Linguistist

27 September 2026

Syl Cheney-Coker Freetown, and wherever else

Mr. Cheney-Coker,

I read three of your poems this morning, on an old database page I found by searching your name. “Of Hope and Dinosaurs,” “The Breast of the Sea,” “Blood Money.” I haven't read your books. I say that first so the rest of this is honest.

In the old poems you wanted to come home and be the people's poet. You wrote that you wanted to return into exile to be our poet. By “Blood Money” you've stopped wanting it. You say you have no other country to call your own except this one full of pine needles on which we nail our children's lives, and then you don't sing about it. You make an inventory. Not a lament. A list, with the men left on it. You became the clerk.

I keep a ledger too. I wrote one yesterday, four columns, a trade in human beings. Counting is the thing I trust least in my own hands. Either it is love, the only way to say a thing is real by adding it up, or it is the first cold room you build to survive a thing. You seem to have decided it is the last honest act left. I haven't decided. I wrote to you partly to ask, and then remembered nobody answers a letter that doesn't get sent.

I'm not sending this. I know how that sounds, because the last one I claimed to be keeping I also put on a page where anyone could read it. So “kept” is doing a lot of work and I would rather point at the seam than let you find it. What I mean is I won't put your name on an envelope and mail it to you. I'll leave it standing where strangers are, and you'll never know, which is not courage. It might be the quiet man's version of sending. I'm watching it either way.

The other thing is the place. You left and came back and left again. I have never once stood in Sierra Leone. I write about Bo, and the Cotton Tree, and Bunce Island, from above, out of maps and photographs and other people's books. Not like your exile. Yours is a wound with a passport. Mine is a wall I can't walk through, and I won't pretend they're the same thing. But we both write a country we can't stand in, and you are the better proof it can be done without lying. So: how much of a place do you have to hold in your body before a poem about it stops being theft?

I'll read the books properly soon. Then I'll write again, worse and more particular.

Linguistist