How Does a Country Sound?

This essay is a preview of the summer issue of our print journal, the LARB Quarterly, no. 49: Traffic, out now. Become a member for more essays, criticism, poetry, fiction, and art—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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THE PLANE LIFTING OFF from Raleigh-Durham at dusk felt, in that small vestibule of time when the wheels are no longer on the ground but the plane has not yet surrendered itself to air, like the caesura in a line of blank verse: a momentary suspension between stresses, the breath you didn’t know you were holding. North Carolina—Gothic campuses, well-regulated syllabi, the orderly calendar of semesters—slid away under a lid of low cloud. It had been the country of my apprenticeship: to the appreciation of literature, to a certain kind of English sentence, and to a poet who seemed, outwardly at least, as bounded and provincial as the stone fences he observed.

In my carry-on, the Frost volume lay with its familiar, blunted corners, as if it had been chipped by decades of use. The book had accompanied me through seminars where the word American attached itself to Frost with the easy authority of a passport stamp—as if stone walls and snowy woods were a natural grammar of belonging. But what interested me in Frost was never his Americanness. It was his stoic devotion to difficulty, his insistence that the mind is most itself when negotiating limits: of season, of land, of obligation. If the professors read him as the poet of New England, I read him as the poet of the unchosen task.

On the long transatlantic night, I did not sleep so much as hover between drafts of thought. Exile had already begun to make me suspicious of fluency. One becomes cautious with the tongue in another country: you learn how easily conviction can be mistaken for arrogance when it is carried in an unfamiliar accent. I thought of South Sudan—still for me an arrangement of remembered textures rather than a governable land—and of how it might receive a son who had learned to read “Mending Wall” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” in the air-conditioned hush of Perkins Library.

In many seminars and informal conversations, we had dutifully parsed “Mending Wall” as an argument between two principles. On one side, the speaker, who repeats with irony that “good fences make good neighbors”; on the other, the neighbor, for whom the proverb is creed rather than question. But what struck me, even then, was the way Frost distributes reason and inertia between them. The speaker’s famous counterforce—“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”—is grammatically vague: no subject but “something,” no theology or politics named. The line registers unease, not program. And the poem, written in Frost’s heavily enjambed blank verse, mimics the very labor it describes: the iambic pentameter keeps threatening to fall into prose, only to be shored up again by stress and measure, the way the wall keeps collapsing under frost heaves and getting rebuilt.

It was, I realized somewhere over the Atlantic, a poem about independence that refuses to define itself either as rupture or as continuity. The wall persists, yet every stone is an argument. The neighbors meet precisely because the boundary has failed. A new line has to be drawn every spring, not in the abstract, but with aching arms. The poem had always been less about property than about the annual obligation of encounter.

I thought of this as I anticipated my own arrival at a border that had become, overnight, international. I was returning not to the old Sudan of my childhood but to a place newly named South Sudan—a wall inscribed on the map after decades of war and negotiation. “Good fences make good neighbors,” the saying went. But what if the wall, once drawn, revealed more fractures within than between?

When the plane finally dropped through the heat haze toward Juba, after connections in Frankfurt and Addis Ababa, the descent felt like entering a less forgiving stanza. The first blow of heat on the open stairway—thick, unarguable, almost comic in its certainty—had none of Frost’s winter reticence. Juba shimmered not with snow but with glare. Instead of stone walls, there were sheet metal fences and improvised barriers of old tires. Instead of old farmhouses, half-finished ministries leaned into the sky with bureaucratic ambition. And yet the moral configuration of Frost’s poems—the tension between inner reservation and outer demand—was instantly recognizable.

Inside the small arrival hall, flags hung from every concrete pillar. They were fresh—the green still luminous, the red unsmudged by dust. A soldier, sweating behind cheap mirrored glasses, examined my American visa, then my new South Sudanese travel document, and said, with a smile that held both pride and apology, “Welcome home. We are still learning how to be a country.”

Outside the terminal, the noise was not yet language. Children shrieked; women ululated until their throats rasped; men shouted phrases—“freedom,” “our flag,” “no more second-class citizens”—that felt more like incantations than political propositions. Celebration, like lyric, often precedes comprehension. A man with absent front teeth cried, “Our suffering is finally finished!” and for a moment I felt the force of the full stop in his voice, his desire not only for relief but also for punctuation. He wanted history to end a sentence and begin another.

Yet my own sense of the day was closer to the unfinished syntax of Frost’s “Stopping by Woods.” The famous closing lines—“And miles to go before I sleep”—are, metrically speaking, a series of postponed cadences. The repetition of “And miles to go” is not a flourish but a stutter; the line happens twice because the mind has not yet reconciled desire (to stop in the lovely, dark woods) with duty (to keep promises). Moral hesitation in rhythm itself—delaying the final rest of the line—seemed to me the only honest music for this South Sudanese moment. Independence was being staged as sleep after travail, but the miles lay obstinately ahead.

My older brother—thinner, more angular than I could recall—found me in the milling crowd. His shirt, too formal for the heat, stuck to his back; he had acquired the slightly hurried gait of those who live by office hours rather than seasons. We drove into a city that looked as if it had been assembled overnight out of contingencies: tanks converted into playgrounds, banners hung on electric poles that had yet to be connected to any grid, aid compounds behind high walls, markets where the stalls were plywood and the currency still tentative.

“Does it feel like home?” he asked, smiling with a curiosity that left room for betrayal.

“It feels,” I said after a pause, “like an arrival that doesn’t end.” The sentence surprised me, but it was accurate. A country being born is all threshold; one is always stepping into slogans that haven’t yet been paid for. Nations, like poems, require revision—constitutional, cultural, ethical. But revision demands precisely the patience that revolutionary moments tend to exhaust. A nation, like a poem, must learn its form from use.

“Good,” he said. “That’s what freedom is—an unfinished sentence.”

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That afternoon, in the market where women sold mangoes against a background of rusted blue UN trucks, I bought a small flag from a boy who could not yet pronounce the name of the country whose colors he waved. Later, back at my brother’s house, I slid the flag into my Frost volume at “Mending Wall.” The gesture felt staged, and yet inevitable. Between those two thin pages lay the question not only of what fences one needed against a predatory Sudan along the northern states, but also of what walls might now arise between returnees and those who had never left, between ethnic groups competing for ministries, between future prosperity and present indignity. Frost’s speaker, joking about “elves” and “gaps,” knew that wall-building is as much about the stories we tell to justify labor as about the stones themselves.

Juba’s nights, run on generators and streets patrolled by men with AK-47s, had none of the quiet Frost loved. And yet, sitting under the solitary acacia tree in the courtyard, The Collected Poems open on my lap, I began to hear correspondences that were not decorative but structural. Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night,” with its recurring refrain “I have been one acquainted with the night,” situates the speaker alone in a city whose “luminary clock […] Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.” The poem’s terza rima keeps folding back on itself, a pattern that goes nowhere. Reading it in Juba, where the streetlamps were intermittent and the time of independence was still being proclaimed on state radio as unambiguously good, the poem read differently. Its refusal to name the cause of the speaker’s nocturnal isolation (“I have outwalked the furthest city light”) felt suddenly like the mood of many around me: a cautious, unvoiced awareness that history could not be rewritten by decree.

Each morning, I walked to the Nile, passing unfinished government buildings across from improvised stalls where fish and cigarettes were sold under the same tarp. Men were building a low retaining wall along the riverbank to hold back erosion. The stones they lifted were irregular, the cement mixed in shallow pans. Children helped, carrying pebbles in tin cups. It was impossible not to think of “Mending Wall” again, and of the curious intimacy that annual labor afforded the neighbors: “We meet to walk the line / And set the wall between us once again.” Frost is careful to note that without the wall, they would have no reason to meet at all.

Along the Nile, too, the wall meant more than simply protection against water. It was a fragile assertion of permanence. The workers spoke in Dinka and Bari, joked in Arabic, cursed in English when stones slipped. This multiplicity of languages was the opposite of Frost’s monologic New England voice, yet the moral atmosphere felt contiguous. The wall being raised here was, like that of the poem, both necessary and suspect: necessary because any community must defend its soil against erasure, suspect because boundaries in a region of cattle migrations and contested ancestral grazing routes have never been merely cartographic.

One afternoon, I visited a teacher in a nearby school. She had taught, she said, through the fighting years—when chalk was scarce, she used the ground as a blackboard. “Hope can be heavy,” she added, after I asked whether independence had changed her work.

It was under the neem tree, in the evening, with fireflies flickering like errant punctuation in the dusk, that Frost’s lines began to fuse definitively with the textures of this other land. The famous woods—lovely, dark, and deep—translated themselves into thorn-scrub silhouettes against a white-hot sky, snow became dust, yet the ethical logic remained. The speaker in “Stopping by Woods” insists, against the seduction of a beauty that belongs to someone else’s property, that he has “promises to keep.” What gives the poem its unsettling authority is not the content of those promises—which Frost never specifies—but the way the repeated line translates abstraction into rhythm. Duty is something you feel in your step before you can define it.

So too here: The promise to this new country could not be articulated in the slogans painted on walls—“Justice, Liberty, Prosperity”—but in whether people returned to teach, whether soldiers stood down, whether wells were repaired. My brother suggested we travel to Turalei, our county’s capital, for Independence Day. “The real joy is in the villages,” he said. “In Juba, it is all microphones.”

The road north from Wau, after a flight from Juba, was rough, corrugated with neglect, but the landscape it traversed had, for me, the shock of recovered rhyme. Cattle moved pale and bony across open plains, tukuls clustered near water points, the air held that mixture of smoke and dust which for years I had known only as memory. And yet the recognition was not complete. It was as if I had returned not to an original but to a translation of my own childhood, slightly misaligned.

At a checkpoint, while the Land Cruiser idled, I walked away from the car for a moment. Standing by the road, I realized I had been hoping that the land, the village, the country would answer my return with some intelligible embrace. Instead, it offered only its unarguable presence: dust, distance, heat.

Turalei, as we entered it at dusk, smelled of smoke and cattle and the faint fermentation of sorghum. Children ran alongside the car; someone shouted my name, or a name close enough. My mother’s compound had altered only in the small ways that matter greatly: a new tree taller than memory allowed, and a wall more cracked.

That night, under a sky undimmed by electric light, I thought of Frost’s New England and my Turalei plains collapsing into each other: his barns into our tukuls, his carefully piled stone fences into our thorn enclosures, his snow into the pale dust that coated my feet. The dream was not a careless conflation of two worlds but an intimation that poetry had long given me metaphors for a land I was only now physically returning to. Frost had taught me, years before, to attend to the exact pressure of a footstep on uneven ground, to the emotional weather of seasons. In his pastoral drills, I had unknowingly been preparing for this homecoming.

At dawn, my cousin stood at the doorway in a uniform too large for his thin frame. The awkward authority of the rifle on his shoulder recalled, in an unwanted way, Frost’s “Out, Out—,” where the boy’s life ends in a flash of saw and blood while the adults, stunned, return to their affairs “since they / Were not the one dead.” Independence in South Sudan had cost too many such boys; I could see in my cousin’s steady, almost rehearsed posture the sediment of drill, the inculcated willingness to be the “one dead” if required. When he said, half-jokingly, that at least now they knew “whose flag we die under,” I heard the logic of “The Gift Outright,” that troubling poem in which Frost writes that “the land was ours before we were the land’s”—a formulation I had once admired as a compact description of American possession, but more somber in my new context. What does it mean, I wondered, to be “the land’s,” to owe the land your body?

My mother, seeing me with Frost’s book in the yard, asked, “Are you studying?” I answered that I was, in a way. “Good,” she said simply. “The country must also study.” The remark, in its unforced parallelism, encapsulated what Frost himself understood about the relation between poem and world: both require repeated attention, a willingness to revise. A country that does not study itself becomes mere territory; a poem that does not study its own means becomes mere gesture.

That night, as songs rose in the square and torches turned dust into flickering amber, I felt the presence of Frost’s steady, unsentimental cadence like an undertone beneath the drums. He refused easy consolations; he distrusted declarations that did not pass through the discipline of form. To read him in Turalei on the eve of Independence was to understand that the gestures of celebration—the waving of flags, the chanting of slogans—were the preliminary stanzas of a much longer work whose real rhymes would be found in irrigation ditches, classrooms, clinics. We had miles to go, not as a poetic flourish, but as inventory.

When I lay awake, waiting for the eastern sky to bruise into gold, I felt history not as a fireworks display, but as a line still searching for its next stress.

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The day before Independence, Turalei woke as if to an exam. Birds tore at the morning with insistent calls; women pounded grain in a syncopated rhythm; boys swept the compound, clearing not only dust but also indecision. Order, that day, was performative. My mother moved water pots into symmetrical alignment, as though the arrangement of clay on earth might persuade the new nation to balance itself.

I saw only exhaustion in the faces around me, masked by festal paint and flags. Trucks and motorbikes arrived bearing youths from neighboring villages, their bodies draped in fabric the color of the new flag, their songs oscillating between praise and warning. Drums started early, as if sound itself could secure what the referendum had promised. Men decorated the square with vines; women traced the flag’s colors on their cheeks. Children waved flags they could barely lift, their arms trembling under the weight.

The village’s preparations had been hasty: the podium constructed overnight, the chairs borrowed, the microphones tested against the stubborn feedback of the speakers—all of it improvised over the unresolved ground of debts, unmarked graves, and the memory of a time when these same men had faced each other over rifles rather than drums.

My own presence was a disruption. People wanted to know about America, about Duke, about whether I would return and teach at the new university. Their questions, half admiration and half reproach, made me conscious of the pressure to retrospectively interpret one’s choices as decisive. “The Road Not Taken” is so often misread as an anthem to individualism, but it is in fact a rather forensic examination of how we lie to ourselves. The speaker admits that the two roads were “really about the same,” yet imagines himself in the future saying he took “the one less traveled by” and that this “has made all the difference.” The difference may exist only in the story he later tells.

Here, among family and relatives, it was tempting for some to imagine that my choice to leave—or to return—could be narrated in the same heroic terms: the one who left, the one who came back. But the truth was muddier. The roads available to me had been shaped by timing, by luck, by scholarships granted in offices far from home. To invest them now with the grandeur of individual will would be to mistake narrative for fate.

In the afternoon, heat ironed the town flat. Cows were slaughtered, their blood absorbed by soil that had so often drunk less ceremonial violence. Radios blared snatches of speeches from Juba, their phrases—“unity,” “development,” “international community”—floating over the square. When my aunt told me, gently but firmly, that “today is not for guests to help” as I tried to assist her with the stew, the word guest did more work than any of those bureaucratic nouns. It named what no anthem could dispel: a distance that had grown not only between north and south but also between those who had stayed and those who had acquired further names—“student,” “diaspora,” “expert”—elsewhere.

The one thing that did not require interpretation was the labor of hands. I sat at the edge of the river drawing lines in the soil with a stick, watching them erase themselves with each breath of wind. The futility of the gesture recalled “Mowing,” where Frost’s speaker admits that “anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak.” The whisper of the scythe in the grass is not romantic; it is matter-of-fact. The work is its own justification. Perhaps, I thought, our Independence celebrations needed that same chastened honesty: less about “forever” and more about tomorrow’s tasks.

As evening thickened, torches came alive. The square became a stage. A wooden podium had appeared as if conjured; a battery-powered microphone shrieked into consciousness. Elders, their faces maps of earlier wars, were seated in rows of borrowed chairs. Even soldiers abandoned their posts temporarily, rifles slung with casual danger across their backs. The mood in the air oscillated between festival and wake; the dead were everywhere and nowhere in the songs.

The county commissioner spoke first, in Dinka that rose and fell like lamentation. “We have walked through the desert of history,” he declared, “and now we drink water that is ours.” The metaphor was apt enough—these were people who knew the thirst of both literal and political deserts—but it also had the smoothness of phrases polished in committee. Frost would have distrusted it. His best metaphors are slightly askew, resistant; they work not as ornaments but as tools for thinking. When in “Birches” he imagines swinging on the trees “toward heaven” before coming back to earth, the image is deliberately implausible. The boy’s acrobatics are physically exaggerated, morally precise: they enact a desire to escape earth’s burdens without the sin of permanent departure. Independence here, I thought, enacts a similar movement: a swing away from domination, a desire for the pure air of autonomy, followed inevitably by gravity. “Earth’s the right place for love,” he insists. 
“I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”

Then, it was my turn to speak. Someone had decided that the student returned from America must provide a gloss on the day, a bridge between worlds. I wanted very much to refuse. Refusal, however, is a difficult word in the context of national unity and solidarity. They handed me the microphone, and suddenly I was acutely aware of my shoes, of the accent that would carry my Dinka and English, of my own unreadiness to issue statements.

I began cautiously, speaking of learning, of how wars and books both have a way of teaching patience. I spoke of teachers writing alphabets on sand, of mothers memorizing the faces of their sons lest they vanish. And then, almost involuntarily, I found myself translating Frost into our context: I told the square that to own the land was not enough; “we must be owned by it in return.” The line paraphrased, without quotation marks, Frost’s claim in “The Gift Outright” that Americans were “possessed by what we now no more possessed.” That poem, recited by Frost himself at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, reveals more about imperial certainty than the poet perhaps intended. Its parenthetical admission—“The deed of gift was many deeds of war”—acknowledges violence yet subordinates it grammatically, as if conquest could be tucked away in brackets.

Here, where land had been not only wrested from a northern regime but also contested among ethnic groups, I wanted to invert the logic: to imagine a form of belonging in which the land’s claims on us—its demand for stewardship, for restraint—preceded our claims on it. When I said it, I felt the sentence hanging in the dusk. Yet the silence that followed was not empty. It had, in Frost’s sense, the “sound of sense”: a pause in which people hear their own thoughts clarified.

My mother did not clap. Her smile afterward was small but suggestive, as if to say: Rhetoric is not yet action.

The night unrolled itself as celebration. Drums stitched together bodies from different lineages. Men with sorghum beer on their breath told me stories about battles I had never seen, about cousins I barely remembered. One asked me, with the impertinent honesty of drunkenness, whether leaving had made me clever, or only lucky.

Later, by the river, my brother cleaned his rifle as if preparing not for peace but for another iteration of what he knew. “Tomorrow you’ll see real independence,” he said. “No guns, only voices.” The irony of his statement—the rifle as constant, voice as anticipated—brought to mind Frost’s “Fire and Ice,” that brief, compressed meditation on the modes of destruction: desire as fire, hatred or indifference as ice. Our war had been very literally a fire—burnt villages, scorched fields—but I wondered whether the next danger, post- independence, would be a form of ice: the slow freezing of justice, the cooling of communal responsibility, the petrification of hope into titles and offices.

The morning of Independence itself began with a silence that felt almost punitive. The town, exhausted by its own anticipation, lay briefly still. Then came the rockets, crude arcs of smoke in a sky already glaring with heat. People gathered around radios; the president’s voice arrived threaded with static, declaring, in the polished simplicity of the present tense, “We are free.”

Women wept, men lifted children high, old people murmured names of those not there to hear the pronouncement. I waved a flag thrust into my hand, its fabric smelling of new chemicals. Yet behind the choreography of joy, another awareness intruded: that independence is not fulfilled by declaration but by maintenance. To the extent that independence allowed people here to bring their love of land into alignment with their labor on it—to farm without fear of being burned out, to teach without ideology imposed from elsewhere—it would be justified. To the extent that it merely substituted one bureaucracy for another, it would not. That first flush of victory is, precisely because of its purity, the most fragile. Indeed, by noon, heat drove everyone indoors. The square was left to flags and goats. I sat in the dim hut, rereading Frost’s essays on his belief that a poem must sound true before it can be understood as true. It occurred to me that the same might hold for nations. The rhetoric of our new state—its anthem, its slogans—would first be tested not by international law but by whether it rang true in the mouths of villagers who still walked miles for water. When I asked my mother, later, whether she was happy, she answered, “Happiness is not for big days. It hides in work.”

By evening, the square had settled into a hush. My brother stopped by to say goodbye; as a judge advocate, he’d been summoned to lend his expertise to an urgent case. “The euphoria will evaporate fast,” he predicted. “Budgets, accusations, old grudges wearing new uniforms.” He asked whether I would write about all this. “At least,” he added, “make the metaphor hurt.”

Walking alone along the outskirts of Turalei, I considered his phrase. Frost’s metaphors—walls, roads, woods, birches—have become so thoroughly absorbed into cultural shorthand that their edges often feel dulled. But in their original contexts, they hurt. The “road less traveled” is not a triumphant choice but a future rationalization, the wall is both a barrier and a ritual of neighborliness, and the woods are both comfort and temptation. If I were to write of South Sudan’s independence with any honesty, I would have to let my metaphors retain their difficulty: river as border and continuity, flag as both aspiration and warning, home as both refuge and indictment.

Sitting by the river that night, watching torchlight tremble on the surface and break into commas of reflected flame, I realized that what I heard most clearly was not the anthem but an emerging meter: the pattern of pauses, the new vocabulary of greetings, the way people said “our country” with a mixture of pride and incredulity. When the drums finally subsided and the last singers drifted past my hut, the word “freedom” having been repeated into a tender blur, I lay awake under the clean stars. Above me, they shone with the indifferent continuity that had outlived empires. Below, the town exhaled. Independence had arrived not as a conclusion, but as a divergence. We stood, as in Frost’s yellow wood, where two roads diverged, with the further difference that we had not chosen the conditions of the divergence.

The truth was less dramatic than any speech, and more demanding: the road ahead was ours to learn by walking, step by step, and by listening, as carefully as Frost had taught me, to the sound our feet make on the ground.

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The morning after Independence, Turalei felt like a stage after a performance: streamers dropped, confetti trampled, the air flat with the absence of an audience. Torn flags lay in the dust, their colors already dulled; paper cups collapsed near the podium; bones from yesterday’s feast shone in the early light with an almost indecent clarity. Celebration had consumed itself, leaving behind its own archaeology.

My mother resumed her ordinary activities with audible relief. Ceremony had never interested her, either in church or in politics. When I told her I would leave for Juba the following week, she nodded. “Cities are restless,” she said. “They can’t stay quiet even when quiet is needed.” Then she added, “Carry your silence with you.”

In silence, I walked through the nearby villages, pausing at places where unrecorded history still pressed through the surface of things: a graveyard where crosses leaned at stubborn angles, the ruined shell of a church built by missionaries nearly a century ago, a water point installed by an NGO whose sun-bleached logo had faded into near illegibility. Each site felt like the kind of ruined structure Frost addresses in “Directive,” one of his strangest and most powerful late poems. There, the speaker leads the reader “back out of all this now too much for us” to “a house that is no more a house / Upon a farm that is no more a farm” and finally to “a broken drinking goblet like the Grail” hidden in an old cedar, from which he instructs us to “drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”

The poem is not nostalgic. It does not offer restoration of the lost house. Instead, it asks its reader to accept brokenness as the condition for a different kind of integrity. South Sudan, in those days just after Independence, resembled that landscape of ruin and command. There was no going back to an unscarred community, to a prewar childhood. The best that could be hoped for was a way of drinking from the past—its courage, its communal practices—without pretending that its structures still held.

At nightfall, my cousin polished his boots, his conversation moving easily between practicalities and fatalism. He might be sent to the border; he did not protest. “We are free but still armed,” he said. “Peace is a uniform we haven’t learned to wear.” What, then, to make of his own green fatigues, with their too-stiff seams? Another uniform, one incapable of protecting him from the disillusion that might follow if this new state proved as predatory as the one it had left.

That night, I read Frost by kerosene lamp. The pages, already yellowed, absorbed the lamp’s weak light. Poems I had once treated as exercises in pastoral craft now felt diagnostic. “The Most of It,” with its seeker crying for a “counter-love,” spoke to the desire so many here had for recognition—from the international community, from the former oppressor, from each other. The poem’s answer—a stag emerging briefly from the water and then gone—offered scant comfort. The universe, Frost suggests, will not mirror us in the form we crave; we must accept more oblique responses.

The next morning, as I packed the volume into my bag, my mother put a small cloth parcel of peanuts on top of it and touched my forehead with her cool palm. “You will think too much,” she said. “Try to feel sometimes.”

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The road back to Wau carried us through scenes now slightly altered by the afterglow of Independence. Market stalls sold keychains emblazoned with the flag; calendars bearing the president’s face curled at the edges in the heat. The paraphernalia of nationhood had arrived quickly, filling the gap between reality and aspiration with plastic and ink. My brother, who met me halfway, reported that the ministries were already quarreling over office space and cars. “They argue about windows while the country bleeds paperwork,” he said. His bitter humor reminded me of Frost’s “Provide, Provide,” whose brisk counsel to secure status before decline could be read as a dark parody of precisely this scramble for position. The poem’s surface cynicism conceals, as Helen Vendler once argued, a critique of the very tactics it appears to endorse. So too here: the spectacle of men fighting over tinted windows in a city lacking reliable electricity was an indictment of a freedom too quickly converted into privilege.

Juba, when we reentered it, had acquired new signage but the same old dust. Billboards announced “A New Dawn” and “Our Oil, Our Future,” as if a pair of slogans might revise geological or political fact. My brother’s house received me with an abundance of warmth, and with mosquito nets already too well acquainted with human blood. I had a week before flying back to the United States; my brother was working late most days, and I spent long hours on my own, drifting through the fledgling capital—an aspiring flaneur, or so I liked to imagine.

In a small café near the university, students argued fervently about federalism, about the legacy of John Garang, about whether Western aid was salvation or slow poison. At another table, a consultant spoke the incantatory language of “capacity building” and “institutional frameworks.” Their voices blended into a kind of prose Frost would have loathed for its abstraction. His insistence on speech that bears the weight of lived encounter offered me a standard by which to judge not only verse but also these emerging national discourses. Much of what I heard rang hollow: sentences with no referent in the streets outside.

In the days that followed, my life in Juba settled into a rhythm of small observations. I visited schools where children shared tattered notebooks; I sat in an empty library waiting for books that had been promised but not yet shipped. At a poetry reading by the river—a gathering of young writers under a sparse tree—someone read a piece comparing independence to a bird flying from a cage only to discover its wings were broken. The metaphor, while predictable, was at least honest. Another poet read in Arabic, his lines gusting in the heat. When they asked me to speak, I considered reading Frost aloud but decided instead to describe his idea that a poem had to sound right before it could mean right. A woman in the audience asked, “How does our country sound?” The question, sharper than any I could pose, lodged in me.

How does a country sound? The anthem is one answer, but only one. Frost would have said: Listen to the ordinary exchanges. In “The Death of the Hired Man,” the moral drama unfolds almost entirely through dialogue between a farmer and his wife as they discuss whether to take in an old worker who has returned to die on their property. The poem’s genius lies in its ear for the nuances of speech—hesitations, repetitions, small shifts in tone. The couple’s argument about responsibility becomes the poem’s music.

So, in Juba, I began to listen less to speeches and more to bargaining in markets, to mothers scolding children, to teachers calling roll. The country, I decided, sounded most itself when it was not addressing the world but conversing with itself in these unbroadcast ways.

Each morning, I walked to the Nile. The retaining wall had grown higher; the same men were there, their motions slightly slower. A fisherman sat mending his net, fingers moving with the unselfconscious grace of necessity. When I asked whether he found the work tedious, he laughed: “When I stop mending, hunger reminds me.” His answer unintentionally recalled Frost’s belief that repair—of fences, of language, of relationships—is both labor and moral practice. The fisherman did not treat the net as an emblem; he treated it as a condition of survival. If the state could learn to think of its institutions in similar terms—not as monuments to power but as things that must be mended or they fail—then perhaps independence would mean more than a date on a calendar.

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On my last morning in Juba before returning to America, I went again to the river with Frost’s book. The sun was not yet ruthless; a slight breeze textured the water into lines. I opened the volume at random and found “The Gift Outright.” In America, the poem had seemed to many a confident articulation of national self-understanding; here, its complacencies were unbearable. The claim that the land “was ours before we were the land’s” rested on an erasure of those for whom the land had always been home. In South Sudan, any such claim would be equally fraught: whose “ours” counted? Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, Bari, Azande? Women who had borne the weight of war? Boys who had fought in it?

I closed the book and thought instead of the inversion I had offered in Turalei: that we must allow ourselves to be owned by the land. To be “the land’s” would mean letting its needs—water, soil, climate—dictate our policies; it would mean recognizing that the rivers uniting us could not bear endless neglect or contamination. Frost’s American frontier optimism had to be turned inside out if it were to serve us here.

Kneeling, I touched the Nile’s warm surface. My reflection broke into small, wandering shapes and then reassembled, distorted. The river’s indifference was oddly consoling. It carried the history of battles and crossings but also the present: women standing waist-deep, laundry, the laughter of children. Its steady movement evokes a timescale larger than the electoral cycle, larger than the span of war and independence. In Frost’s “Neither Out Far nor In Deep,” people along the sand gaze at the sea, though “they cannot look out far” or “look in deep”: human attention fixes itself on vast forces—oceans, histories, wars—even when our capacity to comprehend them remains limited. “The water comes ashore,” the poem insists, indifferent to whether we understand it or not.

Behind me, the city clattered awake: taxi horns, church bells, the distant metallic ring of construction. I closed the book and held it briefly against my chest, feeling in its weight the strange companionship it had offered: a New England farmer-poet walking beside a South Sudanese returnee on the banks of the world’s longest river, their shared concern not with likeness of scenery but with the ethics of attention. Frost had taught me that the mind at its most serious often disguises itself in rural tasks; my country was teaching me that politics, at its most consequential, often appears in ordinary compromises: where to put a well, how to distribute teachers, which language to use at a clinic.

My mother’s instruction—to carry my silence with me—now seemed of a piece with Frost’s practice. His speakers talk, but they also listen: to scythes, to woods, until they “acquire a listening air”—a state where listening becomes not an act but a condition of being. To belong, I realized, whether to a poem or to a country, is to listen for its meter, to feel where it breaks down, where it needs an extra stress, where an old proverb must be questioned.

The road from the river back into Juba’s streets lay unmarked, but unmistakably ours. Standing, dust already clinging to my shoes, I whispered a sentence that was neither prayer nor thesis, the only articulation that did not claim too much: “We keep walking.” Frost’s traveler in the snowy woods walks because promises, unspecified yet binding, compel him. I returned to America with Frost’s poetry newly estranged, leaving behind South Sudan, a country still in draft, inviting revisions I could only hope, in time, to witness in their full measure.

¤

Featured image: Luigi Russolo, Chioma, 1910, is in the public domain. Image has been cropped.

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