Parkes Nii Ayikwei: Ambassador for the Arts inspires Rwandans

Parkes Nii Ayikwei is a Ghanaian writer, editor, socio-cultural commentator and performance poet. His novel, Tail of the Blue Bird, (Random House) was shortlisted for the 2010 Commonwealth prize. A 2007 recipients of Ghana’s national ACRAG award for poetry and literary advocacy, Ayikwei has held visiting positions at the University of Southampton and California State University and delivered lecturers and talks on poetry and creative writing at universities internationally.Material Books hosted the novelist in partnership with Spoken Word Rwanda on Saturday. The British Council sponsored the event.Immediately after the book reading, Joseph Njata caught up with the poet – below are excerpts: Q: Have you always wanted to be a writer? A: I have always written but I had never considered that writing would be my profession – though I like to be a writer. I think I probably wanted to be an actor more than I wanted to be a writer when I was a kid. My actual career is in food industry and I really wanted to work in that industry. It was only later that I saw myself wanting to write more and more and decided to make a change and become a writer.Q: What motivates you to write? A: I love stories. I love being surprised and I love telling stories, I love seeing someone opening eyes surprised when I tell them a story or laughing. I like the effect that a story can have in the life of people. The fact that a story is just words and sound and it can make someone’s heart beat faster or somebody to shout or to scream, I think that is amazing. It’s a way of controlling somebody without physically touching them. That’s what excites me about a story.Q: How was the book received in Ghana? A: The book was received very well. I have been back to do some readings and one thing that I most enjoy about the comments is that people say to me that, when we read this book we realise that a lot of other books that were written from Ghana were not really written for us they were written for the western audience but when we read this book we feel that you wrote it for us. You have written our language. That makes me very happy because that is what I was trying to do.Q: It seems that you have written a lot of poems and fiction. Are you considering writing screenplays? A: I think a lot of us in Africa, if we do not listen to radio, we watch films and personally, I want the story to go as far as possible. So the screenplay is the next logical step. I already do some radio but it’s factual. But I think screenplay has a huge impact in Africa and I really want to develop my skills as a screenwriter and begin to write for films. Q: What do you think are the key ingredients of a good poem? A: A very good poem must always surprise. It must always surprise the listeners from its point of view. For example, I did a poem from the point of view of a mosquito; the point of view is surprising. That is interesting. It also depends on how you put the language together, must be exciting, a good opening you know, and a good ending. Those are the key ingredients.Q: You talked about the importance of the author’s authority in a given story, can you elaborate more? A: Most of the time, children like to listen to stories told by the adults. One of the reasons for that, they think that adults know more about the world – so they trust them. Adults have the authority, whatever they tell the children, they believe because the adult has been in the world longer. It’s the same thing with an author; you have to have authority in order for someone to believe you. You have to make a fantastic story. It might have something may be unbelievable but the reader thinks ‘the author says that way so it has to be that way’. You have to have the authority and the way to get that is to be in control of the world. It seems that you have been there longer than them. Just like in the way that adults have been there longer than children, the writer has to be there longer than the reader. Q: Tell our readers about what got you into publishing? A: Publishing is something that I got into because I felt there weren’t enough opportunities – so I started working on magazines with some friends. That’s how it started and then I asked somebody I saw performing if they had enough poetry to make a book and then we published that. That is how I started. At the moment I don’t edit myself, I have two editors that work with me. So we edit a few books every year and put them out mainly in the UK and the US.Q: Do you only publish African writers? A: No. We publish across the board. I mean we have Irish writers, Scottish writers, Romanian writers, Scottish writers, from all over the place.Q: What do you think is the future of African literature? A: I think the future is so bright because for many years the world doesn’t know our story, nothing is told from our point of view. And because of that there is so much in Africa that is unknown to the world. It’s like the entire western world has been explored by readers. So readers are reading to find out what is happening to other parts of the world, the way we see the world. Why they think of us as poor and we are happy. They don’t understand. All this will come from our own writings, from the stories that we tell from our perspective and that for me is the future of African writing. I think it’s very bright. The important thing is to get the young people reading and getting excited about telling stories and writings and then it will just boom.Q: Are you working on something? A: I am working on a collection of short stories called ‘The city will love you” and the whole idea is to look at how the city changes people. So for instance, many of us come from the villages to the city to make money. All the stories are looking on how people change in the city. In the village everyone knows you. When you wake up, when you walk down you greet everybody but when people come to the city they stop doing those kinds of things. Sometimes they don’t greet everybody. When they put something on the ground they don’t think about it because it’s not really their home. So it’s basically looking at how the city changes people and that is why it’s called ‘The city loves you.’

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Parkes Nii Ayikwei: Ambassador for the Arts inspires Rwandans