One Ghana, One Voice

Back In Full Swing

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 13:24:00 +0000

Dear OGOV Readers,

Hopefully, everything is worthy the wait here at One Ghana One Voice magazine.
We have set the ball rolling with Elikplim Akorli (also known as thegodofpoetry) as our Poet of the Month. Every week this month, we shall feature one of his poems as part as the Poems of the Month series. Please feel free to comment and contribute your ideas on this literary platform.

Literary critic and poet, Kwabena Agyare Yeboah graciously allowed a reprint of his review of Mawuli Adzei's Testament of the Season at the Book Review section. I have my own corner on this website where I can chip in a word or two on how things are shaping out here at OGOV. It is the Editor's Desk. It is the place where you are most likely to grasp an idea of how a month's feature is going to shape up. I promise that I will be brief.

We are still looking for interested poets and writers to contribute material for the Art and Craft section. If you have a 'trade skill or secret' as to how to flourish as a writer, please contact us with your articles and/or essays.

For this month's feature, I was able to interview Elikplim on Whatsapp. That interview has been posted on OGOV's Youtube and Soundcloud channels. I enjoyed the interview thoroughly and hope you would as well.

Thanks for your time.

Prince K. Mensah
Editor-in-Chief

Old Beginnings and New Endings

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 22:40:00 +0000

Dear OGOV Readers,

Receiving the reins of this seminal magazine from the illustrious Rob Taylor was one of the most important days in my life this year. Reorganizing and restructuring has not been easy but poetry, being a continuum in itself, has ways of giving us opportunities to figure things out when they do not go as planned. It has been 5 months since I stepped in Rob’s shoes and I have been in pursuit of known and emerging talent to populate OGOV’s pages. Understandably, there has not been a lot of responses from the more established poets. Nevertheless, in the process of searching, I found many, many wonderful voices from Ghana. Some dabble in the art of spoken word. Others use poetry in novel ways that have gained them a lot of followers on social media. The Ghanaian world of poetry is exciting. It is filled with poets who are bent on using technology in varied ways to get their points across. It is, indeed, wonderful to witness the proliferation of fresh talent and to imagine the glorious future of poetry in my motherland.

As you might have observed over the past few months, new tabs have been added. They are Editor’s Desk, Poet of the Month, Poems of the Month, Art and Craft, Book Review and Contests, Grants and Fellowships. These changes were due to the necessity of giving a platform to poets who have been with OGOV over the years. Those poets, such as Adjei Agyei Baah and Darko Antwi, have their own gigs and do possess experience and exposure that emerging poets might benefit from. Editor’s Desk will contain my musings (and, hopefully, no pontifications) about exciting people and events in Ghanaian (and African) poetry. Poet of the Month will feature the life and times of a selected poet. It will build on the old format in which Rob had interviews and have the poet also write prose pieces about what makes them tick. Poems of the Month will feature four poems from the poet of the month, and, when possible, a commentary on the poem. Art and Craft will feature essays on poetry and writing from contemporary African poets. Book Review will be written by the wonderful Kwabena Agyare Yeboah, a poet/essayist in his own right and one of the finest young minds I have encountered. Contests, Grants and Fellowships will list opportunities for poets to win awards/prizes and chances to enhance their careers. We intend to exhaust every means to make poetry as attractive as possible to anyone who desires to pursue it.

For the month of October, OGOV will feature Elikplim Akorli (also known as the god of poetry). Mr. Akorli’s incisive pieces have fascinated me, ever since I started following him on SoundCloud. He graciously agreed to be the first baton holder in this continuous relay of poetry. I trust that you would enjoy his pieces just as I did when I first read them. I also want to use this opportunity to let you know that selected poets will be interviewed via phone and the interview posted on SoundCloud and YouTube.

Old beginnings and new endings, the continuum that poetry (and all literature) presents is tolerant of novelty and nuance. As Rob allowed a variety of styles on OGOV, I promise to continue to position OGOV as the nursery of literary excellence in Ghana. There will be experiments with new ideas. They might succeed or they might fail. As in life, what matters most is what is taken from what is experienced and who that experience turns us out to be. In a few weeks, the new tabs will be populated with content from established and emerging poets. We ask that, as our partners on this journey, you provide us with feedback and positive criticism. We still have tabs on old work such as Features and Archives. You can go through them to catch a glimpse of inspiration from the works of contributors such as the late LS Mensah and Edith Faalong.

Please go through our guidelines and send us your poetry. We will love to read them. We might like them at first read or we might ask for revisions. In the end, we are all here to make (and ask for) the best out of ourselves. I ask that you join me on this beautiful sojourn through terrains of poetry. To paraphrase the great Ayi Kwei Armah, the beautyful poems are not yet born.

Happy reading.

Prince K. Mensah
Editor-in-Chief

An End and a Beginning

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 20:27:00 +0000

Dear OGOV Readers,

When I co-founded One Ghana, One Voice with Julian Adomako-Gyimah, I hardly imagined that eight years later we would still be around. I dreamed, though it felt like a very distant dream, that OGOV would have served its purpose and faded away, replaced by other magazines and organizations.

When I moved to Accra in 2006 I spent a good six months reading newspapers, listening to the radio, scouring Legon bulletin boards, visiting libraries, doing everything in my power to try to find and connect with other poets and poetry lovers. I became determined that if I did finally connect with someone, I would help make sure that new poets and poetry lovers had an easier time than I did. Finally, Julian and I found each other and OGOV was born. Our goal was to connect writers as much as to celebrate their writing (each poet received an author interview, outlining where they lived and what motivated them to write, and was required to provide their email address - you needed to be willing to connect to be on our site!). Soon enough we had poets in Kumasi corresponding with poets in Koforidua corresponding with ex-patriot poets in the US and UK. And not long after, other magazines and organizations followed - Akwantuo, Ghana Book Review, Writers Project of Ghana, and many more.

What a joy this was to behold! It also, admittedly, took the wind out of my sails, so to speak: Ghanaian poetry was (and is) thriving. By OGOV's five-year anniversary in 2012, when Darko Antwi wrote his wonderful summary of OGOV's work for the Poetry Foundation Ghana website, I felt like we'd reached our goals. We'd featured over 70 poets, and watched many of them go on to found new organizations or publish books. Also, now back living in Canada and with far less time available for the magazine, I no longer felt like I was the right person to lead a Ghanaian poetry magazine.

And yet, I couldn't stop. Why? Because of Martin Egblewogbe, because of Aisha Nelson, because of Kofi A. Amoako. Because of "Scarecrow" and "The Pilgrim Looks Up". Because of your overwhelming responses - in quantity, in quality and mostly in heart - to our calls for poems memorialising Kofi Awoonor and John Atta Mills. Because of Prince Mensah and L.S. Mensah's wonderful "How Poems Work" essays. Because of all the poems and comments and tweets that kept appearing in my inbox. In short, because of you.

How could I leave this? All of you?

So I held on longer than I should, through a move to Zambia and another return to Canada, through career changes and new schooling, and the site suffered as a result. We pulled off a few great things in 2014, including Ngwatilo Mawiyoo's interview with Kwani? editor Billy Kahora, but it was clear that OGOV needed a fresh leader, a fresh start.

And there was Prince Mensah - poet, editor, translator extraordinaire. A steadfast supporter of the magazine since its inception, for years Prince has emailed me whenever the magazine's lagged in producing new content for more than a week or two. Looking back, I realised that for the past few years Prince had become not only one of OGOV's greatest contributors and champions, but our new beating heart.

So it's time for that heart to take the lead.

I offered the position of Editor-in-Chief to Prince in February 2015 and he accepted. Already, Prince has produced new, rejuvenated submission guidelines, reopening the magazine to general submissions. He has many other exciting plans in the works, but I will leave it to Prince to reveal those at the appropriate time. Needless to say, I am confident OGOV will thrive during Prince's term, and I encourage you, our readers and writers, to get involved in shaping OGOV's future. New content, marking the start of Prince's editorship, will begin appearing on the site at the beginning of May. Stay tuned!

I will stay involved in the magazine as a Contributing Editor, helping where I can, and eagerly watching to see where we go next. Thank you all for making the past eight years such a blessing and joy. I can't imagine not having so many of you as a part of my community, and my life.

Thank you, especially, to Julian and Prince, and to my wife, Marta, without whose energy, patience and encouragement this site would never have come into existence. I remember one Saturday at Sharpnet Internet Cafe in Osu when Marta and I sat side-by-side for eight hours researching newspapers and websites and sending out press release after press release announcing this crazy new idea: an online magazine devoted to Ghanaian poetry. I remember that very distant dream Julian, Marta and I held. Now Julian is a father of two (the second just arrived last month!) and Marta and I are expecting our first child in August. And our first "baby," this little magazine of ours, is already moving out of the house, heading out on a new adventure. Imagine!

Thank you, thank you, all. And best of luck, Prince, though I know you will not need it.

Yours,

Rob Taylor
Co-Founder and Former Editor-in-Chief, One Ghana, One Voice

Three Poems from Liberia

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Sun, 12 Oct 2014 23:03:00 +0000

The following poems were written in the first half of 2014 by students at Suakoko Central High School (Grades 3 to 12) in Suakoko village, Bong County, Liberia. All three of these students are members of the school's poetry club (Exodus Weah is the president). They are all Kpelle, and Kpelle is their primary language.

These poems were provided to OGOV by their instructor, Michael Rubey, who left Liberia a few months ago. To the best of his knowledge all Suakoko village, and therefore these poets, have not been directly affected by the Ebola outbreak. We offer you these poems as an alternate way of thinking of Liberia as it suffers the throes of the outbreak. And also as a way to reflect on what is under threat, and all the powerful, beautiful voices that have already been silenced. But mostly, we offer these poems in celebration of the poets and the poems themselves. And we send all our encouragement to the Suakoko Poetry Club - may your produce brilliant poems and poets for years to come!

Untitled - Naomi Keah

O potatoe green
you are so fresh
but slowly, slowly you give blood

Money - Herbecca Fahn

Money! Money! On earth in the
night, in the days and everywhere
people are all on their way
looking for you. Where did you come
from? What makes you so important?

Is it God who blessed you? Or gave you
special blessing from heaven or on
earth? Can you show me both your mother
and father? Name who gave you this blessing.

Can you please explain what makes you fine?
In the presence of you my life is possible.

A Poem About my Grandfather - Exodus Weah

I take my grand father from the village
and carry he in the (USA) to stay with me.
After two (2) years, my grandfather become
to think about the things he use to do in the
village, running after animals, setting traps
to catch animals such as dear, ground hog,
bush pig, bush cow etc.
When he think about February, March, April
and May, he become to feel bad about his self
to be in the (USA)
Oh!! My lovely son I know you love me
very good. Among all my children you are
the only one that show love to me. The best.
But you know that February, March, April,
and May are near the corner, so I want to go
back and do my farm work, to the village,
also to sees the birds flying in the air very
happily, to sees my friends beating the country
gata: I know my trap that I set in the
forest has catch animal, but no want know
about it. Son said remember that the work
of a farmer never end, even to eat the rice.
I promise are will take you back the next day.

Interview with Billy Kahora, Managing Editor of Kwani?

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 19:19:00 +0000

This interview, the second in our series of interviews with the founders and editors of African literary websites and journals, features Billy Kahora, whose Kenyan outfit, Kwani?, is much more than simply an online publisher - it is a national literary institution, encompassing a print journal, books, website, local events, and more. The interview was conducted by Ngwatilo Mawiyoo.

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Ngwatilo Mawiyoo: Did you always know you would be a writer growing up?

Billy Kahora: No, I didn’t know I wanted to write when I was a kid, I just read a lot ‘til I was in my teens. When I couldn't find anything to read that satisfied my curiosity, anger, and admiration for all the things I was seeing and experiencing around me, that's when I thought about recreating my immediate conditions. I did it for fun until things seemed to get worse around me like they do for all teens. I realized then that I had to take this 'replication' of my surroundings a bit more seriously. After that writing became my default way of trying to explain the world, life and all else. The denial that this is what I wanted to do went on for a long time and still goes on.

Mawiyoo: What was your first published piece (and where did it appear)?

Kahora: My first published piece came out while I worked as a freelance journalist in one of the small Lifestyle magazines that proliferated Nairobi in the 90s and are now dead and gone. A more significant moment was when I won a short short story competition at the Grahamstown Writers Festival when I was a 3rd year student in Journalism school. The story was called"he Boy At The End Of Sand" It was 200 words.

Mawiyoo: What was your university experience like? What did you study?

Kahora: I studied Journalism at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. I’d left Kenya to become a writer. Everyone had told me that Journalism was a pretty handy career to try and use to become a writer. I would learn later that wasn't the case but through some stroke of luck I'd taken up English as my second major in addition to Journalism. It would prove priceless for my writerly ambitions.

I discovered creative non-fiction in my final year. It opened up all sorts of new possibilities. South Africa at the time was barely a decade out of apartheid and many fine examples of creative non-fiction were emerging that told the immediate and difficult realities of South Africa, which were not too different from what was going on at home. It was a kind of 'social reality' apprenticeship that showed how knowledge, theory, and writing craft could be used to good effect on the continent. All the things I learned in theory came to life in the crucible that was South Africa at the time.

Mawiyoo: How did you get hired for your current position?

Kahora: I kind of grew into it as the organization was growing. I sent a story to Kwani? in 2003 when I was still an M.A Media Studies student. The Founding Editor, Binyavanga, liked it. I did not hear from him till I got back to Kenya in late 2004 though – I’d been away for seven years. When I met him to discuss the story, we started talking about Kenya, writing, the two issues of Kwani? that were out, and creative non-fiction.

I told him that too much that was being published then – including some of the work in the first two editions of Kwani? – was detached, 'objective' in the narrative voice of bygone educations, privileges and entitlements. I felt that Kenyan language had taken a significant shift; mass 'reality' seemed to bend English, Kiswahili and our other African languages. I argued that different forms of creative non-fiction could serve us in the formalizing and telling of our often oral, informal and disjointed common stories in all their subjectivity.

Binyavanga challenged me to get something practical going based on that little speech. At the time the Munyakei story had just emerged through the Bosire Commission. Judy Kibinge, a friend of Binyavanga's and of Kwani?, was doing a documentary, and so I set out to tell his story in print with all this new access to which Judy was privy.

In the process, I also started helping Binyavanga commission non-fiction for the 3rd issue of Kwani?. We did Kwani? 4 together and when he left I became Editor and did the two volumes of Kwani? 5 on the 2007 elections. The position of Managing Editor was only formalized in 2008.

Mawiyoo: What are your greatest concerns as an editor and writer?

Kahora: The general lack of [literary] tools in the material we receive. When present, those with these tools seem disconnected from local realities, narratives and expressions. One specific technical question I've being trying to grapple with for the last few years is the dearth of 'honest' voice - that which brings forth a real subjective experience located in our idea and experience as a space but understands literature as an artistic register with aesthetics, technical rules and a larger vision. It is often ‘either, or.’ Many writers have access to interesting subjective experience but hardly understand the aesthetics of literary narrative. Those who seem to grasp the latter might well be writing from Mars - which is actually fine - if you are in Mars. (Please understand that my comments are written with a certain bias for literary mimetic representations).

Mawiyoo: The Kwani Trust was, for a long time, seen as the sole contemporary publisher of Kenyan writing. The Kwani? journal still remains the sole literary magazine in the country, which must put pressure on the magazine to be all things to all people. Is this pressure real for you? If so, do you ever feel the need to contend with it?

Kahora: No, we feel none of that pressure. The pressure we do acknowledge comes from trying to be what we've decided to be in the face of many people wanting us to be what they want. The pressure we feel is really about remaining relevant, maintaining and raising standards and discovering new creative voices.

Mawiyoo: How do you decide what direction to take for the annual issue?

Kahora: In retrospect we decide on a topic for the journal based on the following:

- What are ongoing Kenyan/East African realities that require an in-depth, creative take that wouldn't otherwise exist?
- What are the major concerns of the contemporary creative and artistic community that cannot find an outlet anywhere else?
- What are the major aesthetic and technical measures that we think are needed within the region?
- How practical is it to put out an issue of that particular topic? Is there funding? Are there a few key signature pieces that will carry the issue?

Mawiyoo: I understand that you're working on a novel called The Applications and 'a book about Juba'. Please tell me what they're about, how they're coming along and about your process as a writer.

Kahora: The Applications is a novel about a middle-class Kenyan woman who slowly degenerates mentally with the decline of a certain middle-classness that existed in the 90s in Kenya. She loses her mind and her family only to rediscover another life in which she can live on her own terms as a popular religious leader. The novel is split into several sections told by other members of her family, her husband, her two sons and a daughter. I'm one section away from a serious first draft. I started it seriously in 2006. I have been thinking about this last section since August 2013 and I'm hardly there yet.

Regarding the book about Juba, I travelled to Juba a few years ago for three weeks to write a small non-fiction book about an emerging city. I travelled with some well-laid plans, which helped with my enthrallment of the place and I quickly wrote half of the book and then realized that I needed to make another trip and finish the book there with my newly processed knowledge. The book needed to come from my living and breathing Juba. I'm still trying to take that trip and finish that book.

On my process: for me, fiction needs a lot of unadulterated time-space for the imagination to be completely unfettered. Non-fiction needs immersive presence and immediate context.

Mawiyoo: Binyavanga Wainaina and Yvonne Owuor are two notable writers who’ve been published by Kwani? in the past and have gone on to publish a memoir and novel respectively with mainstream “Western” publishers. There’s been some criticism by Kenyan readers that the work is edited for Western audiences and somehow betrays African publishers and markets. As a publisher and writer, would you say this is fair criticism? How does one strike a balance?

Kahora: There are two separate issues here: money and audiences. Writers need money just like, say, runners or academics who go to run in Berlin or teach in New York. Many writers feel they have limited options: the truth is that local publishers are notorious for mishandling writers and their works, even when they have money.

Western publishers, like all publishers, are in it for the money and so they fashion manuscripts according to their perceptions of their markets. There's nothing wrong with that, that's just good old fashioned supply-demand. However, a book is more than a commodity, at least to some writers and the local audiences who raise such concerns.

I always fall back on Sembene Ousmane's quote, "my markets are in the West, and my audiences are local." That's much tougher to say than actualize. The real problem for me would emerge if I pandered completely to Western capital without any other considerations.

One option that is emerging is holding local rights when you have sold the rest to Western publishers. That way you can make the money out in the West with a publisher based out there but at least control what is being produced for your local market, by either self-publishing and distributing or getting a local partner. Note that one's book has more chances for local recognition if it is universally (read: Western) acclaimed.

Mawiyoo: Your book, The True Story of David Munyakei, and Kwani? 5.1 and 5.2, which you edited, offer unique accounts of two critical points in Kenya’s history: the Goldenberg scandal of 1992 and the 2007-2008 post-election crisis, respectively. What do you see as the work of creative non-fiction in the Kenyan context?

Kahora: One key role of creative non-fiction is to open up key aspects of Kenyan and regional history in creative and accessible ways for as many people as possible. Without creative non-fiction or even fiction, many of these issues remain ephemeral TV or social media sound bites, academic papers on some dusty shelf, great media analyses that are only accessible to the educated and professional classes.

Though the greatest part of these kinds of historical moments remain in popular memory and public oral spaces, creative non-fiction offers the closest written record of just that. I've been watching, talking and reading about The Westgate Mall terrorist attack in the weeks after it happened and just comparing anecdote, rumor, supposition and all that's being written. There are few forms beyond either fiction or non-fiction that can try and collapse the two so that we can start a truthful recreation of what happened. Some of the more compelling investigative TV accounts are using the story telling and performative element formats in the reportage.

Mawiyoo: Finally, do you remember this story that appeared in the newspapers a few years ago (about how a man survived being eaten by a python)? I heard about it because the Concerned Kenyan Writers group discussed the story. I think it was Binyavanga who half seriously concluded that it’s no wonder fiction seems irrelevant in Kenya, since reality itself is so far out! With your fiction writer hat on, what do you think is the work or potential of fiction in Kenya?

Kahora: Reality is not only far out in Kenya. It is far out in Mpumalanga, Western Virginia, North New Zealand, Chenai, Chernobyl. Do you know how many people survive being eaten by anacondas in South America?

Great fiction is not written in places where reality is 'far in'. Fiction is written in places where people have a grasp on language (both written and oral) that is highly relevant to the material conditions of the society they live in. It’s written in places that have a storytelling tradition that has internalized that society's culture and economy within the same language(s).

Great fiction happens in places where those languages and storytelling traditions can be streamlined into today's primarily capitalist and modern world, and the publishing offshoots and all the technical processes and mechanisms that come with it.

Stories are a prerequisite of humanity. Whether a society can convert story into a genre, industry, system under its prevailing cultural and economic conditions is what counts in its production of fiction. And Kenya, according to me, struggles in these three conditions to create a serious fiction industry that is sustainable and ongoing. We will continue doing piecemeal things for a while and making excuses as we go along till we address those three primary things.

---

Billy Kahora is the Managing Editor of Kwani? His writing has appeared in Granta, Kwani?, Chimurenga and Vanity Fair. Billy’s short story, "Treadmill Love", was highly commended by the 2007 Caine Prize judges. He is the author of The True Story of David Munyakei, a non-fiction novella about Kenya’s biggest whistleblower, and screenwriter for Soul Boy, a Kenyan film that was nominated for 5 African Movie Academy Awards. Billy was a Regional judge for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

Ngwatilo Mawiyoo is a poet and writer, currently based in Vancouver, BC, where she is a student at University of British Columbia’s MFA program. Her book Blue Mothertongue (2010) explored matters of identity in urban spaces and the African diaspora. Her album “Introducing Ngwatilo” (2011) showcases some of her solo work and musical collaborations. She interned at Kwani Trust in 2008.

Interview with Ivor Hartmann, Founder of Storytime and African Roar

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Sat, 05 Jul 2014 14:24:00 +0000

This interview marks the beginning of a new occasional series of interviews with the founders and editors of African literary websites. Our hope is to collect the stories of the early efforts in African online literary publishing. First up is Ivor Hartmann, founder of the pan-African fiction site, StoryTime.

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Rob Taylor: What was your background in the arts prior to founding StoryTime? What experience did you have in writing? In publishing?

Ivor Hartmann: I have been involved primarily in the arts since I finished High School in 1991. I wrote fiction and poetry for many years before I left school, and occasionally afterwards until 2007 when I returned to writing in earnest. Previous to StoryTime I had no experience in publishing at all.

Taylor: What was your primary motivation for starting StoryTime? What goals did you set for yourself in making the magazine?

Hartmann: After returning to writing I naturally began to investigate publishing markets, especially local publishing, and was wholly underwhelmed by African publishing in 2007. In particular, there seemed to be a real dearth of literary magazines and even more so for anything but general fiction. So rather than moan about it I endeavoured to do something, and the StoryTime magazine was born. My goal was simple, to publish short fiction by African writers, with a zero budget.

Taylor: Can you explain, briefly, the basic structures of StoryTime (the website’s layout, publication scope and frequency, and the organizational/editorial structure of the magazine), and how they fed into/served your motivations for founding the magazine?

Hartmann: Acting on the prime directive of a zero budget, and the severe limitations involved in that, I knew it had to be a digital publication and the platform used had to be free and easily internationally accessible. Seeing that blogs were in effect a free website that could be tailored into a magazine with some basic HTML knowledge, I set up StoryTime on Google’s Blogger − which had the advantage over other blog sites in that it was very stable, had a foreseeable longevity, and one’s word tags were free adwords for Google’s search engine. Being new to HTML, and publishing on the whole, it was very much a learn-as-one-went-along process, so the magazine layout evolved over time until I had a format that I felt worked and was efficient for both the reader and in the publishing process.   In the beginning I was publishing works as soon as they came out of editing, it was pretty erratic. It took a while to build up a decent submissions and editing queue and then I switched to publishing one story a week, which was what I could handle. From the beginning to the close of the magazine I was the sole editor and publisher apart from Emmanuel Sigauke who took over for me during my annual two week holiday, and a few guest editors in the last year. There were a few reasons for this among them was that this was a non-profit, zero budget, non-funded (on purpose) publication, so I could not pay anyone for their time. Another was that I realised that editing every day vastly improved my own writing craft. Also, being set to a weekly publication meant that reliability in editing to a final work in time was paramount.

Taylor: StoryTime put a particular emphasis on displaying each published story as its own mini-publication, complete with a “cover image”. Why was this important to you?

Hartmann: I wanted each individual work to receive maximum exposure on the home page for its first week of publication and not get lost in the crowd as happens with a multiple work publication. It also served to maintain a frequency of publishing that kept readers actively engaged with the site. Being an artist it was instinctive for me to create an interesting cover artwork for each work, which also worked well online especially in the sharing of links to the work across multiple platforms.

Taylor: Why did you choose to make StoryTime an online magazine? Had you ever considered making it a print magazine from the start?

Hartmann: On a zero budget and a complete unwillingness to be funded in any way (I’ve had too many bad experiences with funded projects) an online publication was the only viable route open to me. So no, I had no inclination to make it a print magazine; I did however want to publish a digital and print anthology eventually, either from the magazine or separately, as soon as I had the experience and pool of work to draw on.

Taylor: What do you think of as the major hurdles in running an online magazine (as opposed to a print magazine)? The major benefits?

Hartmann: I don’t know that are really any major hurdles if one has the time and determination, sure there are limits but most often limits nurture innovation and creativity when combined with determination. Obviously the main benefit is in not needing a huge capital outlay that a print magazine usually requires, but this can also be said of Print On Demand publishing, given a ready marketplace for it.

Taylor: Of those hurdles and benefits, which, if any, do you think are particular to working in an African environment?

Hartmann: A particular African hurdle is that for most writers our main publishing languages of English and French are not our mother tongues (of which there are over 100 widely spoken languages and over 3000 less so, not counting dialects thereof). So in particular it’s a hurdle for new writers and in editing with them their works, but like anything when the determination is there it is soon overcome. I do however think that there should be much more publishing in local languages but this is no easy task for a publisher.

Taylor: Did you encounter any particular challenges, which you haven’t touched on yet, in running an online magazine in an African context? If so, what were they?

Hartmann: In the beginning bandwidth was a serious problem, everything took ages to work, upload, etc. so a near infinite patience was totally required. This did become easier over the years as service providers improved their infrastructures and affordability, but it is still a problem for many African countries.

Taylor: At its peak, how many hours a week were you devoting to the operation of StoryTime?

Hartmann: From the beginning till its close I spent on average four hours every day for nearly six years on the magazine.

Taylor: Wow! So much work! I commend you for that. Similarly, at its peak, how much money were you spending per year to keep StoryTime afloat? Did you have any revenue streams to combat the expenses?

Hartmann: I spent nothing but for a basic internet service and my time, and the magazine generated no income. Later the African Roar anthology was launched (and StoryTime as a micro-publisher) and this did, and does, generate some income.

Taylor: Speaking of African Roar, when in StoryTime’s timeline did you begin producing these print anthologies of the magazine? What motivated this development?

Hartmann: African Roar was launched in 2010, so four years after the magazine started. The anthology was something I wanted to do from the beginning. In 2010 I felt I was ready, Emmanuel Sigauke was keen to co-edit, and we had a good-sized pool of work to draw from. Also the advent of mass e-readers enabled me to form a realistic publishing model for a micro-press, that is to say StoryTime publishes the e-book edition first with no expenditure but time and its sales fund the POD print edition. 2014 will be the first African Roar published solely from submissions only for it. Emmanuel and I have also started alternating our editing of it rather than co-editing, last year was the first year of that with Emmanuel being the sole Ed. for African Roar 2013.

Taylor: Why did you decide, in 2012, to close the StoryTime magazine?

Hartmann: By 2012 the online African literature magazine scene was vastly improved from when I started in 2007. And, as much as I loved the magazine I needed to move forward with other things, including my own writing.

Taylor: Though the online magazine is no longer in operation, African Roar is - as you've mentioned in previous answers - still running. This seems surprising, as the general wisdom is that print publications are more onerous (in terms of finances, distribution, production, etc.) than online magazines. Why has it continued on past the life of the online magazine?

Hartmann: A combination of factors made StoryTime viable as a micro-publisher of the African Roar anthology and other anthologies after the magazine closed. The main one I’ve already covered is my publishing model, one that was not possible until fairly recently. Some of the others are time, experience, profit, and exposure. In terms of time, an annual anthology takes up far less than a weekly magazine. After the years of the magazine and editing the anthologies with Emmanuel, I had accrued enough hands-on experience in publishing to be able to continue as professional micro-publisher. Whilst I never minded that fact that the magazine would never earn a cent, and in fact preferred it that way, as a publisher with quite a few ideas for the future I needed StoryTime to become a financially viable entity, which it has begun to. The magazine and anthologies have built up a reasonable reputation with African writers, enough so that when we put out a call for submissions we get a large enough pool to be able to produce quality publications.

Taylor: You've mentioned Emmanuel Sigauke, your co-editor on African Roar, a few times now. Emmanuel is a US-based Zimbabwean author (and past OGOV contributor), you are a South African-based Zimbabwean, and the publication itself features the work of African writers from around the continent. In other words, it’s very much an international project. How did you first get in touch with Emmanuel, and how do you work with him now?

Hartmann: Emmanuel was one of the first contributors to the magazine whose work as a writer, literature professor, and editor, I much respected, so for me he was an obvious choice to ask for help as a relative newbie, and he was gracious enough to do so. We have worked very well together since we started on African Roar, we share similar work ethics and great passion for African writing, and I hope we shall continue to do so as StoryTime grows.

Taylor: Even though African Roar is a print publication, do you think it could have come into being without being preceded by the website?

Hartmann: I think it could have, sure, but it would have been a much harder start, both in terms of a publishing model and my own learning curve.

Taylor: If you could speak with a young writer who was interested in starting a new literary publication (either print or online) in Africa, what one piece of advice would you give them (Africa-specific, or otherwise)? What one pitfall would you suggest they avoid?

Hartmann: Be utterly determined to achieve what you have set out to achieve, tenacity trumps talent.   Don’t listen to your critics unless they have something truly constructive to say, and then listen well and don’t be afraid to change how you are doing things.

Taylor: Looking back now over your time operating StoryTime, do you think you accomplished the goals you set out for yourself? If so, what made that possible? If not, what prevented you?

Hartmann: I certainly did, I set out to publish African writers from an independent pan-African platform, internationally, which I did, and continue to do so. What made it possible? The factors and variables are too many to track, but initial sound impulse and applied determination formed a solid base that enabled me to achieve my goals.

Taylor: Beyond the continued publication of African Roar, what are your literary goals going forward? Any recent projects, or new ones on the horizon?

Hartmann: I have too many ideas about what I’d like StoryTime to do, but primarily I am seeking to address the serious lack of genre fiction from African writers. Sure there has been a surge in Crime (mainly driven by South African writers) and Romance (mainly driven by Nigerian writers) fiction in the last ten years, but all the rest is woefully lacking. This was why end of 2011 I put out a call for Science Fiction and in Dec 2012 published AfroSF, the very first pan-African Science Fiction anthology that was open to submission to all African writers at home and abroad. I am currently putting together volume two of AfroSF for 2014. So that’s been my start in publishing genre fiction and I hope to over the next decade to publish more anthologies, each addressing a specific genre.

Maya Angelou, 1928 - 2014

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Thu, 29 May 2014 02:15:00 +0000

Africa - Maya Angelou

Thus she had lain
sugercane sweet
deserts her hair
golden her feet
mountains her breasts
two Niles her tears.
Thus she has lain
Black through the years.

Over the white seas
rime white and cold
brigands ungentled
icicle bold
took her young daughters
sold her strong sons
churched her with Jesus
bled her with guns.
Thus she has lain.

Now she is rising
remember her pain
remember the losses
her screams loud and vain
remember her riches
her history slain
now she is striding
although she has lain.

In September of last year, we released the results of seven years of polling up-and-coming Ghanaian poets on the question "Which poets have most influenced and informed your work?" The answer, loud and clear: Kofi Awoonor and Maya Angelou. What a shock it has been to lose them both in the months that followed. And what a challenge to the next generation, required now to do their best to fill this gaping hole. But we have their poems still, thank goodness.

While not born in Ghana, in the early 1960s Angelou lived in Accra, where she was an employee of the University of Ghana's School of Music and Drama, the features editor for The African Review, and wrote for The Ghanaian Times. It was in Accra that she met Malcolm X, with whom she returned to the United States in 1964, her life and writing forever shaped by her time in Ghana. And, as it turns out, Ghanaian writing forever shaped by her.

In our poll, Angelou's name came up more often as a poetic influence than any other North American artist, and (by a wide margin) more than any other female artist. Angelou's was one of few modern, outside voices to penetrate Ghanaian poets' consciousnesses, and virtually the only female voice.

Let this reality be a challenge to North American writers and female writers alike, of course, but more essentially, let it be a challenge to all of us as readers and champions of new writing: to make space for outside voices, still often drowned out. To allow the new, strong female voices of the following generations to rise. When you think of Maya Angelou in the coming days, think too of female Ghanaian poets writing now. Think of Edith Faalong. Think of Vida Ayitah. Think of LS Mensah. Aisha Nelson. Emma Akuffo. Juanita Tsikata. Mariska Taylor-Darko. Nana Yeboaa. And on. And on. Think of them and celebrate. This, more than anything, seems like a great way to honour Maya Angelou's legacy today.

Still I Rise - Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Led Into Slaughter - Bernard Kudjoe

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Mon, 19 May 2014 06:42:00 +0000

Maybe we made you angry
Maybe not
What you’ve brought forth
We cannot bear
Have you forgotten so soon?
You woke us up gently
Kindly displayed our tools
At the doors of our eyes
Tamely, you led us into the field
We did not know
The evil you harbored
Out on this naked land
We mingled under your volcano
Our featherless bodies rainwater
A meal cook in us
Did our axes fly into your eyes?
We pondered and pleaded
Have you forgotten so soon
You, who reign from the skies?

Author Profile - Bernard Kudjoe

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Mon, 19 May 2014 06:35:00 +0000

Biography:

Bernard Kudjoe lives in Wassa Akropong in the Western Region of Ghana. He received his education at Osei Tutu Senior High School in Kumasi and at the University for Development Studies. He currently manages a family business. His hobbies are reading, listening to music, and writing poems and short stories.

Five Questions with Bernard Kudjoe:

1. How long have you been writing poetry?

I started soon after I completed senior high school.

2. Who are your favourite poets? Which poets have most informed and inspired your work?

My favourite poets, locally, are Kwesi Brew and Kofi Awoonor. I also like Lenrie Peters in Gambia and William Wordsworth from England.

3. What do you hope to accomplish with your poetry?

I want to be celebrated within and outside the country like other famous Ghanaian writers with my own collection of poems.

4. What did you think of poetry when you were attending Osei Tutu Senior High School in Kumasi? Was there any poetry activity that happened on campus, and were you involved in it?

To be frank with you, there was nothing of that sort on campus, no poetry activities and nobody was even interested in reading your writings. In fact I was compelled to offer science at the beginning in school; a family tradition, and I under-performed. So I switched and offered pure literature as part of my electives because I knew inside me that I desired to write poems of my own.

5. My favorurite line in "Led into Slaughter" is "Our featherless bodies rainwater" - a fresh, surprising line made intense by the presence of the volcano in the preceding line. I'm wondering when in the process of writing this poem did that line/image come to you - was it in the poem from the beginning, or did it come to you later in composition?

Wow, it's great that you like that. That line came to me later in the composition. I needed words to create more emphasis on how hot the sun was shining on their bare bodies and how profusely they were sweating as they work on the field and there, it just came. I considered it for sometime and found it fit where it is now.

Contact Bernard Kudjoe:

bernardkudjoe(at)gmail(dot)com

Greedy Crows - Kyilleh Dominic Arituo

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 06:41:00 +0000

- after Darko Antwi's "Scarecrow"

They went to see
For themselves

There was no body
Only dry sticks
Wearing a white jellaba

There was no fear
It is gone
Like a nightmare

There was no farmer
No fear –

Only some gentle breeze
Moving a dress
To and fro
To and fro

Like a boy on a swing

Greedy crows –
They stole much seeds
During the sowing time

They are here again
To harvest the grains

Author Profile - Kyilleh Dominic Arituo

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 06:38:00 +0000

Biography:

Kyilleh Dominic Arituo was born in Fielmua, Sissala West District in the Upper West Region. After his Senior Secondary education at Lawra, he was employed by the Kwahu North District Assembly as the Steward of the Presidential Lodge. By the close of 2008, he began publishing poems in the Writers Page Gh/Daily Graphic, The Mirror and other online magazines. He is currently enrolled in B.A. Studies at Valley View University.

Five Questions with Kyilleh Dominic Arituo:

1. Usually I will ask a poet what inspired their given poem, but here it is clearly Darko Antwi's "Scarecrow", which we published last month on this site. What was it about that poem that triggered you to respond to it in this way?

The title and the simplicity of the poem in style and diction. This is the type of poem I want to write, simple and attractive. We live in a text message era where the majority of people spend their leisure time "Facebooking" or blogging rather than reading novels or poems like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" for pleasure. The simpler and more concise a writer becomes the more attractive their works to their fans.

The title of Darko's poem, “Scarecrow”, reminded me of my childhood experience with birds and the making of scarecrows during sowing seasons and harvest seasons at the farm in the Upper West region. The birds would eat the greater amount of the seeds despite the scarecrows. Devastating!

I didn’t find my scarecrow in Darko’s poem, I felt left out in his experience. To show my respect and appreciation to him, I stood in his footprint and painted my crow and scarecrow as a way of contextualizing the experience for my people (peasant farmers in Northern Ghana).

2. In my reading, the two poems (yours and Darko's) have quite different tones, chiefly around the idea of fear. Fear's having left is a relief in Darko's poem, and a curse (for the farmer, at least) in yours. Do you read the poems as being opposite, tonally? Do they have places of overlap?

The poems are opposite, tonally. In Darko’s poem, the personas are the ones being scared by an imaginary scarecrow. The personas on discovering that it was an imaginary scarecrow, overcome the fear. In my poem, on the other hand, the farmer intentionally set up a scarecrow to put fear in the birds but unfortunately for him, the birds on closer examination found out that what seemed to be a human being was “Only dry sticks / Wearing a white jellaba.” The birds overcame their fear and went into the farm to eat the seeds. This is a curse to the farmer.

3. The "take away" image I have in your poem is that of the boy on the swing, coming and going, casually and playfully, and yet (as a parallel to the crows' visits) devastatingly for the farmer. It's a nice image that is made menacing by the context. How did you come upon that line? Did it come in your first writing, or in later edits?

As you rightly said, the image is “made menacing by the context”. The persona is angrily mimicking the birds’ mockery of the farmer who sets up the scarecrow to scare them away.

Initially, I wrote the first thirteen lines to comment on Darko’s poem but when my attempt to publish it failed; I added the last seven lines. This was all done at a sitting.

4. Some might say a poem like this copies too heavily from its "source" poem, and therefore verges on plagiarism. What would you say to them?

I don’t think this is the case. Inspiration based on experience has no respect for plagiarism. It is true that I stood in Darko’s footprint and did the painting, but the pictures painted are not the same. Every good artist would testify to this fact as you have already attested that the poems have different tones. There are many examples of poems in this nature, for example “The Tyger” by William Blake and “The Pauper” by Richard Ntiru.

5. If you could have one of your poems "remixed" by another poet, living or dead, who would it be, and why?

If I am to choose from abroad it would be Warsan Shire, a British-Somali poet. Here at home, I would choose Darko Antwi for reasons of simplicity of diction and quality of poetry.

Contact Kyilleh Dominic Arituo:

mypoemmystory(at)gmail(dot)com

Ghana Poetry Festival Announcement - April 25th, 2014

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 07:33:00 +0000

Ghana Poetry Festival is a day poetry festival to be held on April 25th, 2014 at The Center for National Culture, Accra. It will feature book readings, book sales, panel discussions, performance poetry among others. During this festival, legends and pioneers of Ghana poetry will be honored. It will also feature some of the exciting young talents from Ghana.

Theme: The Emergence of Poetry & Its Relevance Today

Location: Centre for National Culture (Art Centre) Accra

Key Activities: Poetry Essay Reading/Poetry Reading/ Open Mic Poetry Session/ Poetry Book Sale / Peer Poetry Reviews / Ghanaian Poetry Legend Tribute & Praise Songs / Soul & Jazz Performance by Zanuela from UK / Poetry Performance

Guest of Honour: Hon. Deputy Minister, Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts

Partners: Poetry Foundation Ghana/Poetry Nite With Rainmakers / People of Equal Thoughts & Spirit/ Kumasi Inclined Poets (KIPS) / Academy of Young Writers/ Walk The Talk / Writers Project of Ghana/ Tyba Poetry etc.

Scarecrow - Darko Antwi

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 08:01:00 +0000

We went to see
For ourselves

There was no ghost
Only slamming doors
And flapping curtains

There was no fear

It had vanished
Like the ghost

There was no ghost
No fear -

Only some angry harmattan wind
Knocking things about
Like a wounded lion

Author Profile - Darko Antwi

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Wed, 19 Feb 2014 08:00:00 +0000

Biography:

Darko Antwi was born in Ashanti New Town, Kumasi, in May 1976 to Kwaku Antwi and Elizabeth Donkor. After his secondary education at Bekwai Seventh Day Adventist, Antwi taught in local kindergarten and primary schools for five years.

In September 2002 he traveled to the United Kingdom. During his stay in England, he was occupied by a string of odd jobs, including the position of a factory labourer, fabric launderer and newspaper columnist.

Antwi is the proprietor of Seaweed Books, publishers of Phillis Wheatley Chapter and organizers of both the Ahenkro Book Fair and the Miss Akoto Book Club. He also serves as a Contributing Editor with One Ghana One Voice.

Five Questions with Darko Antwi:

1. With "Scarecrow" you have joined the long list of OGOV poets writing about the harmattan. That said, do you consider this poem to be "about" the harmattan, or is the harmattan simply a feature of it?

Standing by the title, the speaker is reporting the aftermath of a frightening moment. Reducing it to characters, it is as well about the natural stunt of Harmattan: the wrath of one violent tropical condition. When ground and sieved, Harmattan would come to surface. All put together, it could be related to the need to go into the deep to uproot and discard every form of fear, visible or invisible: fear of heights, fear of darkness, fear of pregnancy, fear of the future, fear of cancer, fear of people and so on.

2. Have you written many poems about the harmattan? Is it a subject you're interested in writing about, generally, or was this a rare appearance of it in your work?

'Harmattan Shall Flee' is one of my earliest poems. That was written in the 1990s. A street typist around the walls of Kumasi Central Post Office got it organised on an official paper, costing me something less than ₵500 (5GHp). I wanted it published. I tried Daily Graphic and a couple of national newspapers eventually. None of them published nor replied. Probably it was not worthy. Maybe it failed largely on evidence that those papers hadn’t any column for poetry by then.

Since that disappointing attempt, I didn’t write anything about the subject until ‘Scarecrow’ came to mind in 2004.

3. "Scarecrow" is a very haunting poem. I wonder what inspired you to write it - a line? An image? An idea?

In 1988, my family was two years into a new home it had moved in to from Ashanti New Town. Everything was going well. New buildings were being put up on the bushy plots closest to ours. The neighbourhood population was growing. The second of my three brothers was born. That same year, I started secondary school at age twelve. The only bad news was the death of my beloved uncle, the 23-year old Akwasi Gyamfi - a sufferer of sickle cell disease.

One early morning, within the first week of Akwasi’s death, I was sent into his room to pick an item. Already, I had developed a fear for darkness. At night, I couldn’t stay in any of the rooms unaccompanied. This time round, I got scared while it was still day, while attending to the room of my deceased uncle. Some few yards to the door, I heard noises. I panicked. I went back to my grandma reporting the ghost I thought I heard. "Ghosts are not real," she responded in disbelief. But I remained quiet and wouldn’t move. She rebuked me saying: "Come on… let’s go in there… show me that your mother or father who has turned into a ghost."

So terrified and humiliated, I followed her into the room. The rest of the story are in the lines of "Scarecrow".

4. You have always been a leading critic and commentator on Ghanaian poetry. How do you find the state of the Ghanaian poetry scene now, compared to five years ago?

Five years ago, there was so much heat. That was a necessary energy, I think. By then, friendships were formed, errors were made, lessons were learned, and confidence was built. Now, it looks very much relaxed. It is not at all a negative relaxation; because between 2009 and the present, we have witnessed the fruit of the weekly interaction and the author exposure of the OGOV scheme, particularly. Since then several books have been published to the credit of some of the poets who were featured. Though minor, the influence of the period can’t be underestimated. Mariska Taylor-Darko and Elikplim Akorli are among the few whose works should not be taken for granted. I am proud to add that I have recently finished a foreword for Nana Yeboaa’s new book, "On the Banks of the Volta".

Interest for online poetry has gone down partly because the stage is active with regular Spoken Word performances. It's encouraging to note that the desire for attention is getting increasingly competitive. Sticking out my neck, it is my firmest opinion that the Spoken Word movement has rather given a boost to the written form. Nana Asaase, Mutumbo da Poet and others have become household names to the attention of the art they represent. There could be other trivial factors to the decline of online activities. We've got to examine them.

5. Continuing off that last question, where do you see things going in the next five years? Ten years? Are you optimistic about the current trajectory we're on?

We don't have much control over the production of quality titles. Improvement is essential, nevertheless. We are now left with a relationship with the public. Ghanaian poetry has to be discussed by ordinary people. It has to be in the news. We have to befriend the mainstream media. They have to write about poets and poetry. That job should not be the reserve solely of journalists. I am afraid they have little expertise, and little commitment/interest in creative writing. Writers (poets) should volunteer critical and exciting reviews. The papers are not too willing to pay allowances. Let's be ready for a sacrifice. Let's do this with the hope that the demand for poetry will become part of the everyday life of the average Ghanaian. Let's do this with hope that someday in the next five years, publishers will have confidence in Ghanaian poetry. Let's hope that in the next ten years, several poets and some excellent works will get domestic and international recognition. That will go a long way to encourage the next generation.

As of now, we have a bunch of poets who have been inspired to share their works with colleagues. It hasn't gone beyond that. It takes calculated deeds to go beyond this dull practice of poet-to-poet readership. I would love any alternative suggestion for the progress of Ghanaian poetry. If any better deed is put to work, I would have faith. But where there is no such application, other than the current trajectory, optimism would be a farce to uphold. As earnest as attention is needed, Poetry Foundation Ghana and Writers Project of Ghana are doing a lot to publicise and develop talents. Thanks should go to the dedicated teams and visionary leaders behind their operation.

Contact Darko:

darko.antwi@yahoo.co.uk

The Lucky Ones Are Not Yet Born - William Saint George

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 07:41:00 +0000

The lucky ones
are still unborn.

Still they live
in Odomankoma's womb
and cast pearls
into the ocean
we call the starry sky.

They look down
into his pot,
and ask the old (wo)man

What is that black smoke
and that flashing flame?
Why do they cry
when they know
you do not hear?

Odomankoma,
wisest in all the heavens,
tells them:

That is hell,
with her new gods,
preaching fashion and makeup.

Ananse has fooled them,
and taken all knowledge,
so they read a book
and think they are right.
They do not look,
they will not find,
but pray I do not send you there,
you lucky ones!

Author Profile - William Saint George

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 07:40:00 +0000

Biography:

William Saint George is the pen name of Jesse Jojo Johnson, an Entrepreneur-In-Training at Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST), a professional photographer and an active blogger.

Five Questions with William:

1. The title of this poem is a reference to Ayi Kwei Armah's novel, "The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born". How does this poem connect, for you, with the subject matter and theme's of Armah's book?

The title of this poem is a deliberate echo of the book you mention. This poem shares the disillusionment with contemporary Ghanaian society expressed in Ayi Kwei Armah's novel.

2. The title and opening lines of the poem suggest that the "lucky ones" will be born one day. When do you think that day will come, and what will the world look like at that time?

I have no answer to that. The poem suggests the "lucky ones" are being held back by God, but it doesn't look to answer when they will come, or what the world should be like then. It is a question the reader's instincts can best answer. What's interesting is God's reply "That is hell,..." and his closing statements in the last stanza suggest that the "lucky ones" may never come.

3. You are an active critic of Ghanaian writing - you mentioned in our last interview with you that you wanted to shape "Ghana's "poetic thought" by not only writing poetry, but by writing about poetry." What is your current opinion of the state of Ghanaian poetry? What are its strengths and weaknesses?

Ghanaian poetry today is a patchwork of different voices coexisting in an oddly interesting flux. I've experienced vastly different forms and one thing has struck me, Ghanaian poetry doesn't seem to have grown up. Yet. But that's just a factor of time. It will become better one hopes.

Poetry is functioning as it should, as a reflection of society's spirit. Ghana's poetry reflects the cosmopolitan world view of those who practice it, and that's a good thing. However, I wish more people understood how serious poetry is. Too many poets see the art as a means to an end, and that's disappointing.

4. Continuing off that last question, where do you see Ghanaian poetry going in the next 10 or 20 years? Are you optimistic that a poetic world more suitable for the "lucky ones" will be made, or are you pessimistic?

The only thing certain is poets will become better, and as their readers become more sophisticated, poems will be more refined. That pleases me. I have no idea which direction poetry will take. If things continue as they are right now, poetry might end up resembling today's music industry - or any other popular art form. That, to me, will be tragic.

5. Do you have a favourite Ghanaian poet right now, someone who you think deserves more attention? Or perhaps a non-Ghanaian who young Ghanaian poets could turn to for inspiration?

Singling out one person will be unfair to others whose work has pleased me. I'll mention a number of poets who I pay attention to, whose poetry I feel deserves more recognition. They are, in no order of preference, Efo Dela, Kwabena Agyare, Daniel Kojo Appiah and Amma Konadu Anarfi. I've made a deliberate effort to discover more Ghanaian poets (who actually write their poems) and I've yet to meet others who're more deserving.

As most of the non-Ghanaian poets I read are dead, I doubt many young poets here will find inspiration in them. Still, I must mention WH Auden as my greatest inspiration for the past year.

Contact William:

williamsaintgeorge(at)gmail.com

How Poems Work #7 - Rob Taylor on Daniel Karasik's "The Pilgrim Looks Up"

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Mon, 27 Jan 2014 06:02:00 +0000

The Pilgrim Looks Up – Daniel Karasik

Of a book I read last week, on the theme of memory,
I’ve forgotten everything, except for a brief description
of how the narrator, on returning to his Tyrolean childhood home,
was remembered by acquaintances of his early years
for his habit of always,
upon stepping outdoors, looking up
to observe the sky’s condition.

When travelling
I too have often done this.

On the African coast, in harmattan season,
the sky would stay so perpetually hazed
that no amount of looking would make that pilgrim’s art
make sense.

A proud, even a hostile sky,
as I remember it: so utterly unwilling to reveal itself.
For three months I could look at nothing else.

When I approached Daniel Karasik with a request to republish his poem "The Pilgrim Looks Up" on One Ghana, One Voice, I mentioned that I was also considering writing a “How Poems Work” essay on it. Daniel sent me a reply confirming he was happy to have the poem republished, and even went so far as to offer me his own take on a “How Poems Work” essay for “The Pilgrim Looks Up.” It was two words long: It doesn’t.

It was a surprising comment on a poem Karasik had chosen only months before to include in his first poetry collection, Hungry (Cormorant Books, 2013). One can probably chalk it up, in large part, to Karasik’s humility and good sense of humour. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he felt there was a little bit of truth to the statement, as well (a disappointing thought considering the excellence of the poem). I remember how quickly I turned on a few of my own darlings (only sometimes deservedly) after finally seeing them in publication in my first poetry collection. Set in their new home within a larger collection, some of them having until then gathered dust in a drawer for 5+ years, a few of my poems seemed out of place, unable to hold their own. And the poems most likely to disappoint me were the ones I was now most distant from, both in the length of time since I’d written them and the physical distance I’d put between the “me” of here and now and the “me” of then and there (hunched over my notebook, scrawling out first drafts).

Our feelings about poems, especially our own, are elusive and ever-changing. Over time and space we return to these texts, inevitably older and hopefully wiser, and they become new things, the wisdom contained within them growing or shrinking or transforming. The poems we read while travelling the world take on different import in our minds than the ones we read in the comfort of our living rooms. Our relationship with poems we read at 20 or 30 or 60 years old are fundamentally different because of that change.

So maybe Daniel was being humble. Maybe he was being serious. Possibly (probably, I suspect) a little of both. To ask him, though, would ruin the fun of speculation. And from what better vantage point can one consider “The Pilgrim Looks Up” than from one clouded in uncertainty?

“The Pilgrim Looks Up” is a meditation on uncertainty, specifically on the key ingredients that make our understandings of the world less-that-assured: memory, place and perspective. The triangular relationship between these three forces is built throughout the poem, with a particular emphasis on one or the other presented from stanza to stanza. Running through the poem, also, is the establishment and merger of two separate narratives: the story of the speaker of the poem (the “speaker” for the purposes of this essay) and the story of the book-within-a-poem’s narrator (the “book’s narrator”). All of this builds to Karasik’s conclusions, on how we live in and embody uncertainty, in the closing fourth stanza.

Right from the first line, Karasik inserts his theme of “memory” into the poem. He does this by injecting it into the (fictitious?) book his speaker had been reading the week before the poem’s “action” takes place. Specifically, he brings in the theme of memory’s evasiveness – how most of what we experience slips away, leaving only touchstones (which themselves may not necessarily be “accurate"). In this case it is the book’s narrator’s habit of “looking up / to observe the sky’s condition” that remains in the minds of his childhood acquaintances. It is a habit that the speaker will come to embody by the end of the poem, as the meta-story creeps steadily into the poem’s central narrative.

The second stanza, a single brief sentence over two lines, performs an essential function. It propels the lives of the speaker and the book’s narrator further toward one another (both are “travelling”) and in so doing establishes that a sense of place and placelessness (a sense most clearly highlighted when one travels) is a concern not just of the book’s narrator, returning to his Tyrolean home, but also a direct concern of the speaker.

The third stanza provides for us the speaker’s place of travel, “the African coast,” and introduces the touchstone memory of the speaker’s story: the dust-filled harmattan sky. This touchstone fits well with the touchstone of the book’s narrator’s story – “looking up / to observe the sky’s condition” – preparing us for the closing fourth stanza, and the full merger of the two storylines. The third stanza also aggressively introduces new perspectives into the poem, which play with how we are to see, and approach, the poem. Until now, all we’ve known about the poem’s location is that it probably isn’t set in Tyrol (an international region in the Alps that includes both the state of North Tyrol in Austria and the province of South Tyrol in Italy), which seems “outside” the speaker’s world – a far off place read about in a book. But in stanza three we are not only given our first grounded place within the speaker’s world, “the African coast,” but also a clear perspective from which to view it: outside. “On the African coast… the sky would stay…”. We are viewing Africa from a distance, both of time and place (that place, I assume, being the Western world).[1]

Harmattan, West Africa
(Photo Source)

And yet a twist is thrown into that structure by the introduction of the word harmattan.[2] Harmattan is such a foreign concept to Western audiences that the word itself is underscored by a red squiggly line each time I type it into my North American word processor. (Do you mean Marmaton? it asks when I right-click – my word processor knows the name of a tributary of Kansas' Little Osage River, but not the name for a major recurring environmental event which affects the lives of hundreds of millions of people annually). Here in Karasik’s poem, though, harmattan is mentioned without explanation. And in making that choice, Karasik welcomes in another perspective to the poem: the West African insider, the person for whom “harmattan” does not need quotes or italics or a red squiggly line. The poem is instantaneously shot into this new moment and place, as if the author is saying “We all know what’s going on here. If you feel left out, you can Google it.”

Marmaton River, Kansas, USA

The poem also enters, in this moment, into dialogue with the volume of West African poems written on the subject of the harmattan, and some of the dominant themes such poems often embody – confusion, mystery, deprivation of one sort or another.[3]

So here in stanza three we reach the height of the poem’s kaleidoscoping perspectives: we see from the vantage point of the speaker, reading a book; then the book’s narrator, travelling to Tyrol; then the book’s narrator’s Tyrolean acquaintances, remembering back; then the speaker travelling “away”; then the speaker in place, the “away” becoming the “here”, the language assumed and comfortable. We are speaker, narrator, acquaintance, foreigner, native.

It should be noted that for all these locales and perspectives, most of which are affixed to particular geographic places, Karasik’s language avoids specificity. The childhood home is “Tyrolean,” which could refer to any number of specific places on either side of the Austrian-Italian border; the location for the harmattan is simply “the African coast.” Bearing the outside knowledge that Karasik once lived in Accra, one can assume that the poem is situated there. In the version of Karasik's poem “A Wrapping Ceremony” which appears in Hungry, Karasik doesn’t shy away from adding a locational tag as an epigraph to the poem in order to specifically locate the events in Ghana. Yet here he resists that impulse, and instead goes as far as to even strip the “West” off of “West Africa,” making it appear the poem could be situated anywhere on the continent (though, of course, most of Africa is harmattan-free). This seems to be an intentional choice of Karasik’s: to keep the exact locales of the poem, the exact places and perspectives and memories, as hazy as the harmattan sky itself. To keep us unfixed and borderless, as both travel and the harmattan encourage.

In the closing stanza Karasik merges the two narratives, and the two characters, in the poem. The “pilgrim” of the book and the “pilgrim” that is the speaker become one through their common motion: the speaker looks up into the harmattan sky “so unwilling to reveal itself.” The poem about reading a book about memory becomes a poem that has fully absorbed the book and become simply about the core thing – memory itself.

As the two characters become one in that closing image, our perspective, as readers, becomes clear as well. We find ourselves watching the speaker watching the sky, we as readers positioned both outside the speaker’s world and somewhat present in it, viewing the speaker through the very haze that he/she is staring up at. A triangular relationship is formed between the reader, the speaker and the harmattan, mirroring the triangular relationship between memory, place and perspective that has been explored in the poem.

But Karasik doesn’t simply leave us with these observations and connections as neutral thoughts – the speaker specifically ends the poem emphasizing how fascinating he finds all this fog and forgetting and uncertainty, essentially prodding us to be fascinated by it ourselves. And when we do that, the questions posed by the poem come spilling out: What are we looking at when we look into the haze of memory, mired as it is in different perspectives, cultures, and histories? Can we see a memory from different angles, once it’s been made? If memory is reduced to touchstones, can it ever be expanded again? What can we see? What can we know? What of our experiences can we really retain? What can we retell?

Memory fades. Perspective is always limited. Travel for insight alone is ultimately fraught. In the end all our efforts result in some kind of imperfection, some level of failure. This, of course, brings in the alternate reading of the poem’s last line: “I could look at nothing else,” not because the speaker was fascinated, but because he had no other choice. The harmattan would not permit another way of looking. Regardless of all this thinking on the matter, the outcome is the same. Everything results in haze, in harmattan. To some extent the answer to the question “How does it work?” is always It doesn’t. But, as Karasik asserts, each morning we inevitably step out the door and look up nonetheless, fascinated pilgrims that we are.

[1] The common thought here being that any inter-continental dialogue between Africa (especially English speaking Africa) and an outside force occurs with “the West,” most often Europe. As Ngugi wa Thiong’o put it recently on the Chimurenga blog:

The links between Asia and Africa and South America have always been present but in our times they have been made invisible by the fact that Europe is still the central mediator of Afro-Asian-Latino discourse… In my case, I had always assumed that my intellectual and social formation was tied to England and Europe, with no meaningful connection to Asia and South America. There was a reason. I wrote in English. My literary heroes were English. Kenya being a British colony, I had learnt the geography and history of England as the central reference in my widening view of the world. Even our anti-colonial resistance assumed Europe as the point of contest; it was we, Africa, against them, Europe.

This is changing, of course, with Asia’s steady advancement in Africa. But for now, and for the purposes of this poem, the presence of the West-Africa dynamic seems a fair assumption.

[2] For unfamiliar readers, the harmattan is a seasonal West African trade wind which blows dust from the Sahara down into the Gulf of Guinea. You can read other OGOV poems about the harmattan here.

[3] For a classic sample, read Kwesi Brew's "The Dry Season".

Rob Taylor is the editor and co-founder of One Ghana, One Voice.

The Pilgrim Looks Up - Daniel Karasik

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Mon, 13 Jan 2014 20:29:00 +0000

Of a book I read last week, on the theme of memory,
I’ve forgotten everything, except for a brief description
of how the narrator, on returning to his Tyrolean childhood home,
was remembered by acquaintances of his early years
for his habit of always,
upon stepping outdoors, looking up
to observe the sky’s condition.

When travelling
I too have often done this.

On the African coast, in harmattan season,
the sky would stay so perpetually hazed
that no amount of looking would make that pilgrim’s art
make sense.

A proud, even a hostile sky,
as I remember it: so utterly unwilling to reveal itself.
For three months I could look at nothing else.

Author Profile - Daniel Karasik

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Mon, 13 Jan 2014 20:27:00 +0000

Biography:

Daniel Karasik (b. 1986) is a Toronto-based playwright, poet, fiction writer, and artistic director of indie theatre company Tango Co. His plays have received professional productions across Canada, in the US, and regularly in translation in Germany. He is the author of three books: The Crossing Guard & In Full Light, a volume of plays (Playwrights Canada Press), The Remarkable Flight of Marnie McPhee, a play for children (Playwrights Canada Press), and Hungry, a poetry collection (Cormorant Books). His recent honours include the CBC Literary Award for Fiction, The Malahat Review‘s Jack Hodgins Founders’ Award for Fiction, the Canadian Jewish Playwriting Award, and the Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award. His fiction and poetry have appeared in prominent magazines - including The North American Review, Magma, The Fiddlehead, and Air Canada's inflight magazine, EnRoute - in four countries.

Five Questions with Daniel Karasik:

1. The harmattan is such a notable, and unique, feature of West African life. Can you think of any equivalents in Canadian life? In Canadian literature?

Scatological remarks aside? Political blowhards aside? I suppose the northern lights have a kind of mythic status. As does the north, the idea of North. At least that's what my Canadian Literature classes at university told me. But unlike the harmattan, those are phenomena that most Canadians don't encounter very often. They probably have a greater presence in our literature than in the daily consciousness of most people who live in Canada.

2. The last time we interview you, you spoke a bit about your interest in playwriting and the ways in which it overlaps with the writing of poems. You are also a writer of short fiction. Could you speak of the relationship between your writing of poetry and short prose? Which came first for you? Did one fuel or inspire the other? Do you approach the writing of each differently, and if so, how?

Prose came first, though poetry wasn't far behind. I try to be equally conscious and specific and attuned to music and feeling when I write in either form, but otherwise I don't know how to compare them meaningfully. Maybe part of my trouble is that I think it's actually a false opposition, since two prose pieces (say) can be informed by as different motives as a prose piece and a verse piece. Maybe I just don't find the comparison very interesting. OR, maybe I find it so interesting that I'm overwhelmed and sense that I'd need thousands of words to adequately unpack it. One of my favourite writers, Lydia Davis, writes wonderful prose-verse hybrids. She's considered to be a short story writer (and translator from the French), but several of her short pieces have been anthologized in The Best American Poetry volumes. The best of them have an urgency, a precision, an elegance, a supple music, a wisdom, and a deep, unsentimental compassion. Those virtues are what I want, as a reader and a writer. They're what I aim for. At the moment I'm not preoccupied with what form they arrive in, though of course I try to attend to the technical demands of the form they arrive in.

3. You won the 2012 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Short Story prize for your story "Mine", which is quite short. Do you come to very short fiction with a different attitude than you do longer fiction? Is there a shortness at which you think of a short story more as a poem (a prose poem?) and less as a story?

I come to short and long fiction with an identical attitude, because almost all of my fiction - and most of my drama, and some of my verse - starts long and contracts. It's rare that I write a story or novel/novella that doesn't shed at least a third of its original length, and often closer to two-thirds, by the time I consider it "finished" or it's published. Sometimes I suspect I'll never publish a novel of even average length, since everything I write shrinks in the wash so much. To judge by current habits, I'd need to write a first draft the length of Anna Karenina to end up with a novel of maybe 350-400 pages. True to form, the first draft of "Mine," which you mention, was more than three times as long as the version that won the CBC fiction prize. I never feel that brevity of prose turns a story into a poem, though I do sometimes find that radical cuts can give a prose fiction a kind of poetic compression - the language streamlined and intensified, images more crystalline, character actions starker, motives less editorialized.

4. In a recent interview I conducted with you about your first book of poems, Hungry, you mentioned that "music precedes theme when I conceive a poem". I find this idea is true for most of us as children - we love the sound of words, and we love to play with them - but by the time we get old enough to be writing "adult" poetry, many of us have left "sound" behind as the source of our writing. We write first from/for the head, and from/for the ear second or third or not at all. I wonder if you could talk a bit about your journey to that statement of yours - has music always preceded theme for you? And how do you keep it that way, especially when you feel you have a "theme" you really want to talk about?

Music hasn't always preceded theme for me. Sometimes I've been discursive to a fault. I find this balance hard to manage. What I crave is a music that's fused with and carries meaning. Detached from meaning, or without much meaning to bear, music can still give pleasure, and who am I to thumb my nose at pleasure? But it's rare that I get a memorable pleasure from poetry that's just music and wit. Music may precede theme when I write a poem, but it doesn't precede urgency, need, feeling, a vague but insistent sensation that something has to be said. I don't think that's writing "from the head." I think it's writing from the whole person. I want to encounter whole persons in literature, not just body parts (head, ear, heart, etc).

5. What's next for you in your writing life? Any new projects on the horizon?

I'm polishing a novel and a short story collection. Working on a handful of new plays. Trying to surround myself with as many remarkable people as possible, in both my work and my not-work.

Contact Daniel:

daniel_karasik(at)hotmail.com

2013 in Review

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 09:38:00 +0000

Normally at this time we would be posting our "Favourite Poems" of the year for everyone to review (you can read past "Favourite Poems" posts here). But 2013 has not been a "normal" year for OGOV, or for African literature. We began the year with a three-month publishing hiatus - our first in our almost eight-year history, and our publishing cycle was then sadly interrupted three times to mark three great losses in African writing, culture and history: Chinua Achebe's death in March, Kofi Awoonor's death in September, and Nelson Mandela's death in December. On each occasion we took time from our normal schedule to stop and reflect on these giants - most notably with Kofi Awoonor, for whom we devoted two weeks of poem-a-day tributes. You can read that special coverage here:

Poem and Tribute to Chinua Achebe

Kofi Awoonor Memorial Poems

Poem and Tribute to Nelson Mandela

2013 also saw one other - more anticipated, on our part - major endeavour: our systematic cataloguing of Ghanaian poets' literary influences, which we presented in a series of posts under the title Ghanaian Poetry's Influences. It was both heartwarming and saddening to be able to reveal that Kofi Awoonor topped the list as the poet who has had the greatest impact on Ghanaian poets writing today. Saddening to be reminded that we had just lost such an icon, heartwarming to know his poems and memory will live on for many years. We hope that this research can help guide new writers to new influences, and can serve as a sign post for where Ghanaian writing was at this particular moment in time. If you haven't reviewed the results yet, follow this link and click through the various posts listed at the bottom.

Between all of this, unfortunately, we were not able to publish near the volume of new, regular (non-elegiac!) poetry that we normally do here at OGOV - which led to our decision not to hold a "Favourite Poems" competition this year. What we did publish, though, including new poems by Martin Egblewogbe, Daniel Karasik and Aisha Nelson, and a song by OGOV favourite Kae Sun, was among the strongest content we've published in years. So it's not a stretch to say that while we didn't have a competition this year, we feel everything published this year was a "favourite" in one way or another! Take a look through our archives to see for yourself.

One last exciting addition in 2013 was more a formality than anything - Darko Antwi, long time OGOV stalwart, was officially drawn into the fold as a Contributing Editor (one of our first requests of him was the commissioned Mandela tribute poem we published earlier this month). Welcome, Darko! It's good to have you around.

We are very excited as we look forward to 2014. New poems, a new How Poems Work essay, and a new interview series are already in the works. Who knows what all will follow that - like everyone else, we'll have to wait and see what 2014 holds for us!

We leave you with a poem by Contributing Editor Prince Mensah, posted below. Happy New Year, all!

Rob Taylor
Editor
on behalf of the OGOV team

New Year's Resolution - Prince Mensah

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 08:46:00 +0000

dreams half-baked, halved by edges
of circumstance, life reinterpreted
through constant surprises, disappointments,
appointments with truth and consequence -
now an old year, once new, ebbs with age,
algaed by experience, the new one
beckoning with promises and choices -
the mind once again is given a chance
to dream an elusive future as
the heart tries to rid itself of junk,
the accumulated unforgiven -
the new year's oath is to be free from encumbrance

we sway to unheard music playing
in sacred and secret parcels of the soul -
contentment cannot keep contents of will
still, we struggle with silenced thoughts
and war against tyrannies placed on us by others -
bloodied and burdened, we still persevere,
keeping list of goals from gaols of inaction -
again, we tell ourselves that we can be:
again, we rise after so many falls,
again and again, we resolve the will
to ready itself for the possibility
of triumph or trials, of endings and starts -

Prince Mensah is a Contributing Editor to One Ghana, One Voice.

A Final Walk to Freedom - Darko Antwi

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 01:24:00 +0000

As you leave,
Earth has not changed much.
Ticks still feed on cows,
frogs still squat in envy of crabs.
Sheep play the fool, as always.
Mandela, as you go,
pray for our conscience–
that we do not only place you
amongst saints, gods and supermen
and continue with our old ways.

You took a long walk
but it was not to freedom.
Now you walk
into the most private island:
no wildcats, no shrapnel,
no shadows, no virus
or tempest.

As you leave,
Earth has not changed much.
Ants onward create,
vultures scavenge,
tear and idle about without vision.
As you go, Mandela,
pray for our poor souls–
that we do not only place you
amongst saints, gods and supermen
and continue with our old ways.

You took a brutal walk
but it was not to freedom.
Now you walk
into the most private island,
no boundaries, no tribes,
no bishops, no advantage
or exploitation.

You walked and walked.
You walked mountains and valleys.
You stumbled and fainted.
You rose and travailed.
You carried us all.
Now take rest, just rest,
as you leave.

---

Darko Antwi is a contributing editor to One Ghana, One Voice.

In Memoriam: Nelson Rolihlahla Dalibhunga Madiba Mandela - An Essay and Gathering of Poems by Prince Mensah

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 01:21:00 +0000

When you go Madiba your nobility shall be our lasting inheritance
this land you so love shall continue to love
we shall trail the long and majestic walk
your gallant walk shall be our cross and shepherd.
- Jekwu Ikeme, When Mandela Goes

How can I start this? I am writing about the most important man in recent times. The world’s most famous ex-prisoner. 46664. The world’s favorite statesman. The world’s best example of personal triumph. My favorite African. Nelson Rolihlahla Dalibhunga Madiba Mandela. Activist. Freedom Fighter. Boxer. Lawyer. Lover. President. This man had seen and done it all. A man whose struggles were closely followed by the eyes of the world. A man who lost everything and got almost everything back. The closest man of our times to the biblical Job. What he went through should have deteriorated his view of mankind. Rather, it enhanced his ability to relate to people. What was done to him could have shattered his dreams but it invigorated him. In all recent examples of human success, Nelson Mandela stands out as valedictorian. He was not a victim with vendettas to fulfill; he was a victor with visions to implement. Mandela recognized the brevity and frailty of life; he put that consciousness to great use.

He also put his names to good use, fulfilling the Latin proverb, nomen est omen (The name precedes the fame). Rolihlahla means troublemaker, but not the type of troublemaker (like bullies and robbers) who torments his own community. Rather, it stands for being a thorn in the flesh, which Mandela was to the apartheid system. He lived to make injustice uncomfortable. As commander in chief of Umkhonto we Sizwe (ANC’s armed wing), Mandela made sure he undermined the efforts of the South African government in practicing apartheid. He could not countenance the rule of tyranny.

It is hard to believe that a man, who was larger than life, has passed away. However, death comes to us all as the Book of Ecclesiastes poignantly puts it. I vividly remember two days in my life as a young admirer of the freedom fighter Nelson Mandela. They were the day he was released from Robben Island (11 February 1990) and the day he was sworn in as President of South Africa (10 May 1994). In the eyes of this young African, these days were validation for all that Mandela had gone through on his long walk to freedom. I grew up, just as many Africans throughout the continent, following the travesty that was unfolding in South Africa. I was too young to remember Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) but I recall the indignation with which my circle of friends broached the subject of apartheid. How on earth could strangers enslave indigenes of this beautiful land, on their ancestral earth? It did not make sense at all but again who said schism ever made sense? I watched with awe how Mandela brought blacks and whites together through his statements and actions. He was not bitter. He was not on a war path. He was on the path of change. Mandela met challenges headlong, disavowing both black and white extremists. The new South Africa had no chance if it allowed the yeast of malevolence to travel along into its future. Mandela inspired songs and poetry. He elicited respect. Yet, in spite of it all, he exuded humility. He was approachable. He was affable. He was admirable. Mandela was what Dennis Brutus stated in his poem, "I am the tree…",

I am the tree
creaking in the wind
outside in the night
twisted and stubborn

To him, freedom was worth fighting for. It was worth dying for. It was the very premise of the human race. Without freedom, it was impossible to live fully and attain one’s potential. Mandela saw how other nations had stubbornly denied their own citizens their freedoms and how that denial had poisoned their body politic. He sacrificed a life of comfort under apartheid for a life of discomfort under freedom. His life is a confirmation that any battle waged in the name of freedom is not in vain.

His life was more beautiful than all the eulogies that will be written about him. Death, like the late Chinua Achebe said in his poem, "The Explorer", is

a rough
circular clearing, high cliffs of deep
forest guarding it in amber-tinted spell
A long journey's end it was though how
long and from where seemed unclear,
unimportant; one fact alone mattered
now-that body so well preserved

It was something Mandela did not fear. That was the secret of his unrelenting courage. It is a secret we all must learn: that we only start living when we die to our fears. Mandela walks into eternity with his head held high. Like Wole Soyinka mused in his poem, "Night", Mandela’s transition occurred
when night children haunt the earth
I must hear none! These misted cells will yet
Undo me; naked, unbidden, at Night's muted birth.

In the end, Mandela leaves a legacy far greater than all his detractors combined. His life was a force that was prepared to do everything necessary to attain freedom. As long as apartheid and racism existed, his job was to make them as untenable as possible. This is the noble ideal that most people lack the courage to pursue. Mandela pursued freedom at the cost of his own. He fought for liberty even when it meant that he was not going to see his family for 27 years. He rose when others chose it convenient to sit. He lived when others died many times before their actual deaths. Mandela has become a father of the world. The grand irony of it all is that, in his life , we see tenets of Christianity come alive. More alive than those who use this religion as a tool to reach unholy means. The (so-called) terrorist, communist and nation wrecker practiced Christianity as it should be, not as some culture deemed fit. It is refreshing to note that Christ himself was called similar names by the government of his time. He was called rabble rouser and troublemaker. Heck, he was crucified for being an insurrectionist. Rapper Nas said in his song, "You Can Hate Me Now", that
People fear what they don’t understand. Hate what they can’t conquer…

In the beginning, Mandela was misunderstood because he was feared. He was hated because of his indomitable spirit. However, he did not acquiesce himself to definitions thrown at him. He displaced them all with the best evidence in the court of life: the trajectory of his own life. It was said in apartheid South Africa that people did random things to go to prison so they could meet Nelson Mandela. At the beginning of his fights, Mandela experienced what David Diop described in his poem, "Close to You". It was like
the breath of the world has poured its
pain upon me
Pain that loads the present with the flavor of tomorrows
And makes of love an immeasurable river

Mandela is dead but he brings to life many questions that require immediate answers. Questions such as Why do we still tolerate the institutionalization of prejudice in our society?, Why do we make life difficult for people who are not like us? and Why do we care less about the plight of our fellow citizens?

His passing is yet another chance for the world to reach solutions for racism, that abhorrent forebear of apartheid. Even in this modern world, the ugliness of racism has managed to steal itself, like a rat, into the ship of progress. We witness nihilistic portrayals of prejudice among the human race. These are facts that continue to battle truths encapsulated in the vision that drove Mandela to become a man everyone wanted to meet. This is a moment of global soul-searching. We cannot claim progress if we tolerate the effluvium of fallacies that surround us: products from years past, long buried just under the surface. We cannot accommodate wrong and allow what is right to exist in difficulty. In the end, it is good that continues to inspire us. Evil might paralyze us, it might even kill us, but the power of good always prevails.

How can I end this? This is not an epilogue on the life and times of Nelson Mandela. It is a new beginning, a continuum of consciousness. What he lived for cannot die. It lives in the hearts of people whose hearts beat for change, whose eyes detect a better future. It is a light divine in its source and existence. This is a call to a better world. A world where no man will regard himself as either inferior or superior just because of skin color, race, origin and status. A world which the greatest men to have ever lived strove to bring into existence. Mandela is a reminder of our own potential for greatness. If he, an individual, could become a movement for change, then our communities and countries have no excuses to tolerate ugliness. He has become a lasting symbol, similar to what Christopher Okigbo mentioned in the poem, "Thunder Can Break". Mandela is like those

… iron birds
Held - fruit of flight - tight
For barricaded in iron handiwork a miracle caged.
Bring them out we say, bring them out
Faces and hands and feet,
The stories behind the myth, the plot
Which the ritual enacts.
Thunder can break –
Earth, bind me fast –

He is an indelible part of our consciousness as a race. His essence permeates our sense of fairness and confronts the accepted laziness with which we battle the ills of the world. Mandela’s life stands as a challenge to everyone to become a catalyst for change and to stand up to any kind of oppression. To him, anything of worth was worth fighting for. The beauty of Mandela’s life lay in its simplicity. By being everyone’s equal, he transcended the obstacles placed on him by his own society. Today, we remember his speeches and actions, but we can remember him best if we take a page from his approach to life. His speech during the trial that sent him to prison for 27 years contains the mantra of his illustrious life:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

---

Prince Mensah is a contibuting editor to One Ghana, One Voice. You can watch Prince's video poem for Nelson Mandela here.

Ghanaian Poetry's Inspirations - An Introduction

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Wed, 20 Nov 2013 02:13:00 +0000

What do Ghanaian poets read?

Where, and to whom, do we turn for inspiration?

Do they care about my country? My country's great poets?

In the six-and-a-half years I've been running One Ghana, One Voice, I've received questions like these many times, in many different iterations. What fuels and interests Ghanaian poets seems to be an issue of curiosity for both Ghanaian poets and scholars, and for international observers. Heck, Frank O'Hara even mentioned a similar curiosity directly in a poem.

As the oldest (and therefore longest running) online magazine of Ghanaian poetry, I feel we are well (if far from perfectly) positioned to attempt to answer these questions. As regular readers of OGOV will know, every time we welcome a new poet to the site we ask them the same three (well, four) questions, by way of introduction:

How long have you been writing poetry?
Who are your favorite poets? Which poets have most influenced and informed your work?
What do you hope to accomplish with your poetry?

You can read a recent example of the Q+A here.

Back in 2008, when OGOV was only a year old and the volume of data was much more manageable, I produced a post listing the artists most commonly named in answer to the questions "Who are your favorite poets? Which poets have most influenced and informed your work?". That post can be read here.

The sample size for that post, though, was rather small. So now, five years later, I've decided to both update and expand on that post. These new results come from interviews with 93 poets (the vast majority Ghanaian, plus some non-Ghanaians who write on Ghana) dating from April 2007 until September 2013. Together, those 93 poets listed 298 different artists as influential to their writing a total of 559 times (an average of six "influences" or "votes" per poet).

We've decided to present our date in the form of answers to popular questions we have received over the years. The questions can be read at the bottom of this post - simply click the links for answers!

Some of the answers will be expected, but some will surprise. We hope you enjoy this overview, and if you have any further questions you'd like answered, let us know!

Yours,

Rob Taylor
on behalf of the OGOV team
September 2013

p.s. The original publication of much of this series was delayed due to the death of Kofi Awoonor (whose influence, as you will see, figures large in these results). It should be noted, then, that all the "votes" for Awoonor were cast prior to his passing. One can reasonably expect that since then his influence has only grown. You can read our series of tribute poems to Awoonor here.

Questions Answered

Which continent's artists most influence Ghanaian poetry?
Which country's artists most influence Ghanaian poetry?
Who influences Ghanaian poets more, men or women? By how much?
What types of artists are influencing Ghanaian poetry?
Which female artist most influences Ghanaian poetry?
Which artist from Ghana most influences Ghanaian poetry?
Which artist from Africa (non-Ghanaian) most influences Ghanaian poetry?
Which artist from Europe most influences Ghanaian poetry?
Which artist from the Americas most influences Ghanaian poetry?
Which artist, generally, most influences Ghanaian poetry?

Which artist most influences Ghanaian poetry?

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Taylor) — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 06:00:00 +0000

Answer: Kofi Awoonor.

More detail:

Kofi Awoonor was listed as an inspiration by nineteen different OGOV poets, far ahead of Maya Angelou, Kofi Anyidoho, and Wole Soyinka, who were each mentioned thirteen times.

The top fourteen:

Arists who most influence Ghanaian poets

1. Kofi Awoonor, mentioned by 19 poets, or 20% of all poets interviewed
2. Maya Angelou, 14%
2. Kofi Anyidoho, 14%
2. Wole Soyinka, 14%
5. Kwesi Brew, 12%
5. Atukwei Okai, 12%
5. William Shakespeare, 12%
8. Mutabaruka, 10%
9. Langston Hughes, 9%
10. Ayi Kwei Armah, 8%
10. Dennis Brutus, 8%
10. Leopold Senghor, 8%
10. John Donne, 8%
10. John Keats, 8%

Observations:

The diversity of this list is noteworthy: many Ghanaian authors, and others from Africa, but also English and American writers. And Mutabaruka, for good measure.

All of these artists, however, were born before 1960. Who will come after them to help inspire the next generation? Some of the other lists may give a few hints to this, but the truth is we'll just have to wait and see...

More Information:

This post marks the end of our series on Ghanaian poets' influences. Click here for an overview of this project, and to read the lists that came before.

What do you think of these results?

Leave your thoughts in the comments!