The New Carthaginians

Nick Makoha 

Penguin, 2025

Review by Maria Jastrzębska

The ancient, North African civilisation of Carthage was destroyed by the Roman empire; an act of vengeance to stop it ever becoming a challenge again. In his Prologue to The New Carthaginians, Nick Makoha warns us it is not only the living who die. ‘Futures die. So can a past.’ It’s not hard to find parallels of such devastation today. ‘Have you seen my city on fire? Flames throwing themselves/at buildings the way the sea throws itself at rocks,’ he asks in the poem CODEX©. What happens in one part of the world influences things elsewhere, even through seemingly random or, at the time, incomprehensible connections or coincidences. Nick Makoha’s recent collection of poems examines this butterfly effect with dizzying skill.

Flight – in every sense – and fall are at the centre of this book. The persona of ‘the poet’ is accompanied on his journey by Black American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and the mythological figure of Icarus, who also inspired Basquiat. They drink, smoke, watch basketball and hang out together, figuring out schemes for ‘reversing the silence’ as the jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk did in his music (II.SAMO©…AS AN END TO BOOSH-WAH…). 

Throughout the book we follow the 1976 Air France flight from Tel Aviv, diverted by hijackers to Entebbe in Uganda, Nick Makoha’s homeland. The hijackers seeking the release of Palestinian prisoners looked to support from Idi Amin, the very dictator from whom the poet’s family had to flee. Ordinary people found themselves caught on a stage set up by those with power and their own agendas, such as the governments who, in turn, supported the hostages out of ‘the selfish ambition of America’ (Eroica 2). The dividing lines between the various protagonists are not neatly drawn and we are invited to fly with them all towards ‘foreign dying’ (’76 III.). 

It would be easy to sensationalise both Basquiat, who died so young, and Icarus as doomed figures but in Nick Makoha’s work they are more complex. They strive to release themselves not only from ‘the boiling rage’ which the poet knows well, (Codex© of Birds), the violence of colonisation, which causes ‘the Black astronaut [to be] born with/a wish for his body to fly away’ (Between Flights). But they also turn a paintbrush into ‘the tip of a spear’ (Icarus talks to the poet on Rodeo Drive about leaving). ‘Remember when they smoked our bodies like cigars,’ Makoha writes in one of the title poems, telling us New Carthaginians will no longer be ‘the chorus’. 

This is not a comfortable book and nor should it be. A journalist talks of his country ‘the way a wino pees Pepsi into a can’ (The poet as Cassius Clay 1982). But speaking of the enormous, vicious subjugation of an entire people is a means to healing from it. Making art, and literature, is an act of resistance, an antidote to erasure through transformation, a means to reconnect with our own selves and with other people.

Engaging with Basquiat’s early SAMO© work, a word co-created by Basquiat and Ali Diaz and used as a grafitti tag in imaginative slogans on buildings, public toilets and trains,  Nick Makoha tells us: ‘to call it graffiti is to call/hieroglyphics gibberish. That’s ignorant..’ (CODEX©) We find ourselves inhabiting the satirical wit and surrealism of Basquiat’s street art which served as a critique of the modern world, and of capitalist American greed in particular. The poet employs Basquiat’s ‘exploded collage’, allowing, as he explains in his Notes, for multiple codices of information.  He does this blurring the lines between main text and footnote, shifting our focus. Arresting stanza and page breaks carry us into simultaneous narratives. Nick Makoha then follows Basquiat’s meteoric rise to fame –  the ‘new’ artist, as othered artists are inevitably seen, who flies (excuse the pun) in the face of conformity and the white hegemony of the art world. In ekphrastic poems, such as ‘Hollywood Africans’, which satirise stereotypes of African Americans in the film industry, he goes on to explore and riff on Basquiat’s later work. 

There is humour and sensuality in these poems too, as well as romance, real or sometimes imaginary: ‘I’m not saying I’m Robert De Niro.’ (CODEX©). Nick Makoha switches with ease between the lyrical, factual and conversational; his language is absolutely stunning. In the same sequence: ‘However poorly used her voice/is a star among the stones’. 

I found a wealth of history, culture, thinking and art in this book.  At times I felt lost with so many ideas vying for my attention. But then, in a world of facile soundbites, I am grateful to a poet with such range and ambition, who refuses to settle for anything less than a whole, interrelated picture. As a migrant, he needs no reminding that he ‘can be in two places at once’. (Basquiat asks the Poet about Death). Paradoxically, some of the poems to which I kept returning are ostensibly simple yet carry a depth in which I found myself both grounded and moved . In CODEX© he remembers his childhood, when he had a ‘small unspeaking part’. He invokes the land of his childhood, the fields his father once walked and the boatmen still there, as he moves back and forth through time and place: ‘Like the raven/I wish I could climb up out of these clouds ushered from one life through/to another.’                                    

New Carthaginians_ Penguin Books

Maria Jastrzębska

Maria Jastrzębska is a poet, editor and translator.