Anderson Tepper introduced Ben Okri; Ben Okri introduced the empty chair. The empty chair takes on more power, the more PEN events one attends. Okri's introduction was so beautifully felt and spoken that it resonated as the best I've heard so far.
Okri was a surprise to this reader of the dazzling novel THE FAMISHED ROAD. He is more professorial than I had expected, and several of his poems were lists of rules. However, I tried to follow his credo of approaching things with an open mind. Why should I have expected him to be any way at all?
Most interesting to me were his words about the sources of his own writing. His mother a storyteller, and his Nigerian life imbued his...
The crowds have left; the reviewing stands, disassembled. The reflecting pool isfrozen with sea gulls light-footing across it. Washington, DC has held its grand party. For three days, everyone was on foot, bundled in coats, scarves, gloves and walking everywhere--to the Mall, to the Capitol, to the White House (or as close as one could get), peering over barricades, hundreds of...
Or go to link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkLP6V3C414&feature=channel_page
Mariska Taylor-Darko’s “I Love Ghana” resonates with the same kind of expansiveness as the poems of Walt Whitman. Taylor-Darko’s work celebrates the Ghanaian identity with exuberance and vivid, figurative observation. A mother of two boys, she began writing late in life. She lives in Accra. She describes her thoughts on poetry: “Poetry is one of the most satisfying ways of expressing my innermost feelings and a way ofnarrating and revealing what I as an individual have experienced. I love Poetry and Poets. Poetry in Ghana is now being understood by the young and many more...
I have a murky and confusing ethnic background. I was raised by folks of English and Scottish heritage, but they were not my biological parents. My biological parents are first generation Irish on one side and a mix of English, First Nations Canadian and probably some French, on the other.
Banc-de-Pêche-de-Paspébiac, where my ancestor James Day landed. A bit like the moors, no?
My paternal great-great-grandfather (1768-1833) was a master shipbuilder named James Day, born at Shorwell on the Isle of Wight, who arrived in Paspébiac, Gaspé...
I went early on election day to vote at the polling station in the church on the cobblestone street in my neighborhood. The lines snaked down the block as neighbors read their morning papers, chatted, visited each other with their dogs on leashes and waited to get inside. After I voted, I went to the airport, and before the polls closed, I flew out to Africa.
When I arrived in Amsterdam, the big television screen outside the airport announced that Albert Gore was the next President of the United States. I went to sleep for a few hours in an airport hotel before my connecting flight. When I awoke, the television announced George Bush was the next President of the United States. I boarded...
I am working with a masters student on his thesis. He traveled to Builsa, in the remote northeastern region of Ghana where there is little contact with the outside world. There, he collected more than 60 slave resistance songs that were never previously documented. These songs, containing powerful figurative language, were sung more than two hundred years ago and have been sung and preserved in the Builsa tribe’s oral tradition every since. The Builsa sung these songs as they fought the Ashanti tribes trying to capture and sell them to white slavers on the coast. Today these songs are sung in traditional ceremonies...
The night sky swarmed with pale insects like snow flakes fluttering outside the window of the airplane as it landed at the small airfield in Northern Nigeria. At first they looked like moths, but they were hundreds…thousands of grasshoppers...
I’m sitting looking out at the Indian Ocean from the eastern edge of Africa in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It is Labor Day, at least in the U.S., though in the U.S. it is actually still Sunday night; but here it is morning with billowing white clouds,...
Last night, around 11pm, a knock came to the door of my chalet here in the Sasakawa section of the Cape Coast campus. When I opened my door, a young woman stood at my door. It was the same woman who had knocked on my door two days earlier in the afternoon and asked to do my laundry. I had told her then that I did not need her services. This time she carried an infant tied to her back with a brightly batiked bolt of cotton cloth. Beside her stood a spindly boy no more than six or seven years old. The woman spoke Fanti to the boy. The boy...
I was assigned an office in the English Department the first day I arrived at the University of Cape Coast. They did not have a key for me so I couldn’t go into the office.After a couple of days, someone decided that I could borrow the key that the department office had as long as I returned it. I was promised that I would receive a key of my own any...
This past Sunday in the late summer afternoon with a thunder and lightning storm at two, then blue sky and sun by four, we held a small family barbecue to welcome home from Africa the daughter of a good friend and to send off that night to Africa our future daughter-in-law. Both young women are graduate students in International Relations. The first was working in a refugee camp in Ghana with families soon to return to Liberia. The other, a PhD student, is researching the role of education in post conflict Uganda and earlier in the summer was in Malawi, where she and other graduate students had started a nonprofit to raise money for girls’ scholarships to high school (Advancement of Girls Education—AGE).
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There was nothing neutral about watching fellow white southern Africans – one who lives in the U.S. and one who lives in South Africa – talk about their powerful, groundbreaking memoirs (Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Scribbling the Cat and Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart). It was a meal where everything was served up – loathing, longing, “ordinary murder” (Malan’s phrase), betrayal, complicity, family dysfunction southern African-style, marinated in a mix of racism and booze. On the subject of whether or not their families had read their books, Fuller responded first with, “My mother organized a one-woman boycott of my book.” After she suggested to her father that he listen to it on tape, “I can’t listen to any bloody tapes....
Barnaby Sandwich has been kept up several nights running by what sounds like an orgy of rats in his sheet rock; and he recently learned the hard way that sauerkraut and sour cream do not mix; but despite sleeplessness and a stomach amok, he has pressed his way through half a dozen more PEN events, among them “Every Day in Africa,” “Voices from Today’s Iran,” “Humor Out of Context,” and “A Believer Nighttime Event.” The good people of PEN have worked hard to assemble a massive and impressive festival of dozens of events and hundreds of people, that must necessarily bridge a variety of tastes and sensibilities; and the same good people have been known, not incidentally, to stand Barnaby to a bowl of...
