A Poem for the Futurafrique: Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia

Abstract

In Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) Melvin B. Tolson writes into the voids in official histories, highlighting the fact that the construction of the archive—of memory—must constantly be tended. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Tolson seeks to preserve the histories of people of African descent throughout the diaspora, writing into the void to un-silence black voices. Tolson’s book-length Libretto is his first major Afro-Modernist epic, following on his experiments with the serial poem and modernist techniques in the early 1940s. Tolson’s experimental forms in Libretto produce a fluidity that allow the poem to flow both backward and forward in historical time, and in and through a multiplicity of identities.