The clouds outside are heavy and shaped
like humps; inside there are two –
a man and a woman – caught in a moment
of arched backs. There is sorrow and the sound
of tears. She, with the wet cheeks, is the one
who is joyful, while he who wipes them is sad,
for he has forgotten how to cry when happy.
Maybe he never learned. This is the story
of the princess and the pea, except
there is no pile of mattresses to lie on.
He has planted a pea inside his beloved
and wonders if she’ll ever know a tranquil
night again; but it took many days for a smile
to reach her and sleep is the last thing on her mind.
Is this not how families are built – on smiles
and the undulating sound of tears?
Originally published in "The Makings of You", Peepal Tree Press, 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Biography:
Nii Ayikwei Parkes is a writer, editor, socio-cultural commentator and performance poet. A 2007 recipient of Ghana's national ACRAG award for poetry and literary advocacy, he has held visiting positions at the University of Southampton and California State University and is the author of four poetry chapbooks including eyes of a boy, lips of a man and the Michael Marks Award-shortlisted, ballast: a remix (2009), described in the Guardian as, “An astonishing, powerful remix of history and language”. Nii's event-specific commissions include a reading for the London Mayor’s vigil on July 14, 2005 (in response to the London bombings). He also writes for children under the pseudonym K.P. Kojo.
As an advocate for African writing, Nii runs the African Writers’ Evening series, at the Royal Festival Hall and contributes journalism on the subject. He was a 2005 associate Writer-In-Residence on BBC Radio 3 and the featured face for poetry in the 2004 Time Out London Guide. Nii’s début novel Tail of the Blue Bird has been translated into Dutch and German and was shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Prize. His latest book is The Makings of You, a book of poems published by Peepal Tree Press.
Throughout March 2011 OGOV will be featuring poems from "The Makings of You". After the month is over all of the published poems and interviews will be archived here.
Five (More) Questions with Nii:
1. In your essay "What We Run On When We Run About Poeting", you say that emotional feeling lies at the centre of what makes you passionate about poetry, and go on to speak to how interactive, inclusive learning can help new readers of poetry connect to this emotional core. While we can't run a poetry workshop here in the Q+A, I was wondering if you could suggest a few poems that you like to use in workshops, or just distribute to friends, that are "core poems" for yourself, emotionally speaking? Why do these particular poems connect with you in the way they do?
This is a question that really could get me doing an all day response, but I will assume a link to the essay and shorten my response. In formal poetry of the Western tradition, one of my favourites is W.B. Yeats' "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" - perfectly structured, yet it has emotion at its core, its imagery reaches out: "the heavens' embroidered cloths" and then distills back to the individual in the closing line "you tread on my dreams".
Atukwei Okai's "Fugue for Fireflies" uses rhythm, syncopation, humour, the Ghanaian conventions of Abe shi daa (Between you and me, there can be no / Ritual of / Thanks,) and local imagery (Your hair is black like the ruins left in / The wake of a harmattan bushfire.) to create a song of hope, love and lust.
Li Young Lee's "The Cleaving" is a long free verse poem that is a perfect example of how the chaotic illogic of emotion can flutter around the world while hanging on to a pole of logic, and I connect to it because I love the visceral language, the place of food in its narrative, and the fact that I am a believer in the interconnectedness of all things.
I could go on through Kwesi Brew, Pablo Neruda, Ainsley Burrows, Rilke and Michael Ondaatje, but it would take forever. These are all people that should be read - seek them in the kingdom of the internet and if you love them, buy their books. I buy loads of second-hand books to keep my book-buying costs down.
2. For years you ran The Writers' Fund of Ghana. For readers who aren't familiar with this project, can you explain your goals for that project? What were your greatest successes? Your biggest hurdles?
Although The Writers Fund is on a small hiatus while I build a bespoke website for it, my passion for it remains the same. My goals for the project relate to the huge gap in the production of writing from Ghana since the 60s and 70s and my belief that that dearth relates to the lack of resources to support writing and reading.
Our goals are: To serve and encourage excellence in creative writing in all the languages used in Ghana; To raise public awareness of the pivotal role of literature in shaping, preserving and developing a society’s identity and cultural life; To lobby educational institutions at home and abroad to secure residencies, scholarships and research opportunities for Ghanaian writers; To work to ensure that Ghanaian writing is well represented in the curriculum in schools and universities both at home and abroad; Support the initiatives of the Ghana Association of Writers.
I think most of the work we managed to do was in support of the Ghana Association of Writers (e.g. we supplied a computer for their administrative staff last year and we have had a few books sent to the GAW library via a simple Amazon.com wishlist). I personally delivered a few literary magazines and we have subscribed to African Writing magazine on behalf of the GAW. The challenges are mainly bureaucratic and the tendency that people in Ghana sometimes have to believe that young people can't possibly do anything of magnitude on their own. I am relaunching soon primarily because I have a higher profile now and I know certain key people better; I'm confident that the second life of The Writers' Fund will be ribboned in much more glory.
3. It's great to hear that the Writers' Fund will be back. Are there ways our readers can help you in your efforts, both leading up to and after the relaunch?
Anyone who has ideas is very welcome to contact me and initiate the exploration of those ideas. One of the things that drives me is the notion that our literary reading - both academic and personal - is in general so many years behind that we haven't tuned in to what we can do with language, how (learning from the Latin American writers, for example) we can bring our unique approach to how the English language is used, etc.
As a result, I am really keen to set up libraries all over the place and anyone who knows how we can get our hands on free shipping containers to use as the framework for building these libraries would be a very welcome contact at the moment. I have had some preliminary discussions with architects about how to customise containers using locally sourced material to create library spaces that are fascinating and conducive to reading/learning.
4. You mentioned earlier that you haven't gotten many responses from Ghanaians to The Makings of You. Hopefully you will get a few through this month-long sneak preview. Do you have any plans to travel to Ghana in the near future? Or to ensure that The Makings of You is available at libraries and schools? It would be wonderful to see the book read widely in Ghana.
I was planning to go to Ghana later this year, but because of some family happenings I've had to reconsider it. I'm not ruling it out completely, but it's unlikely this year. As with all my books, I will make sure that a few get leaked into the system, so we'll see.
5. What are you working on these days? Poetry? Fiction? What should we expect next from you?
I'm working on a book of short stories called "The City Will Love You" for Random House that I intend to finish in the next month or so, and I hope to finish a second novel and another collection of poems soon after that. Of course, soon in writer's language could mean 2013!
Contact Nii:
Email: nii.parkes(at)gmail.com
Website: http://www.niiparkes.com/
Absorbed in the transparent music
of clinking glasses, I am slashed
back to the mundane by a waiter
handing me a menu ex cathedra
then slinking away as silently
as an espadrille-shoed ghost
Around me my seven companions
delve feverishly into the textual
mysteries of the folded card, fondling
its ridged paper expectantly
as they debate: chicken, fish or lamb?
I bear a crippled smile as I open
my pleated gift knowing I will be stumped
as I always am by the ambiguity
of culinary lingo; does seared tuna
mean cooked on high heat for three
or five minutes, on one or both sides?
This is why I rarely go to restaurants.
For the same reason I censor the news:
what makes an Iraqi victim unfortunate
and an American one tragic? What makes
Somoza an OK guy, and Castro a vile man?
Is it the same ghost that decides that
Che was a guerrilla, and the lobster is done?
Originally published in "The Makings of You", Peepal Tree Press, 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Biography:
Nii Ayikwei Parkes is a writer, editor, socio-cultural commentator and performance poet. A 2007 recipient of Ghana's national ACRAG award for poetry and literary advocacy, he has held visiting positions at the University of Southampton and California State University and is the author of four poetry chapbooks including eyes of a boy, lips of a man and the Michael Marks Award-shortlisted, ballast: a remix (2009), described in the Guardian as, “An astonishing, powerful remix of history and language”. Nii's event-specific commissions include a reading for the London Mayor’s vigil on July 14, 2005 (in response to the London bombings). He also writes for children under the pseudonym K.P. Kojo.
As an advocate for African writing, Nii runs the African Writers’ Evening series, at the Royal Festival Hall and contributes journalism on the subject. He was a 2005 associate Writer-In-Residence on BBC Radio 3 and the featured face for poetry in the 2004 Time Out London Guide. Nii’s début novel Tail of the Blue Bird has been translated into Dutch and German and was shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Prize. His latest book is The Makings of You, a book of poems published by Peepal Tree Press.
Throughout March 2011 OGOV will be featuring poems from "The Makings of You". After the month is over all of the published poems and interviews will be archived here.
Five (More) Questions with Nii:
1. How have you found the reception to the book by readers from England? Has it differed from the reception of Ghanaians? Have Americans, outside of the context of both Ghana and England, responded in a third way? Do you think it is possible for those who haven't experienced the cultures and environments of Ghana and England to engage with the poems as fully as those who have?
I haven't had the chance to read this collection in Ghana yet, but the few Ghanaians in the UK who have read it say that they recognise themselves in some of the poems. The reception in the UK has been good, although I would say that the reception in the US, where I have just completed a short tour, has been better. I don't know why that is, but I'm always happy to have an appreciative audience.
2. As you hinted at in your last answer, you were recently on a short US tour. What parts of the country did you visited? What were the highlights?
I was in New York State (New York City and Rochester); Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia; Connecticut and New Jersey, and I had a whale of a time. The reception was very warm - all the books my publisher sent sold out and at the Baobab Cultural Center in Rochester we had a very stimulating discussion on ideas around literature from Africa and current movements within the continent.
3. You seem to move comfortably between "traditional" left-margin justified poems with line breaks and prose poems. In the case of "Ayitey, 1973", in fact, the poem almost seems to transform from one to the other, as the lines grow longer and more unified in length. Generally speaking, at what point during your creative process do you confirm the form of the poem? Does it come early on, as part of your first impulses? Late in the editing process? If it is a conscious choice, what elements of subject, style, etc. help you determine which direction to take?
With me form is always secondary; content comes first. Of course, at times the form comes hand-in-hand with the idea, but generally, I fine tune form and structure during the editing stages – I'm quite a thorough editor of my work and I agonise over how small details affect the reading of a poem, so a jauntier poem where the poetry is in the language will have a lighter, sparser form and a more detailed poem where the poetry is in the events may have a more compact, prose-like structure.
4. Continuing on the editing theme, what kind of a working relationship did you have with Peepal Tree Press poetry series editor, and fellow Ghanaian, Kwame Dawes? Did he provide detailed edits, or broader advice and guidance? More generally, what role do outside editors play in your writing process?
I think editors provide the questions that we are afraid to ask of our work. It's human nature to rest in comfort zones and editors take us outside of them so we can reach the nucleus of our work. So, Kwame was a great cynic; he made me have to defend what I was writing and out of that all the pretentious appendages that didn't belong in the poems were sent packing. The director of Peepal Tree, Jeremy Poynting (an incredibly well-read man) was also involved in the process so the work had three pairs of eyes on it. It was a very enriching experience.
5. You are a fiction writer as well. Do you find that the writing of one stimulates the writing of the other? I've known of writers who have to "switch their brain" between the two genres, and others who move back and forth between them effortlessly. What has been your experience?
I tend to take a break from poetry by writing prose and vice-versa. I find it keeps me productive, but I don't think I find that I have to 'switch' to do so, except in the middle stages of writing a novel, where a certain level of focus is required that I have never experienced with poetry.
Contact Nii:
Email: nii.parkes(at)gmail.com
Website: http://www.niiparkes.com/
This is what I know; that I wake
up one morning when I am eight and walk
outside to the sound of a cock crowing.
The leaves on the first tree I touch are black
and gleam with whispers from the night’s passing.
All about me are shadows and I am, at once,
unsure of what I know: the bushes I kicked
my ball past yesterday are pumped with new muscles
and rise from the riddled haze in front of me
as sentinels from another realm. The cock has gone
quiet and I curse myself for stepping unshod
into the moist mystery afoot at the calling of a phantom
cock. I blink three times but the shroud will not peter
and, behind me, footsteps echo like a call to the sun.
When my father reaches me I raise my arm and point
in front of me: what is that? Mist, he replies –
and what do I know of mist, its shifting brilliance, its weightless
weight, its liquid kiss? But I know the shape I pointed at,
my love, that brooding morning
under my father’s darkness, and tonight
I name you – you are mist.
Originally published in "The Makings of You", Peepal Tree Press, 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Biography:
Nii Ayikwei Parkes is a writer, editor, socio-cultural commentator and performance poet. A 2007 recipient of Ghana's national ACRAG award for poetry and literary advocacy, he has held visiting positions at the University of Southampton and California State University and is the author of four poetry chapbooks including eyes of a boy, lips of a man and the Michael Marks Award-shortlisted, ballast: a remix (2009), described in the Guardian as, “An astonishing, powerful remix of history and language”. Nii's event-specific commissions include a reading for the London Mayor’s vigil on July 14, 2005 (in response to the London bombings). He also writes for children under the pseudonym K.P. Kojo.
As an advocate for African writing, Nii runs the African Writers’ Evening series, at the Royal Festival Hall and contributes journalism on the subject. He was a 2005 associate Writer-In-Residence on BBC Radio 3 and the featured face for poetry in the 2004 Time Out London Guide. Nii’s début novel Tail of the Blue Bird has been translated into Dutch and German and was shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Prize. His latest book is The Makings of You, a book of poems published by Peepal Tree Press.
Throughout March 2011 OGOV will be featuring poems from "The Makings of You". After the month is over all of the published poems and interviews will be archived here.
Five (More) Questions with Nii:
1. In last week's interview, you noted that you "think in Ga and write mainly in English". Do you think of this process as an act of translation from Ga to English, or as the writing of a hybrid language: an almost-English, with the tones and rhythms of Ga working in the background?
It's an interesting question and I think that our generation of hybrid Asian, African, Latin American and Caribbean folk operate on a sliding scale between those two processes. For me, I rarely think about translation in the context of Ga/English and poetry so I guess I would say it's an almost-English (inasmuch as you can argue for a 'pure' English, of course). I would consider it, more precisely, a personal variety in a family of hybrid-Englishes.
2. Do you consider the poems in "The Makings of You" to be autobiographical? Or at least biographical (from a common speaker, though not yourself)? Or does the perspective change from poem to poem?
Half of “The Makings of You” is autobiographical in the sense that the poems derive either from direct personal experience or from amalgamations of experiences that I know of. The ridiculousness of the conventions of international travel highlighted in the poem "Crossing Borders" could only have become obvious to me through personal experience. The rest of it is autobiographical in the way that all poetry collections are – in that I write about things that concern me. For instance, the effects of the slave trade on my own family inspired the ballast series, although they are complete fantasy.
3. It was great to see you mention Kwesi Brew in your list of poets who influenced your own writing. Brew is a favourite of ours here at OGOV, and we've done our best to champion his writing. You did the same on your old Wordpress site, djwenmo. In fact, at the time of this interview, our biography of Brew and your posting of his poem "The Mesh" are the top two search results when you Google "Kwesi Brew". This in itself says a good deal about the dearth of online discussion on Kwesi Brew. How do you explain this lack of attention to the work of Kwesi Brew? If you could make a claim for why Brew and his writing should be discussed more online, what would you say?
The dearth of attention is, I believe, as a result of our earlier poets all being lumped into academic imprints with no effort being made to publish them as mainstream poets (Atukwei Okai was an exception as his début was published by Simon & Schuster). I think Brew is a particularly interesting poet to study because, like Christopher Okigbo, you can find his work in two distinct voices, a perfect European mimic and then a hybridised voice knowledgeable about its Ghanaian origins; it's like a map of the psychological effect of colonial-era instruction.
Kwesi Brew's work maps a return to one's essence; he credits his encounter with African-Americans with helping him see the value in the culture that he had discarded as barbaric and archaic, leading him to delve back into knowledge and sensibilities that he had buried in his later work. For that reason, his work is of value not just because of its sublime quality, but also for anthropological reasons and as a basis for philosophical debate.
4. I often find love poems either come first or last for poets. For some, the first batch of terrible poems they write early in their career are love poems. For others, love poems are something that takes them a long time to approach. What has your history with love poems been?
Oh, I have a distinguished and – by contractual necessity – secret history of writing love poems for several clients while I was in Achimota School. That's all I can say on the subject. I'm not sure how good they were, but they worked.
5. Do you find love poems to be easier or harder to write than other types of poems? Or are they no different? Why do you think this is?
I think real, heartfelt love poems will always be difficult to write, because they are not just about the craft of writing poetry; they are about outright honestly and vulnerability. All poems are to some degree, but they are not necessarily going to be read by the 'loved', whereas love poems often are.
Contact Nii:
Email: nii.parkes(at)gmail.com
Website: http://www.niiparkes.com/
Portent in the air, always – a sense of change
coming – in Hanoi, Manila, in the ring
of pugilists. Our father, undoubtedly watching
that haze of fists and feet, must have felt a twinge,
some primordial premonition of his seed’s skin flaming
in the kiln of his new wife, hardening in stance
as Marcos declares himself irreplaceable and George
Foreman, forearms like torpedoes, plants on Joe Frazier
the pin of defeat that Nixon couldn’t fix on his map
of Vietnam. The end of your second trimester was
nothing short of dramatic, but your coming, two days
preceded by the first cellular phone call, a day after
the opening of the World Trade Center, brings more fire:
propane expands with a bang in Arizona, France flexes
mushroom clouds in Mururoa Atoll, aeroplanes crash
like toys and an energy crisis grips the West – this is to say
nothing of the fiery gleam of a saxophone going dim
in a pawnbroker’s window, the abandoned music sheets
found years later turned yellow in a chest. There will be
better times – a spidery steel suspension, kin to another
that spans the Volta (the electric heart of Ghana), will reflect
its lights in the black waters between Asia and Europe, stitching
the space between two continents. Apart from the facts, I have
nothing to piton the drama of your birth with; I’ve seen the date
list: in order – the birth of Sean Paul, Oscar De La Hoya; the death
of Pablo Picasso; Haile Gebrselassie (birth); the fall of Bruce Lee;
the first cry of Nasir Jones (also the son of a horn
player, later known as Nas) then this – in one line, poetry and a dearth
of poetry – Pablo Neruda leans into his own shadow, inherits
its weightlessness, fades with the night. It is September 23, 1973,
you are almost six months old. There is a picture of you sprawled
in an ocean of bed, a hard thing, a pin on a map, a wriggling spider
in a cream web, crying.
Originally published in "The Makings of You", Peepal Tree Press, 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Biography:
Nii Ayikwei Parkes is a writer, editor, socio-cultural commentator and performance poet. A 2007 recipient of Ghana's national ACRAG award for poetry and literary advocacy, he has held visiting positions at the University of Southampton and California State University and is the author of four poetry chapbooks including eyes of a boy, lips of a man and the Michael Marks Award-shortlisted, ballast: a remix (2009), described in the Guardian as, “An astonishing, powerful remix of history and language”. Nii's event-specific commissions include a reading for the London Mayor’s vigil on July 14, 2005 (in response to the London bombings). He also writes for children under the pseudonym K.P. Kojo.
As an advocate for African writing, Nii runs the African Writers’ Evening series, at the Royal Festival Hall and contributes journalism on the subject. He was a 2005 associate Writer-In-Residence on BBC Radio 3 and the featured face for poetry in the 2004 Time Out London Guide. Nii’s début novel Tail of the Blue Bird has been translated into Dutch and German and was shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Prize. His latest book is The Makings of You, a book of poems published by Peepal Tree Press.
Throughout March 2011 OGOV will be featuring poems from "The Makings of You". After the month is over all of the published poems and interviews will be archived here.
Five Questions with Nii:
1.How long have you been writing poetry?
I'd say I've been writing poetry for close to twenty-seven years. I just used to write things on bits of paper; it was my father that first gave them a name when he saw something I'd written and asked if I was writing poetry.
2. Who are your favourite poets? Which poets have most inspired and informed your poetry?
I love different poets for different reasons, but my primary inspirations were overheard conversations when I was growing up. Our languages in Ghana have so much poetry in them. In the more conventional sense, I love Kwesi Brew 's later work, Atukwei Okai's tongue-twisting genius, W.B. Yeats, Gwendolyn Brooks, Pablo Neruda and some of the work of Christopher Okigbo.
3. What do you hope to accomplish with your poetry?
Simply to explore human questions, to keep open humanity's dialogue with the earth. I find that because – in the African context – so many anthropologists and Western writers have created 'impressions' of us in writing already, some of my work tends to seek to reopen debates on the complexity of our existence.
4. The poems in The Makings of You map out a life divided between Ghana and England. In "Crossing Borders", for instance, the speaker notes "I can scarcely remember / my first crossing of water, / borders, date-lines or fingers." How has your own life been split between these two countries, both physically and mentally?
I was born in the UK to parents who – by choice – spoke to me in Ga, so I am a hybrid from birth. However, my awareness of the world began to take shape in Ghana and West Africa where I spent most of my formative years, although the books I read were largely in English, even if they were by African writers. It's hard to say what's what, but mentally, I'm very much Ghanaian – having my Ghanaian tongues (which unlike English contain tones as well as meter) allows me to use and question the English language in a manner that respects my origins and traditions.
5. A major theme of the poems in "The Makings of You" is an intertwining of personal and collective histories. This approach is on full display in "Ayitey, 1973", where the birth of the speaker's sibling is tangled in a web with contemporaneous world events. In doing this, the universal and the individual, the "known" and the "unknown" (from a reader's perspective), meet at a common place that isn't-quite-universal and isn't-quite-known. This seems to be an ideal space in which poetry can reside and thrive, and it is a space you create consistently in your poems, even the purely biographical. In these, the speaker is always almost-at-home in his particular setting (the Ghanaian poems a bit "English" and the England poems a bit "Ghanaian"). What do you think about this interpretation of the book? Were you intentional in creating a space like this?
The intertwining of the personal and universal is a definite engine of my poetry. I am a subscriber to chaos theory – the notion that a small change in one place can have dramatic effects elsewhere, so elements of that govern the leaps that I make in my work. The element of English/Ghanaian is not deliberate, but since I think in Ga and write mainly in English it is not surprising.
Contact Nii:
Email: nii.parkes(at)gmail.com
Website: http://www.niiparkes.com/
