Detained at Kilometer Zero

by David Shook

Poet David Shook recounts being detained by the Commissioner of Police in Equatorial Guinea, as he and a skeleton crew of rogue filmmakers attempt to smuggle in their equipment, in order to find missing poet Marcelo Ensema Nsang, who was tortured in the late 1970s under the Macías regime. Ultimately extricated from his interrogation by his handlebar moustache, Shook provides a thumbnail portrait of Equatorial Guinea's sociopolitical present, including the West's embrace of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, despite his undemocratic reign as the longest serving president of any African nation, and his horrendous record of human rights violations. David Shook is a poet, translator, and filmmaker in Los Angeles.

16 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 5, 2012

About the author

Raised in Mexico City, poet, translator, and filmmaker David Shook studied endangered languages in Oklahoma and poetry at Oxford University before settling in Los Angeles, where he edits molossus and Phoneme Media.