Ghana Journal: Builsa Resistance Folksongs

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 and as work songs when they are in the fields.

Even if the mice are a hundred
Even a hundred
Even a hundred
The cat can stretch itself and catch them all

***

They should go behind the elephant and push it down
They should beat the elephant
Beat the elephant
Beat the elephant
They should go behind it for it will go down
They should go behind the elephant and push it down.

As I read these two songs I couldn’t help but hear echoes of them in the poems of the slave potter Dave who wrote his words on the sides of his pots in the first half of the 19th century. Dave was born in Africa and brought over on a slave ship around 1800. Here are three of Dave’s poems that seem to resonate:

I saw a leppard & a lions face
than I felt the need of – grace
--3 November 1858

Horses, mules and hogs-
all our cows is in the bogs-
there they shall ever stay
till the buzzards take them away
--29 March 1836

A better thing I never saw
When I shot off the lions jaw
--9 November 1836

I could also hear the Builsa’s voices in the blues songs of Bessy Smith.

Selected Works

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

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

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.