Ghana Journal 1

We Are Getting Drunk

I shared dinner with a young seventeen-year-old fresher named Samuel who is reading for Social Studies. I met him at the Gods Way Internet café. The net was down. It had been down the entire day. While we waited for it to come back up, Samuel took me to the dorm restaurant where we ordered fufu and goat. Fufu is a massive cassava dumpling. It is served in a spicy tomato and fish broth with pieces of boiled goat. The fufu is made by mashing cassava until the starch breaks down and it becomes a massive gooey ball, the size of a softball. Then it’s cooked with no water to make it even gooier. This is then served in a spicy tomato and fish based broth with chunks of boiled goat floating around the fufu dumpling. The waitresses were extremely amused when I did not finish the stew. They teased me that I needed to “belong to the clean plate club.”

When we returned to Gods Way, the internet was up and running again. I responded to two or three emails for an hour. The connection is extremely slow. On my way back to the Sasakawa Cottages where I am staying I passed the football pitch where earlier in the day I watched fifty or so cows graze. A university herder prodded the bovines with his staff and moved them lazily from one end of the pitch to the other. In the twilight groups of young men stood on the same pitch in small circles. They bounced on the balls of their feet and chanted Christian prayers. Every evening when the sun sets they gather on the pitch and chant and sing. Their voices drift up among the trees in the gathering darkness.

Later this evening I sat on the cottage porch and read a play titled Dear Blood by the Ghanaian playwright Victor K. Yankah. I share an office with Victor at the University of Cape Coast. He is the chair of the Drama Department. Set in pre-colonial era in the imaginary kingdom of Emukura, Dear Blood is a retelling of Antigone. It is amazing how this story still resonates today in its subversiveness. The tragedy of human rights being undermined by a man’s capriciousness seems so prescient to contemporary politics. Would we be at war if not for Bush and Cheney’s bigotry and egocentrism?

I was taken by the executioners drinking song at the end of Yankah’s Dear Blood.

Ye num bio ye num bio
Nsa yea ye bru nso ye be num.
Eya a musi mipe nsa
Eya a musi mipe nsa woo
Kobina ee enye mea.

Sung in Twi, a tribal language of Ghana, it roughly translates as

We are drinking we are drinking
This drink we are getting drunk
we are getting drunk
But we continue to drink
But we continue to drink

Earlier in the day Victor pointed out the village of Apewosika, which butts up against the campus. Recently, the land that the village is on was bought by the university as part of a major expansion. The residents of Apewosika, however, refused to leave, and the university couldn’t force them to. A ten-foot concrete wall is being built enclosing the entire village. I can imagine the executioner sometime in the near future standing at this gate singing his song: Ye num bio ye num bio/ Nsa yea ye bru nso ye be num/ Eye a musi mipe nsa.

Selected Works

1. Nonfiction

DJ Kool Herc
The first picturebook biography of the founder of rap and hip hop, DJ Kool Herc!

America Dreaming: How Youth Changed America in the 60s
"Phenomenal."–Howard Zinn "Excellent."–New York Times Book Review

Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance
“Harlem Stomp! is a wonderous new book: it celebrates a time, a place, an energy, and a people who refused to be held back and so they created a culture the entire world is still reeling from.”

--George C. Wolfe, writer, director, and producer of the Public Theater, NYC

3. Poetry

Dave the Potter
A picturebook poem describing the life of the slave potter Dave. Illustrated by Bryan Collier.

Contemporary Poetry of New England
“Contemporary Poetry of New England offers a vivid portrait of a region, its colors and smells, its physical and emotional textures, and the people…. It presents a range of poets, few of whom would call themselves a “region poet,” although each has taken to heart in a private way Frost’s haunting dictum: ‘Locality gives art.’”

--from the Introduction

2. Fiction

A Brush with Napoleon
A seventeen-year-old is plucked out of the Grande Armee to sit in place of Napoleon for a portrait of the Emperor by the artist David.

Casa Azul
"I felt like a kid reading every word on the page! I liked the strains of "magic realism" coming through in Frida's house! Children will relate to this very much! The story is charming and reads like a thriller." –Margarita Aguilar, Assisant Curator, El Museo del Barrio

4. Middle Grade Series

Xtreme Mysteries
These kids love extreme sports--snowboarding, skateboarding, rock climbing, wake boarding--and are ready to fight when the right to do their sport is threatened.