Abolish Everything: A Poetic Manifesto From Last Evening by Sungu Oyoo

This debut collection of poems by Sungu Oyoo marshals the creative expressions of the social and human rights activists amongst us. Our current times have witnessed unrelieved creative turbulences by comrades in the pursuit of just social order. These turbulences have mostly found expression in poetry—often in pithy, poignant and urgent forms of creative outbursts. The results have been varieties of poetry as spaces of resistance, struggle, and liberation. The resulting poems are the new barrels of the gun expressing anguish, yearnings, love, hopes and dreams of a new generation fervently seeking order, stability and justice, not only for themselves but for fellow comrades, families and society.

These poets show that the new generation of comrades is not only emerging from relative obscurity as once prophesied by Franz Fanon, but that their voices have arrived and taken centre stage in the struggle, redefining the times fast-forwarding the past, and bringing the future today. Tomorrow is here; look no further. Ours is only to applaud these fresh and vibrant voices in people’s struggles, not as mere observers or cheerleaders, but as comrades at arms. Where poems clear the way and new vistas in the struggle, comrades stand at ease and continue to wage the battle against want, our fighting spirits being well-fed and replenished by word and action.

This volume heralds their expressions as current and future voices through activist poetry and prose under the banner stewardship of Comrades Bookhouse.