The New Carthaginians by Nick Makoha

An exploration of falling and flight, and inspired by the artistic techniques of Basquiat, The New Carthaginians is a perspective-altering collection of poems that undoes the traditions of European antiquity and forms a completely new and original mythology.

Published 27 February 2025.

The New Carthaginians comes seven years after Nick’s debut collection, Kingdom of Gravity, which was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis prize and praised as a book of the year in the Guardian by Bernardine Evaristo and Jackie Kay. Nick is an award-winning poet who is adored by acclaimed poets and novelists Terrance Hayes, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Roger Robinson and Erica Wagner.

The author’s (Nick Makoha) personal story fleeing Uganda with his mother after the Entebbe Hijacking influenced his poetry with themes of flight. He also went on a trip around America and across Europe viewing every Jean-Michel Basquiat. After viewing a Basquiat painting, Nick had an emotional response that prompted him to write The New Carthaginians.

The poems open with Nick the Poet, in an airport, as he is waiting to depart. Through a collage of ideas, metaphors and cinematic poetic techniques, Nick explores the feeling of flight and falling. The feeling experienced by so many Black British people of never quite feeling steady, or a real sense belonging, neither here nor there.

Using the idea of ‘an exploded collage’ allowed Nick to connect his three characters (Basquiat, Black Icarus based on Basquiat’s painting ‘Icarus Esso’ and is in conversation with Bruegel’s painting ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ and finally the Poet which is Nick himself) as they fly and embark on a heroes’ odyssey. These three characters are ‘The New Carthaginians’,  a metonym for Africans that is a creative attempt to centre African narratives within a space dominated by the Western Canon.

‘Hold that note,’ writes the poet. ‘In this place you are no longer the chorus . . . In any future, remember you are a New Carthaginian.’