The Sun Laughs at Night by Davy Fidel
Reviewer: Ishaya Ibrahim
Davy Fidel’s The Sun Laughs at Night is a masterful collection of 51 poems with an arresting impact that begins with the title. Here, Fidel portrays the sun as a force capable of expressing the human emotion of laughter. To laugh “at night” signals timidity, fear, or surrender. The title is not a mere peg or fancy phrase to capture attention; it is at the core of the book’s theme. The poet does justice to it.
In the poem “MISLEADING PATH,” Fidel shows how a system, a tradition, or a power structure that spans centuries oppresses the people it is supposed to empower — caging instead of liberating them. This line captures that truth: “The sun melting in a refrigerator is them;” How does the all-powerful sun that lights the universe get caged in a refrigerator and melt inside? This is the power of imagery that Fidel deploys with commendable impact to convey a potent truth about the human condition.
But how does the sun get to laugh at night? It is because the people are awakened and now aware of the centuries-old MISLEADING FACT presented to them as tradition or ethics. These lines grip me:
They are today, not yesterday.
Misleading centuries is their ethic;
I read in my last book before I died.
Each poem in The Sun Laughs at Night leaves the reader craving the next until the entire collection is devoured. And even then, you are left pondering the reality of the oppressed, which the poet makes clear through words that put flesh on skeleton, turning the abstract into the concrete.
The Sun Laughs at Night is that poem you read to release your rage against a rigged system that seeks to redefine even your own very identity. One poem, “I AM,” captures that truth, but like the biblical moment when Moses asks God how to present Him to the skeptical Israelites, God replies, “I AM .”
The poem also echoes Bob Marley’s “Babylon System”: “We refuse to be what you wanted us to be; / We are what we are, that’s the way it’s going to be.” In Fidel’s “I AM,” the speaker, like Bob Marley, rejects the identity the oppressor has forcefully tried to impose on him: I am the bird singing for my liberation you can’t stop.
I am the song tomorrow shall talk about. I am!
A sampler:
I AM not the prison you arrested!
I AM not the gown you have sown!
I AM not the book you are pulling OFF!
I AM not the letters on your carpet!
I AM not any of those urchins;
Those holes in your words you embalm;
Those pigeons you toss around miserably;
Those verbs you castrate while eating them raw;
Those pegs pegging your philosophy.
The poem contrasts this rejection with what the speaker affirms he is:
I am the bird singing for my liberation you can’t stop.
I am the song tomorrow shall talk about. I am!
In The Sun Laughs at Night, Fidel connects with the reader’s emotions, using vivid imagery to make his points unmistakably clear. It’s a great book every lover of art, freedom and justice should read.
