Posts featuring Ama Ata Aidoo

Every Dirge Sung: Patricia Jabbeh Wesley on Liberian Poetry as Literature of Witness

March 25, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I wanted Liberia placed on the literary map of the world. And my life’s goal was to be that writer. . .

Named by The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry (2017) as “the first major poet to emerge from Liberia in decades,” Dr Patricia Jabbeh Wesley was born in her mother’s hometown of Dolokeh, Maryland County, southeastern Liberia, and raised in Monrovia, the capital city of Liberia. She then emigrated from there to the United States with her family during the First Liberian Civil War (1989-1997). With six critically-acclaimed poetry collections under her belt, Nigerian historian Ayodeji Olukoju has called her “a rising Liberian female literary star who has made a mark as a poet of note”, and she has been named Chee Dawanyeno by her people, the Grebo. Dr Patricia believes in the poetic moral imperative to bear witness on the brutalities—such as war, settler-colonialism, carnage, and genocide—perpetrated by those with structural power against the common people. In the words of Zimbabwean poet Tsitsi Jaji, from her panegyric “Praise Song for Patricia Jabbeh Wesley”: “But you look death in the eye and it looks down.”

In this interview, I spoke with Dr Patricia, recently proclaimed the Republic of Liberia’s inaugural Poet Laureate, on Liberian poetry as literature of witness and its poetic topography de nos jours; the presence of African orality and indigenous storytelling in Anglophone African writings; and the anthology she edited from the University of Nebraska Press, Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): As a survivor to the First Liberian Civil War, your activism involves documentation of and fact-finding on Liberian women’s stories of trauma as well as speaking your truth as an expert witness (such as during the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Hearings in Minnesota in 2008 as commissioned by The Advocates of Human Rights). You once spoke of enshrining the war through words and of literature as testimony. Is that, for you, the role of the poet in times of lawlessness and monstrosities—a witness?

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley (PJW): Yes. I believe that the role of an artist and poet is to be the town crier of her people, the voice of the voiceless, the preserver of tradition and history of her people’s sensibility. In our African tradition, the artist belongs to the people, to the community, to the village, and to the clan. As a survivor of the brutal Liberian civil war, I must keep alive our families, friends, and all the people who were silenced in the fourteen-year-long series of civil wars. I have always used my poetry and writing as a tool for activism. One of our mother authors, the late Ama Ata Aidoo of Ghana once said, rightly, that, “For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.”

AMMD: In Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), you historicised Liberian poetry, finding its roots as early as the 1800s in the time of statesmen Hilary Teage and Daniel Bashiel Warner—the anthology’s impetus being that “the silence [of Liberian literature at the global level] was deafening.” Can you speak more about this silence and how this anthology is speaking against it?

PJW: The anthology does not speak against the silence, though. It ends the silence. Liberian literature, art, and culture have been suppressed since the country’s founding. The founding fathers who were freed slaves from the South of America built a country fashioned after their former slave masters, where those who had always owned, lived on, and tended to the land were made the subordinates and those from outside were the lone leaders. They relegated the Africans who owned the land at the country’s establishment to a near second-class citizenship, not allowing indigenous Africans in what is now our country to help determine the direction of our country. That lasted for one hundred and thirty-nine years until the first military coup in 1980. The only other time an indigenous African was anywhere near the top of the country’s leadership was when Himie-Too Wesley, or H. Too Wesley, my husband’s great uncle, was made the Vice President in 1924 when the League of Nations charged the Liberian leadership with the enslavement of Krus and Grebo people, H. T. Wesley’s ethnic group. And for historical context, the newcomers, or Americo-Liberians, the freed slaves who founded the nation, were a very tiny minority, ruling the nation for 139 years while indigenous Africans were the huge majority and continue to be today. READ MORE…

With Bones Against Heartbreak: Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek on the Ugandan Acholi Poetry of Exile

October 2, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

I have been thinking about . . . how poetry might offer a space to imagine a different world, to challenge power, insist on life . . .

“Dear Dad” is how Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek opens a sequence of letter-vignettes to her late father, the revered northern Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek, who wrote in Acholi and English. The intimate piece, entitled “The Meaning of a Song,” was included in River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation, an anthology of decolonial and feminist politics published by Tkaronto-based trace press. In it, Okot Bitek meditates on her Africanness as someone born to Ugandan exiles in Kenya after the Uganda-Tanzania War of 1978-79: “What is it to claim an African identity? What is it to be African or not? How is it that we’re not reading both Ocol and Lawino as African and imagining that there are far more representations of what it means to be African?” Such poignant examination is also to be found in her award-winning poetry collection 100 Days (University of Alberta Press, 2016), in which she muses on the terrains of history, wanting to know “what is it to come from a land / that swallows its own people”. 

In this interview, I conversed with Okot Bitek on the expanse of Ugandan poetry of exile from Acholiland, African literature as world literature in itself (even and most specially) without translation, and the politico-literary legacy of her father, Okot p’Bitek. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I want to start this conversation by quoting from your essay “The Meaning of a Song”, anthologized in River in an Ocean: Essays on Translation (2023): 

We were people until we were Acholi, also Acoli, and then we were defined by foreign terminology by the Arabs and written in an even more foreign alphabet by the European colonialists and missionaries.

How is naming vital and significant in the collective sense, specially among the colonised?

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 9, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bridget Peak, Wambua Muindi, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from Kenya, Canada, and Oman!

In this week of literary news, our editors on the ground are bringing stories of triumph, mourning, and commemoration. In Kenya and Ghana, readers mourn the loss of pioneering feminist author Ama Ata Aidoo; in Canada, a Quebec initiative supports readers in finding more books by Indigenous writers; and in Oman, a lauded author brings home the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Read on to find out more!

Wambua Muindi, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Kenya

The end of May seemed to position itself as a direct communication to geo-literary production history; on May 27, a bilingual anthology of East African short stories, The Heart is A Bastard, launched at the Goethe Institut Library, Nairobi. Edited by Elias Mutani and Zukiswa Wanner, the collection is a result from the Kenyan writing workshop under the auspices of the Univerity of East Anglia International Chair in Creative Writing. The inaugural chair for Africa, Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangaremba, expressed her delight over the launch, which includes stories in English and Swahili translations. Some of the emerging writers featured in the anthology include Gladwell Pamba—from whose story the anthology’s title is taken, Fatma Shafii, Nyasili Atwetwe of Writers Space Africa Kenya, Charlie Muhumuza, Noella Moshi, and Sia Chami. The anthology not only holds space for these writers but also represents the creative breadth of the region, while simultaneously embedding a language politics given its bilingual character.

However, this joy was dislodged by the unfortunate news of a writer’s death. On May 31, Ama Ata Aidoo, the Ghanaian author of Our Sister Killjoy (1977), a pioneering feminist novel, died at the age of 81. As such, Africa is mourning; Ghana is mourning and Kenya, too, is mourning the novelist, playwright, short story writer, and committed radical feminist, who wrote to assert the agency of African women within literary history. As reverential eulogies have been paraded across the world, the Kenyan literary community joined in the outpouring of grief in a country where her influence not only transcends her writing, but is also compounded by a teaching stint she had at the then named Kenyatta College, now Kenyatta University, as well as the literary contributions of her Kenyan-born daughter, Kinna Likimani. Where Austin Bukenya, a leading East African scholar of English and literature, for instance, dubbed her “Queen of African literature”, Mukoma wa Ngugi, the author of Nairobi Heat and son to Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, sees her as a “pillar” without which “the African literary tradition wobbles”. While Joyce Nyairo, an academic and a cultural analyst, references the short story “Something To Talk About On The Way To The Funeral” as praise of her storytelling genius, Yvonne Owuor lamented, in proper proverbial fashion: “A great, and giant tree that sheltered many beings has fallen”. Moreover, her writings, which among others, include The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), No Sweetness Here (1969), Anowa (1970), and Changes (1991) cut across the genres to show the depth of her imaginative oeuvre and demonstrate the commitment—in different but related ways—to the African woman’s cause, through literature and in society. Rest in Power Mama. READ MORE…