What Belongs to You

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 leads to Uganda becoming a pariah state and later to the young Makoha's escape from the country. Concerned throughout with flight and falling, the sample and the loop, it is a poetry collection of staggering originality: a work by an author at the height of his powers, in which the familiar Western canons of art, history and philosophy are prised apart and reassembled in a new configuration. Drawing on Basquiat's technique of the 'exploded' collage, Makoha's triumvirate of characters - the Poet, a Black Icarus and a resurrected Jean-Michel Basquiat - embark on a heroes' odyssey, gathering the 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.