The poem called Society’s Creed. It speaks about a host of the social issues that plague our society as depicted by a news briefing I happened to watch one evening.
The Tampered Workshop is a series of virtual creative writing workshops, designed to help Ghanaian and African writers harness their writing and become more capable and confident writers.
Saving life is a preserve of God and I would be delighted if somehow he used one of my poems to do so. Imagine just weaving words and salvaging the breath of a whole human being. That's big!
The universal society is what I always aim at speaking to (with my poetry), that I always hope to have an impact on.
To borrow the words of a poet I deeply admire, Yusef Komunyakaa, to me Africa is a “wounded paradise” (from his poem, “Tenebrae”). I ache for a reparative future.
Africa! My Africa has failed me. It has ceased to function as a continent, failed to recognize queer bodies, and failed to provide a safe milieu for our existence as humans. Africa has no tomorrow. Africa is a vast abyss of nothingness.
I like Dis Poem because of the courage and aura behind the poem itself and the author in the person of Mutabaruka. I envy the bold and beautiful way with which it challenges inequality, racism, slavery, murder and injustices around the world.
Child-trafficking and child-labour are criminal and unjust. Sadly, many young girls who have been reduced to maids serving in homes in cities in Nigeria are daily abused, assaulted, raped and denied tasting the honey of knowledge. Dozens of such poor girls are yearning to have a better life and future, like the children they are paid peanuts to wash panties for or serve as nannies.
Hence, while the historian's mind is riddled with events, the poet's is bursting with colour, having memory as its minefield. However, there is no fixity to verse. Not in its fidelity to what was or its facility for what will follow. Both past and future are the canvass upon which imagination subsists. Along the way, it rids itself of all ethical sympathies.
Meanwhile, Wanlov the Kuboloro, who joins with M3nsa to complete the rap-artiste duo from Ghana, FOKN Bois, advocates for a young man who has put a coin into the canister: “He has donated for America.” Looking into camera, “Don’t give him troubles when he applies for a visa.”
