When asked where she feels at home, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley lists several places: her native Liberia; Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she immigrated during the civil war in Liberia in 1991 and lived for twelve years; and now Pennsylvania, where she teaches at Pennsylvania State University in Altoona.
Jabbeh Wesley returns to Liberia often, usually for a few weeks at a time. But in 2013, she returned for four months, and the experience was so powerful that she produced her fifth collection of poetry during those months: When the Wanderers Come Home (University of Nebraska Press, 2016).
“In the last twelve years, I’ve been going back and forth for to Liberia for research,” Jabbeh Wesley says. “I wanted to get as much recorded as I could, because some of the people I’ve been researching have died. But I’ve never stayed for more than four weeks each time.”
During her last stay in Liberia, Wesley worked on a memoir that was already about 700 pages long. But there were still images, emotions, and memories that spilled beyond its pages. They found their way into poems. A few hold the humor that Jabbeh Wesley, with her ready laugh, enjoys. But others explore her pain and grief for a country torn apart by war.
In spite of several awards Jabbeh Wesley has received in Liberia for her work, she believes that that Liberians now show little interest in literature.
“I still feel that way,” she says. “It’s even worse now. It’s worse than when I was growing up, when we read a lot. The war has thrown our country back a hundred years. The value system of the people has changed. When you have a country that has been overtaken by rebels that then became leaders of the country, when you have a government that is run by some of the people who fought in the war, who started the war and killed people, then the general population begins to believe that education pays doesn't off that much.”
Even so, Jabbeh Wesley tells of a party given in her honor in Liberia, where all her books quickly sold out, people even bidding more than the cover price. They also don't stay long on the shelves of a bookstore in the capital city Monrovia either. Jabbeh Wesley says the apparent lack of interest in good books may have a lot to do with their scarcity in Liberia.
Jabbeh Wesley is still working on her memoir, now pared down to 550 pages. She says it's currently under consideration for publication. Her other poetry collections include Where the Road Turns (2010), The River Is Rising (2007), Becoming Ebony (2003), and Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa (1998).
She earned a BA at the University of Liberia; an MS at Indiana University; and a PhD at Western Michigan University.
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