Fifty Years On...

There should be a grand party at my home tonight. Groundnut stew, palm oil soup with slices of boiled snail, pink and green slimy okra stew with slivers of fish and chicken, kontombre, garden egg stew, fried plantains, tatale—those sweet peppery plantain fritters—fufu, banku, kenke, fried fish, fish stew, jolof rice, steaming chunks of yam, cocoyam, mounds of steamed white rice, roasted goat all seasoned to a flaming energy with hot peppers and onions—a fantastic feast to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Ghana’s independence from Britain. My house should be filled with Ghanaians speaking Fanti, Ewe, Twi, Ga, Hausa and pidgin English, shaking hands with the snap of fingers, sipping potent brew and reflecting on the occasion. But tonight I will watch American Idol, work on a presentation for a meeting of school librarians in Columbia, and give only a passing thought to the anniversary…

A more responsible poet, a genuinely nationalist writer, would have planned the publication of his next book to coincide with this date. He would have written an epic poem with a central character called Quackoo who will turn fifty tonight, and who carries in his body the narrative of a nation, its promising birth, its giddy childhood of sudden and dramatic growth, its turbulent preteen years of juvenile delinquency, and its decidedly unruly teen years spent trying so many different paths, spilling blood, confused by the deliciousness and security of rigid conformity and militarism and the competing temptations of getting by with tricks, lies and games. In his body are the scars of those years—all the battles, all the injuries, all the unchecked chaos that he always knew he would survive. Then in his twenties and thirties, he found the austerity of becoming an adult, becoming a man, knowing that children must be fed, that women can be complicated and can have needs and can make him feel inadequate; a man in his twenties and thirties, trying to see if at last he can build a small house, find a steady income, shake off some of the friends that have not meant him well, face up to the terrible control of the things he has no ability to change or control. That man who walked along the roads of his city seeing its beauty and its ugliness, seeing the ruins left after a wayward youth, and trying to find a way to hope. In his middle age, he has begun to wear suits instead of the fatigues, he has begun to speak in the language of adults, in the pragmatic language of a man who has lost faith in pure idealism. Sometimes he stands and looks out to sea and grows silent remembering the dreams of his youth and how different the world is for him now. In this epic, Quackoo sits naked on the edge of his bed, sees the corns on his toes, the toughened blisters on his instep, the bundling of veins on his calves, the dry flakiness of his knees’ skin, the loose flesh around his stomach, the pain in his back, the ghostly ache of his wrist that was once broken in several places, the awareness that behind his ribs and chest are a complex of treacherous organs growing old, becoming increasingly unreliable. He carries in him the burden of his country. He has lived long enough to see worlds he never thought he would see, to have dreams of a past that goes far beyond his years, a memory of the language of the earth, the whisperings of ancestors under the earth, the soft sobs of a land still trying to heal after so many of its rooted parts have been yanked out and transported away. He has lived long enough to know that his life is divided between nightmares, dreams and the uncertain realities of his present. He looks out of his window in the day and sees strangers walking through his land as if they own it. He sees how quickly everything is moving these days and how little he knows about the way young people talk, about how the old ways are going away and how the language of his old ideologies taste like dust in his mouth. I should write an epic complete with flying humans, talking lizards and snakes, mangoes shaped like human organs, the monstrosity of people dying from sickness, and the absurdity of cell phones ubiquitous as empty green and brown bottles in this Africa. I would not know how to end the book, but it would have an ending, and the book would be launched at the party, and my people, all these Ghanaians, will be gathered in my house in Columbia, South Carolina, reading passages from the book and weeping, and telling me how much it speaks to them and to their lives; and then we would watch the Ghanaian football team at the World Cup coming close to making our impossible dreams a reality, and someone will pour libation, gather his cloth and speak into the wind—into the March wind, with the full yellow moon looming above, and my children standing around and thinking to themselves, “We are Ghanaians, we are Ghanaians, too.”
But I will be watching American Idol, to see if that wide-smile Indian fellow who has made it this far because he is so hopelessly charming and impossibly uncomfortable with trying to be a star, will somehow shock us, transform himself into a leather-pantsed, and silk-shirted rock musician, prancing like Mick Jagger on the stage, blowing us away with a very un-immigrant performance, a performance that tells us that miracles are possible over night.
I am a Ghanaian. But I am working on becoming a more Ghanaian poet. I am working on becoming a more Ghanaian writer. I am a Jamaican poet, right now—a Jamaican writer. But there is evidence that with some effort I can be both a Jamaican and Ghanaian poet. Then I will be able to live up to my passport, which is still Ghanaian. This fifty year anniversary might well be a start. I will send an e-mail to my Ghanaian mother and congratulate her on the anniversary. I will start to make more earnest plans to orchestrate my return to my native land soon. These are the small gestures of someone who knows that he can find his sense of national identity through the imagination and through memory.
My father went to Ghana in 1957. He arrived when the world was changing and something gloriously meaningful was happening in that nation. He understood that when he insisted that my day name, Kwame, be my official name and not a pet name. He made the decision, I am told, because I was born at the time when Kwame Nkrumah survived an assignation attempt in 1962. There will not be a special Time Magazine devoted to Ghana’s fifty year anniversary, but at least today, I will try and give some homage to the moment. Over the next week or so, I will send occasional Memory Letters to Ghana in this blog.