“Interlude: Sasa and Zamani,” as best as I can describe, uses the two ontological dimensions sasa and zamani (Kiswahili) as a way to imagine my father’s death as the eventual passage into a forever completely distant from my ability to fully grasp. Sasa is the dimension of the immediate past, the present, and the very near future that allows for a dead person to remain “living dead” as long as someone alive remembers them; and zamani shares space with sasa within the immediate past but covers backward from sasa into an infinite wellspring of everything that ever was, a frozen time of myth and history. John Mbiti describes zamani as “the final store-house for all phenomena and events, the ocean of time in which everything becomes absorbed into a reality that is neither after nor before.” Someone dead moves into zamani when there is no one alive who remembers them, when all who would have remembered them have themselves traversed into sasa, which is always spilling backward into zamani. For a more in-depth description, please refer to John Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy (1970) and La Vinia Delois Jennings’s Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa (2008).

“Final Poem for Amiri Baraka”—The character Crow Jane appears in a series of poems by Amiri Baraka. In “An Interview with Amiri Baraka,” conducted by William J. Harris (Conversations with Amiri Baraka, ed. Charlie Reilly, 1994), Baraka says, “[S]he has got to be killed off because there is no further use—I can’t get anything else from her. Crow Jane is the white Muse appropriated by the black experience.” The “three-toed frog” is mentioned in Nina Simone’s striking song “Dambala,” from her album It Is Finished (RCA Records, 1974). Damballah is a loa/lwa in Haitian Vodou and is commonly known as the Sky Father.

“The Flying African”—This poem is based on the folktale of the flying African who taught enslaved Africans how to fly back to Africa. The story is often considered a retelling of the historical event of Igbo Landing, where Igbo captives who were purchased in Savannah, Georgia, were then boarded on a small ship heading to St. Simons Island. On board, the enslaved Igbos revolted, drowning their captors and grounding the vessel at a nearby marshland. It is at this marshland where they chose mass suicide by walking into the water, singing, “The Water Spirit brought us. The Water Spirit will take us home,” a reference to their supreme being, Chukwu. This location is known as Igbo Landing. Amadioha is an alusi (spirit) of the storm for the Igbo people.

“Final Poem for the ‘Black Body’ ” uses an edited image of the slave ship Brookes from “Description of a Slave Ship” (1789, woodcut) at the British Museum.