Interview Team: ERNEST EMENYONU, CHIJI AKOMA, AKACHI EZEIGBO, OBI NWAKANMA, ROSE SACKEYFIO, CHINYERE EZEKWESILI, and IQUO DIANA ABASI
ALT: A few days ago, you won, deservedly, African Literature Association’s highest award – ‘The Fonlon Nichols Award’ for outstanding creativity, and defence of Human Rights. Congratulations! So, let us begin by asking you to tell our readers a little bit about yourself – Kofi Anyidoho, the man, the poet, and his beginnings.
Kofi Anyidoho: If I were to identify myself, I often say, I am a teacher by profession and a poet by preoccupation. Due to family circumstances, I did not have the initial advantage of going to secondary school, but at that time, Teacher Training was available and free. So, that was the option I took, and I believe honestly, that God had His own plans for me. It has turned out that the teacher training option was the hand of destiny, for which I am most grateful today. The very first classroom I went into was a Primary One classroom. There was a little girl in that class who made it very clear to me that she was more intelligent than I was. She was quick; she was sharp and she was very careful not to offend me. I learnt from that point that, as a teacher, I could encounter students who were better endowed naturally than me. The advantage I have would be age and experience. I was a teacher at one level, but I was also learning from my students all the time; so having had the chance to teach at the elementary, secondary, Teacher Training, and university level, in that order, has defined me in many ways. However, the point of our gathering here in Knoxville is related to my work as a creative artist. I started through a creative writing program, which was in place in Ghana at the time. Initially, it was for students in Teacher Training Colleges and Secondary Schools with Sixth Forms. It was some kind of apprenticeship. You form a creative writing club in your school under the guardianship of one of the English teachers. Students wrote and their work was corrected by the English teachers. Later, the programme was officially adopted and accepted by the Ministry of Education, with people like Efua Sutherland and, Dr E. O. Apronti and later, Dr K. E. Agovi, as patrons. They would go through the most promising pieces submitted from all the schools and follow it up with a workshop. The workshops were held during Christmas and Easter holidays, and a bigger one at the national level, during the long vacation. Eventually, they selected what they considered the best pieces, to be published under the title Talent for Tomorrow officially by the Ministry of Education in large quantities and distributed free to students in the schools. Therefore, you can imagine me as far back as then, seeing my writing among those published at the national level!
ALT: When was this?
KA: This was in the early to mid-sixties and went on into the mid-seventies. I consider this important because one of my writings in Ewe was selected for publication. I was excited. Then somewhere along the line, the school discouraged me from writing in what they referred to as vernacular. I was told to write in English if I wanted to be a serious creative writer, so I abandoned what I already had and started writing in English. Then, I started receiving invitations for poetry festivals. On one occasion, when I went home my elder sister Aku Kpodo complained about how everybody else benefitted from what I did as a creative writer except my own family. I was reminded of the fact that I got my gift from the family and they expected some kind of giveback.
ALT: So, to contextualize what you have just said, how important is the history of creative performance in the family to your own production as a poet? As you just narrated, your grandfather Abotsi Korbli Aanyidoho and mother Abla Adidi Anyidoho were great poet-cantors in the oral tradition. How did that influence your production in English?
KA: Well, that is the beauty of the impact of tradition. That it works best if you acquire it, if it grows in its own soil before you try to export it later. As an academic, I developed a theory of what I call ‘The Fertilizer Theory of Knowledge Production’. We are led to believe that fertilizer is very beneficial but the truth is nobody sows a seed in a pile of fertilizers. The seed must first take root in its own soil.
ALT: What is the main thrust of your writing? What thematic preoccupations do you focus on in your poetry?
KA: In general, what one writes about is defined by significant moments in one’s life. The early part of my career coincided with difficult moments in the history of our country as African people, the political and economic challenges that we had, the interventions of the military, etc., so I had to respond to these. Throughout my period at the university when I began to take my creative writing seriously, every school year was interrupted by student protests. The general population had been silenced, the journalists were afraid to write the truth. It was the young people, especially the university people, who took up the challenge. I was part of that generation. You find some of my poems dedicated to colleagues who were shot dead during the protests. The military pretended they were working in the interest of the people while their selfish interest was their top priority. These were the preoccupations of some of my poems. At the same time, because my grandfather and my mother specialized in the composition and the performances of funeral dirges, reflections on death and life also dominated part of my poetry and has continued to do so. Now that I am getting closer and closer to my time, I see very dear colleagues, mentors being called away and in my most recent collection ‘See What They’ve Done to Our Sun Rise’ (yet to be published), there is a whole section on poetic tributes to departed colleagues, some of whom I had very personal relationships with, some not so well-known but made very prominent contributions at the national and international level. So, I will say my focus is not limited to any particular theme. Whatever happens around me, that’s what drives my work as a poet.
ALT: Thank you for this wonderful insight into your life and your artistry. Earlier you talked about the teacher’s need for humility since there are possibilities of his learning from his students as well. Chinua Achebe’s essay, ‘The Novelist as a Teacher’ also comes to mind here. Could you speak more about your experiences as a teacher and how it has impacted the way you engage with your creative work.
KA: Well, it so happens, maybe because of my closeness to the poetic tradition of my people at a personal level, that it became the focus of my research project as a scholar. In fact, as an undergraduate the long essay that I wrote was on the life and work of a traditional composer of funeral songs, Kodzo Ahiago Domegbe, who when he became too ill to continue passed on the leadership of the group to my mother. That focus on traditional forms of creativity, as a long-term research project, has worked very efficiently in complementing what I have been learning about in the classroom from Shakespeare and all the other people whose footsteps we are following. I have been a life-long beneficiary of what I call the elders. Our generation benefited from the path that was cleared for us by the Achebes the Okigbos, the Efua Sutherlands, the Soyinkas, the Kofi Awoonors, the Okot p’Biiteks, the Ama Ata Aidoos, the Mazisi Kunenes, the Dennis Brutuss, the Kamau Brathwaires, etc. My work fortunately was to bring me into personal acquaintance with some of these people. So, yes, some of my works have a stamp of tradition but that tradition did not come only from my mother and grandfather. It came from that whole generation of creators who gave a particular shaping and impetus to our search for ourselves as a people. As you can find in the works of that generation, it continues to inspire some of us, if not many of us.
ALT: Can you name specifically anyone whose works from that generation specifically speaks to you? Or who inspired you that you have a deeper connection with?
KA: I could name individuals like Kofi Awoonor, who did what I was trying to do, what I should have started doing in the first place. It will be unfair to stop with just one or two names because I have already indicated the kind of inspiration I got from other people of his generation. But there is a whole movement in my creative career where my greatest inspiration came from the creators of the African Diaspora. There was a powerful influence from Langston Hughes, Kamau Brathwaite, from Rene Depestre of Haiti, and Abdias do Nascimento of Brazil through translation. The African-American tradition also influenced me. I could recite several of Langston Hughes’ poems as a young creator-teacher and I inflicted them on all my students. So it is a widening slide, like dropping a stone in a pool; the circles expand and expand.
ALT: Thank you so much. We are just curious. You have an album produced alongside a collection of poems and you decided to do some folk songs in your mother tongue. When you went into doing this, how did your family take it, seeing that they couldn’t understand you originally when you did it in English?
KA: Let me tell you something that I hope will nail it down. My father did not take care of me. It was my mother’s youngest brother who, when I dropped out of school at a certain point, took me under his care, taught me how to weave kente cloth, and insisted that I must go to school. That uncle happened to be an incredible composer as well and a master drummer. And the impact of his song compositions and performances in my life and work is immeasurable. I finally produced a CD of my first poems in Ewe and started singing some of the songs for my people. This is one of the CDs of my songs in Ewe. When the recording of the second one was ready, my uncle came to visit me in Accra and that evening I bought him a bottle of beer and asked him to sit down. I put the CD on and left the room. I could hear him laughing clapping and full of excitement. When the thing ended, I went in and sat down with him. He looked at me and said, ‘It is now that I know that your going to school was a good thing. I can see how great you can be. Some of the things in those poems even I could not have thought of saying them like that in our own language. You have taken the tradition and you are enriching it. I am glad I sent you to school, but it is only today that I can see what a great opportunity it can be, that you came back to your tradition and added something to it – the benefit of going to school’ (Kodzovi Anyidoho).
ALT: So, what is the present state of Ewe poetry today?
KA: Unfortunately, not as healthy as I would like it to be.
ALT: Is it because the traditional ones are gone and something has disappeared?
KA: There is a lot of reticence. The tradition has been ‘hijacked’ by the church. The songs that used to move me, coming from the inner core of my people’s culture have been replaced by Biblical ones. Most of the songs in Ewe now are in bits and pieces of Biblical texts. …some of the best lovers of Highlife music I used to know are Nigerians, not Ghanaians.
ALT: Let’s follow up on your collections, the accompaniment and all. What do you say is the relationship between performed poetry and poetry in print?
KA: As a follow-up on the CD cassette recording of my poetry and its impact, it was clear to me that some of that could be valuable when I published this book Praise Song for The Land. It came out with a CD. Later, The Place We Call Home also came out with CD recordings.
ALT: This was even before the digital era. What inspired you to do that at the time?
KA: When I did the Ewe CDs, there was a program on Ghana Television called ‘Adult Education in Ewe’. The producer and host Yaoga Amuzu invited me for a chat. He wanted me to share with people my research on some of the traditional composers like Henoga Vinoko Akpalu, the greatest of the composers whose work had tremendous effect on Kofi Awoonor, myself, and countless others. So, I shared my knowledge about the power of Ewe traditional poetry as in the voice of Akpalu and others. At the end of it, he noted that I had said a lot of wonderful things about Akpalu and my grandfather, about how they enriched the Ewe traditional poetry. He then wanted to know my generation’s contribution towards the enrichment of the Ewe oral tradition. So I shared a few of my poems on the TV program. As I was performing, and I have to emphasize, ‘Performing’ because I was not reading, I could tell that the recording crew in the studio became very energized. The camera operator got carried away. I could hear the director shouting at him, ‘Look into the camera, look into the camera’. He was so fascinated; he was looking at me instead of the camera. The performance was broadcast. Later, I travelled home and in one of the neighbouring markets, Anloga, I went to buy Sabala (a particular variety of onions). The woman raised her head to give me the onions, looked at my face and shouted Ghananya! – the title of one of the poems that were broadcast – and then she proceeded to recite almost the whole poem. This woman had never been to school. She was playing back chunks of my poetry, which she had heard just once on TV. Then, I went back to school. The next Monday, a young man, a messenger who worked in the bindery of Balme Library was waiting for me at my door. He said, ‘Prof those poems, can you share them with us?’ I mentioned that they were going to be published soon. ‘You mean to put them in a book?’ I said. ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Prof, wouldn’t that hide it from us. People like me who cannot read? Why don’t you record them for us?’ So in fact, when I finished the recording and launched it, I invited that young man. He was the one who got the first copy.
ALT: This is ‘The Praise Song for the Lion’?
KA: No, this is the recording of my poems in Ewe. Ghananya
ALT: One is struck by the title of your collection ‘Praise Song for The Land’. It corresponds with Elizabeth Alexander’s American poem read at the ‘Obama Presidential Inauguration’ talking about ‘The Praise Song for the Lion’ for the day. Did you see that as an echo of your poem?
KA: When you put it that way, you suggest that I know her work as well as you do, but I wouldn’t like to even assume that. I rather like to believe that the creative impulse goes around.
ALT: Let’s return to this Ewe Poetry. You are such a powerful, influential voice in African poetry. It goes beyond Ghana, West Africa, and the continent. Listening to you and thinking about that moment when your family says ‘everyone else seems to be enjoying what you are doing, but we don’t have access to what you are doing’. Then you began writing in Ewe and recording your poetry. There is this unprompted reaction from younger viewers who are interested in the language of African literature, especially literature in the indigenous languages; how would you like to engage with this big question that we always ask – What is the best language for representing African literature? What is the most effective language to deploy to represent African culture, sensibility and aesthetics?
KA: I try not to be dogmatic about it. When I set out on the journey of writing some of my works in Ewe, part of that came from Kofi Awoonor who said to me ‘Don’t ever send me a note in English again. You have to write to me in Ewe and I will do so too.’ It is not an ‘either or situation’. My sister sold things in the market in Accra for many years; she didn’t speak English; she didn’t speak dominant languages in the market. However, when it became critical, she managed a word or two in English. However, the important thing for me is your best creative work normally can be done in your own language and as a student of literary history/comparative literatures, I know that the best work created in any language will always eventually reach the world through translation.
ALT: Let’s come back again to ‘Praise Song for The Land’. You dedicated it to all the people ‘I call my people, ancestral voices’. Who are they?
KA: It was deliberately framed so. I could have just said to my ancestors. They are not the only people who are my people. I have already told you how I have been influenced by other people from different parts of the African world, but we have to go beyond that. In my newly published collection of poems in Ewe, I acknowledged all the people I’ve mentioned. But I also point out that those people who have been my teachers deserve part of the praise, not only my teachers, but look at all the time you invested into the study of English, …Shakespeare, etc. They also deserve to be acknowledged. I also appreciate my direct family members, the larger African people and the Diaspora community. I must acknowledge how much the Diaspora has become part of my consciousness. Similarly, you sitting here today (referring to the ALT Editor, Prof. Emenyonu), when I see you, I can’t believe that it is the same person. You remember the Calabar days, when you organized the Calabar conferences – ICAEL an annual conference that held in the first week of May and was well known world-wide?
ALT: We would like to ask you a question about Transafrican, Transdiaspora in African literature. What has happened to literature in the continent?
KA: In my own career, you all know about that moment in our history in Ghana when it looked like everything had fallen into pieces. What sustained me as a creative person, a scholar, a teacher during that period was what was happening in Nigeria. Every year, I had opportunity to visit Nigeria either once or twice. It could be Ibadan; it could be Calabar, Lagos. Most of my colleagues back home were too busy looking for ways of escape, trying to get their passports and try their luck elsewhere. Then what happened to us in Ghana earlier also happened in Nigeria. All my Nigerian colleagues of the late seveties through the mid-eighties, most of them are now here in the US and elsewhere. So that’s the unfortunate development, but we don’t have to lament, because there is always a good thing that can come out of so-called bad situations. Would we have preferred it that you all stayed in Nigeria or is it not better that you found your way out against the odds and establish new lines of work which have become beneficial to all of us today both at home and here in the Diaspora? At a certain point in our lives, I was as familiar with some of what was going on in Nigeria, who the new crop of writers were; and there was what was going on in Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda. Today, that’s not happening much anymore. I’II be presenting a paper here on a panel tomorrow on the work of Tade Ipadeola. I was invited out of the blue in 2013 to serve as the international consultant for the ‘Nigerian Prize in Literature (Poetry)’ and I received the final slot of the poetry collections. I was embarrassed to discover that yes, I knew one of the three short-listed poets – Ogochukwu Promise – but the other two, I hadn’t even heard their names. I started reading their work and I was excited. I saw the anchor of myself, a professor of African literature, but I hadn’t even heard about these incredible writers next door. It is still possible for us to improve remarkably. At the award ceremony in Lagos, Nigeria, when Ipadeola was announced winner that evening, he said he was going to use most of the prize-money, $100,000, to establish something in honour of Kofi Awoonor, who had just been killed in a terrorist attack in Nairobi, an acknowledgment of how much impact Awoonor may have had on him. But that direct thing is no longer happening and I feel sad about it. Poetry is alive in our various countries; however, the young generations have gone away from books into spoken word artistry. I thought those I knew in Ghana were doing great till I visited Togo on a particular occasion and saw a group of four young artists break into the hall and start performing incredible spoken word poetry in Ewe, English, and French and I was amazed. I wish some of my people in Ghana were there to see what was happening. As far as I can tell, those guys have beaten them to it. And I know some of that is happening in South Africa and Uganda.
ALT: The difference between spoken-word and written poetry has to be done canonically. How do we preserve that?
KA: It is supposedly new, but that was what my grandfather and my mother did. We are the ones who are going to play catch-up, but with an important advantage that we can now do it in our own languages, on the local platforms as well as on a wider platform and even internationally.
ALT: You call the new crop of poets, young generation, so, what is your specific message to them?
KA: My message to them is simple. We value what our oral traditions stand for, but we also regret the fact that we have no record of them once the performance is over. Today, it doesn’t have to be that way anymore. You must try to be a spoken-word artist as well as a published writer. That’s my challenge to them.
ALT (Iquo Diana Abasi): From your position, it does seem that all young poets are spoken-word poets. I want us to make that distinction. There are spoken-word poets, performers, and writers. I’m also a spoken-word poet. I also do performance and write, and there are many young poets like me. Some have the challenge of their inability to write their poems on paper and have it appreciated.
KA: I also insist that they do it as much in their own languages as in English. For example, last year I had the privilege of being selected as the winner of the Republic of Serbia’s Highest Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. What they call the ‘Golden Key of Smederevo Award’ and part of the reason I discovered when I went there was the awareness that I was doing poetry both in English and in Ewe. I don’t know whether Professor Milena Vladic Jovanov is here. She is in one of the panels to present a paper on my work. She was chair of the search committee and played a key role in my selection for the award. At the awards ceremony, I performed many poems in English and Ewe, but in the end, the audience asked me to repeat a particular poem in its Ewe original. Here is a book of my selected poems specially published for the occasion, Twin Brother. It is a bilingual collection in English and Serbian, edited by Prof. Milena Vladic Jovanov, who also did the translations.
ALT: Who are the publishers?
KA: The festival organization that awarded me the prize. So, for the people who do not understand my language, they made it clear that of all the poems I shared with them, the ones that they enjoyed most were the ones in my own language. It is a remarkable observation. The same thing happened at the national level; I gave a reading two months ago in Ghana. At the end of it, the poem that they asked me to repeat was the one in Ewe. Well, most of the people in the audience were not from my area. That tells you something: you can only sell with confidence what is truly yours.
ALT: Some people were nudging you to name names, but there’s a name that has popped up quite a few times, this evening: Kofi Awoonor, you mentioned him. There was a reference to the commitment you both made to write to each other in Ewe. We know that in 2015, you had published ‘The Promise of Hope’, which was a collection of selected poems that you edited of Kofi Awoonor, coming right after his demise. He went to Nairobi because the work was about to be launched and published. What do you think of his place in African poetry?
KA: There is no doubt in my mind that he was highly revered. He was generous with his creativity, generous in relationships. He was as close to the Nigerian colleagues of his generation, sometimes even more than he was with colleagues in Ghana, sometime because of politics. His legacy as an intellectual creative colleague as far as I am concerned in Ghana is in a class of its own. Fortunately, towards the end of his life, I invited him to the English Department where he joined me in the training of young creative writers, some of whom since then have matured and would always acknowledge both of us as those who made it possible for them and it’s important that we should never forget people like that.
ALT: What is the state of poetry in Ghana today?
KA: The state of poetry in Ghana is moving in various directions. There are a few people I know who are doing well. One of them has written a paper on my work for presentation at this conference. He was in a creative writing club and in English. There is a whole majority, male and female, who are going places as spoken-word artists. The best among them include Nana Asaase and Chief Moomen, now full-time professional spoken-word artists, drawing large audiences on all kinds of stages and platforms in a way we of our generation never dreamed of.
ALT: Thank you very much. You have made us very proud. This particular year’s African Literature Association Conference is one that is going to be difficult to forget.