A’bena Awuku-Larbi is a polylingual poet, a legal practitioner, and a womanist. Her poems have appeared in the Contemporary Ghanaian Writers’ Series and The Big Yellow Post. She is an alumnus of the Mo Issa Workshop 2021 and co-founder of Happy Monthlies Ghana. Her professional background includes work on energy management, literary artistic activism campaigns with ActionAid, menstrual hygiene management with Happy Monthlies Ghana and gender-based violence awareness with Young Urban Women’s Movement Ghana. She writes about women and for women at The Second Woman.
Amy Shimshon-Santo is a writer and educator who believes that creativity is a powerful tool for personal and social transformation. She is the author of Catastrophic Molting (Flowersong Press), Even the Milky Way is Undocumented (Unsolicited Press), and the chapbook Endless Bowls of Sky (Placeholder Press). She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes in poetry and creative nonfiction, a Rainbow Reads Award and Best of the Net in poetry, and national recognition on the honor roll of service learning.
Àkpà: Hello Amy and Abena. Thank you for accepting to do this. Ever since the Pa Gya Festival, I have been immersed in The Ocean Between Us. Sincerely, I cannot imagine anyone else who could have done it better. While the letters lay the foundation, the poems are the bricks in the wall. How did you know you were going to work on a project together, and is there a thing working together has taught you?
Amy: Hello Àkpà and A’bena! Thank you for reading the book and for welcoming us into conversation, Àkpà. I am happy to have a new opportunity to stay connected.
I first met A’bena when we were paired together in the Mo Issa Writers workshop offered by Writers Project Ghana. We spent time together each week in an editorial process with her poetry. It was her task to write. It was my job to read and listen, and help her advance her own poetic goals. I was moved by her voice and her approach to life. She is a very impressive human. She runs a menstruation education organisation, writes powerful poetry, and sustains a high stakes full time profession as an attorney.
One day, we were talking about the importance of using local imagery in poems to evoke a sense of place. A’bena told me about Ouidah, and mentioned a ritual honoring ancestors who were forced into bondage. The rituals resembled festivals in Bahia, Brazil. I felt it in my body. It robbed me of my breath — trying not to cry. I showed her images from the Festa de Yemanja in Brazil’s Northeast. We saw how the human family was reaching out toward each other in two rituals of remembrance that face the salt water horizon — neither one knowing that there were people on the other side looking back.
When the formal mentorship program was done, we decided to keep going. We stayed in touch throughout the pandemic, meeting most weeks on the same day and time (my morning and her evening). A’bena suggested we write letters, so we couched our compost poems (what I call process poems) in an epistolary structure. We sometimes wrote in response to prompts at the same time, but we mostly wrote asynchronously in one shared document. That record became the bones of the book.
A’bena: Hello Lovelies! I am excited about this. Àkpà, I am glad you read our work. Cela me remplit de joie de savoir que vous appréciez notre poèmes. My life is a nautical adventure. I identify with water, how she moves and all the forms in which she exists. My spirit is a body of water and I trust her to bring me treasures every time. I was nervous when I was first introduced to Amy, I felt the spectrum of emotions a child is when they are opening their Christmas gifts. When our hearts finally met in conversation, it was indescribable. Communing with Amy was like drinking from a healing spring. That’s how I knew this person was my person.
Amy thrives on plans and structure. I had never conceived of expressing the art of words within a structure. I had never had to plan a poem. I always wrote from emotions and bursts of creativity. Working with Amy allowed me to live everyday like a poem. I didn’t have to wait for some rainbow of emotions to write poems. I am inspired by her style and in the ways it has changed my creative experience.
Àkpà: Off the coast of the Atlantic ocean, Badagry, is a place known as the Point of No Return. One of my favourite things to do is to sit some feet away from the troubled water, overlooking it and wondering what is beyond there. And now that Yemoja, a Yoruba deity is mentioned, I am also thinking of the cultural export that came with the Transatlantic slave trade. For you, is the spiritual a route towards home, another kind of discovery of the self? What is your amen?
Amy: Some kind of return is possible, even if it is to our own full selves. Paulina Chizine speaks about the necessity that we honour ancestral knowledge. Colonisation was an existential, physical, and material theft. Ecological too. As a member of the Jewish diaspora, with family in the Jewish and African diasporas, I think a lot about identity, knowledge, loss, and restoration. We know how to have fun, create beauty, and carry knowledge — but, it is also challenging to shake off the legacies of trauma.
“I see the world as a pluriverse where multiple worlds fit together. This notion lends itself to rich cultural and linguistic experiences.”
— Amy Shimshon-Santo
Eu sou filha de Oya (I am a daughter of Oya), but Yemanja is minha mãe pequena (my small mother). At the same time, my ancestry is 100% Jewish. When I made a family with someone from Northeastern Brazil we decided that we needed to welcome all of our cultures, languages, and faiths into one harmonious space. I became an interfaith person who belongs to an interfaith family. Curiosity, mutual respect, and coexistence was key to creating a welcoming home. For example, we often give thanks for our meals in both Yoruba and Hebrew.
I see the world as a pluriverse where multiple worlds fit together. This notion lends itself to rich cultural and linguistic experiences. Spanish was my second language, and Portuguese was my third. Hebrew is my mother’s first language (She also learned Aramaic, Yiddish, and some Ladino as a child). Growing up in California, I heard English with dashes of Hebrew and Yiddish first, followed by Spanish. My mother’s mysterious root language was always present on the other end of the phone when she spoke to family. My mother tongues were not taught in school, and I have yet to become fluent in them. My mother always said that I should go to temple to learn Hebrew. In retrospect, she was right. Our languages and cultures are wrapped up in faith. Whether we accept, reject, or adapt religious traditions, faith has been a part of how people came to read and write. My prayers are multiplicitous. They are justice seeking, and rooted in respect for the natural world.
“One day, I will taste the final drop of water that will carry me to my beginning.”
— A’bena Awuku-Larbi
A’bena: I am a body of water. I know this in the cyclical nature of my reality, of how my worldview. I believe that everything is water. Everything flows. You just need to dig the right spot. This is how I can live and find spiritual nourishment, by drinking from different bodies of water.
In daily interactions, I find the “right spot” through communication and there is no communication without language. I try to speak the language of the water I seek. Sometimes it is Twi, Ga, Ewe, Fon, Hausa, Sisala, Spanish, French, English, Hindu, Silence, Korean, Rain, Chinese, Harmattan, Sunlight, Brown Earth, Wine, or even Blood.
I hear their story. I carry these stories in my being and they inform how I express myself, how I love myself, and how I find my way back to my fountainhead.
I loved Badagry when I visited a couple of years ago. There is a certain longing that lingers in the air over there… it’s like the last whispers of a desperate prayer. I think of Badagry as Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. The water calls for the souls her shores have lost. This is the story she says.
Very different from the air in Ouidah (my mother’s home). Ouidah is a fierce chant. Her taste is heavy and she holds your tongue captive whether you want it or not. My grandmother often talks about how women in our lineage are like the African leopard (our clan totem) – imposing and féroce. This description reminds me of Ouidah and her sea. Ouidah is the Creation of Eve. The water exists, asserting her being just as she is. This too, is her story.
One day, I will taste the final drop of water that will carry me to my beginning.
Àkpà: One thing I mostly admire about this work is the infusion of your other languages into English. I like the natural flow of it. I wonder, was it deliberate, or because you felt English couldn’t carry the weight of what was intended?
Amy: It was absolutely deliberate. Bring all of your languages with you, is my dictum. Bring your ancestors forward. There is no need for one language to carry everything. It can’t. We have language assets all around us that deserve attention, respect, and inclusion in our lives, our education, and in our writing.
I am deeply impressed by the abundance of language vitality I see friends enjoying in Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, and South Africa. In contrast, I lost my mother tongue. This was partly because white supremacists wanted us dead. They wanted our bodies and histories and languages dead. So, I humbly study my aleph bet and go about the work of restoration. Every letter gained is a win.
A’bena: I am a body of water. I am a collection of all the things and beings that have passed through me and lived through me. All of these things and beings have language. English is never enough to give them all their voice. And so I speak in the language they need to express themselves.
Amy taught me the idea of letting the poem be what it wants to be in the way it wants to. In this way I discovered there were many more languages inside of me. My heart is the Tower of Babel and my poems carry out her sounds.
Àkpà: The concept of multiplicity interests me — how one person carries a multitude in them. And the thing about poetry is, it gives you access to that potential. Igbo language becomes the language I fall back to when I am angry; French when I am extremely excited, and English because I must survive [laughs]. Are you also different persons when you inhabit these languages?
Amy: That is beautiful. Enjoy that! I see this as a question of self editing, and advocacy for wholeness. I already am multiple, all in one. I decided, when I began taking writing seriously, that I would stop editing my whole self out just to make other people more comfortable. I enjoy my multiplicity. Yiddish is for singing to babies, for my elders, and for jokes. Hebrew is for my mother, and my cousins. Portuguese is for the family in Brazil, capoeira, samba, and música. (It used to be my language of romantic intimacy, but not anymore!) Spanish is very close to my heart due to where I grew up in California (Aztlan), my enduring friendships, and memories of living in Mexico and Central America. I enjoy them all, and I am open to learning more. I hope that someday my ear tunes in better to Yoruba, Fon, Ewe, Krobo, Twi, Ga and the amazing Pidgin amalgamations that prevail. I focus on the love and dignity of languages as living libraries of experience. There is no way that one language could ever do that. Everytime it has attempted to, we’ve been squashed.
“I am never alone if I can write and speak. I am never powerless if I can string words together to create.”
— Amy Shimshon-Santo
A’bena: I love all the persons I am in the languages I exist in. You know how water takes the shape of the container into which it is poured? All the languages I am acquainted with and moulds in my being. Depending on the season and circumstances, I inhabit a mould and I become a square or triangle, a rectangle or hexagon. In this way, I move.
Àkpà: Also, part of writing is reclamation. I am curious. What do you want your writing to do for you?
Amy: Writing is indeed reclamation. Reclamation, and also relationship— to oneself and to the world. I never expected writing to do anything for me, but it has done so much! Writing has been a great companion. Writing has been a vessel capable of holding and transmuting more than I know how to handle. Writing has brought me into a more authentic relationship to myself, and sparked new intimacies with people, nature, knowledge, time, and space. I am never lacking if I can read and listen. I am never alone if I can write and speak. I am never powerless if I can string words together to create. I read a letter and am filled with sound. Every Hebrew letter is a sound, a number, and a story. Language is a gift our ancestors made for us.
A’bena: Writing for me, gives a voice to the different things and beings that have lived through me. Storytime: I had a roller-coaster of a life in Senior High School. There was a person I met that made the experience better – Akosua Afraso Quaicoe. Long after I left High School, her essence lives in me and finds expression in the way I write the letter “a.” I learned, because of her, that an alphabet is a language. Because people understand me differently when I write that letter. Every time I see that letter, I am reminded to hold my poise in the most desperate of sitations. We don’t talk regularly anymore but she lives in me and through me. ‘A’ is the language of Akosua A. Quaicoe that lives in me. It is the same reason why when I say the word “scavengers,” in that relaxed and sugary sweet tone, I am speaking the language of “Henneh Kyereh Kwaku” or when I speak “Dear Poet” like I am fresh out of a meditation, I am talking through Amy Shimshon-Santo. Sometimes it is not even a word, it is an onomatopoeic phrase like ‘eeeeeeeeeh’ (sang in a sharp ascent), I am channeling the spirit of Amamat Bukari or heh-heeeehi (sang low to high to a sharp low), I am embodying Audrey Seshie.
Writing is for calling out the spirits of the people and things that have left memory in me.
Àkpà: What is your daily writing process? How do you approach your writing, any daily ritual?
Amy: I approach writing as a way of life, similarly to how I approach a daily Ashtanga practice. Daily practices change you through a gentle process of reconstruction. Little by little, you shed and grow and shift.
My ritual is to write in the mornings. I prefer mornings because once the other responsibilities of the day grab my attention they hijack my brain and I become their prisoner. I write poems most days. Some of them are not worthy of sharing with a mole, a raccoon, or the moon. I write them anyway. A simple brown notebook. A thin blue pen, or a sharp pencil. A cup of tea or something hot to drink. That’s all I need to begin. Sometimes I take on a specific poetic form for a week and then alternate. Sometimes I journal, or respond to another poem. Sometimes I read a poem, collect random words, and then ask the pen to make something new from the scattered words on a brand new page. Sometimes I go sit somewhere different, breathe in the air, and write at the intersections of what is going on around me and inside me. I love music and people, but when I write I want quiet and solitude.
“Every moment of my life is a poem and when the moment presses deeply into my brain, I write it down.”
— A’bena Awuku-Larbi
When I’m teaching a lot, or I am on deadline with a book or editorial project, I let myself just focus on the editing which is a complex creative process in itself. Sequencing. Framing. Reviewing for flow. Cleaning things up while not suffocating the strangeness out of them. Style. Technologies. It’s a lot to consider. I toggle from one mode to the next: generating and editing, generating and editing. And then, sometimes rest or a road trip!
A’bena: Before Amy, I wrote from creative bursts. It was sporadic and all over the place. Now, my writing is like how I practise my spirituality. Mindfulness. Every word, every emotion even in the most minute form will be put in text. I have a Google Keep account where I store all these.
Every moment of my life is a poem and when the moment presses deeply into my brain, I write it down.
Àkpà: The Ocean Between Us is among many things, a celebration of womanhood and an ode to friendship. The stream of consciousness in A’bena’s letter, preceding the Da Ablawa poem, is the highlight of my experience with this book. How do you approach healing?
Amy: I love your summation of the book’s essence: “a celebration of womanhood and an ode to friendship.” Ase’. I agree. It is a thrilling highlight. Her words defy gravity and go everywhere she wants. That piece holds multitudes, and finds balance in the dichotomies and dialectics of her actions. It is an I am all women kind of poem.
Our early relationship was consolidated while she edited “Da Ablawa.” We spent time together pulling on the strings of stanzas and discussing what the poem wanted to say. There is medicine in that poem. (Do you remember when she surprised everyone by singing it in the Church of Poetry?!) It was the ever-present totem in The Ocean Between Us. Coincidentally, it was one of the last poems we located inside the book structure.
We had generated a lot of process writing —playful, sad, angry, energetic language that traipses about on the page like it owns the place. We went through our straggler free writes and folded some of them into the letters that are interspersed between the poems.
A’bena told me once that she noticed me focusing on healing in my writing. That makes sense. I’ve been trying to save myself. Break myself out. Find some better way to live. I have a warrior in me who likes to raise the octane. The warrior works surgically, dissecting things, splitting things open to see how they function. Rendering them powerless over me, or shifting my relationship to power.
For me, the point of poetry is to be in my nature and sentipensar libremente (to feel-think without obstacles). Freedom seeking is the opposite of recklessness. In times like these, it is the most responsible thing that one can do.
A’bena: Àkpà, thank you.
I like that you call it a stream of consciousness because that was what was happening over there and that was me in the last lap of a sprint, zooming towards the finish line of healing.
On healing, are you familiar with the Hogbetsotso story? Hogbetsotso is celebrated by the Ewe people in Ghana. I call Ewes my cousins because of their relationship to the Fon. The festival celebrates the escape and exodus of a people from a tyrant. The people were “imprisoned” in the city bordered by thick great walls. In order to escape, the “Women” threw washing water and I believe all kinds of liquid against the wall in the course of their daily lives to soften it. One day, that wall crumbled and the people walked backwards out of their oppression. They entered their freedom by walking backward.
This is how I approach healing — I open up my pain to the universe. She hurls water at that painful spot. Water comes in the form of people, events, animals, plants and spiritual encounters. Water falls over the wall of pain in a progressive increase of intensity. When the highest point is reached, the wall crumbles and my being escapes. But I exit pain with my back. What that means is that I write poetry. When you look forward with your back, you are not relying on your eyes to chart your future. You are relying on that je ne sais quoi, on the distilled silence of God that is only expressed in a poem.
I enter my freedom in the way heaven unlooses itself into the ocean – in drops of words; the condensation of thoughts and ejaculate of emotion.
Àkpà: Yes, I remember. A’bena has one of the best voices I have ever heard. She’s music. Also, that reminds me how the poems in this collection read like something set to music. Is music what you aspire to? Do you also consider the possibility of performing to a set note, when writing?
Amy: A’bena is music. She is so many things. Justice seeker. Sentient being. Compassionate. Bold. Playful. I didn’t know that she sang until she belted it out live on Twitter! More of that please.
Poetry is music. I love how it feels in my body to breathe to speak it. If I had my way, I’d always recite to instrumentation. This year I was lucky to be able to perform with friends playing the atabaque, berimbau, agogô, surdo, and tabla. I love working with percussion. With or without instrumentation, the voice is an instrument. The breath is my river, my pulse.
A’bena: Language has melody and I am glad I found in Amy, someone who appreciates the voice of language. Have you read the “ja ja ja ja ja” poem? Dear Lord! It is one of my favorite rhythmic poems in the book.
I don’t think poets should aspire to music. We are music. To poem is to make music and we know this if we put our work in a kaleidoscope and continually rotate the tube.
I am a sucker for drums, bass guitars and cellos and I’d love to do that with this work when the opportunity comes.
Àkpà: Amy’s words, “May our words and wishes keep us safe,” ring deep in my head. They go beyond, maybe, the literal. This is because we are more than ever living in a time writers are paying for the written words with their freedom and life. What are you afraid of?
Amy: This is a contradiction we face — personal and social safety or risk. The future is in even greater danger if we do not become comfortable speaking the truth. Too much is at stake. People’s lives. Nonhuman life. The planet itself. By 2050, it’s estimated that there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. The ocean can live without us, but we can not survive without the ocean. On the other hand, violence prevails and it makes sense to want to hide.
Poetry is a great way to practise freedom of speech (not just legislate it, but get better at actually doing it). Freedom of speech is crucial for a just society. (A’bena and I both share a connection to legal precedents. A’bena is an attorney, and my father was a labour lawyer.)
“My dream is to travel with poetry and keep connecting, creating, and learning with amazing people in different places.”
— Amy Shimshon-Santo
Recently, I was in an unexpected, uncomfortable bind with immigration. I thought, Who are you kidding? How is poetry going to get you out of this? I felt naive. What saved me was having relationships with people who cared about me enough to come to my aid and help me resolve the issue. Our well being is dependent on the quality of our relationships. I do not mean the abstract notion of “connections” or “network.” I mean real people who actually care about your welfare, will show up for you, and are trustworthy. bell hooks wrote that we can begin to cultivate trusting relationships by being trustworthy.
I used to live in fear. That’s a sad truth. Leaving home very young and trying to figure out how to support myself was a stressor. Becoming a single mother who had to provide resources, peace, and possibilities every day for her kid was a stressor. I was terrified a lot of the time. At this stage of my life, I am more afraid of having regrets than getting things wrong. I am more afraid of not trying the things I want to do before I die than anything that might happen along the way.
A’bena: I worry I’d never be able to poem. I use the word poem as a verb. I worry that the way I express myself would be policed, then gentrified. I worry I’d never be able to see poets poeming.
Poets are weeds, cacti and succulents. We grow in the most adverse circumstances. A prayer for safety is a prayer for strength to continue to thrive in a world that is hostile to our survival.
Àkpà: Amy’s creative career started with dance and capoeira. A’bena, you are also a trained attorney. How do you reconcile this with writing and travelling? How do you find rest?
Amy: She doesn’t rest. She cooks. Her homemade spices and fish powder are world renowned.
My dream is to travel with poetry and keep connecting, creating, and learning with amazing people in different places.
As for rest, it’s like brushing your teeth. You just have to do it. Self care. Rejuvenation. We get to do that. We must.
A’bena: [Chuckles] Amy is right. I barely rest. I am always occupied with something. Think of me like you’d think of the hydrological cycle. Everything happens all at once and in some strange design it all works out pretty well. Being still is a chore for me that’s why I am drawn to people who are calm and grounding.
Àkpà: I am fascinated about meals. I enjoy cooking as much as I enjoy eating. I get angry when people rush their meals. I feel it’s something that should be approached with care, savouring every ingredient, and regaling in the love and care with which a meal is prepared. My friend, Ryn Yee, a New Zealand based writer, and I share recipes with each other to “stay in touch with the eternal” [laughs]. What is your pleasure meal? And do you have a recipe you’d want to share?
Amy: That’s fantastic. Daily pleasures add up and change the quality of your life.
I hope that A’bena tells people about her signature fish powder and opinions on ceramic soup pots.
I value good food, but I’m dwarfed culinarily by my brother, daughter-in-law, and many friends. Last night I cooked trays of baklava and spanakopita for guests. My survival strategy is to always keep a pot of soup in the refrigerator (chicken, lentil, split pea, borscht). I could live on soup. My favourite meal in Ghana was groundnut soup and fufu (and, of course, waakye!). A’bena and I ate groundnut soup and fufu with Mamle Wolo in her home, and then spent the evening discussing food, fashion, and life.
“I love food and I have so many opinions about different dishes.”
— A’bena Awuku-Larbi
A’bena: I was really delighted that night at Mamle’s place. So many wholesome moments.
In line with my default mode, I don’t take time to enjoy my food. Another reason I enjoy eating with loved ones. I enjoy food with them.
I like fish powder because my mother and grandmother use it in their dishes. There is a standard type of fish used to make the powder but I like playing with other kinds of dried and/or smoked fishes to get different tastes. I love food and I have so many opinions about different dishes. I must have been so passionate about them for Amy to notice!
There is this dish I make that my family loves. They call it “shabo shabo”. Before I explain how it is made, I should tell you I like spice. I love bold and piquant flavors. I like food that provokes me.
Shabo Shabo could be anything from a stir fry, a twist on jollof, a stew, or a sauce. It is a dynamic dish because it is made with whatever is left in the fridge and pantry right before the next market visit. Shabo Shabo is usually a one pot dish. The highlight of the dish is spice. Spices used include any combination from ginger, garlic, anise, rosemary, chilli pepper, black pepper, clove, guinea pepper, senegal pepper, basil, locust bean, cinnamon, soy sauce, curry, coriander, lemon, mint and nutmeg. I have a small mortar and pestle for pounding and crushing the spice, not blending it. I also like to lightly roast some of my spice too before crushing. Proteins are usually roasted, grilled or baked in their juices. Usually chicken or fish. Carbohydrates are usually rice (boiled), plantain (boiled), or Gari (steamed). Vegetables are lots of green leaves, peppers, onions and carrots. These are usually chopped into small pieces. By the time you are done eating this meal, you should be sweating and satisfied. And of course, the fridge must be empty.
Àkpà: What books are you reading now, and what writers or artists have influenced you?
Amy: I’m teaching an environmental humanities course so I’ve been reading a lot of creative nonfiction. For example, Reconsidering Reparations and Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmer. I’m preparing for a gathering in Bahia and have been reading and translating poems into Portuguese. The list includes: Lucille Clifton, Mahtem Shiferraw, Obiageli A. Iloakasia, and, of course, A’bena. I spent yesterday watching interviews with Paulina Chizine, a lighthouse of a novelist from Mozambique! I will be reading all of her books. I spent today listening to Dionne Brand reading The Blue Clerk. Bury me beneath a library.
A’bena: Last month I read five books
No Good Men Among The Living: America, The Taliban and the War through Afghan Eyes by Anand Gopal, The Woman who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone, Less Than Human : Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others by David Smith, If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance by Angela Davis and Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis
I am yet to draw up my list for this month but notable mentions are Amy’s Catastrophic Molting and Even the Milky Way is Undocumented, Theory I by Otto Scharmer, Assata, an Autobiography and Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel.
I love books that explore magical realism, and Chinese novels. I like biographies and autobiographies of people who have changed the world in some way. I read Buddhist literature. I like myths and spiritual mysteries. I like afrobeat music, amapiano, Beyonce, Rihanna, NNavy, Isak Danielson and Andrea Bocceli. All these have influences on me. I also have a fondness for Edvard Munch.
Àkpà: What do you have in your care package? How do you unplug from this chaos going on in the world?
Amy: Care package. Hmm. I don’t have a care package, yet. What’s in yours? May I have one? What I do have are practices — what you might call creative habits. I’ve created a rhythm that works for me with walking meditation, ashtanga yoga, writing and listening to literature and music. These practices help me live. With the help of the public library, they are free where I live. Everyone deserves a public library. It’s the best institution that I know of in my region.
A’bena: Care package? I don’t know what that looks like but when I unplug, I go to spas and indulge in what they have to offer. I enjoy open spaces that celebrate art (without the crowd), brownies (the irregular kind), chocolate and Chinese food. I travel up north or towards the west, away from the bustling city centres.
Àkpà: What do you think is the role of the poet, to preserve the self, or to translate experiences, or…?
Amy: Great question! I would never tell a poet what their role should be. Do what you want (or at least try) might be my advice. My role is to dive voraciously into language as a liberatory practice, try to educate myself out of ignorance, and grow into a better relationship to myself and to the world.
Poetry was inherent to many ancient languages (even though it is rarely taught as such). Chizine says that “orality is humanity.” It’s a form of knowledge that doesn’t war and impose itself on everyone else. It is our birthright to embody and expand upon this legacy in our own ways. Self and society are inseparable. Poetry is a way to activate the blessings of our creativities and cultures to benefit our lives, communities (living and dead), and the futures we wish to inspire.
A’bena: The role of a poet in what context? Generally, I think poets are the universe, the great beyond, the layer of life beyond the human experience and they exist as such wherever they are placed.
muqabalal 