...a shameless, desolate, hungry present. - Paperback

by Alf E. F. Muronda (Author)

A Shameless, Desolate, Hungry Present is a psychologically rich and philosophically resonant long-form poem that interrogates the fragmentation of postcolonial identity in the aftermath of liberation struggles. Through a solitary soldier's fragmented consciousness, the poem engages themes of historical amnesia, ecological collapse, and spiritual dislocation. Set in a barren, post-revolutionary landscape, the text explores the existential paradoxes of heroism and defeat, memory and erasure, agency and paralysis.

Drawing on a symbolic lexicon grounded in African cosmology and guerrilla resistance, the narrative unspools with cinematic pacing and rhetorical gravitas. The poem's speaker becomes both witness and relic-suspended in a liminal temporality where ancestral sacrifice collides with the absurdity of an unredeemed present. Natural imagery-bleached bones, silent rivers, sun-stripped bark-functions as both metaphor and testimony, anchoring broader questions about the cost of historical progress and the psychic toll of liberation deferred.

This poem is essential reading for scholars of postcolonial literature, African poetics, trauma studies, and political aesthetics. It offers fertile ground for interdisciplinary analysis, especially in the contexts of eco-criticism, memory studies, and narrative resistance against hegemonic historicity.