Ghanaian poet on quest to nurture African writers

Shoulder length dreadlocks, wide probing eyes, a slow measured walk. He has something of the restrained, pent-up energy of a slinking panther.

Casually dressed in jeans and an African print shirt, you might pass him on the streets and mistake him for any other artist-type wandering in from the Kenya National Theatre. But there’s more to him than meets the eye.

The 39-year-old Ghanian writer and publisher Nii Ayikwei Parkes was recently in Kenya for the Storymoja Hay Festival that came to a close towards the end of September.

While cutting a laid back figure leading poetry workshops and discussions in the Nairobi Museum’s precincts, the author is quite acclaimed in the international writing sphere, a former poet-in-residence at the Poetry Café in London, former associate artist-in-residence with BBC’s Radio 3, a published writer and a publisher in his own right, with over 40 writers under his publishing house, Flipped Eye Publishing.

Parkes’ debut novel Tail of the Blue Bird published by Vintage books, was shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth Writers Prize, a publication which allows his name to sit alongside significant writers such as William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Albert Camus, Tony Morrison, Orhan Parmuk, Haruki Murakami and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, also published by the same group.

Apart from having performed and appeared at readings in many parts of the world, Parkes also founded the African Writers Evening series at the Poetry Café in London’s Covent Garden in 2003, which has over the years featured the who-is-who in contemporary African writing. It has given young and upcoming writers a significant platform and voice in the heart of the global publishing axis.

Some of the writers the evening series has featured in the past include recognised writers such as Sierra Leone’s Kadija Sessay, Libya’s Hisham Matar, Malawi’s Jack Mapanje, Kenya’s Wangui wa Goro and Ken Kamoche, Uganda’s Monia Arac Nyeko and Goretti Kyomuhendo, Zimbabwe’s Brian Chikwava, South Africa’s Zoe Wicomb, Nigeria’s Helon Habila, Ben Okri, Sefi Atta and Helen Oyeyemi, among many others. Indeed in his organising and publishing endeavours, Parkes is inadvertently unveiling a new generation of thinkers to the world.

ANSWERING QUESTIONS

When did Parkes start writing? “I don’t know exactly when I began writing, but I recall that I actually started keeping the writing when I was about 10. My father saw it and said, ‘Oh you are writing poetry’, and so I sort of started to keep things so I could show them to him,” he said.

Every writer has their unique reason for why they write and Parkes is no different. “Writing is my way of both asking and answering my questions about the world. I’ve always had a feeling that things have meaning and that things are connected. I needed causality, so I would create it through writing.”

He says that for him, this quest for meaning and making sense of things makes him view himself as a story teller rather than a poet or a novelist.

The writer, who was born in the UK but grew up in Ghana, has published four collections of poetry — Eyes of a Boy, Lips of a Man, Ballast, Madrigal, The Makings of You and the novel Tail of the Blue Bird.

Even as he writes, Parkes is heavily involved as an editor in his publishing house. Originally founded in Ghana, it is now based in the UK and co-published with an Irish man and a Grenadian. Some of the authors they have published include prolific and prize winning authors such as Kadija Sesay, Ainsley Burrows, Nick Makoha, Malika Booker, Warsan Shire, Nina Bahadur, Inua Ellams, Agnes Meadows, and Roger Robinson among others.

The authors are a mix of writers from Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and the UK. Parkes avers that due to the need for editorial distance in the work, the company does not publish his own writing.

Publishing in non-African markets has its challenges, too, but the Ghanaian writer, makes an important case for the need for black and other marginal editors to be present in the internationally publishing industry to mitigate images and stereotypes presented about them.

“The act of editing from another perspective means that you are transforming the literary landscape. I’ve been lucky with my success as a writer but I’ve also encountered a lot of ignorance along the way. One editor would read something and say ‘that’s not African’ yet they’d never even been to the continent. Another editor would want me to make the family in the story have 15 children, as if there is only one type of family in Africa. It’s thus about exploding the viewpoints and perspective.”

Parkes further elaborates, referring to the work of one of his publishing house’s writers, Kenyan-born Somali poet Warsan Shire: “I often ask, if I had not been there, would Warsan have been published in the same way? Would a European writer ask her to make certain changes? It’s in things like clichéd images and concepts which other people would just let slide. When Warsan writes about Miriam Makeba, as an African I understand how important Makeba is to Africa in a way a European editor might not, all the undertones of the symbol of Miriam Makeba would be lost on them. Those may be little things but it is the little things that influence how we see the world.”

Indeed, in tune with this idea that it is the little things that count, Parkes also holds ‘small transformations’ as something which interests him in his writing.

“I am very interested in transformation. It’s important that we are aware of ennobling our culture. When you look at how the West engages with Japanese and Chinese people, you see how they treat them with reverence. They get training on Japanese culture before they travel to Japan for business meetings. Here in Africa, though, we don’t allocate dignity to our own cultures, we always apologise for who we are and that’s why we are regarded as we are. That’s what the small campaigns I do in schools and on panels are about.”

Tail of the Blue Bird looks at how a whole village is transformed by the work of one man, exploring how the men in the village stopped beating their wives the day the character Kofi Atta was beating his daughter.

FICTIONAL VILLAGE

“I was interested in how laws come about, how societies decide to govern themselves and noticing the manner in which colonial society came and changed the way we did things. This fictional village had only little contact with colonialists but it had order. In a sense it asks the question of why we make it look as though it was colonialists who came from outside to bring order and justice from outside, yet we had it all along.”

At the memorial tribute of his fellow Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor, Parkes spoke of ‘Sankofa,’ the concept of going back before you can move forward, something which he said he had shared resonance with, with the late poet.

‘Sankofa’ is also the title of one of his poems, some of the lines almost eerie shamanic invocations of doom if the continent fails to do so: “Flow…but like blood that leaves/the heart to circuit the body/you will return for cleansing./You will find that freedom carries/dirt in its bowels, and/your only protection is here.”

What challenges has he faced on his writing and publishing walk if any? “Most have been to do with people’s views of what Africa is. But I wouldn’t really call them challenges because it is just the way the world is and you deal with it.

“More direct things have been actually getting work completed and because of our particular situation, you feel you are dragged to be an activist when you know you need to be writing. I guess that’s the challenge of African writers.”

Parkes has in the past worked as a freelance creative writing teacher. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of London’s Birkbeck College, although he studied Food Technology for his first degree.

More recently, he has relocated from the UK to Ghana with his wife and two children, where he is currently writing a TV series for Ghanaian TV, writing a book on Accra and completing a book of short stories.

His parting shot for aspiring writers: “One of the most interesting things about writing is it is up to the individual writer to decide how their career can go for them. Ultimately, it is up to each writer to do their thing.”