I change hands - K Darch

Both masters and slaves
push their tools
in the sand of me
where love arrives
and dies so easily
I spend myself on it
like old ghana cedis
like a pesewa to a pom
at the plantain seller
turns sister Kesewa
on a dime
when he tells her
he tells her
the bottom has dropped out
of your only currency
then sits back and enjoys
his peace and quiet
and coffee

I lay here long enough
I stay still long enough
for him to rearrange the lay of my land
before I change hands

both scholars and fools
have tossed
the pennies of my affection
into deep and shallow pools
of the moment’s discretion
they’ve been won and held
and squandered and spent
on both pacifist’s and soldier's
mild amusement
levying wound-new skin against his
rusty metal restraint
"hey, no constraints" he says
so I shed clothes like soft
and heavy petals

in another shower
my hard earned beauty
for his inherited power
I've been staked out, mined,
melted down, embossed
found and just as quickly lost
before I change hands

both sadness and joy
work their hands over
another day
in another land rover
with john dave I-ti
yankee, kiwi
love is a starvation economy
whether or not the deal is fair
whether driven by desire or dare
or duty
the bottom has dropped out
of this small waist and beauty
first blonde hair for pounds
then south african rands
still you engrave your queen on me
and I change hands.

Author Profile - K Darch

Biography:

K Darch is a writer and artist who grew up between the military base and downtown Kingston, Ontario. She lived in Ghana for a total of fifteen months over 2006 - 2007. She now lives as a visitor on Coast Salish territory Vancouver, where her recent work explores the connections between colonial history and violence against women. She is currently completing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

Five Questions with K Darch:

1. Could you tell us a bit about the writing of this poem? Was it written quickly or over a long period of time? In Ghana, Canada, or both? What was your editing process?

It was written quickly. I was in Ghana, a few weeks before heading back to Canada. I woke up one morning and wrote it down. It felt like a bomb had detonated in my chest. Everything fell back into place, but everything had shifted. It seemed that the thing that was immediately changed was me, and that the work was a record of that moment of change.

I left it as it was until I got to the University of British Columbia, then I had it workshopped in Meryn Cadell's lyric and libretto class, who read it as a persona poem in the form of song lyrics. I made some small changes based on their suggestions.

Before, the "pom" -- a term that means "British guy" in this context -- was quoted saying, "your emotional truth is my out of date currency," which I thought was funny and meant something very specific to me, but people found it confusing so I took it out.


2. This poem can be read as a companion piece to your last poem featured on OGOV, "her body is the land", as both an analysis of the financial and environmental abuse that occurs in a globalised economy. The connection between this poem and your analysis of galamsey in the last poem comes through most strongly in lines like "I've been staked out, mined, / melted down, embossed / found and just as quickly lost". Do you view these two poems as part of the same project? Can we expect more such poems in the future?

The narrator in this piece is articulating a crisis in which she is realizing her own lack of an internal locus of control. There's a nihilism that comes from the perception of having no control over the outcome of things, of having life happen to you. She's realizing that she may have sold herself short -- or, to get away from the monetary metaphor, she has let herself down. Like the earth in "her body is the land" she has been treated as a substance to be bought and traded, a currency that has no inherent value, and can either appreciate or depreciate in value depending on terms she has no control over. Except, for example, the control to conform to popular beauty standards, but that, she discovers, is not enough to keep her from being an object with a price that can depreciate to her peril. She's on the verge of saying, "Wait a minute. Even if I do all this work to conform, I'm still not winning. I'm still not an equal player."

In this sense, both poems reflect a concern about how market-driven concepts and market-driven language are applied to politics, culture and social interactions -- a language of efficiency, consumer choice, transactional thinking, and individual autonomy. And this language has a way of shifting risks and burdens of responsibility onto individuals rather than governments and corporations. This market logic extends into the realm of all social relationships. As Ayi Kwei Armah says in "The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born": "It is very easy to get used to what is terrible."

How does mining legislation play itself out in what we take as normalized labour conditions? How do racial and gender inequalities play themselves out in normalized interactions between men and women in Ghana? In both pieces I'm trying to rearrange the deeply familiar so that I can see it again. So that the anaesthetic, numbing effect of this market-driven language becomes aesthetic (i.e. something we can sense, feel). This language and these approaches strive to make themselves invisible -- this is how power protects itself -- by being invisible as such. I want to de-familiarize this approach by shifting context, putting it right into a poem or song for example, to make it visible, to take away its power.

Both pieces are about a moment where something you thought was deeply personal, that you thought was only you, only your problem, is actually the result of, say, legislation that was passed, or systemic economic or social inequality. The first realization is that you've been internalizing the burden of something that is really a systemic issue, and the second part is that there is a group of people who benefit from you continuing to think that it's just you, who benefit from you internalizing this burden. It's a huge slap in the face, but it's also transformative, because you realize that there are more of you and you're part of a story that's much bigger than yourself.

In this sense the pieces are part of the same process. I'll definitely continue to make things in response to this phenomenon as long as it continues and as long as it is a matter of shared concern.


3. Referring back to the lines quoted in the last question, this poem seems more concerned with rhythm and rhyme than what we've seen of yours in the past. Why is this? Was it an intentional decision or did it spring up organically in the writing of the poem?

It wasn't intentional at all. I woke up in the morning and there was this rhythm, and the rhythm invited me to put all this stuff there that was bothering me, to organize it. It seems that poems come from a seed -- one line or phrase that sprouts, and then songs start with a rhythm. The rhythm is like a lullaby to me. It allows me to take these things that are grim and painful and tangled and bring them into consciousness, which is a step towards transforming them.


4. Has there been any progress on the passing of Canadian mining bills C 300 and/or C 354, or on your own project, since we last discussed them?

Yes. Bill C 300 was defeated in parliament by six votes, 140 - 134. Again, this bill was meant to hold Canadian mining companies accountable for their actions in other countries. It's funny, how it looks -- it's just so bald -- that 140 Canadian MPs think that Canada should not be held accountable for its actions in other countries. An important caveat is that a significant chunk of Canadian pension funds are invested in Canadian gold mining companies, Goldcorp in particular, and Canadian pensioners don't even know it. Many MPs could have voted this way to protect the pensions of their constituents. Meanwhile, Goldcorp continues to contaminate water supplies across Africa and Latin America with cyanide.

The next bill to keep our eye on is Bill C 354, which has been described as stronger legislation than C 300. Even pro-mining blogs concede that C-354 is "couched in much more elegant philosophy," or just as better legislation to provide legal protection for those in other countries who are victims of gross human rights violations.

In my own work, I've turned my attention to the corporate privatization of universities by mining and pharmaceutical companies, because right now the university is where I'm positioned.


5. The new year has just begun - what are your political and personal wishes for 2011?

I was leaving Kingston, Ontario on the bus after New Year's, and I had this revelation that if I could go back in time a few years, knowing then what I know now, I think I no longer would have succumbed to the belief that my values and my success in the world were mutually exclusive. I wouldn't have been embarrassed about my values. Back then, I had a sense that my values (i.e. my sense of what was just, my intrinsic and political goals) were somehow at odds with my extrinsic goals: a career, status in a community, a living wage.

I guess my political and personal wish is to prove everyone wrong who would shame other people for their values. My wish is for my values to be my internal locus of control and for this to be the basis on which I earn a living wage.

Contact K:

krissy.darch(at)gmail.com

her body is the land - K Darch

Vanilla Ice on the loudspeaker says kick it one time boyyyy
mine deeper harder faster now
be a miner for a heart of gold
it’s illegal
not the taking
just if you don’t have a permit
her body is the land where all you need is a license
to plunder
the paper work becomes an extension of the violence
signatures and lines and hands that sign

galamsey, they call us
we are illegal miners
after the same thing as those licensed ones really
(the aura of licenses)
survival
(the aura of survival)
the desire to have children
we don’t have papers or permits
sometimes we use mercury
it gets into the water
the children have sores and rashes
but our operation is the same if
smaller
no funding from the government
no sustainability
inspectors
no heavy equipment just our hands
grassroots plunder
I take from the earth with my own hands
economy is not abstract here
there’s economy and the economy
burning down the skin of the legs of the girl down the river
like the skin of a grape
she will be a porter like her mother
and carry
nuggets from the earth
the newspapers say it’s criminal
we know
it’s just criminal
on a smaller scale

we take gold out of the earth
we take and we take it

we were born here in the gold
nothing will make us stop

*

hope, like gold
can be traded

wrested from the ground with mercury
how many rashes and rivers to extract this hope?
hope is a dirty word here
a nugget covered in dirt

they send in the journalists for human rights
(as opposed to the ones who aren’t)
who cut tiny openings through which
the story comes in spurts
between the squeeze of the lede and the nut graf
and the two line quotes
gold and mercury coming out
between business finance culture leisure

*

we travel from town to town
she carries and she cooks
and when I come home covered in mercury
she hides me in her body
she hides me in her body to hold me back from the world

*

Canada goes for gold
gold standard
gold rush
gold wash
gold collar worker
goldschläger
gold digger

*

men make nations
and call them she
draw borders, set limits, regulate and sell off rights
of access
and call that project she
God bless our homeland Ghana
and make our nation great and strong
as it lives this divided life
what men say it is
and all the things it really is.

*

Gold running beneath the children’s feet
under those mud huts and malnourished children, the news says
in an imagined whisper
gold
they don’t even fuckin know it

Author Profile - K Darch

Biography:

K Darch is an activist, writer and artist who grew up between the military base and downtown Kingston, Ontario. She lived in Ghana for a total of fifteen months over 2006 - 2007. She now lives as a visitor on Coast Salish territory Vancouver, where her recent work explores the connections between colonial history and violence against women. She is currently completing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

Five Questions with K Darch:

1. It's been over three years since you were last profiled on this site! What have you been up to in that time?

I've been completing my MFA, doing some independent journalism through the Vancouver Media Co-op, Megaphone Magazine, and now I'm teaching as part of UBC Creative Writing's Booming Ground program.


2. It's been quite a while now since you last lived in Ghana. What is it about Ghana that keeps you writing about it?

I know that I changed when I was there and I still haven't put together what that's all about. I still have stories I need to tell. And reasons that are pressing, right now, that those stories need to be told.


3. This poem is based out of research you have been doing into Canadian involvement in the Ghanaian gold mining industry. Can you tell us a little about Canada's involvement?

It's estimated that half of the mining capital in the world is raised on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The role of governments' relative to mining is a variable one: the Ghanaian government works hand-in-hand with multinational corporations, whereas the Costa Rican government is fighting the expansion of Canadian mining companies in court. Because the Ghanaian government licenses land to a multinational, individual Ghanaians who have been mining this land themselves for generations are deemed illegal. The illegality of one group depends upon the legality of another. Also, within the span of a few years, Barrick Gold, a Canadian gold mining company, filed suit against a Montreal press, and after that threatened a Vancouver press with legal action because they were publishing a book that was critical of Canadian mining in general, and specifically laid blame on Barrick for the deaths of a number of miners.

While I was reading about this, I found out that my former boss, who ran the NGO I used to work for in Ghana, is married to a man who worked at a Canadian gold mining company. This got me thinking about how humanitarianism can dovetail with, and give social license to, exploitative businesses. It has touched my life in a number of ways.

For those interested in this subjected, I've included some relevant links below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galamsey
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8356343.stm
http://www.miningwatch.ca/en/canadian-gold-mining-interests-involved-police-shootings-ghana-west-africa
http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=67451


4. What are your intentions for your research project going forward? Might there be ways for Ghanaians, or Ghanaian poets in particular, to be involved in the future?

One of the concrete intentions to any work around this issue would be to pass bill C300 or bill C354, which would hold the state's feet to the fire, and hold mining companies legally accountable for their abuses.

I'm interested in collaborating with Ghanaian writers to explore the tensions between legal mining and illegal mining. What is the dance between "illegal" Ghanaian mining and "legal" multinational extraction (where Canada has a huge stake)? How does neoliberalism - the dance between governments and companies - shape this border too?

I would like to find a way of redistributing the visibility of these stories; to find out the ways in which multinational corporations are shaping the discourse in terms of legality, sustainability, and social license in order to produce counter narratives; to incorporate statements of Ghanaian miners affected by these licenses and invite them to reflect on the conditions of their illegality.


5. On a lighter note, which "Stop, Collaborate and Listen" song do you prefer? Vanilla Ice's or Ofori Amponsah's?

Ofori Amponsah's version, all the way. But I like Ice's hair carving.

Contact K:

krissy.darch(at)gmail.com

After 8 months in Ghana - K Darch

New moon like the smile of the
Cheshire cat and deep yellow
on a slight angle as we're
just barely north of the equator
in the centre bobbing
remembering baths in the north
parts of my body under the water
and parts out
thinking about the line
where the water ends and air
begins, moving gently
a delicate line
a loose strand of beads imprecise
easily lifted and shifted
and uncommittedly resting
on the cusp of a girl's hip
like the equator
tracing the swell of the earth
my body, a buoy
the water line has dropped
from a hard unmoving top
to an unfixed, flexible
middle (tropic means turning)
accentuated with beads
to remind me of ease
and equipoise
and that half of me is now
above the surface
that I am no longer afraid of my own face
and I am no longer afraid of the sun

Author Profile - K Darch

Biography:

A recent graduate of University of Ottawa's Visual Art program, K Darch [the obruni in the picture - ed.] is a visual artist and writer who has produced and exhibited work with a humanitarian focus on Canadian social issues. Last year she lived in Ghana for 8 months teaching art and literacy at a community library, which sparked continuing volunteer work with women in developing countries. She is currently living and working in Toronto, and plans to return to Ghana soon.

Five Questions with K Darch:

1. How long have you been writing poetry?

When I was a kid I wrote silly rhyming poetry that read as song lyrics, but I've mostly been writing since I was about 15.

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

The first poet I ever really read was Charles Baudelaire. In high school it was T.S Eliot, E.E. Cummings, Adrienne Rich, that whole modern bunch. Then later, Pablo Neruda, Nicole Blackman - a New York based spoken word poet. But I'm more influenced by song lyrics than anything else. Sometimes I hear amazing poetry in the most obscure, 80's pop music.

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

To make sense of things, to make my own heart race, to communicate thoughts and feelings that go beyond the tables-and-chairs world of the everyday.

4. What do you think can be done to better promote African literature in Canada?

Canadian audiences are totally ready for African literature, as well as African art and dance. There's a spontaneity, jubilance, courage, and sensuality that comes out of Ghanaian cultural expression that is so refreshing in a culture that tends towards the analytical and the abstract. There's a cynicism here which Ghanaian culture sort of flies in the face of, and that's its strength.

There's so much talent in Accra alone, and with a bit of support from over here, and some on-the-ground work in Ghana, I know it wouldn't take long to round up an anthology of totally original poetry written by young Ghanaians. I think there's a lot to be gained from the collaboration between the two cultures.

5. You have taught art and literacy in Ghana, with a special focus on women. Through that work, how do you now see the position of women in Ghana in regards to literature - both in reading others work, and writing and sharing their own?

Like I said before, I think North America is really ready for literature that comes out of Ghana. In crude marketing terms, Africa is the flavour of the month right now, with movies like Blood Diamond coming out, and The Constant Gardener, as well as celebrity involvement, particularly that of Angelina Jolie. The interest is there - the work just needs to be put out there.

Before I left for Ghana I read Hustling is not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl, and Exchange is Not Robbery: More Stories of an African Bar Girl, by John Chernoff, and I was fascinated. I always tell people that it's a different world over there, and these books capture that like no Westerner ever could. Until then, the only representations of Africa I had been exposed to were written/produced/controlled in some way by Westerners. These books were narrated by a young Ghanaian woman and we follow her trajectory from, I think, Bolgatanga all the way to Accra where she makes a living through prostitution. I was captured by the energy behind her voice. The book just crackled with it. But it took some North American dude to recognize that value and put it out there.

I met a lot of kids in Ghana who felt like reading and writing was a waste of time. It's time for Ghanaians to get serious about literacy, to recognize the value, not to mention the marketability, of their own stories and their own voices.

Contact K:

krissy.darch(at)gmail.com