Epilogue

In an era where the Western Canon has lost favour and literary judgment is relativised, Ilongo Fritz Ngale’s Fingers of Dawn is an enriching collection of poems imbued with the existential subtleties and enigmas of human life and experience. The form and content of the poems go beyond the poet’s immediate geographical landscape, and can unquestionably be compared with any great poetry of our time.

Ilongo Fritz handles the unpredictable and the incomprehensible order of life with a maturity that hardly qualifies him as a beginner. Linguistically solid, technically sound and thematically sophisticated, the collection embraces a variety of critical and interpretative paradigms. Every reader will have something in common with the poems.

Fingers of Dawn touches all spheres of human existence and experience, given the multivariate sources of the poet’s inspiration. He is inextricably attached to himself and the deeper undercurrents of contemporary life. Ilongo Ngale’s attempts to face the subtleties of life make him a realistic poet. The psychological, philosophical, historical, cultural, sociological and metaphysical are all implicated in the poems. The poet’s creative potentials and quest for artistic identity can be seen in the undoubted uniqueness of his expression. What is implacably good in his collection is his creativity and the psychological process of the collective unconscious, which account for the spacelessness and timelessness of his concerns.

To talk elaborately about this collection with specificity to poems will certainly be prejudicial. This will deprive readers of their expectations of discovering and unveiling the richness of the poems. Suffice to say that Ilongo Ngale’s artistic appraisal of the enigmatic and complex nature of life delineates a universe of shattered dreams and seeming hopelessness. Human endeavour is futile since man is cut off from his spiritual and metaphysical context and is no longer abreast of human values. Man is born obviously guilty and is either consciously or unconsciously responsible for his plight. His struggle in life lies either in his overwhelmingly difficult attempt to prove his innocence of this ingrained guilt and better his existence or ascertain evil.

Contemporary issues that touch the social, political, economic and spiritual dimensions of the world are conveyed with artistic strength through a multiplicity of powerful images and symbols. It is evident that the present world order offers little or no outlet to the realisation of humanity’s dreams. Paradoxically, it embraces and consolidates it. Political malpractices engendered in senseless supremacy and power, economic and social exploitation, religious hypocrisy, spiritual sterility and metaphysical confusion have overpowered human consciousness.

In the face of the stalemate in which humanity finds itself, Ilongo Ngale does not remain disconsolate. In his astrological-historical conviction, the dawn of a new era will certainly alleviate humanity of its crises, ushering love and peace. The Fingers of Dawn are obviously a metaphor for the inscription of a new world order; an invigorating, sustaining and harmonising chain of being. Ilongo Ngale as a poet-philosopher is doing just that.

 

Prof Charles Ngiewih Teke

Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich

Germany

 

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