Clautel Buba joins Maine Poet Laureate Stuart Kestenbaum in conversation and to read his poem "Inside The Life I Knew," featured in A NEW LAND, a poetry anthology from The Telling Room. Stuart and Clautel discuss how poetry creates empathy among people who live across continents from one another, dusty roads, ice falling from the sky, working with kids with autism, writing poems on your phone, and trying to find the right path to follow. Clautel is now working as a classroom aid.
Voices of the Future is hosted and conceived by Stuart Kestenbaum, produced by Josephine Holtzman and Isaac Kestenbaum at Future Projects, with help from Carly Peruccio, mixed by Merritt Jacob, and music by Jordan Kramer. Voices of the Future is curated and distributed by Molly McGrath and Rylan Hynes of The Telling Room. This series is made possible by the Academy of American Poets with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
To learn more about The Telling Room and its programs, visit www.tellingroom.org.
Clautel Buba: The reason why I write this poem, because I wanted people to know about other places, where I came from too, and see how life there is different than here. Just for people to feel the way I felt.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Welcome to Voices of the Future. I'm Stuart Kestenbaum. In this series, I'm interviewing young writers and poets from Maine, all of whom have participated in programs of The Telling Room, a nonprofit writing center in Portland. The Telling Room's mission is to empower youth through writing and to share their voices with the world. All of the authors in the series are featured in A New Land, an anthology of 30 poems written at The Telling Room. When I read or hear the work of these writers, I am moved by their enthusiasm, skill, and courage. Some of them were born in Maine, others have come here from Africa and the Middle East. All speak with urgency about their lives and their futures. Clautel Buba graduated from Portland High School, and now he works as a classroom aide. In this episode, Clautel tells me how writing poetry helps him remember growing up in Cameroon. First, you'll hear him read his poem, “Inside the Life I Knew.”
Clautel Buba: My name is Clautel Buba. “Inside the Life I Knew”
The Abubaca drinks from the Wubat River
and runs through my village, Balikumbat, in Cameroon.
Abubaca—
gray soil banks, monkeys hanging from fruit trees—
mangoes, oranges, papaya the size of my two hands.
The lines in my hands are like this river.
They bend and spread. They are the river and the long, dusty road
running along it from my village to Bamenda,
the bigger city.
When I go to the city,
I spend five days outside the life I know.
I see lights, TV, and running water.
But I am from the village,
living with my grandmother, next to this river
where the water is too dirty to drink.
We boil river water for cleaning and cooking.
Keep a tank full for drinking and washing.
I have big hands from working with this water making clay bricks,
farming corn, and growing up at age seven
from hard work.
I.
Dry season—
Christmas is coming, we are out of school.
It is a season for building houses.
Many friends work together for francs.
We work as such young children
from six in the morning to six at night.
We make the bricks by hand.
When we dig a hole so hard to dig, in cracked soil,
we use an axe. Blisters cover our palms until they are hard.
We go through layers of black, red, orange, white, and gray,
and then we start seeing water.
We cut through tree roots with a machete. Holes can be giant.
Water comes from the Abubaca.
Girls carry jugs of water on their heads, or, if they are strong,
they swing them to their shoulders or hold twenty liters in each hand
like men.
Boys pour the water into tubs bigger than we are
in a metal truck we push to the hole.
We pour the water into a huge barrel five of us could fit inside—
pour it through a faucet into the clay in the hole,
and mix it in the ground.
We pound the clay, frame it in wood,
put water on our palms, smooth it on the bricks,
pull the bricks out of the mold, spray dry dust on the bricks,
leave them to dry in the sun, cover them in grasses
so they will not crack. We lay the bricks in rows.
Someone counts them, won’t pay for broken ones.
10,000 francs—not enough for a nice cell phone.
Christmas comes. We take showers, wear nice clothes, dance,
let off fireworks, stay up all night, waste a lot of our little money.
When it comes to having fun we act like little kids,
when it comes to work, we act like grown men.
When the sun comes up it’s hot,
but at night we all gather around a big fire, burning cassava,
eating, and getting warm.
In the dry season, the danger is the wind.
Hunters build fires in the woods.
Wind blows and spreads fire to the bushes.
Dust storms bring twisters. If one comes in our door,
it can suck the roof off our house.
People get sick from breathing in the dust.
II.
Rain on the roof, wavy tin roof, beats over the corn.
It starts as a single note that you hold your breath on,
And when you take a new breath the song continues on.
When I was little I covered my ears with my hands and beat them
to hear the sounds change.
As you keep listening it sounds like music.
The water falls off the roof in straight lines
and dots the brick red ground.
The rainy season is a hard time, too.
It is the time to grow food—corn, grannut, okra, beans, cocoa,
cassava, plantains, potatoes.
At the beginning of the rainy season we plant corn
in big fields that we hoe by hand.
The land is huge and we are so small.
We plant corn as deep as our finger with our heel—
too deep and it won’t grow, too shallow and the wind knocks it down.
Cover it up and the rain grows it.
There comes a time when
we take the grasses out that grow around our corn.
We break it off when it is still fresh and green and put it in bags.
We store the corn up under our roof when it is half-dry.
The heat from our grandmother’s cooking dries them all the way.
Outside we play soccer in the rain, sliding in the mud,
dribbling through splashes.
My cousin and I sometimes take a big mixing bowl
from my grandmother’s kitchen,
fill it with rain, and pour it down over our heads.
When lightning comes—it always comes fast—
and then thunder, we run inside.
Great puddles form in the road. Cars get stuck.
We push them out for money.
Sometimes people can’t pay so they wait for the puddle to dry.
Danger in the rainy season is when the Abubaca floods.
It damages the houses we built.
Corn plants get ripped out of the soil,
beans wash up, cassava bends to the ground.
My life by the gray soil banks
of the Abubaca was inside the life I knew.
But we were like animals living in the zoo.
Animals who were born there.
The food they eat is the only food they know.
They don’t know there’s a whole forest out there
where they can eat as much as they want,
do whatever they want to do, go anyplace they want to go,
and be free.
Stuart Kestenba…: Thank you so much. When did you write this poem?
Clautel Buba: I think it was 2015 or 16.
Stuart Kestenbaum: And you had just come to America?
Clautel Buba: I actually came in America in 2012.
Stuart Kestenbaum: There's such a sense of place in what you wrote about Cameroon. Your memory of it is so vivid in what you wrote.
Clautel Buba: Yes.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Do you still think about it now?
Clautel Buba: Yeah, of course, I think about it all the time. I mean, what made me to write this poem is because I was thinking of where I came from a lot, because when I first moved to America, I was surprised. Like I say in the poem, we're living in this small village, we didn't know what the whole world was about. I didn't know there is places that you can be free and you can have so much opportunity, things like computer, TV, water, living in the house that is nice. When I came here, my mind kind of opened, you know? I feel maybe I should write this poem about where I come from. Just for people to feel the way I felt. I was just putting myself as someone that is here and imagining the village that I'm from.
Stuart Kestenbaum: It seems like such a loving portrait of where you came from, I think.
Clautel Buba: Yeah, it is.
Stuart Kestenbaum: I also really liked your description of the different kinds of seasons, like the rain on the roof.
Clautel Buba: Yeah, when it's dry, it's really dry, like a desert. It's really dusty and the grass is all dry and we have fire every dry season.
Stuart Kestenbaum: What'd you think of your first winter here?
Clautel Buba: I remember I was in class and I just saw a bunch of ice falling from the sky. I told my teacher this was my first time, and she let me stood at the window and I was watching it. It was really cool.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Where was that? At Portland High School?
Clautel Buba: Yeah, Portland High School.
Stuart Kestenbaum: When your family decided to come to America, did you have images in your mind of, "When I get there, this is what it's going to look like"?
Clautel Buba: When I first got here, it was really different here. All the time, it was like, "Wow! Wow! Wow!" The food and everything, I was just shocked. The road, the buildings, and everything, I was just shocked the whole time. Excited, happy, shocked. Everything was just so cool. But then over the time, I just kind of got used to it. But at the same time, I'm grateful, you know?
Stuart Kestenbaum: Are there any qualities to Maine that remind you of Cameroon? Do you see places and you say, "Oh, that reminds me of…"?
Clautel Buba: Actually, I went to a farm called Smiling Hill Farm in Westbrook. They have different types of animals. They have cows, they have llamas, they have horses, they have pigs, they have species of chicken. When I got there, I was just shocked because I saw so many similar animals there, the ones that we used grow back in Cameroon. It kind of brought me so much memories. I actually went there with the place that I work at.
Stuart Kestenbaum: What kind of work are you doing now?
Clautel Buba: Right now I'm working with kids that have autism. I actually started in March.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Are you writing now?
Clautel Buba: Sometimes I write poem on my phone.
Stuart Kestenbaum: Oh, yeah.
Clautel Buba: I was just basically writing about how I feel about life, all the things that come at me. The feeling I get when I think of my family back home, how they're struggling, what they're going through. That's basically what I write about, what I went through as a kid and who I am today. Right now I'm just kind of trying to find where to go in life, who to be, and what to do. I'm kind of lost a little bit, trying to find the right path to go. I like writing. When I joined The Telling Room, it feels good writing the story of your life and other people’s life and all that. Like I was saying, the reason why I write this poem is because I wanted people to know about other places, where I came from too, and see how life there is different than here. Does that make sense?
Stuart Kestenbaum: Yes. It does.
Clautel Buba: Because as I'm growing up here and I'm getting used to here, I sometimes started to forget about where I come from a little bit. Every time when I read this poem, it actually reminds me a lot of things. It actually brings me back to my village, how things used to work. So this poem is really important to me because every time when I read it, it kind of just reminds me of where I started from.
Stuart Kestenbaum: When I hear you read it, I feel like I'm right there. And it's such a great way... This helps you remember too.
Clautel Buba: Yeah, yeah, this help my memory a lot. So over the time, I always have this feeling that, "Oh, I really want to keep doing this."
Stuart Kestenbaum: Voices of the Future is hosted and conceived by me and produced by Josephine Holtzman and Isaac Kestenbaum at Future Projects, with help from Carly Peruccio. The music in this episode is by Jordan Kramer. The series is made possible by the Academy of American Poets with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. To learn more about The Telling Room and its programs, visit tellingroom.org. I'm Stuart Kestenbaum. Thanks for listening.