Kwabena Agyare Yeboah
There is an idea that Kofi Anyidoho presents in his poems. He uses ‘dance’ and ‘cloth’ to illustrate the point of continuity – tradition. A woven cloth grows taller because a piece is added to the old half. Dance, on the other hand, connotes dialogue.
These metaphors are offerings on how we should think. That there can never be the present without the past. That we can never go ahead without dialoguing.
Take this as a matter of contemplation. The BBC radio producer Henry Swanzy left London for Accra in 1954. Acclaimed as the producer of the BBC’s Caribbean Voices, he was seconded as the head of programmes to the Ghana Broadcasting System where he worked till 1958. In the Gold Coast, later Ghana, he produced The Singing Net. The programme introduced many members of Ghana’s first generation of writers to a wider listenership.
Less than a century earlier, radio as a technology had been used to rally the Gold Coasters’
support for the British Allied Forces in the World Wars. But Swanzy ushered in a new path, of what public memory could be. The contributions to the radio programme became a print anthology called Voices of Ghana (1958), ably edited by Swanzy himself.
The writers you will find in this anthology are markedly different from those that Swanzy published, both on radio and in print. The former comes from a generation that grew up on the internet and are receptive to myriad of tendencies as to the form of a literary genre.
we ask google, who are we?
google says how to marry us. how not to marry us.
If you are from an earlier generation, you will most likely be at loss with the above lines from Awo Twumwaah’s She Shall Be Called. It is a true attribute to contemporaneity.
Fui Can Tamakloe’s short story However Long the Night is written entirely in pidgin. Hitherto, whether reading Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel Fragments or Amu Djoleto’s Money Galore, you find that pidgin, or broken English, are spoken by men of Northern extraction and are occupants of menial jobs in urban Accra. In this sense, language, the brokenness of English, becomes an aspirational marker.
In Tamakloe’s short story, the protagonist is a university graduate but is expressive in pidgin. Across generations, with the inventiveness of language, characters come to share the same fate of poverty, notwithstanding their diverse origins.
You will find that almost all the poems are prosaic. Their politics transcends a nationalist notion. Rather, even as they are firmly rooted in the local, they branch into a sense of American-favoured globalism.
This is best seen in Jay Kophy’s poem Manifesto. The poem seems to be about the death of a black boy. For a poet based in Ghana, it will seem that it is an over-reach to talk about racial politics in America and possibly, Europe. Suffice to say, it plays out differently in Ghana. This is how the poet chooses to (un)say what he wants.
The politics is the personal, even in love. Victory Osas’s short story is a delightful read. It is witty and when you are done reading, you will scold yourself for the taking the story seriously.
Love unburdens you. It sets you free.
I approach contemporaneity with skepticism. Because it only affords immediacy. But sometimes the facility of immediacy is an allusion. It is myopic. It does not give us the space to assess happenings in their totality.
Primarily, I am relying on the Akan proverb which translates that you do not fight ants while standing in them. Regardless, here is my hope. My hope is that this work is not only read on its strength. But also, on its vision and promise.
Here is to the many voices that we have been waiting on. And this arrival in itself is not of being. It is of becoming, of the things to come.