How Poems Work #5 - L.S. Mensah on Prince Mensah's "Fresh Memories of an Old Village"

The following is the fifth installment in our "How Poems Work" series. This series aims to give OGOV readers and poets an opportunity to talk about some of their favourite poems previously featured on the site. We have a special treat this time, as L.S. Mensah brings us a new poem never before published on the site - Prince Mensah's "Fresh Memories of an Old Village".

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Fresh Memories of an Old Village - Prince Mensah

Bare trees and barren earth
Trapped in afternoon silence
Haunted by songs of forlorn
Children left behind by dead
Parents and fleeing relatives.
They watch the dance of dead leaves,
Choreographed by the whirlwind,
Moving to unheard music.
They wait and wait and wait
To awaken with faith,
Expecting this ghost village
To become what it once was.

(Reprinted by author's permission.)

There are many things one could do with a poem. Sometimes like water, a poem can exist in different states: a liquid, a solid, a vapour in the air. Sometimes it is like light, both wave and particle. In the same way, when one reads a poem like Prince Mensah's, “Fresh Memories of an Old Village,” one could take a number of things from it, such as the paradoxical title which sets up the abstract noun fresh against the concrete noun village. One might even see the phrase fresh memories as an oxymoron. By the time we speak of memory/memories, we are already in the past, and so the two words begin to peel away from one another. One could pick up the poem's resemblance to Kwesi Brew's “The Dry Season” and point out that the difference between the two is that while the stripping in Brew’s poem is inevitable, the harrowing in Mensah's is caused by humans. We can also break the poem into, say, three parts, where the poet places his full stops, and from there analyse them. I’ll try to do that, but my main task here is to pick a word/image, and see where that leads.

If you want to know about whirlwinds, the place to go is The Hebrew Bible, also called the Old Testament. But first a detour – the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “whirlwind” as “a column of air moving rapidly round and round in a cylindrical or funnel shape.” The dictionary then concentrates on its cyclical/spherical/curved shape; and passages like Isaiah 5:28 seem to bear that out:

“Whose arrows [are] sharp, and all their bows bent, their horses’ hoofs shall be counted like flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind:”

It seems that every time the whirlwind appears, it is accompanied by an action word, though not always that of a rolling motion. Sometimes there is a scattering, a carrying off, etc. The OED traces the word's etymology to sometime in the High Middle Ages, around 1340; and since the Bible predates it, it is not difficult to see how the definition then is not designed to express the more complex meanings the word connotes in the bible. Biblical scholars remind us that the whirlwind “is not restricted to a rotary movement of air”; it can also be translated as “storm”, “tempest” or “storm-wind” as in Job 21:18 “They are as stubble before the wind, and as chaff that the storm carrieth away,” or Deutero-Isaiah 54:11 “O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, [and] not comforted ...”

I took it upon myself to ask the poet Prince Mensah about whether he had any biblical images in mind while writing the poem He told me in an email exchange that the whirlwind was his channelling of Hosea 8:7, which states: “For they shall sow wind and reap a whirlwind”. Hosea ben Beeri was an 8th century prophet who prophesied in the Northern Kingdom of Israel in the reign of Jeroboam II, when Assyria's hegemonic ambitions in the Ancient Near East were clear for all to see. Hosea prophesied under the Sinai tradition; which emphasises the centrality of the Mosaic covenant. Ancient Israel brings God's judgement upon itself if it strays from the demands and conditions set by Yahweh at Sinai. Their punishment therefore is as a result of their own sins.

If we follow this reasoning then the barren landscape in the poem is as a result of the adults abrogating their responsibilities. Let's take a look at the first part of the poem:

Bare trees and barren earth
Trapped in afternoon silence
Haunted by songs of forlorn
Children left behind by dead
Parents and fleeing relatives.

The first five lines, a single sentence really, run on the heels of each other, and to see where the poet's thoughts lead, one needs to read the next line, and then the next line – it's like peeling an onion, with each succeeding image revealing another. Look at the opening line again: in both bare and barren, you have the verb bar; in this case, to prevent; and there, trapped in the silence, are the children who have been abandoned, both by the dead and the living. We are in an upside down world with no adults, and the humans alive are children, not usually the normal order of things. When we move to lines 6-8 the children

… watch the dance of dead leaves,
Choreographed by the whirlwind,
Moving to unheard music.

Though the leaves share the same condition of death as the parents, the former have been animated by the whirlwind. It is possible that the children, being children, have no idea that when the whirlwind passes things do not get back to what they once were. But if things were not normal to begin with, what would the whirlwind bring? Even in the Hebrew Bible, the whirlwind is not always the eschaton portrayed by the prophets. Its appearance does indicate the overturning of the old order of some sort, as seen by Ezekiel as he stood by the Chabar in Ez. 1:4:

“And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness [was] about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire.”

It is clear from what follows in Ezekiel’s vision that the Israelites had never before encountered a situation like that. However in Job 38:1: “the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said...” This theophany is really the beginning of the end of Job's suffering, and in time he regains all he had lost and more. In 2 Kings 2:11: Elijah “went up by a whirlwind into heaven.” There is a possibility then, for a future restoration; even for the world that the poem depicts. As Mensah says again, in an email:

“The whirlwind can also be seen as a comforting element to the children because it 'choreographs' a display for the forlorn children, giving them a semblance of hope in a time of hopelessness.”

They wait and wait and wait
To awaken with faith,
Expecting this ghost village
To become what it once was.

Conclusion

A poem can mean different things at different times, depending on how one looks at it. So can words and images within a poem. The history that a word or an image carries can lead one to a particular reading. In the poet's response, he mentions the words “forlorn” and “hope”; put them together as “forlorn hope”, and you go back to the phrase's origins in the 16th century, all the way through to the Napoleonic Wars, and to the stalemate in the trenches during the First World War. The forlorn hope is usually a group of soldiers selected to lead an attack, and often not expected to return alive. Sometimes a few do return, and these become instant heroes. Their survival is a testament to man's ability to defy the odds, like the children in Mensah’s poem holding out for a hope that just might come.



References

Egblewogbe, M. and Hill, L. (2011). Look Where You Have Gone To Sit. Woeli Publishers.

Douglas, J.D. (1980). The Illustrated Bible Dictionary: Part 3. Intervarsity Press.


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L.S. Mensah is a frequent OGOV contributor. Read more of her work here.

Favourite Poems of 2011

Readers' Picks:

portrait of a lotto prophet as savior of the people by Prince Mensah (Issue 5.38, September 24th - 30th, 2011)

Comments on portrait of a lotto prophet as savior of the people:

"Time is very important in this poem, and I like how Mensah uses the temporal divisions (Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow) to point up the inevitability of the people's fate. By fixating on immediate material needs, they condemn themselves to exploitation when they, like the refrain, dwell only in the present. The Lotto Prophet is the Pied Piper, this time he punishes the people for the mistake of wanting more, ironically, by taking what little the people possess. It could be applied to the present financial crisis." - L.S. Mensah

"When two or three lines in a poem stick to your memory, when you love to read that poem again and again, then that poem has some qualities that cannot be measured. An example of that poem is Prince Mensah's "portrait of a lotto prophet as savior of the people"" - Darko Antwi

A Text Message To My Friend, Jake, Who Died For Their Sake by Philip Addo (Issue 5.50, December 17th - 23rd, 2011)

Comments on A Text Message To My Friend, Jake, Who Died For Their Sake:

"I love the poem because it touches on a very sensitive issue: "Slave trade in our modern time." I think I adore the poem. - Molai Addo

"Well done to Philip Addo for his amazing poem." - Darko Antwi

Forgotten Heroes by Martin Elorm Dogbo (Issue 5.45, November 12th - 18th, 2011)

Comment on Forgotten Heroes:

"This poem's theme is very universal. The sad songs of “Forgotten Heroes” are sung in every language of the world, but it was handled with poetic artistry by Martin Dogbo with such melancholic undertones that pluck on emotional strings." - Dela Bobobee

Staff Picks:

Mother of Ikemefuna and Mother of Equiano by L.S. Mensah (Issues 5.42 - 5.44, October 22nd - November 11th, 2011)

Comments on Mother of Ikemefuna and Mother of Equiano:

"L.S. Mensah does a great job by writing about two mothers of two characters; one fictional (Ikemefuna) the other actual (Equiano). Both men were slaves; Ikemefuna in another neighboring tribe, Equiano in another foreign nation. "Mother of Ikemefuna" executes an excellent juxtaposition of death and life against a background of hollow traditions. Ikemefuna's mother speaks, as a microcosm of women in stagnant cultures. In "Mother of Equinano", the mother is a collector of memories, a woman whose small heart has enough space to contain all the places her lost son had ever stepped on." - Prince Mensah

"What a treat it was to feature this pair of poems by L.S. Mensah. "Mother of Equiano" in particular, especially that cracking ending, has haunted me more than almost any poem featured on OGOV to date. And in addition to the poems, L.S. is one of the most thoughtful and generous interviewees we've ever had (see here for yourself). What more can we ask for?" - Rob Taylor

Thinking aloud, while sipping palmwine in England by Darko Antwi (Issue 5.52, December 24th - 30th, 2011)

Comments on Thinking aloud, while sipping palmwine in England:

"In compelling diasporan mode, Darko Antwi pulls the strings of nostalgia to the notes of change (or vice versa). As he sips palmwine in England, the poet makes a clear statement that he refuses to drink English alcohol and, ironically, it is the only thing in his culture that still tastes right. Using the backdrop of rain, the poet muses about home, about the sheer simplicity and sensuality in the way of life. Amidst all that, there are serious issues that have managed to morph themselves into normalcy. Issues that continue to undermine the progress of society. Darko captures questions that run in the diasporan state of mind: is home still the same way I left it? Are people still dependent on rain (a euphemism for external factors) to make important decisions about their lives? " - Prince Mensah

"This poem is rich with images of home. Heavy with them. They spill from it like rain from the "pelvis of the roof". You can feel the weight of it all as you read. You can feel the ache. Beautiful stuff." - Rob Taylor

Ayitey, 1973 by Nii Parkes (Issue 5.10, March 5th - 11th, 2011)

Comment on Ayitey, 1973:

"As with many year-end awards, poems published on OGOV near the end of the year tend to get more attention than early-year poems that have slipped from our collective memory. This often leads to wonderful poems being overlooked, something which cannot be allowed to happen for the poems in Nii Ayikwei Parkes' "The Makings of You" series. "Ayitey, 1973" stands out in particular, weaving its web between Accra and London, Vietnam and 9/11, George Foreman and Bruce Lee, Picasso and Nas. And Neruda leaning over it all. It is a mesmerising poem." - Rob Taylor

Mother of Equiano - L.S. Mensah

I would howl, but my throat
Is a gravel bridge, worn
Weak, where the thunder
Broke its scapula.

Hear me, you gods of
Childbirth, before my cry,
Hard-edged as Gbawe stone, hurls
Itself over the edge of this dirge;

For the Atlantic complains: that
My grief graffities the seas
With acoustic smog, disturbs
The sleep of off-duty fishes.

So I hide my threnody
In the spear tips of grasses
And I settle for a sob.
Shame! Shame! On the Atlantic!

What day is today?
It is the day of childbirth.
But in the breast milk that sours,
I hear my children cry.

In the raw lick of harmattan fires,
Is their cry: “Mother, we're cold.”
Were I an alchemist, I would dig
Up their after-births,

I would breathe life into them,
I would water them with my tears,
I would keep vigil
Till they return.

No one knows the shape of grief
Until it acquires land in your throat,
Saying; “do what you will
Your forever begins today.”

And what day is today?
It is the day the snatch-and-carry
Carried off my children on the wings of salt.
Tell me saw-wing swallows,

Did they pass by?
Point out the ground they trod,
So I may collect and keep the dust
Till they return.

They must return; they only
Stepped out to play.
No one turns to ash.
I only went to farm that day.

Often the songs of saw-wing swallows
Populate my dreams; often in fragments --
They skim the surface of things --
They remind me of young

Water – brooks, streams,
Rivulets and such
Where once you played.
They remind me of you.

The saw-wing swallows lend
Me their voice-boxes, to call you
Out from across the Middle
Passage -- only the silence returns.

If you should return
And find me gone, know this:
I searched. I looked. Found not a fragment.
Of you.

Author Profile - L.S. Mensah

Biography:

L. S. Mensah was born and raised in Accra, and lives in the UK.

Five Questions with L. S. Mensah:

1. Like last week's featured poem, this poem is based off a Nigerian book - in this case, Olaudah Equiano's slave narrative, The Interesting Narrative Of The Life Of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, the African. The main difference between this and Achebe's Things Fall Apart, of course, being that Equiano's book is autobiographical. Did the fact that the source material for this poem was “real” change how you approached its composition?

I didn't immediately see the Nigerian connection, but they really are cracking writers. The book's authenticity has been a point of contention since it was published in the late 18th century, and Equiano himself responded to critics in his own day. That era is of course long gone, and today the questions that remain are posed in the interest of scholarship. Paul Lovejoy, a historian of African slavery, has raised questions (in Autobiography & Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African). He claims there are records which show Equiano was born in South Carolina instead of Essaka in Igboland; though Lovejoy himself concedes that most details are correct. On the other hand Catherine Acholonu, a Nigerian poet and critic, has undertaken some wonderful work in The Igbo Roots Of Olaudah Equiano. Equiano's Travels (as it is published by Heinemann African Writers Series), opens up the problems of how we should approach our past, and what happens when the boundaries between autobiography, historiography, travel writing and the larger work of memory itself collide. Even libraries are faced with the problem of its classification; my borough library places it on the autobiography shelf, while back home, I expect to find it on the literature shelf.

My approach was influenced by the fact that every captive, including Equiano and his sister, left family behind. The (real life) slave narratives that have come down to us are filled with people who search for their relatives, including children, and in cases where they are able to trace them, they make efforts to redeem them if they are relatively well off. However that aspect of the history is rarely discussed, and there are reasons why. In Ghana, you find that it is often a taboo to talk about the slave past. The truth is that in some areas, the chiefs and traditional authorities took active part in the trade, and would rather the subject not be opened up. Also, the descendants of those who were enslaved (at least in Ghana) do not necessarily want to dredge up their ancestors' past. Even today, it is spoken of only in hushed tones. When I was a child, a lady once asked for her marriage to be dissolved; the reason being that her husband's relatives had referred to her as the descendant of slaves; never mind how long slavery had been abolished. Her request was granted; but the curious thing was that it was to her husband’s family to which her ancestors had once been enslaved, and then absorbed after the abolition. They should have been the last to raise such an insult. We also know that some of the Diaspora Blacks who travel to Ghana do so not only to see the slave forts, but to trace their family’s original home.

2. Both this poem and last week's take the perspective of mothers who do not figure significantly into the original narratives as presented by Achebe and Equiano. Was your primary goal in writing these poems to give a voice to these women? If so, why did you find this to be important?

Thanks, you have a way of asking questions which forces one to either re-think, or to look again for new insight. Yes, by refracting the experience through their eyes, I give voice to the women, but now that you ask I believe it is also broadly about the children. Both the fictional Ikemefuna and the real life Equiano had relatively easier lives before they were taken away from their mothers. Okonkwo expected first his own son Nwoye and then Ikemefuna to work almost as hard as he did on his farm. Though Equiano paints a relatively romantic picture of his childhood with his parents, he was put to work (in the domestic slave trade) almost as soon as he was captured; as for example, working the bellows for a (gold)smith. Lovejoy, quoting Eltis and Engerman, says that between 1663 and 1867; a period of just over two centuries, about 421,530 children were enslaved.

Ama Ata Aidoo's Anowa, a play about the slave experience, picks up the issue of the unaccompanied slave child. The lead character has no children, yet is the only one who expresses any concern about the slave children in her own “big house”. Herself “a child of several incarnations,” Anowa strays from the path her Mother Badua had mapped out for her:

I want my child to be a woman
Marry a Man,
Tend a farm
And be happy to see her
Peppers and her onions grow.
A woman like her
Should bear children
Many children
So she can afford to have
One or two die.

As a child Anowa's own questions about the legacy of the slave trade was met with some reluctance by her grandmother:

Shut up child or your mouth would one day twist with questions
…
You frighten me, child,
You must be a witch, child,
…
No one talks of these things any more
All men and women try to forget
They have forgotten.

Whatever the grandmother's protestations, she answers Anowa's questions; something denied to the slave twins Panyin-na-Kakra, who fan Kofi Ako's empty chair. Kakra, when questioned by Anowa, cannot remember their mother, and has no recollection beyond the fact that they came from “the house in Tantri”. This leaves Anowa to wonder about the unknown mother:

“… who is she? Where is she sitting while they stand here fanning an empty chair? Let someone go and see how she suffered bearing them.”

What we have in each poem over these two weeks, (also in Anowa) is an inversion; i.e. for whatever reason, a parent either outlives or is separated from a child. The older generation in the (child’s) original community, is unable to pass on its mores – and so what starts out as a break down of the family eventually results in cultural suicide.

3. We've now seen two “mother” poems of yours over the last two weeks. Are these part of a wider series? If not, are you undertaking one in the future?

Yes, each is part of a wider series, i.e. while the Ikemefuna poem speaks for the colonial experience, the Equiano poem stands for the slave experience; the two overarching crises which sit firmly in the African past. But I believe my interests tend more towards the slave experience, since it was with that subject that I found my feet. If there's anything I'll call a long term project, it is the slavery poems (all others are later accretions), and I take it as a good sign that three have been published so far: “Equiano Meets Mama Lot” in the Sentinel Champions Series; “Equiano Visits Cape Coast Castle” appears in Whispers In The Whirlwind, published by Mensa Press and “The Grand Emporium” in look where you have gone to sit, by Woeli (and the Writers Project Of Ghana).

But I have had my turn. For now let's sprinkle star dust on others who have also taken on the subject of slavery. It was Ghanaian poet and critic Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang, who in his ambition to fill what he calls a “gap in our history four hundred years long” has done the wonderful work of publishing a collection about the impact of slavery: Cape Coast Castle: A Collection Of Poems. He writes in “Equiano's Retort”:

…
They scattered the ash and the old people
They killed the young in their yolk
…

Everything is present in my memory
Even the far future, the buried fury

And in “Equiano: A Mother's Song”:

They snarled him like a beastly thing
Took him washed out in streams of fishy swarm
Scaled and sold him, my flute song
Where his mother can never reach him
My body is streaked with red clay
I will not be consoled.

You can see how my own Equiano poem picks off the crumbs after Opoku-Agyemang. Here on OGOV, Roland Bankole Marke’s “Africa's Shores” is also in that vein, slavery which demands that humans become chattel, is also a question of a breakdown in morality (you can read the comments to see why I took issue with the poem). Finally in your own [ed. note - this interview was conducted by Rob Taylor] “The Slave Castle at Elmina” published in your collection The Other Side Of Ourselves, you describe how as your tour group entered the Condemned Men’s Cell at Elmina, a woman “had felt something flying”:

…
and sure enough when we quieted down
we could hear its faint cries and sense
its frantic little bird heart rattling in its cage of bones.

You also draw a contrast between the treatment of

of rebellious slaves - how the soldiers
would put five or six of them in and not open
the door again until they were all dead

And the bird given its freedom by one of the tourists:

who waited motionlessly
until he could hear the bird well enough
to find it and cup it in his hands,
carry it out into the courtyard and send it
scrambling into the sky

After all these centuries, the incarceration spaces can still appear spooky. I have seen grown men cry coming out.

Thanks, Poets.

4. The punctuation in this poem is very important, especially in the last stanza. Did you play with the punctuation a great deal to come to this version, or was the punctuation, or was the punctuation more or less like this in the first draft?

Punctuation is often the last thing I take seriously, mainly because I’m quite horrific at it. I usually keep to the bare knuckle method of a comma, a comma, until I reach a full stop. With this poem, I started with what became the first and last stanzas (with a change of word here and there), though not necessarily in the positions they now occupy, and yeah, with what became the final stanza I had to turn from my normally long sentences and work in the short lines (the idea of fragmentation was in my head but I was probably unsuccessful with that).

5. What have you been reading of late? Do you have any book recommendations for our readers?

I'll say I'm mostly rereading, but I read James Gleick's The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood which came out this year. It's a wonderful read, if anyone can get it; especially in light of the recent discussion over the role of the internet in writing.

I'm (a lapsed) Anglican so I've been reading the King James Bible all through this year. This year, 2011, is the 400th year of its publishing. I'm reading it side by side with Robert Alter's The Art Of Biblical Narrative, which treats the bible as literature. I've slowly come to see the Bible as one of the best books with which to learn to write. Before anyone taught writing, the biblical writers knew their pacing, their parallelisms, their allusions, etc. and could handle multiple narratives without losing the reader. Even if you’re not Christian, you might enjoy it, and it could help you get Whitman.

I've been going through C.C. Reindorf's A History Of the Gold Coast and Ashanti. Reindorf was a Ga (half Ga, half Dutch), who became a Presbyterian Pastor, and contributed to translating the Bible into Ga. He was Tacitus without the salacious gossip, and published his book a century after Equiano’s Travels. Read and compare Reindorf’s book with Equiano’s to see how the representation of history and narrative changed in just a century. There is a version of his book online, otherwise if you’re really interested, email me for a copy.

I also recommend Abdulrazak Gurnah's Paradise; shortlisted for both the Whitbread (now the Costa) and the Booker (now the Man Booker) Prizes in 1994. Gurnah is a Tanzanian (born in Zanzibar) of Arab heritage, and his novel is based on the Koran's version of the Joseph story. It is set in East Africa around the beginning of the last century. Yusuf, the main character is another young man without his mother, and just like the Koranic Joseph, impetuous and with too much luck for his own good. His parents were forced to sell him into slavery, and he was never to see them again. The book ends with Yusuf about to join the war effort for the First World War to fight on the side of the Germans. Again, read and compare Gurnah’s book with Things Fall Apart, and see how two novels, set in roughly the same historical time but in different parts of the continent, treat the coming of colonialism, amongst other things.

Also for anyone who wants to know about the slave past, William St Clair's The Grand Slave Emporium: Cape Coast Castle and the British Slave Trade is an excellent read. You don’t need to be an academic or a student to enjoy reading it. I borrowed his title for “The Grand Emporium”, and never gave him credit. Shame on me.

On a lighter note I'm also rereading the Harry Potter novels. The thought of Nearly Headless Nick, Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, the Gryffindor House Ghost, (played in the films by John Cleese) not allowed to join the headless hunt fills me with sadness.

Contact L. S.:

lsmensah(at)aol.co.uk

Mother of Ikemefuna - L.S. Mensah

Some days all I startle are brush tailed
Porcupines, gathering twigs for leaf
Supper. They offer to de-quill my grief
But I decline, walk on, search on.

The forest brims with emptiness
Who knows what the dead must
Think of me, staining their eternity
With my tear-logged pain?

Eternity; that cold finality, thought
To stretch the length of the after-life,
To regurgitate the wounding tear,
To stare the stark horizon in the face,

Where a boy holds his head
In an alien wood, on an alien
Crossroad, his blood tock-ticking
To the old chronometer of revenge.

I have been scanning the Sphinx'
Face since; yet refuse to answer
Her perpendicular riddle, however
She phrases this logic of my existence.

I carry an ossuary inside of me,
When I move, it clatters
With my boy's ghost bones.
Once, I called it a womb.

He perished in the year of locusts,
Caught unawares in his place of rest.
Oh look for a headless ghost with a pot shard
Ikemefuna was my boy's name.

Author Profile - L.S. Mensah

Biography:

L. S. Mensah was born and raised in Accra, and lives in the UK.

Five Questions with L. S. Mensah:

1. This poem taps into another piece of African literature as a source of inspiration (Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart). Here at OGOV we don't see many poems that take advantage of that rich resource for inspiration. Do you think it is important for African writers to explore and expand upon existing African literature?

I think we should, and like you said, it’s a rich and ready resource for us to mine, but I wouldn’t want to tell others which themes to explore. The moment we pick our pens or sit behind a keyboard, we engage with both the oral and the written work that first opened our eyes to our own literature. At the very least that body of work generates questions in us that we spend the rest of our lives pondering. By engaging with their work we are also able to ask ourselves a million what ifs, and hold ourselves up to the light, to see where the shadows fall.

The response does not need to be to a novel or a play; it could be to a situation or to a poem/set of poems about a particular situation, and our poets are already building what is shaping up to be an impressive body of work on the Keta problem. It started with Kwesi Brew's “The Sea Eats Our Lands” and Kofi Awoonor's “The Sea Eats The Land at Home” to which others on OGOV have responded: Edith Faalong’s “Without Roots”; Kwofie Mathew’s “Keta My Love”; Prince Mensah's “Keta Stories" and Andy Kwawukume’s “Keta”. Let's not forget your own “I Have Gone To Keta: Daytrip” - a response to Kobena Eyi Acquah's “I want to go to Keta”. Keta has become the motif of our national angst, and poets and writers will go on writing about it.

2. Did this poem come to you as a poem bound to Things Fall Apart from the beginning, or did the story of Ikemefuna become wound into the poem as it developed?

Not really, it started out as the best laid plans of a feminist that went awry. At first I thought I'd explore the relationship between Okonkwo and his wives. I ended up writing about Okonkwo himself ("Okonkwo's Beatitude"); then about his third wife ("Mrs Okonkwo the Youngest"), both of which appear in We Come From One Place published by Mensa Press. When I turned to Ikemefuna, I thought to explore him through his mother's eyes because he is the only one who even wonders about her. She is a character in the book, only because her son remembers, but even those memories are at risk, because he knows they become vaguer with time. I also thought I'd tie his fate to the locusts that appear in chapter seven of the book, since that foreshadows Ikemefuna's own end:

“The locusts settled in the bushes for the night and their wings became wet with dew. Then all Umuofia turned out in spite of the cold harmattan, and everyone filled his bags and pots with locusts. The next morning they were roasted in clay pots and then spread in the sun until they became dry and brittle. And for many days this rare food was eaten with solid palm-oil.”

Ikemefuna had lived with Okonkwo for about three years with nothing happening to him, so he thought he was safe, but he dies a day after the arrival of the locusts. Achebe himself tells us that despite his bravery, Okonkwo is a man afraid of being thought a coward, and that fear is what leads him to join the killing despite Ogbuefi Ezuedu’s advice. Should the community let the boy go and risk the wrath of the gods? From my reading of the book, Achebe also raises a point about the futility of the scapegoat. There is nothing to suggest whether Okonkwo’s community would have fared better or worse if they had let him go. Certainly in the real world, that would not have prevented the arrival of the Europeans in his village, and the subsequent trauma the community, and all Africa, was to suffer.

3. When did you first read Things Fall Apart? Has your perspective changed in the intervening years?

I must have first read it sometime in my first or second year of secondary school. I would say my perspective has deepened. The issues it raises are not as black and white as they first appeared to me back then. Things Fall Apart is the classic it is because it offers no easy answers, but we take what we want from it anyway. We tend to pick up the obvious, such as the treatment meted out to the Africans, and we are right to do so. However, Achebe also presents us with a society that regards knowledge and people's place in the world as fixed; one that discriminates against women, strangers and the disabled, and one that sees itself as more civilised than neighbouring communities. Tell me what has changed? And why do we still tell ourselves that we had a near-perfect society in the past? Okonkwo’s community also complained about the world going to the dogs, you know.

4. “Some days all I startle ...” is an excellent opening to a poem. When in the composition of the poem did this come to you?

Looking back, I believe that phrase started life in one of my Congo poems but it always impeded my efforts to do anything with it. It became the starting point for this poem, but even then I wouldn't say the outcome was guaranteed. Seamus Heaney makes a point about how the right opening line can lead one to generate a whole poem, but one does need some luck too. A lot of the time I feel like an Accra cobbler, making shoes out of those worn car tyres, hammering them into place with oversized Kantamanto nails!

5. How many drafts did this poem go through before it reached the version published here?

Over a dozen. Of my million hideous obsessions, the number of drafts of a single poem I go through is probably the worst.

Contact L. S.:

lsmensah(at)aol.co.uk

To The Congo (A Spell Against Forgetfulness) - L.S. Mensah

I know nothing of what the storm tells
of the history of the congo
does it begin when it thunders
or does it finish when geography
and geo-history
mingle or join themselves

- “The Hearse”, Tchicaya U Tam'si

The river that forgets its river-ness,
Abandons its engagement with the sea,
It forgets the shrieks of yellow
Beaked gulls, bent on
Raising raucous hell, over

The availability of nesting
Seaweed. It thinks no more
Of wader birds on tide-fled
Estuaries, probing the mud’s
Scalp, for invertebrates

The memory-harassed river,
Dis-remembers the speckled kingfisher,
That scans the water’s torso in High
Definition, to dive bomb for blue
Crabs. It blanks out the eternal cursive

Of the waves, lace-cuffed, playing
Adzenuloo, Adzenubaa*
With the harried shingle,
In its forever dance
Of etch-and-erase

But the sound of water in its many incarnations:
    Trickles – gushes – splurges 
                Whooshes – slurps – mizzles
                               Drizzles – splashes – gurgles
Forever haunts the river that forgets its river-ness.

*Riddling game in Accra

Author Profile - L. S. Mensah

Biography:

L. S. Mensah was born and raised in Accra, and lives in the UK.

Five Questions with L. S. Mensah:

1. The proposed “Grand Inga Dam” hydro-electric project on the Congo River, which would be the largest hydro-electric in the world, looms large over my reading of this poem. Did you mean for this poem to speak to that project? If not, what were the main concerns you were writing towards?

My writing of this poem, in the first instance had nothing to do with the Grand Inga, since I had no idea about the project. On one level, it starts and ends as a spell poem, with the power of the words unleashed by the incantation. It is in line with some of the poems I've been writing, which explore different speech genres: riddles, oaths, invocations, libations, even curses, but in this case a spell (at least what I choose to call a spell).

In this poem, I use the river Congo as an allegorical canvas on which I attempt to hang a range of ideas about the on going disruptions (to put it mildly) in that part of Africa. In the African imaginary, the Congo region locates best of all, both in time and space, when and where someone turned our Rubik’s Cube, leaving us to rotate it to its original solid blocks of colour. Often when invoked as a comment on the modern African condition, it can elicit strong responses from African writers and intellectuals, including Chinua Achebe’s response to Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness". Perhaps the poetry equivalent to "Heart of Darkness" is Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo (A Study of the Negro Race)", which in its time also attracted its share of the racist blame. Go here for a discussion on that poem. The gaze, looking in has never been easy for us, whether it's the deracinated V. S. Naipaul 's well known views or Tim Butcher's "Blood River".

There is a point to be made that the relative peace which enabled West African poets to return to the past, and allowed them to explore indigenous poetic forms like the Ewe dirge, Ijala chant, the panegyric, the poetry of abuse, etc. was denied to the Congolese people. Right from 1960, their independence year, there was a civil war, not to mention the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961. If I'm correct, the present conflict has been raging since August 1998.

It would be worth one’s while to look at what the poets of the Congo region have had to say about their particular situation. When, as far back as 1958, Tchicaya U Tam'si (Congo Brazzaville) in 'Fragile' writes “endlessly I decalcify my joy” he makes you think sharply about the context from which this kind of verse emerges, for in this single line he sets up ideas about impurities, imperfections, depositions and hard water; all this about an emotion supposedly linked to happiness. The adverb of time, ‘endlessly’ placed right at the beginning of the line indicates that this cleansing process will go on forever. In a conflict or war situation, all the narratives of one-ness people have woven around themselves begin to fall apart, and the longer it goes on, the more they come to the realisation that they have always been strangers to each other.

Your reading of "To The Congo" as a comment on the Grand Inga however, puts a different but interesting slant on it, because it takes it from the political to the ecological, and therefore to concerns about harnessing natural resources for our use, and the price we, as well as the natural environment, pay for it.

2. Regardless of the intentions of this particular poem, do you feel, as a Ghanaian whose land (and greatest river) was so transformed by the damming of the Volta, that you have a particular perspective to provide the Congolese people? Do you feel Ghanaians have a particular responsibility to weigh in on the project?

The Congo has the unique distinction of being the only river in Africa, if not the world, which crosses the equator twice. This means there is water in its channels all year round. The primary aim of the Grand Inga therefore, is not for water supply. It is about meeting the energy needs of the Central & Southern African sub-regions. To achieve this, they would have to move or re-locate huge numbers of people.

In the case of the Akosombo Dam, the numbers for the Volta Lake vary but this article suggests 70,000, and also lists some problems faced by other dams across Africa. Many of these, including the Inga 1 and Inga 2, have not faired well managing problems foreseen and unforeseen, from decreased water levels in these reservoirs to invasive aquatic plant and animal species.

As with the situation in Ghana, the realities and intricacies of international financing require the energy needs of the various interest groups to be tiered, so that industry always gets a far higher percentage of the power than private homes. You see this clearly in times of power shortage. Homes and small business are always the first to have their power rationed.

That said, we should not be in the business of depriving others of their needs. It is the price of progress.

3. What role can poetry play in raising the environmental consciousness of Africa?

Heh! I found this most difficult to think around, and my answer may still be unsatisfactory, but I’ll give it a try.

African poetry can link us with those aspects of our philosophical traditions that require the individual to be responsible to his environment. In our small communities, where we all speak the same languages and worship the same deities, our farmers and fishermen set aside specific days when they do not farm or fish. These same communities sometimes structure their annual agricultural festivals around the idea of closing off particular ecological zones or areas, such as forests or water bodies for a period of time. The Bakatue Festival, celebrated by the people of Elmina/Edina comes to mind here. However, in the process of modernisation and urbanisation, when we move into ever larger conurbations, we forget or abandon these principles and expect someone else to mind our environment for us. Poets of the drier regions of the Savannah and the Sahel, where droughts are more frequent, are most likely to explore such issues. Tijan Sallah (The Gambia) says in 'Sahelian Earth', rather bluntly:

Very little water has fallen
On palmfronds to support
The throat of crows…

Rains have signed a contract of neglect
With our landscape…

Our inheritance has suddenly turned into
The restless despair of the camel's fate.

Chenjerai Hove (Zimbabwe) in 'Lost Bird' reminds us of the problems birds face in the urbanised, industrial environment:

Some say he fell in the chimney
of a nearby factory
others say he choked
And fell in the sewerage works
So he died, passed away without a tear.

Again and again, these poets remind us that when we let go of the natural environment by whatever means, we lose ourselves. Kofi Awoonor does this best in "The Sea Eats The Land At Home" when he personalises the impact of the destructive power of the sea:

Adena has lost the trinkets which
Were her dowry and her joy,
In the sea that eats the land at home,
Eats the whole land at home.

This powerful force of nature has taken away the symbols of her status in her community. It is a serious erasure of Adena’s identity. Of course it can be fixed by replacing the items of her dowry, but they say there’s nothing like the original.


4. Birds, especially African birds, clearly play an important role in the world of your poems. What is it about birds that drives you to return to them? Do they represent something consistent throughout all your poems, or does the meaning of the presence of birds change from poem to poem?

As a matter of fact there are two things I write consistently about; water in its many incarnations (sea, rivers, dew, rain, etc) and birds. In this poem the two meet. Invoking “the animal as an allegorical emblem” as Auden puts it in “The Dyer’s Hand”, allows one to adopt a Brechtian distance, all the while being aware that the poem deals with some aspect(s) of the human condition.

I’m not sure though, that I employ avian imagery in a naturalist’s kind of way. But poets are not always the best assessors of their own work. Often, in answering questions like these, the poet’s own self-delusions and subjectivities come into play. When we have laid bare our proclivities and psycho-pathologies, we become like Kweku Ananse, who in his attempt to hide the pot of wisdom, ends up losing everything when the pot breaks. It is impossible to gather these back into one's bosom.

Birds remind me of home, of those early evenings when the starlings perform their roosting dance, and the harsh cries of vultures in tall palm trees, especially when it rains. Birds also bring up questions of the exilic condition, free will and determinism, but these are outside the scope of this poem’s concerns. As for the birds I use, they change from poem to poem, depending of course, on the subject matter, though I have a few favourites I return to again and again.

5. Continuing with the last question, it seems at times that you are almost cataloguing the birds of Africa. Would you agree with this statement?

Yes I do have a habit of cataloguing everything around me, including birds, and I hope I live long enough to catalogue as many as I can, that is, before some of them become extinct. Since I got myself a copy of David Alderton’s The New Encyclopedia of British, European and African Birds, I have come to regard myself as a tinpot expert on birds, and it’s been wonderful!

Contact L. S.:

lsmensah(at)aol.co.uk

Favourite Poems of 2010

Readers' Picks:

TRƆTRƆ by Kwadwo Kwarteng (Issue 4.3, January 16th - 22nd, 2010)

Comments on TRƆTRƆ:

"I love the way Kwadwo Kwarteng explored sounds to paint a vivid picture in the mind of readers, about an experience most of us have witnessed! Whoever reads the poem can imagine what to expect in the "Trotro" on any day." - Oteng Owusu

"Kwarteng has the potential/ability of breathing life into each sound - be it chaotic or serene. And the life-span [of the poem] is long and enduring in the ears of those who cherish rhythm." - Darko Antwi

Silence by Samuel Adjei Ntow (Issue 4.8, February 20th - 26th, 2010)

Comments on Silence:

"With a very good command of the English language, and the highest order of figurative speech, Ntow uses the trance-like Silence to express both the interior and exterior relationship between a social organism and its environment." - Darko Antwi

"This is a good work. Indeed these [things] do happen through the night in Ghanaian settings and for Ntow to have captured the details in his work makes it wonderful. Well done." - Nana Agyemang Ofosu

The Deer Hunt by Mariska Taylor-Darko (Issue 4.38, September 25th - October 1st, 2010)

Comments on The Deer Hunt:

"I chose this poem based on three broad categories: 1. Its descriptive screenplay quality, appropriate POV and clever use of imagery, 2. Its socio-cultural significance, and 3. Its potential as a reference point in literature books for educational purposes." - Dela Bobobee (Read Dela's essay on The Deer Hunt here)

"This title stands the chance of being a key literature in any modern Ghanaian collection of cultural importance." - Darko Antwi

Staff Picks:

Swear Note by L.S. Mensah (Issue 4.29, July 17th - 23rd, 2010)

Comments on Swear Note:

"I love this piece because it addresses a serious and emotional issue in our modern society using various figures of speech and animations that put your mind to work and make you visualize the brutal activities that women under trokosi go through. I am sure any women's organisation would love to use this piece for advocacy" - Julian Adomako-Gyimah

"L.S. Mensah's use of the specular is apt for the theme of mirrors in this poem. She uses the same words in reverse structure to capture an ancient African saying: "if you point at a person with your index finger, remember the rest are pointing at you."" - Prince Mensah

old dust made new by Daniela Elza (Issue 4.11, March 13th - 19th, 2010)

Comments on old dust made new:

"Daniela uses spaces to create a sparse landscape and a staccato of varied emotions in a poem that captures Harmattan in all its glory and grimness. " - Prince Mensah

"I personally haven't experienced Harmattan for a while and this piece brings back memories, particularly of when I was a kid and had little control about the damage that this season caused our hands and lips. Great work. " - Julian Adomako-Gyimah

The Burial of Saint Domeabra by Darko Antwi (Issue 4.36, September 11th - 17th, 2010)

Comment on The Burial of Saint Domeabra:

"Poet and critic Darko Antwi delivers a loaded sermon in his poem about transience. More hidden is his indictment of culture in playing games with a person's reputation. Darko's poem is international in reach, even though it is local in description. "The Burial of Saint Domeabra" is a palatable piece of work: it contains an array of food for thought." - Prince Mensah

How Poems Work #1 - L. S. Mensah on Kwesi Brew's "The Sea Eats Our Lands"

This week's post is an experiment for One Ghana, One Voice. "How Poems Work", which we hope will become an occasional series on the site, aims to give OGOV poets an opportunity to talk about some of their favourite poems previously featured on the site. Before starting in, we want to take a moment to acknowledge Arc Poetry Magazine's How Poems Work series, which directly inspired this one. We hope you enjoy this offering, and join the conversation yourself.


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The Sea Eats Our Lands - Kwesi Brew

Here stood our ancestral home:
The crumbling wall marks the spot.
Here a sheep was led to slaughter
To appease the gods and atone
For faults which our destiny
Has blossomed into crimes.

There my cursed father once stood
And shouted to us, his children,
To come back from our play
To our evening meal and sleep.
The clouds were thickening in the red sky
And night had charmed
A black power into the pounding waves.

Here once lay Keta.
Now her golden girls
Erode into the arms
Of strange towns.

The poetry of Kwesi Brew (1928-2007) exhibits a cut-to-the-bone starkness. In his hands, nature and the supernatural are unforgiving in their relentlessness to humans. For Brew the good old days either never happened, or indeed were not that rosy. What is now is what has always been, and this is why his is a poetry at ease with the anxieties of the modern African. Even when it looks back, his work makes no demands for a return to the past; instead it dismantles the myth of a bucolic past. For example, in his poem “Ancestral Faces” the ancestors slipped into the limbo of time, to watch us, the living, go about our business. In the end they saw us, / and said: They have not changed. In other words, the ancestors recognised themselves in the living.

Brew's “The Sea Eats Our Lands” not only picks up some of the ideas mentioned above, but also contributes to that sub genre of what Gerald Moore calls “Africa's rich marine poetry”. Moore rightly mentions Edouard Maunick (Les Maneges de la mer, Presence Africaine 1964) and Jean-Baptiste Tati Loutard (Poemes de la mer, Yaounde, 1968), but one could also think of Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang(Cape Coast Castle, 1996), Joe de Graft (“The Old Sea Chain”), Lenrie Peters (“On a Wet September Morning”), Gabriel Okara (“One Night at Victoria Beach”) and Kofi Awoonor (“The Sea Eats The Land at Home”).

Brew's poem captures the gradual decline of Keta, a coastal Ghanaian town, due to marine erosion. It is a tightly locked sequence of three stanzas, each of which begins with a spatial determiner, rooting both speaker and reader into place. For this reason the first stanza starts here, the second continues over there and the third brings us back here. We end where we started, with the persona standing guard over what is left of his ruined home.

Back to the first stanza. The narrator's ancestral home has fallen, he informs us, despite countless sacrifices to the gods. All that is left is the wall, itself crumbling for faults which our destiny / has blossomed into crimes. Though we are not told the specific nature of these faults, we are made are aware that they have metastasised. The problem is first noticed in the home, specifically the family’s sacrificial alter, the point of contact between man and deity.

In the second stanza the narrative pulls back a bit, this time to frame the desolation in both meteorological and metaphysical terms. The reader is immersed even more firmly into what happens when a community gets on the wrong side of its gods. At the heart of this is a multigenerational curse, and all are obliged to serve time, even the speaker’s own father. There are two things peculiar with the curse. First, whoever inherits it comes to the realisation that the only condition that offers respite is childhood. However, since no one can remain a child forever, the curse awaits everyone. Second, the curse is infused with colour symbolism – red and black being the colours of mourning in Ghana. The clouds were thickening in the red sky / And night had charmed / A black power into the pounding waves. Red is associated with bleeding, danger and things forbidden, and ''appears in various shades at the longer-wavelength end of the visible spectrum''. This community would bleed itself out, and omens have been signposted for all to see, even in the sky. Black consists “optically in the total absence of colour”, again, there is no way out of this. In between red and black appears night, that time between sunset and sunrise. Night is significant here because it is the talisman which activates the sea's destructive impulse, out of sight and far from any help.

In the third stanza the speaker removes himself from the scene, and in what Seamus Heaney calls “the thin quatrain”, focuses on the plight of the community’s women. Even as it swallows everything in its way, the carnivorous sea rejects the town's female inhabitants and only men are allowed to carry this burden. Under the onslaught of the curse, the old patriarchies still undergird conceptions of what contributions women, the other half of the population may make. Theirs is simply to pack and leave, to erode into the arms / Of strange towns. They are denied any chance to rebuild their crumbling town. It is true that these strange towns might provide opportunities for renewal, for there they would have the chance to start again, but only at the expense of their own community. The narrator returns to colour symbolism again, and Keta's golden girls would lose their shine and be stripped of their identities once they venture into other towns. Gold, that symbol of permanence, turns to dross under the onslaught of this curse.

By the end of the poem we realise that the poet is telling us a morality tale, complete with a lesson. This is the story of how Keta became its own Atlantis, how all the men disappeared, and how the women survived but not intact. By incorporating the morality tale, we see how Brew absorbs an older narrative structure from the folk tradition.

There are two ways one could look at this poem over all. First, that it is not for nothing that the persona takes us through his history, for his intention is to make us identify and empathise with his town’s destiny. He is aware his gods and ancestral cults have failed him, and realises any positive outcome would have to depend on human agency. His community has come to an end as a viable entity because his people appealed to the wrong kind of god. This is why he is no longer willing to stand by the old mandate and maintain the supposedly unchanging bond between man and the supernatural. Through the power of the printed word he leaves the reader to carry this fight on. He trusts the reader to make an appeal on his behalf, this time to a secular god – the political state – because the resources needed to turn his town’s fortune around are only available to the secular state.

Second, one could argue that the persona is convinced this is the end of the road, period. He takes the time to allow us a peek into his world so that he can pass on the knowledge that no system of thought endures forever. At any rate, when he is gone, there will be no one to worship his old gods. Both humans and the supernatural failed to realise that Keta's problem has always been one of geological determinism, and no amount of libations can turn the sea back. Just as the sea nibbles at the land until there's nothing left, so do whole cultural systems come to end, and when they do, no amount of shoring would hold them up.

While this essay situates Brew’s poem within the African marine poetic tradition, its approach is by no means exhaustive. It would be wrong to think that the seascape poetry of Africa is modern. There is a wealth of material from sea shanties, lullabies and work songs if one pays any attention to the traditions of coastal people. The extract below is my own translation of a Ga folk song:

Wote nsho le naa (We went to the beach)
Fen nye wo (We were cold, so cold)
Wotee woya wu nsho le (We took a swim)
Obi le yagbla tsaani (While your child hauled in a seine net)


Another way to access this particular poetic tradition is to take a close look at the poetry about slavery, For this, one could turn to poets like Tati Loutard and Opoku-Agyemang. Again this is not new. The dirge below, translated from Ewe, is believed to have been composed by captives waiting to be carried off by slave ships. Gbodzo was the name of the local slave trader.

Avie mata na Gbodzo yee (I shall rub Gbodzo with tears)
Avie mata na Gbdozo yee (I shall rub Gbodzo with tears)
Fu nade gbe (The sea may roar)
Ga nade gbe yee (The irons may clank)
Nye wukula meva hade o (The rower has not yet arrived)
Avie mata na Gbodzo yee (I shall rub Gbodzo with tears) (1)

The dirge above offers an insight into the influences of a poet like Kofi Awoonor whose “The Sea Eats The Land at Home”(the other Keta poem), I urge the reader to take a look at. There is a way in which texts allude to, complicate and enrich each other. Both poems assume a social realist stance, harnessing artistic practice in the service of a common good – the plight of Keta. However, each incorporates different traditional narrative forms to achieve very different outcomes. Brew's narrator, in the manner of a story teller imparting a morality tale, takes an almost dispassionate tone. On the other hand, Awoonor's – a dirge, occupies a more personal imaginative ground, its tone accusatory, and as is the case with all dirges, a complaint against prevailing conditions.


(1) Acheampong, E. (2001) 'History, Memory, Slave-Trade and Slavery in Anlo (Ghana)', Slavery and Abolition, 22: 3, 1-24


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L.S. Mensah is a frequent OGOV contributor. Read more of her work here.

Swear Note - L. S. Mensah

Disguised as the hoof-note of an ancient Justice,
You gallop through my runnels,
Pounding my daughters into the mud.
Even the moon shields her ripeness from your flares
As you drape my children in tradition's calico.
No! My daughters shall not be cook pots,
To feed the hunger of gods and ghosts;
No longer would they be your hierodules.
I Shwilao* Patron River of Trans Volta, make this pledge:
I shall send, in the beaks of augur-buzzards, a flywhisk of plagues.
This shall I do to you and more,
If you, Trokosi# would not let my daughters go.

If you, Trokosi, would not let my daughters go,
This shall I do to you and more:
I shall send, in the beaks of augur-buzzards, a flywhisk of plagues!
I Shwilao, Patron River of Trans Volta, make this pledge.
No longer would they be your hierodules
To feed the hunger of gods and ghosts;
No, my daughters shall not be cook pots
As you drape my children in tradition's calico.
Even the moon shields her ripeness from your flares.
Pounding my daughters into the mud,
You gallop through my runnels,
Disguised – as the hoof-note of an ancient Justice.

* The Volta River
# Ritual servitude in some areas of the South East of Ghana

Author Profile - L. S. Mensah

Biography:

L. S. Mensah was born and raised in Accra, and has been living in the UK for the past few years. Recently her work has appeared in the annual Barnet Poetry Anthology, Akwantuo.org and Sentinel Poetry’s Champion Poems.

Five Questions with L. S. Mensah:

1. The complete reversal of the poem is an interesting device. What inspired it? Had you seen it done in others poems, or did you come to it yourself?

It’s called a "specular" poem. I believe it has been around for some time, but it was Julia Copus who popularised it. Her poems "The Back Seat of My Mother's Car" and "Kim’s Clothes" have become classics in their own right. As you can see from the link, she has a far better grasp than I have managed. Basically the lines in the first stanza are reversed in the second. The only thing one is allowed to move around is the punctuation.


2. What effect do you hope for the reversal to have on the reader?

To enable it to be read another way, in other ways. You have to see this as if through a mirror. When you stand in front of a mirror, you of course see your own reflection. But then again what seems to be your left hand appears as the right hand of your reflection you see.

There is another reversal of a sort, for the narrative is structured around a variation of the oath formula. In the typical oath, the speaker sets a condition for himself. If he ever violates that condition, he suffers the consequences. In this poem, the speaker has set a condition alright. However, it is up to the addressee to meet that condition and if not, suffer the conditional curse.


3. Can you explain trokosi for our readers who aren't in the know? What is your personal experience with trokosi? What inspired you to write a poem about it?

Trokosi is ritual bondage or servitude of women in parts of the South of Ghana, Togo and Benin. Virgin girls are pledged to shrines in atonement for crimes committed by a member of the girl’s family. Her family is responsible for her upkeep in the shrine, and if she should die or become too old before the debt is paid, the family is obliged to replace her with another girl. Shrines could also make these demands in exchange for other services.

Personally I have no experience with trokosi. Really, I come to this topic by way of writing some poems about the Slave Trade. There are obvious parallels here. Back then the loudest voices against abolition were the traditional authorities, because a considerable percentage of their economies depended on the trade. Even after the Abolition in 1807 (British Empire) and later the Abolition Act of 1874 -75 (Gold Coast Colony & Protectorate), they still found ways to circumvent the system. There were courts set up to prosecute anyone buying, selling or even owning slaves, but it was not unusual for owners to bring their slaves before chiefs and religious elders who then administered fetish oaths to bound slave to owner. No slave would dare break this oath for fear of possible (supernatural) consequences. Colonial and court records abound with examples.

The historians tell us that it was only around the late 18th to early 19th century when shrines started to request humans as payment for their services. This coincides with the period just before and after the abolition of the Slave Trade, so the practice is just over 2 centuries old.


4. What is your intended audience for this poem? Ghanaians or global? While obviously you can do both at the same time, do you view this more as a poem that's meant to inform or to persuade? In other words, to inform the uninformed, or to engage in a discussion/debate with those already in the know?

This poem is for anyone, and is meant to serve as a stepping point, possibly for some kind of debate. Whether it persuades the reader is really up to that reader, because when it comes to debates over tradition, attitudes are pretty much set in stone. There is a tendency to create a halo around everything we call tradition, even when it exploits our own people. It becomes an unequal relationship with one side exerting power in all sorts of ways over the other. This is about the material and sexual exploitation of women pure and simple. It is also a class thing. Those who defend the system, including the priests, chiefs and local educated elite usually have their daughters living far away in Accra or in the West. Their daughters and granddaughters would never be bonded to these shrines as initiates. It is left to their poorer relations to carry this on.


5. What is new in your writing life that our readers may be interested in?

I’m waiting to see what the upcoming anthologies from The Ghana Poetry Project and Mensa Press would bring for me. For now I’m working on some more specular poems, as well continuing with my poems on slavery.

Contact L. S.:

tsikata_was_no_tsatsu(at)hotmail.co.uk

Wrickken - L.S. Mensah

Three-syllable-wind
Disinherited of moisture,
Bespoke and befitting
For the dispossessed,
Dear spirit-child-of-sand!

Who was it carved up the world’s winds,
Assigned you to me, as if to inject my parts,
With ampoules of your absent wetness?
Who was it bequeathed you this loom,
To weave a million ballads of dryness?

Some deficiency must bend your needle
Northeast; where, knuckled into the year’s
Headwinds, gargoyles greet your passing.
Great-great-godfather-of-the-sahel, yours,
Is a problem with rickets.

Long ago astrologers of meteorology,
Foretold the coming of a Sand Messiah,
Downwind of the wind gradient,
A desert dervish, come to tap
Dance with the wind.

And for this I waited; watching
The dandruff moult in the sun-brushed
Twigs of women’s braids.
I bore witness, as you, genuflecting,
Ripped humidity from its hinge.

And what did I gain but a squint,
Sat squat on the trig point of my vision?
Still, even devoid of moisture, you carry
Cadences of water in your double helix.
Or dare I say helices? And dare I say,

One day, just like that, at the break
Of the libationer's prayer
Whatever phlegm of water you gorged;
Would rise, to reign, then fall,
As nayabinghi rain:

De dum.
De dum.
De dum.
De dum.
De dum.

So sleep well. You, on your vowelled
Pillows. I too, shall snore well.
A parting note:
If we should meet in the damp dew, you’ll know,
By the way my skin crackles with drought-static.

"Wrickken" is the fifth of our series of poems on the Harmattan. New entries will be posted each week, and collected here.

Author Profile - L.S. Mensah

Biography:

L. S. Mensah was born and raised in Accra, and has been living in the UK for the past few years. Recently her work has appeared in the annual Barnet Poetry Anthology, Akwantuo.org and Sentinel Poetry’s Champion Poems.

Five Questions with L. S. Mensah:

1. As a child, what was your reaction to the coming of the Harmattan? Has that changed now that you are an adult?

With a sense of dread really. One could sense its approach as the air becomes drier. I think the economic situation also had a lot to do with it, since the price of shea butter suddenly skyrockets. Suddenly shea butter sellers become the common enemy, and we're allowed to moan. As an adult, I look at it as just another weather phenomenon.


2. Living outside of Ghana now, do you miss the Harmattan season at all? And how does it compare to winter in the UK?

I do miss it around this time of year since it's at its height between December and February, which roughly coincides with Winter. In Ga the word for the Harmattan 'Aharabata' is the same as that for the month of January.

It is important not to over fetishize or romanticize it since it causes real discomfort. Some people's skins do really crack, especially around the heel, and bleeding lips are common, not to mention those with asthma and other breathing problems. There is even scientific evidence to suggest it leads to an increase in cerebrospinal meningitis (CSM) across the sub region. In Mali, CSM is known locally as 'the wind illness'. This being Africa a few hundred children die from this disease around this time.


3. In the past, did the Harmattan affect your writing? Would you write less or more during the Harmattan season? Would the themes or tones of your poems change?

I wouldn't say it affected my writing very much; I suppose its presence enabled me to be philosophical about it. I think I have a few poems on the Harmattan, and I'm beginning to look at them as a sequence.


4. Your attention to detail, and to using the right words in the right places, is a great lesson to new Ghanaian writers of how a good poet is a craftsman (or craftswoman!). A question about craft then: when you are choosing your words for such lovely lines as "To weave a million ballads of dryness" and "You, on your vowelled / Pillows" how much of your concern is to literal meaning, how much to image, and how much to sound? What balance are you trying to strike?

Thanks a million for the compliment!

With this poem I started with the literal meaning, from the dictionary definition (and that's a possible way into a poem). You see the word 'Wrickken', is itself an old English word for rickets. 'Harmattan' the dictionary says, is of Akan origin, and dates back to around the 17th century. It is possible the word was absorbed into English, not long after the Europeans became heavily involved in trade with Africans. For me then, the poem draws on metaphors of deformity and timelessness.

The detail comes with the rewrites, when I start to reshape my material. I arrived at the line “To weave a million ballads of dryness” through a moment of serendipity really. I'd heard Marina Lewycka ("A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian"), on the radio, refer to the success rate for new writers as 'a ballad of failure' and then took it from there. For me, that line functions as a crutch. Since I tend to write (overly) long poems, I often look for a phrase or a line which can hold the poem up in places (sort of like Atlas), and allow my reader to pause for breathe, and then continue. I trust my reader to, at some other time, return and investigate the line, and by extension the whole poem again.

As for the phrase "You, on your vowelled / Pillows" it was an attempt to tease out a metalinguistic strain and tease out other meanings from that, but went no further with that. At some point one has to pull back and allow the reader to do the rest. By the time one has made decisions about where to break the line, which point of view to adopt, imagery, metaphor, assonance etc. the poem would have settled and found its own internal balance.


5. How many revisions did this poem go through before its present state? Is that number average, high or low for you?

This must be about the 9th or 10th revision, which is average really. I'm a bit finicky and as soon as I tell myself I'm done with a poem, I go back and start making changes to it. The way I approach it is to copy and paste the last draft, save it with the date, or write by hand in a notebook, also dated. That takes a little more time, but helps me think as I write. The danger with the rewrite is that it could bleed the poem of all vitality. But this way I can go back anytime if I lose my way.

I'll end with what William Herbert says in the essay 'Creative Space':

"Revision is the point at which you stop talking to yourself and start relating to your audience. Until you revise, you are just hanging around in creative space. Revision is the means by which you manoeuvre.

This is the pencil-thin line that a writer must turn into a thoroughfare: you journey into the hitherto unimagined for no other reason than you want to, and you must bring the reader along because you've made them think that they want to as well."

Contact L. S.:

nomadafricanus(at)yahoo.co.uk

Favourite Poems of 2009

Readers' Picks:

Apology to Witches by Darko Antwi (Issue 3.41, October 10th - 16th, 2009)

Comments on Apology to Witches:

"I chose this poem because it holds a stock of lesson for every African to read. Many times we have lashed out at Europeans for being the sources of our woes. Though they can't be left out entirely, much havoc have caused by we ourselves and the writer explicitly reveals that. He pinpoints some instances where societies have come in to decide the fate of African and makes it quite satirical, compelling readers to reorganise their thoughts and assess themselves before the cast the first stone.

In a nut shell, I chose this poem because it's not meant for relaxation, but instead is meant to cause to people to change their ways in order to see the change that they long been looking for." - Adjei Agyei-Baah

"A critic and a constant on OGOV, Darko has almost single-handedly resurrected the power of analysis on OGOV. With this poem, he goes straight into the issue of projection, of blaming others for the consequences of our actions. Darko fearlessly presents the subject with the splendid couplet:

Nobody did us
We did ourselves" - Prince Mensah

Savannah Rain, West Africa by Daniela Elza (Issue 3.6, February 7th - 13th, 2009)

Comments on Savannah Rain, West Africa:

"Cinematic. Great pacing. Carries itself in 11 couplets, until the very last line. Harnesses the suddenness of a tropical storm, then slows it down so the reader can experience it as if through a stop-motion lens. It is about the Savannah's most precious and treasured element - water - and how its action shapes everything else." - L.S. Mensah

"Brilliant. Brilliant. And I want to say this again." - Martin Egblewogbe

For my Husband, an Educated Fool by Nana Yeboaa (Issue 3.23, June 6th - 12th, 2009)

Comments on For my Husband, an Educated Fool:

"Nana Yeboaa just said what so many women would like to say but can't... " - Mariska Taylor-Darko

"I like this poem because it channels the frustrations of women who are caught up in the constant redefinitions of love within and outside a race. It is about the travails in the exposure of familiarity to a terrain of new options. There is a theme akin to the central one in "Things Fall Apart" - the center cannot hold because a new reality has risen on horizons of heritage." - Prince Mensah

Zimbabwe by Prince Mensah (Issue 3.44, October 31st - November 6th, 2009)

Comments on Zimbabwe:

""Zimbabwe" is a beautifully crafted poem in which Prince explores the ideas of place-naming, identity, and boundaries. He does this with a melodic voice, carrying the reader through the politics of Zimbabwe with seeming effortlessness." - Marta Taylor

"The struggle continues, a bold moving poem Prince." - Ivor W. Hartmann

Staff Picks:

Why Birds Sing by L.S. Mensah (Issue 3.37, September 12 - 18th, 2009)

Comments on Why Birds Sing:

"L.S. is a treasure. She writes with such probing ability that just one read of her poem is an injustice to the love of poetry. She commands attention from her readers with her style and manages to present language in a bouquet of beautiful images - here's a prophecy: L S will become one of Ghana's top poets. Mark this on the wall." - Prince Mensah

""Why Birds Sing" is my favourite poem published on OGOV in 2009. L.S. Mensah's attention to form and to sound is admirable. Like Edith Faalong in 2008, L.S. has arrived in full form. We can only hope that 2010 will bring us new poets of similar talent - and of course more work from L.S.!" - Rob Taylor

Pantoum #4 by Van G. Garrett / Fui Koshi (Issue 3.35, September 1st - 4th, 2009)

Comment on Pantoum #4:

""Pantoum #4" is from Van's "Snaps of Ghana" series, which ran on OGOV throughout August and into early September. "Snaps of Ghana", featuring Van's photographs and poems from his travels throughout Ghana, was the first time we focused an entire month on the work of one poet, and was a great success. With or without the rest of the series for support, "Pantoum #4" is a strong poem, utilizing its form to reinforce its themes of relaxation and contemplation." - Rob Taylor

Interregnum by L.S. Mensah (Issue 3.45, November 7th - 13th, 2009)

Comment on Interregnum:

"What an apt poem! The beauty of being is on display in this poem. This is juxtaposed with the bleak sense of emptiness with laughter-morsels with Brother Silence. L.S. Mensah just gave Zimbabweans a gift, a still picture of existence, a reportage on reality. This poem showcases a poet who is observant of the past, present and future in a single passing moment." - Prince Mensah

Interregnum - L.S. Mensah

I knew exactly what you were going through. It's just that I didn't have the right to discuss your problems… hold on just a little bit longer now.
- Lucky Dube, Hold On


In the ruins of Great Zimbabwe [1], swallows
Return with mud. Mute – they make a million
Journeys to build their nests where mosses
Face true north. Brother Silence muzzled
Their tongues with mortis of rigor.

Between Zambezi and Limpopo, the past
And its appurtenances tattoo the plateau,
And Great Zimbabwe hugs her granites;
Each to the other, no need for mortar.
See, O see how she slopes to an almost cornice,
Apex of a gone civilization:

Belligerent – solemn – stoic –

Bivouacked against every minim
Of rain, every quaver of wind.
Some say her tonguelessness begun,
When strange footsteps strayed into her caves,
Forgetting to knock. Whatever the cause,

It unsettles. Who knows, who knows why the sun
Propagates the seer’s gaze with solar-pollen?
The palm wine tapper's calabash is not for the juice
Of coconuts, nor the divining bowl for hand dipping.

Even the River of Crocodiles limps with silt.
Tell me Limpopo, how did Brother Silence cast
His spell over your catchment? But the river elbows me:

I have work to do.
I'm only a middle-aged
River, shifting sandbanks
For my tenant sand martins.
Inquisitor, let me pass.

Who will bear the blame gourd when Great
Zimbabwe is jettisoned into history’s marginalia?

Perhaps a tour guide, a survivor, might
Bring his charges, point where the Great Enclosure once stood,
Where Mwari [2] once spoke, before the outbreak of non-sound.

Perhaps they’ll bask in the familiar comfort
Of old monuments; now and then catch a moment,
Now and then, with the contrails of their breath, cup the numb quiet.

Perhaps, they'll stare into its pools, as if the stare, when
Stretched to the thinness of sand strafing the gut
Of an hourglass, might unpick some mysterium, stitched
To the loin cloth of Great Zimbabwe's skeletons.

O, I wonder if they’ll wonder, whether old
Monuments, like words, possess their own
Etymologies, which untended, shed their clarities.

Let it not be said we hibernated in the bald
Shade of acacias, when our neighbours' fields
Caught fire, from renegade lightning storms.
May it not be mentioned we shared
Laughter-morsels with Brother Silence,
Even as he sharpened his sickle
Against his brother’s windpipe.

I am a stranger troubadour, from another
Corner of our savannah, who, having come
This far between rainbow and earth's paw,
Disembarked my tongue.

I must go now.
The peddler of parables should not
Hear the bearded owl’s ululation.

Let me go now.
This is a song with many voices.
Let someone hum the refrain.

[1] Great Zimbabwe is a complex of Iron Age ruins of a civilisation that flourished in modern day Zimbabwe, after which the country is named. The name Zimbabwe comes variously from the Shona words: dzimba woye (venerated houses) or dzimba dza mabwe (houses of stone).
[2] The Shona Creator God



"Interregnum" is part two of our five-part series of poems by Ghanaians on Zimbabwe. To read all contributions to the series so far, click here.