A Trunk Full of Random T-Shirts: A Conversation with Nii Ayikwei Parkes

Parkes in Paris, Sebastien Fabre © 2005

I’ve been a fan of Ghanaian poet Nii Ayikwei Parkes’ work since I read his tall-lighthouse chapbook M is for Madrigal (2004). His first full-length collection, The Makings of You, has recently been released by Peepal Tree Press. In addition to his work as a poet, Parkes has published a novel, Tail of the Blue Bird (Jonathan Cape), and several other shorter works. He has contributed to a wide range of magazines and publications in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. In 2007 he was Writer-in-Residence at California State University—Los Angeles. We corresponded by email.

DS

I saw that you have a couple new poems in the current World Literature Today, which, I think, is about the intersection of jazz and poetry, right? I’m often skeptical of jazz poetry—sometimes the connection seems forced. But I know you’ve explored the connection between the blues and poetry, tell me about that.

It’s funny you should mention the blues and jazz in the same question, because my jazz poems are in fact a kind of blues. My father used to play the saxophone but I never heard him play it; all he said was he had to pawn his sax before my older brother was born because he was broke. What we know of his love for jazz was the records he played incessantly. However, I’ve seen the book he taught himself with, and after he died a few of his friends have come and said, You know, your Dad was a real good sax player. What I think blues and poetry have in common is a spirit of searching, an undertone of yearning, which is also what my jazz poems have—my ear always straining to hear my father in every jazz song.

You’ve published several chapbook-length collections of poetry and a novel. How did preparing your first full-length poetry collection differ?

I think chapbooks are easy because it’s like arranging all your green t-shirts together in a drawer, the links are often obvious. A novel is one step further—it’s green t-shirts but you’re looking at the variations of green, exploring the manufacturing process, linking green to blue and yellow so that a complete story of green is told. A full-length collection can go two ways—the way of the chapbook, with a single theme or subject, which I often find boring; or the way it went for me, which was like receiving a trunk full of random t-shirts to make sense of. I had a heavy load of poems from years of writing and I read and assessed them, looking for underlying commonalities. It taught me a lot about myself as a writer; what my concerns are, my approach, the shifts in my perspective over the years. I think that is perhaps the main difference; I sort of knew what ideas I wanted to put across in the chapbooks and the novel, whereas with the full-length collection I discovered the ideas as I put it together.

What I mainly do is talk about writing from Ghana and Africa, use it when I teach, talk about my literary heritage, the ideas that influenced me, that sort of thing. In Ghana, I also work to support the initiatives of the Ghana Association of Writers both as an individual and through the Writers’ Fund I set up a few years ago. The Writers’ Fund is in hiatus, but I’m due to relaunch it later this year.

What African writers have inspired your own development as a writer? Which do you consider overrated, outdated?

I hesitate to call any writer overrated or outdated because I blame publishers for those shortcomings (unless the writer self-published). I say this because I find that the books from certain eras that I felt were seriously flawed as works of art (I actually don’t like “perfect” art, hence the qualification of seriously.) fitted in with the political agenda of the publishers. Speaking of inspiration, I have been inspired by the work and ideas of people like Ama Ata Aidoo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Atukwei Okai, Christopher Okigbo and Mariama Ba. Atukwei Okai, in particular, has also been my mentor since I started my journey as a professional writer ten-odd years ago.

What about young writers? I’m especially interested in poets from Ghana.

I get a lot of poems sent to me from aspiring Ghanaian poets—not many of them are good, but there are emerging poets like Prince Mensah, Naa Deidei Armah, L.S. Mensah, and Abdul-Fatawu Yahay. On the burgeoning spoken word scene in Accra, I am told Percy Mutombo has been making a name for himself.

As an LA-based publication, I’m very interested in your time here. What did you think of the city? Was it a productive place to write?

I loved LA. As a Ghanaian, the weather made it easy for me to love it, but I also worked with a great, supportive faculty at California State University, Los Angeles, had a great apartment in East LA which was great to write in—and, of course, there were so many live music events, plus Amoeba, which must have one of the most extensive ranges of any music store I’ve been in. It was a productive place to write because I felt so at ease in the city, but also for the odd reason of finding it weird in some ways, especially when I went out to eat; it felt like all the waiters and waitresses were on stage, waiting to be discovered—the smiles were megawatt but skin deep, and attempts at conversation often swayed very swiftly to auditions. They weren’t all like that, of course, but as a people-watcher it was great for material.

You write a lot about power, power structures, and power dynamics. What do you think is the role of the poet in society? Does the poet—or do you, at least—have an obligation to address those things?

I think the poet’s role is to find the surprise in the mundane, to sensitise the reader to the world that surrounds us. Beyond that we must choose what’s important to us and for me one of those things is power. I think the feeling is more compulsion than obligation, but I also feel that power relates to everything; there is a power dynamic between our ability to stand and the force of gravity—then again that might just be the scientist in me speaking.