Roots – Foreword

By Nana K. A. Prempeh

Poetry, I have discovered, is a way to breathe. It is a way to take in the world and give yourself back to it. It is the art of fellowship, of communion. Sometimes we can tell wonderful music by its ability to reach us in ways we did not know we could or even needed to be reached. It may be that its lyrics and melodies bear the very signature of emotions we are aware of but cannot quite name. I feel that every time the horns blast through while listening to “I FEEL IT” by Jon Bellion and Burna Boy. Likewise, I knew what the words ethics and morality meant. But when I watched the 2002 drama-thriller, John Q, starring Denzel Washington, I understood what ethics and morality could be. Exceptional art does that. It does not merely represent or reflect life, it inaugurates possibilities; new ways of being in the world with ourselves and one another. It fosters communion. This anthology is exceptional art. 

Like my encounter with Denzel Washington’s John Q, the poems here yield distinct characters of life and color, bearing the ability to return experience to you as a newborn. Take the pristine sneakiness of the following lines from the opening poem, “Mother Mothered” by Adwoa Amankwah: “when she got confused, she’d shout / and we’d shout back, it was the only way / we understood each other over the wall.” Here we are at the foot of a scene that feels familiar and yet it oozes with a newness that begins and ends with what it means to behold an opening, to walk a path, to commune, to be together and apart. That “it was the only way” alerts us to the presence of an opening, a path. Yet, where freedom might breathe, the shackles of “only” as a qualifier for this freedom space foretells the barrier we encounter at “the wall” in the next line. As if this was not enough, the speaker does not permit readers to abandon hope, for despite the paradoxes of freedom that are expressed through a sole path toward the freedom of being in excess with one another, there is more than enough room to still “understand each other.” Is there anything that speaks to the character and color of our being more than this paradox of bound freedom? In the world of these lines the imperfections of a mother’s communion with her own, sneaks up to, as it were, shake the table upon which we presume the comfort of self-righteousness.

In their collective soul, these poems are hymns of freedom, of its heft and dread. They are the bones and sinews and sighs that collect at the altar of pursuit. They are a report on what it means to occupy motion as its own way of being, as its own home, as another path not outside of the darkness but beyond the overdetermination of light. The assortment of writers here so aptly express the depth and variety of freedom to us all. So even as I contend that at their core these poems are hymns of freedom, there is a striking uniqueness to each of them. 

That perhaps offers us a useful commentary on the possibility of inhabiting a world where multiple and diverse freedoms can cohere. 

Still, I suspect that this is not the immediate province of these verses. In the vast yet intimate cosmology of these poems, each offers us the gift of relearning how to be attentive. Detail, after all, makes character. So as the intentionality of detail with which the world of each poem is woven commands our intimate attention, we begin to learn something of ourselves and our own worldmaking as much as we do these poets and their gloriously chaotic minds. The surrealist Ars Poetica of Kodwo Hybrid, “Making a journey through poems” is a useful example here. As is to be expected with Ars Poetica, you enter this poem to behold its anatomy and the way it reflects or deviates from the universe of poems. In Hybrid’s universe––and perhaps the name is a clue––we awake in a poetry world where “a sea” with mouth “keeps looking at the sky” yet dolphins remain swimming. The personification of the sea and the realism of a dolphin swimming seem at odds, absurd, surreal, and yet they do not quite clash, instead, they make possible new ways of making worlds and being. The familiar expanse of the sea is rendered at once intimate in scale and yet even more expansive as we come to regard it beyond the confines of what we know and expect it to be. That freedom to be in excess of familiarity that binds, even if it has to exist in a surreal world, is the same that animates the possibility of a world where “the dolphins don’t swim this way.” In the world of a surrealist poem, we are confronted with the existential question: must we always swim this way? The writer says, “I’m trying to write a poem about / things I know / but not where they come from” and we are left to wonder, what does it mean to know that you do not know enough to limit yourself to the familiar, to the conventional and expected? How does such a dialogue between convention and control enlighten us about the possibilities of freedom?

We often mistake freedom to be nothing else but liberation. Sometimes, however, stepping into expectation while attempting to negotiate a way out, a way to insist on otherwise ways of being, becomes its own prison. For the speaker in “Last Sunday,” Ama Pomaa’s poem, “It’s an avalanche of bullets in an open field, and [with] nowhere to hide.” Like this speaker, sometimes this is the only possible world a soul fighting depression believes they can inhabit. Sometimes it is worsened by love so contorted that it becomes a noose, like the love of a grieving mother, or the repressive affection of family and church. What then? The speaker in “Last Sunday” wants to know. This is their world:

It’s almost like someone left a radio on in my / head, tuned to a channel that works around the clock to tell me everything that’s wrong with me. / I want to change the channel / but I can’t because the tuning knob is broken. The harder I fight / to block it out, the louder it becomes. So, I let it play, losing / myself into its razor-sharp castigation.

Perhaps it is our world too. What now?

Heaviness isn’t always oppressive; it should not be regarded as a mad thing to always avoid. Laughter too is heavy. And there is a poignant heft to the humor brought to bear in some of these poems. In “the man who wanted my nomba” for instance, Ama Afrah Appiah gives us a scene full of grace even as nastiness breeds in its underbelly. The speaker in her poem fetches humor with a purposeful precision by granting us a delightful twist at the end of the poem. That kind of humor is not taught. It is experienced. It is one that Appiah does not withhold from her readers. It is also evident, albeit in a sharper register, in Nenyi Ato Bentum’s “Faces,” where we encounter the bizarreness of political campaigns.

The poems in this anthology shift and slip and bend and evade, swerving with purpose. From the speed of depreciating faith to the density of joy. Especially impressive is the breadth of styles proffered in this collection. Some of the work here read like an ode to the early champions of traditional African and Ghanaian poetry. Nenyi Ato Bentum’s “Little Things Also Die” is constructed with a sophisticated clarity that is not unlike what could be expected of a Kofi Awoonor verse. The matter-of-fact pace, the wringing of depth from colloquial diction, and the irony of a relaxed urgency in tone, are but a few of the traits that allow Khadia Alexandra Okai-koi’s “december 25th in accra” such monumental pull. It reminds me of the wit in Ama Ata Aidoo’s poetry. Lest anyone be misled, the brilliance of these poets and how they resonate with the legendary craft of our elders is not to be mistaken as mere replication. No. It is that their own genius shines so brightly that it lights both the paths forward and re-illuminates the continuity of a rich heritage. In this, something of who we are and who we are becoming remains and thrives. In this too, we find communion. There are other kinds of poems here too, of course. Some brief, some lengthy, all magnificent in their unique glories. The usual suspects of love and faith and family prevail. So too, new angels and demons to be wrestled with. There are odes and ballads, elegies and epics, gifts, as they say, that keep on giving.

Good poetry helps us feel our way through questions we do not know we have. Great poetry presumes nothing yet assumes everything in the ways that allow for us to reimagine what questions and answers themselves are. As the speaker in K. Asare Bediako’s “Cityscape” declares, “Being a man is no grave!” What is it to be a man then? Bediako does not presume to have answers here. Only an invitation to consider. What would you be when there is not a how to be? Do we look to the grave of mothers for such answers or the grieving joy of queerness to reframe how we ask questions of ourselves? How do we teach ourselves to live when we have not figured out how to not grieve love? Or like the speaker in the poem “In His Chest, His God” by Kwame Boateng who says “His slow descent into madness and long suffering is what he calls his God ordering his steps,” what does it mean for the God of a boy to mold love from madness? What does it mean for such a boy to die unremembered yet with his God still in his chest? These questions are not mine. They are the very table set before us by these brilliant writers to dine and reflect, to commune with self and other. 

This is a feast full of bones yet hot with the fat of life. Chew slowly. Share generously.

Enjoy!