You can’t have “song” without “son,” and Teddy Warria shows brilliantly and movingly how the call of, and to, the ancestors lies at the intersection of genealogy and poetry. Warria himself is the song of his ancestors. Even more importantly, Warria’s poem demonstrates how capacious the idea of the ancestor, of the father, of the mother, can be. Warria puts in relief just as sharply the immediate influences of his life, the people who have mentored, taught, and given. This song is, in short, a song of modern Africa, of the myriad intersections that make up Warria’s life, and the multitudes that are connected to each other. Above all, this is a poem that stands at the intersection of a newly revived Kenyan literary scene and the tremendous entrepreneurial spirit of contemporary Kenya.
