounds like ‘pain’ in ‘The way you say pen’. ‘Aged six,’ writes Baafi, “Our first trip without Dad / I etch fire into my legs with my mother’s pain”. When one is communicating across time zones (as in ‘GMT–1’) an event can take place in the future/ past or in the past/present. Chaotic Good, which describes the moral disposition of a character, for me recalls the phrase ‘good trouble’ – the type of trouble that has liberation in mind, when a person finds herself in an untenable situation and chooses to disrupt it.
Nick Makoha’s second collection, The New Carthaginians, tells the reader “Here is where one thought becomes two” (‘Riddle Me This, Batman’) and “With that paradox [is] our landscape”(‘Prologue’). As those lines indicate, this is a collection concerned with splitting events, linguistic registers, perspectives and (like Baafi) time frames. Makoha then pieces these back together in fragmentary ways.
The ‘consciousness’ of Makoha’s poems is dispersed, described as outside of the ‘canvas’: “the eyes of a bird or the eye of God// […] or the / eye of a poet with a story to tell” (‘Prologue’). As in a cubist portrait, we see many different angles of the same subject at once; not a replica of a face, but a discontinuity of features. Makoha’s speaker says in ‘Icarus: a Self Portrait – 1984’: “Coming from a point-and-shoot neighbourhood, / I am looked at from all sides”, and elsewhere, “Photographers / see the world differently // from the rest of us. […] to them, [a day] is a gathering /of time or more // accurately of light”.
Makoha conveys a different way of seeing and experiencing, part collision course, part fever dream, often removing the parameters of a conventional narrative or field of study, so that academic registers, mathematical concepts, musical notation, and the speaker’s tangential thoughts and metaphors rush into the field of the poem, hijacking the reader’s continuous experience of the text. The New Carthaginians can be viewed through numerous broken lenses or ‘containers’ simultaneously. ‘The Ugandan summer of ’76’ includes accounts of the hijacking at Entebbe Airport, a ‘Black-winged Icarus’, and a reimagining of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. These might all be seen as ways of representing exile: “don’t be fooled by the never-ending pattern of abstraction. It’s the only way // we can become particles of light” (‘A Panel of Experts’).
It is breaking, flight, and the hope of transcendence that underpin Makoha’s Icarus-like ambition. His is an aesthetic fashioned after Basquiat, whose work the curator Diego Cortez called “exploded collage”. Makoha’s experiments with form and his use of interruption and redirection challenge the borders of the poem, and at its best provide the blueprint for a burgeoning disruptive aesthetic that at times recklessly – and thrillingly – flies too close to the sun.
Both Baafi’s and Makoha’s collections use poetry as a means to re-enter and break with a past that is also present. As stated in Baafi’s ‘Sankofa’: “This time and every time, I was the code I needed to find my way back.”
Zakia Carpenter-Hall is an American writer, tutor and critic living in the UK.