After the Ceremonies: New and Selected Poems

by Ama Ata Aidoo, Helen Yitah (Editor)

Overview

Ama Ata Aidoo is one of the best-known African writers today. Spanning three decades of work, the poems in this collection address themes of colonialism, independence, motherhood, and gender in intimate, personal ways alongside commentary on broader social issues. After the Ceremonies is arranged in three parts: new and uncollected poems, some of which Aidoo calls “misplaced or downright lost”; selections from Aidoo’s An Angry Letter in January and Other Poems; and selections from Someone Talking to Sometime.
              

Although Aidoo is best known for her novels Changes: A Love Story and Our Sister Killjoy, which are widely read in women’s literature courses, and her plays The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa, which are read and performed all over the world, her prowess as a poet shines in this collection.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803296947
Publisher:	UNP - Nebraska
Publication date:	03/01/2017
Series:	African Poetry Book
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Ama Ata Aidoo was born in Abeadzi Kyiakor, in south central Ghana in 1942. She studied literature at the University of Ghana, won a fellowship to Stanford University, and subsequently accepted visiting professorships in the United States and Africa. Her poetry collections include Birds and Other Poems, Someone Talking to Sometime, and An Angry Letter in January and Other Poems. Helen Yitah is an associate professor of English at the University of Ghana. She is the founding director of the University of Ghana–Carnegie Writing Centre and author of Throwing Stones in Jest: Kasena Women's Proverbial Revolt.

Read an Excerpt

After the Ceremonies

New and Selected Poems

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By Ama Ata Aidoo, Helen Yitah

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Copyright © 2017 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0109-6

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CHAPTER 1

Part One

New and Uncollected Poems

Prelude

For My Mother in Her Mid-90s

Aunt.

Don't ask
me how
I come to address my mother thus.

Long
complex, complicated stories:
heart-warmingly familial and
sadly colonial.

You know how
utterly, wonderfully
insensitive the young can be?

Oh no. We are not here talking adults
who should know better
but never do.

Aunt,
I thank you for
being alive today, alert, crisp.

Since we don't know tomorrow,
see me touching wood,
clutching at timbers, hugging forests:

So I can enter young,
age, infirmities
defied.

Hear my offspring chirping:
"Mummy, touch plastic,
it lasts longer!"

O, she knows her mama well.
The queen of plastics a tropical Bedouin,
she must travel light.
Check out the wood,
feel its weight, its warmth
check out the beauty of its lines, and perfumed shavings.

Back to you, My Dear Mother,
I can hear the hailing chorus
at the drop of your name.
And don't I love to drop it
here, there, and everywhere?
Not missing out by time of day,

not only when some chance provides,
but pulled and dragged into talks
private and public.

Listen to the "is-your-mother-still-alive" greeting,
eyes popping out,
mouth agape and trembling:

That here,
in narrow spaces and
not-much-time,
who was I to live?
Then she who bore me?

Me da ase.
Ye da ase.

I.

Fires and Ashes

Me Pilgrim

for Kinna XII and Esi (Doughan) II

The symbols were there
for all to see
except me:

Security was not in brick and mortar,
but paper.

All kinds:
old dailies,
new journals,
books,

and the endless files and folders.

I girded me with these and maybe
managed to block my view of the world:
its musts and must nots,
its what oughts and ought nots,

the rules,
the expectations,
the censure.

But never mind.

I was not aware of
how others saw me as
I came and went

... until now.

You could not afford
to be generous
knowing I would not be around
when you needed me.

You were kind.
So you hugged and kissed me
hello and goodbye
on each appropriate occasion.

For the rest,
you got on with your lives,
the happy details and the grim:

the weddings,
the births,
the funerals.
The latest research concerns,
promotions granted or denied.

And not forgetting
the very serious business of
acquiring creature comforts.
And me myself?

Lacking the solidity of
bricks and mortar,
dependable land,
the glow of gold and
other valuables,
I pack and bind the year's papers,
lock them in one more
tin trunk,
shove it into one more corner
to wait for my next move.

When the neighbors wake up in the morning
I shall be gone ...

... again!


Heathrow Healing

Surely,
between Ghana and Bosnia Herzegovina,
there is some impressive
mileage in letters of the alphabet, and
solid kilometers.

We do not talk of
the ho ... hum business of language, or
the even more awkward matter of a
so-called rainbow world, and such.

So, Drazen,
where do I place

this caring,
this anxiety that
nothing at all goes wrong,
awry;
that nothing gets lost in translation and transmission;
that nothing ends up
overlooked, misplaced,
lost?

Just when we thought we'd given up on you,
dear "world's busiest airport":
the crowds,
the noise,
the feeling of a general sort that
out here,
one is frankly not much at all,

darling old inefficient Heathrow,
every now, and every then,
you come out with
your magic ...

... and then some.


As the Dust Begins to Settle II

An Afterword, Twenty Years On


For Kojo T

The dust never really settled. It rose higher,
blew farther, and filled
our mouths with
the most awful grit:
clogged up our lungs,
got into our eyes and
blocked our visions.

Until we began to see things
from our masters' viewpoint.
Which meant
in contemporary parlance — that
socialism died

with the crumbled Berlin Wall, and
Glasnost and perestroika
came to occupy areas where
our old ideals had been.

There was a time when
we were absolutely sure
that the right way to be is left!

No more.
Here and now,
it also means
recognizing ourselves as
fast aging, could-have-been revolutionaries,

who look for life's soft cushions
to rest our brittle bones.

So my dear,
where on this earth
would you find sleep
when the cadres
declare of you that
you kept the state intact and
canonized Stability for
just another neo-colonial phase
of our post-colonial era?

... and there are fresh twin gods in town, they say, called
Privatization and Divestiture.

So tear-choked babies we now are,
we scream and wail for
our lost innocence
our perished ideals
our knocked-out hopes.

The three-hundred-and-sixty-degree-turn-around
is complete.

... and there are fresh twin gods in town, they say, called
Privatization and Divestiture.

Kojo,
we really fell on
very bad times when
those we considered comrades
became
our worst enemies:
jailed, tortured, run of town.
or stayed, but in varying degrees,
got humiliated into submission.

And now,
that unlike those veranda boys and
much-maligned old prison graduates
who came out to
practice what little they knew to preach,
— just poor half-educated patriots really —
we are
sharper,
clearer,
more practical, and
certainly more aware of the demands of changing times ...

So look at us
freed leftists,
lugging the briefcases of
"Ultra Rightists" and despair.

Ah-h-h
we trail a step behind
archconservatives:
at once fashionably suited, and
ideologically fashionable!

While those of us who chose
exile, forced or self-imposed,
still crawl through the
padded corridors of the West
in search of crumbs and
limp home every now and then
bearing our bundles and burden of
woeful compromises,
to claim privileges
we would rather have died first
— in our other life —
than look at,
much less touch.

And we cringe at the voice of the future
coming down with heavy censure:
"... and they brought fresh twin gods into town," called
Privatization and Divestiture.

The schools,
low and high,
have collapsed inside and out.

We did not develop our human power
but took energy from its bones, and
made book-learning a
crime for which
to apologize, as
everybody scrambled for
something — anything — to sell, and
none of it "made-in-Here."

Do you remember when
that was our
spoilt-brats' attempt
to poke fun at
our own industrial efforts?

All have been abandoned, sold, and lost.
Only the massive walls of the silos remain.

And those, they say,
now breed
unprogrammed fish,
errant tadpoles, and
baby snakes
who sing a unisoned farewell to
a nation's long-term plans for
food security
the present secured.

My Brother,
if anybody cares,
it certainly is not those
who for their
personal ten percent have killed
rice farming in these parts
so that we would import
rice from all and sundry,

long grain and short, perfumed or not:
such sweet seductive grain ...

Meanwhile,
quite, quite unbelievably,
the gutters are still open and
ready to swallow — in an instant —
us and or all our children,

forever bubbling with
old and new poisonous filth: a
nauseous testimony to
how sanitary we are
in mind,
in body and our very soul.

Dear Kojo,
yesterday is irretrievable,
tomorrow unknown.

So it seems that these days
we are caught in

a complex confusing current
wondering:

What next?
Which way?
Where?
How? ...


To a Silk Shirt in the Sun

Tetteh Quashie Circle, Accra

It was one of those
glazed-over mornings
with a brittle hardness
and killer-sharp edges.

Everything cracked.
Nothing opened.
Not even the wonder of spatial travel
consoled:

assuming
we could have traversed
the rain and the mud,
the "is-there-an-oven-nearby?" sunsheat,
the germs
the bugs
the viruses
the worms

non-performing phones
powerless power
leaky roofs and
sinking floors.

As for our life,
it's turned into a ball of hairy/spiky juju
the sasabonsam that rolled ahead of us,
no matter how fast we ran.

I drowned, or nearly.

Then I saw you, Silk Shirt,
embroidered and elegantly tailored into
a perfect comfy fit,
a reminder of easier places and softer times.

I could not believe such boldness amidst the muck.
Then I saw her, too.

As you ambled from the east and she from the west
toward some definition-defying space,
eyes dancing, lips a-quiver with
joy that dares not name its source,

I breathed and
pinched myself:
happy to be alive
because you are.


After the Ceremonies

For Belle

1

Alors, Ma Petite

The wonder of writing for you is
I could do it in 3 or 4 languages:
smatterings, mind you.

As to the matter on hand,
it's a tale we can tell,

a right rite that was alright
for the bit of paper
signed, sealed, and handed to you
to be used
now,
tomorrow,
always.

Yet,
in all of this and that,
the stone fell when
the matter-of-fact priest
so matter-of-factly
admonished the groom
not to ever dream of mistaking
you for a punching bag.

Honey,
just hearing him speak of such possibilities
sent my poor heart
dropping somewhere
into the bottom of my being.

Given his size and yours,
I could just see me
shuffling and stumbling
in the dark
to some hole or mansion:
— who cares? — Where
he gave you that single blow ...

To search for, and
scoop up
the you that had been:
mingy bones,
a spoonful of blood,
a sliver of flesh ...


2

My Child,
if they came for laces and tulle
there were none.
If they came to see
1 Best Man
2 Maids of Honor
4 Bridesmaids
1 Dozen Pages
2 Dozen Flower Girls
they were not there.
No rose petals and powdered sandalwood.
No 6-tired cakes.
No 15 inane speeches.

Watching
your delicate back and close-cropped hair,
I wondered at what point
you foreswore
Madame Pompadour?

Mind you,
that little affair you wore
was glory in simplicity.
Something jade,
something black?

A black wedding dress?

"Hell no!" Not even you and Kinna
can pass that one off,
here!
Though I can hear
incomparable Chanel
creaking in her pewter grave!


3

My Child,
none of all that was
marriage
by most people's reckoning,
says Yours Anarchistically Truly.

Yet
I know that
one Saturday so many moons ago,
you got properly married.

Do you remember the drama?

The drums,
the castanets and all
the songs in polyglot,
the music: ancient and modern,
historical narratives
that spawned good-natured fights,
the jokes,
the laughter,
the drinks,
the food, the food, the food,
and
children running in and out
having their whale of time?

Then it was time.

See you and Kwame walking in
in gorgeous
Sahelian unisex cool:
wondrously white, silvery, perfect ...

That was fun, Ma Belle,
That
Was
Fun.

II.

Grieving for the Living

An Interrogation of an Academic Kind

An Essay


Dear Auntie Efua,

"Auntie" Efua?!
In lieu of
Dramatist Extraordinaire,
Teacher, Enabler, Inspirer,
Impresario Supremo?

So,
how come you could be that addressed
not just by the youth — near and far —
not just by family — close and extended —
but by your peers, too:
academic, intellectual, and sundry other learned ones?

Some industrial,
others mercantile,
but all reverential?

— and not to mention those who politically and otherwise
could, and may have tried, to burn you in a latter day
auto-da-fé.

Now this is a confession of sorts:
some — not all — of us
wondered every now and then
— not loudly or in any unquiet way, mind you,
but perhaps irrelevantly or irreverently —

what in the Creator's name this kind of domestication was all about?
"It's a sign of our respect," we said.
"And? ..."
"... and wanting to own up to those
Wondrous nurture-filled Fridays
— mid-morning, late afternoon, details indifferent —
and the sterling honor of such an appellation.

And seeing too that you had
more than earned that right
from mothering a nation across its
right reaches, left banks, northernmost posts and southern shores ...

Ow-w-w,
how you had mothered us:
with that [maddening] formidable [self-] assurance,
those humorously luminous and luminously humorous eyes that
sought out
our inner weaknesses
in hopes of setting us straight
not just some day
but right away,

plus that indulgently mocking laughter
so charming and often tinkling with
the sheer wonder at the wonder that you knew
was this earth, us humans, and our lives ...

You walked for us too.
And girl, how you walked!

Purposeful steps
down, inside, and along
cold castle and other walls
clutching carefully crafted
weighty-with-wisdom bits of paper
forty hours a day
ten days a week,

to plead and cajole
in the [vain] hope that
someone, but anyone up there —
and they always were up there —
through you
could might would
hear our cries,
feel our pain and
see the neglect of us and
all that held our life's health,
our almost-complete destitution,
and if only for a while,
taste the bitterness of our
despair.

Dear Gold-Nuggets-Giver and Precious Beads Distributor,
Our True Lady Silk of the Slender Arms,

we remember you so sharply
swinging those arms and cutting the breezes with
the grace and the power of a woodland goddess,
striding and gliding
your way to sundry sites of creative construction:
— the classrooms
— the theaters
— the lecture and other halls where meetings were held of great
national import ...

All in your effort to build and have "something built."

Me na Oye-Adee-Yie,
you knew us
didn't you?

the incompetence-with-an-attitude,
the envies,
the jealousies,
the boastful lack of confidence,
the glaring ignorance that sought to hide a knowledge of itself,
in negativity, greed, and mindless cruelty?

And not counting out that puzzling viciousness which gloried
only in the ability to deny others any entry through
doors that should have stayed open for
achievements,
or provided exits from
frustrations and
humiliations ...

But then,
you never gave up on us:
not for a minute.
Knowing as you did
that given half a chance,
we could, and still can, soar
high above our normal human frailties and
make a glowing glittering something of ourselves and our world.

No wonder then that with such knowledge,
you did
Ananse and his daughter
the only way
they should be done today.

Yet you tiptoed through it all
disregarding the no[n]-sense,
forgiving the foolish-ness,

encouraging,
supporting,
affirming.

So what did you think we were going to do without you,
dear Dr. Mrs. Efua Theodora Sutherland?
Not much:
unless you counted our best under the circumstance.

But,
and this is the other confession of sorts,
since we knew
you brooked no spinelessness,
we hope you had some way to know
we called you "Auntie"
only
in lieu of ...
... "Mother," "Teacher," ...


For Bessie Head

To begin with,
there's a small problem of address:

calling you
by the only name some of us
knew you by,

hailing you by titles
you could not possibly
have cared for,

referring you to
strange and clouded
origins that eat into
our past, our pain
like prize-winning cassava tubers in
abandoned harvest fields ...

Some of us never ever met you.

And who would believe
that but those who know
the tragedies of our land
where
non-meetings,
visions unopening and other such
abortions are
every day reality?

To continue a
confession of sorts,

"Miss Head" will just not do.
"Bessie" too familiar.
Bessie Head,
your face swims into focus
through soft clouds of
cigarette smoke and from behind the
much harder barriers erected by some
quite unbelievable
twentieth-century philosophy,

saying more of
your strength
than all the tales
would have us think.

For the moment,

we fear and
dare not accept that
given how things
are,

poetry almost becomes
dirges and
not much more.

But
we hold on to knowing
ourselves as daughters of
darklight women
who are so used to Life
— giving it
feeding it —
Death
was always
quite unwelcome:
— taking them by surprise —
an evil peevish brat
to be flattered,
cleaned,
oiled,
pomaded,
overdressed and perfumed ...

We fear to remember:
fatigued as we are by so much
death and dying and
the need to bury and
to mourn.

Bessie Head:
such a fresh ancestress!

If you chance
on a rainy night
to visit,

if you chance
on a sunny day
to pass by,

look in to see
— how well we do
— how hard we fight
— how loud we scream

against the plots
— to kill our souls our bodies too
— to take our land, and
— feed us shit.

Come
benevolently,
Dear Fresh Spirit,

that rejoining
the Others,
you can tell them
that now more than ever,
do we need
the support
the energy

to create
recreate and
celebrate ...

nothing more
absolutely
nothing less.


A Taking Care of Our Bourgeois Palates II —

in Memoriam Jean Genoud, Six Years On

Yes, Jean,
it's about you
after the morning's coffee and the ciggi,
face aglow with fresh makeup, and

joie de vivre.

Which notion was clearly invented,
not by the French, but the French Swiss,
to welcome that wild and funny Luden girl,
their bride from across the Channel.

Oui, Jean,

it's about you
with a tipple of whisky-and-water:
milling the garlic and the peppers
to merge with the mustard
all moistened with the oil for
the day's leafy drenching.

Yeah, Jean,
you so seriously labored over
those leaves' décor!
"Quite mad really," I thought then.

So how can I not remember you all my waking hours,
picking as I have to do, the bottled poisons that
I lie to myself are wholesome enough to
dress up some great greens?

No, Jean,
I now know
"am na gud
at tha' kinda thing."

That hit with such a monstrous loss,
I should pull myself together,
dry up my face, and
move on.

Rather, My Dear,
I sit, and keep sat here
among the dying embers and the ashes, and
simply refuse to be comforted.

And not just that.

Forgive me, Jean:

that I also weep enough tears
to dampen down
your newly-acquired wings, and
create a special lake

which threatens to swallow you
all over again,
or at the very least, slow down your progress
as you wade through toward the gates of heaven.

As for those who remind me that
"knowing this particular problem should be half the cure,"

My Dear,
they have not lost you, or anyone
half like you.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from After the Ceremonies by Ama Ata Aidoo, Helen Yitah. Copyright © 2017 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword by Helen Yitah    
Part One: New and Uncollected Poems
Prelude
For My Mother in Her Mid-90s    
I. Fires and Ashes
Me Pilgrim    
Heathrow Healing    
As the Dust Begins to Settle II: An Afterword, Twenty Years On    
To a Silk Shirt in the Sun    
After the Ceremonies    
II. Grieving for the Living
An Interrogation of an Academic Kind: An Essay    
For Bessie Head    
A Taking Care of Our Bourgeois Palates II—    
Our Very Dear Juliana    
Juliana (The Translation)    
More Bad News: In Memoriam Fred E. K. Gbedemah    
Awoonor? Ebei Oo!     
Awoonor, Hmmm . . . (The Translation)    
These Days (III): A Letter to Flora Nwapa    
Ode to Qunu    
III. The National Corruption Index and Other Poems
The National Corruption Index    
I. Really Funny Numbers    
II. Just This Morning    
III. More Really Funny Numbers    
IV. About Single Trees    
IV. All of It    
On Reading Jackie Kay    
Why on Earth Do I Continue to Listen to the BBC?!     
Mourning Ricci    
IV. Ghana: Where the Bead Speaks
Ghana: Where the Bead Speaks    
Part Two: Selections from An Angry Letter in January
I: As Always, a Painful Declaration of Independence
As Always, a Painful Declaration of Independence    
II: Images of Africa at Century’s End
Images of Africa at Century’s End    
In Memoriam: The Ghana Drama Studio    
A Question from the Expatriate Community    
An Angry Letter in January    
Speaking of Hurricanes    
These Days: I    
Three Poems for Chinua Achebe    
1. A Modern African Story    
2. Questions    
3. New in Africa: I    
Loving the Black Angel    
No Grief No Joy    
An Insider’s View    
Homesickness    
Two Letters    
1. Family    
2. After an Argument    
III: Women’s Conferences and Other Poems
Just One More Job for Mama    
Whom Do We Thank for Women’s Conferences?     
A Young Woman’s Voice Doesn’t Break. It Gets Firmer    
Comparisons II: We Women, Still!     
These Days: II    
A Path in the Sky    
A Birthday Gift    
A Postcard from My Vacation    
A Revelation    
Part Three: Selections from Someone Talking to Sometime
I: Of Love and Commitment
Crisis    
Of Love and Commitment    
Greetings from London    
Three Poems for Atta Britwum     
1. Ghana Funerals    
2. Nation Building    
3. A Salute to African Universities    
For Steve Hymer—A Propos 1966    
Two for Kojo    
1. As the Dust Begins to Settle—A Long Story II    
2. Regrets    
II: New Orleans: Mid-1970s
Carolyn    
For a Zulu in the Bayous    
Lorisnrudi    
Acknowledgments—with an Apology to Ronald    
III: Routine Drugs
Routine Drugs I—for Eldred Jones    
Routine Drugs II    
Gynae One    
Comparisons—for Rose    
Wondering about Him Who Said No to the Glare of the Open Day    
IV: Reply to Fontamara
Reply to Fontamara I    
Reply to Fontamara II    
Now That the Weatherman Has Gone Crazy . . .    
Heavy Traffic    
From the Only Speech That Was Not Delivered at the Rally    
V: Legacies
The Visible World    
Of Gifts and References    
For Kinna II    
Ekunekun    
Totems        
VI: Kwadwom from a Stillborn Creole Kingdom
Egyeifi’s Farewell    
Nourishment    
Woaeenn I    
VII: Tomorrow’s Song
Wanted Urgently for Immediate Employment    
Source Acknowledgments