Chapbook Chats: Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto Interviews Yaanom Author Sarpong Osei Asamoah
To celebrate KUMI New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set, Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto is talking to poets whose chapbooks are included in the KUMI edition of the wonderful ongoing series. Enjoy this conversation between Chinua and poet Sarpong Osei Asamoah.
Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto: Congratulations on the release of your chapbook, Yaanom, featured in the 2024 New-Generation African Poets series! Could you share your experience of seeing your work published in this acclaimed series, and what it means to you personally and professionally to be part of this important moment for African poetry?
Sarpong Osei Asamoah: Thank you Chinua. I will begin by quoting what Saddiq Dzukogi said about the New Generation African Poets Chapbook Series: the longest revolution. In that spirit, if I may be so bold, I’d say that KUMI continues one of the greatest African revolutions of the last ten years. To be part of this cohort of incredibly talented African poets is tremendous. I consider this publication a milestone in my occupation as a Ghanaian poet. I’m thankful to Kwame Dawes, Chris Abani and all their acolytes for this generosity. It was also essential to me to keep the tradition of fabulous, APBF published, Ghanaian poets such as Ama Asantewa Diaka, Henneh Kyereh Kwaku, Tryphena Yeboah, and Jay Kophy among others. Ergo, I was insistent on my debut to be published by the APBF in order that I may be in fellowship with these and all the wonderful African poets from all nine previous volumes of the box set series, all of whom I revere and admire immensely.
C. E-O: How did you arrive at the title for your chapbook?
S.O.A: My selection of Yaanom as my debut book title is as delicate and deliberate as the naming of a child. In the Akyem and Ewe culture, both of which I belong to, nomenclature is as essential as creation: what one names an entity sets its fate eternally. I wanted a temporal body not to only contain but contend with and completely explicate the veracity of the work Yaanom is; Yaanom is a funeral ceremony. Yaanom came to me in its capacious, multi-layered Akan familiarity. The word ‘Yaanom’ possesses a unique capacity, as inferential languages typically do, to morph with context, exhibiting a multi-entendre characteristic. This meant, at least to me, that it could contain the multitude I sought after, for, and to invoke in my debut.
Entomologically, Yaanom is derived from the Yaa, meaning female born on Thursday: Yawoada, which directly translates to pain day or day of pain; Yaa, as in Yaa Asantewaa, and more ergo: Yaa nom : Yaa and them; Yaa ‘enem; in southern African-American lingo, if you like: Yaa and folk like her : Yaa and the people with her : Yaa’s people. Yaanom may mean folks; it’s a chant, a call to attention, a shoutout. Yaa is the name of my twin sisters. Yaanom is also an iconic classic rap or hip life song of the 90s in Ghana. Its carnal and ethereal significance to my identity and practice is insistent and disambiguous.
C.E-O: Can you talk about the organisation and how you chose the poems included in Yaanom?
S.O.A: Truth be told, I set out to write a historical excavation of my ancestry as a function of my identity in my debut collection all along. This meant I buried myself in tons of research. While I researched, these poems came to me almost completely assembled. But more essentially, the incomparable Kwame Dawes who was my seasoned editor identified the blueprint and guided my path to laying each stone in this book.
C.E-O: In “Yaanom,” there is a reflection on a transformative journey through the night, capturing the haunting beauty and complexity of the speaker’s surroundings. The journey mentions several locations significant to Ghanaian history. How do these places inform your poetry and personal narrative?
S.O.A: In Yaanom I grapple with origin, my people’s beginning, because, and I suppose I speak for a generation or two of young Ghanaians when I say, I could not recognise and locate myself in present day Ghana. I am a lost son. I believe identity is inextricably linked to location and the infrastructure that crystallises an origin. As the saying goes, if youdon’t know where you are coming from, you cannot know where you are going. Thus Yaanom, the poem, is a map of sorts.
I surmise Yaanom as a body of work is a subtly triangulation, and ekphrastic-esque in character. It speaks for, to, and with historical places, monuments, and relics of a not so bygone difficult era as though they were the persona itself.
In Yaanom the persona is a voyager like I am, a state of consciousness, burdened with travelling from place through other places to self-actualize by transcending space and time.
C.E-O: The garden in the poem “Testimony” serves as a complex symbol. Can you explain the significance of the bioluminescent wound and how it reflects your relationship with the divine?
S.O.A: It is true, Yaanom is a catalogue of symbols and allusions. My own spiritual-religious experience of the divine as a function of the human construct is as James Balwin recounts in The Fire Next Time. Sceptical involvement at most, cautious agnosticism at least. To me, “Testimony” is a grimace, is an accusation of the man-made divine of complicity, its pious and grotesque silence and involvement in the ongoing funeral the event of European arrivals have been to my country. “Testimony” wants to grapple, through the phrase “bioluminescent wound” with the European foreign policy to use religion as a “shiny toy” dangled as bait to serve as the “Trojan horse” for the purpose of neocolonialism. The “bioluminescent wound” is also a metaphorical reference to the middle passage, the channel through which Europeans came into Africa and by which African slaves were conveyed to the Americas.
C.E-O: History is important and in that regard, the poem “Doomsday Device” is a powerful meditation on the trauma of colonial violence experienced during the British invasion of Kumase in 1874. How does your understanding of the historical events surrounding the British invasion influence your writing? What personal experiences or family histories led you to write about this specific moment in time?
S.O.A: Great question, Chinua, that however begets a short yet not simple response: in my occupation as a writer, a poet, I have had an overwhelming sense that the brutal introduction of English language as currency of power in the Gold Coast, Ghana was an invasion of all Ghanaian languages and ergo an invasion my originality as Ghanaian poet, as the gruesome English invasion and bombardment of Kumase in 1874 was to the people of Asante. “Doomsday Device” is an allusion to the fact of language’s colonialism.
C.E-O: Still in history, the poem “Yaa” is a powerful tribute to Nana Yaa Asantewaa, the renowned warrior queen of the Ashanti Empire, who fought against British colonial rule. How does Nana Yaa Asantewaa’s story influence your understanding of resistance and empowerment in contemporary contexts?
S.O.A: Chinua, look, in my experience Ghanaians lost their desire, will, ingenuity, tact and fleur to resist a while ago. It’s a tragic yet nuanced cowardice which has proliferated in our society as a virtue. Resistance is necessary but difficult, is romanticised and ruined in our time. Thus, like Nana Yaa Asantewaa, no one picks up dust and gets none in their own eyes. We must be prepared. This is the essence of Yaa Asantewaa’s tribute.
C.E-O: “Dixcove(RY)” explores the historical and geographical significance of Dixcove, a coastal town in Ghana, while reflecting on the legacy of colonialism. The poem references various forts and historical landmarks that symbolise the complex interplay of power, trade, and cultural exchange in the region. How do you balance the celebration of (local) heritage with the acknowledgment of colonial trauma in your work?
S.O.A: I came to Yaanom a griot, to tell the stories of the lost, their landscape and its marks that make it and mare it. I was also, like previously stated, searching for a place to belong in time. And sometimes as it happens when searching for an important object, one has to rummage through a gallery of other artefacts. In the case of “Dixcove(ry),” the speaker, not unlike me, rummages through many places and their infrastructure: slave castles and protectorate forts to find a home, to discover something, anything, to celebrate. This is to say that whether or not we like it, these colonial relics are also our local heritage.
Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto is an Igbo and Nigerian poet, fiction and nonfiction writer, and essayist, exploring the themes of culture, religion, lineage, ancestry, divination (dibia afa), post-colonialism, migration and the complexities of existence. His full- length poetry collection, The Naming, will be out on December 1, 2025 with African Poetry Book Fund via Nebraska press. The Naming explores the movements, excesses, and extremes of existing as a postmodern individual, connecting these experiences to familial ancestry and lineage.