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With her latest short story collection, Ghanaian poet and author of Someone Birthed Them Broken, Ama Asantewa Diaka, set out to document the lives of contemporary youth in Ghana: ‘I wanted to create something that future youths could look back on—something they could hold up against their own lives
With her latest short story collection, Ghanaian poet and author of Someone Birthed Them Broken, Ama Asantewa Diaka, set out to document the lives of contemporary youth in Ghana: ‘I wanted to create something that future youths could look back on—something they could hold up against their own lives and say, “This is where we came from. This is what it was like.”’
First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.
Our questions are italicized.
What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
I read everything that lived on my uncle and my father’s bookshelves. My uncle was big on crime and thrillers, he had every John Grisham, Michael Crichton, Stephen King and Dan Brown title you could think of. My dad, on the other hand, was curating his pan-African existence, so I was reading political non-fiction by Kwame Nkrumah and Camara Laye long before I could fully understand it. School introduced me to Ann M. Martin’s The Babysitters Club, Katherine Applegate’s Animorphs and all the playful, addictive reads of that age.
If your life so far was a series of texts, which text (fiction or non-fiction) represents you at this moment?
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Nigerian novelist, poet and author of Graceland, Chris Abani, does not believe ‘Nigerian literature’ exists as a category: ‘It is a common misconception that there is a fixed category that can be read as essentially “Nigerian literature”. Nigeria has 500 nations, 500 languages and about 2,000 dialects. While culture and language can overlap, the level of diversity is such that Nigerian literature cannot be easily narrowed down.’
For the co-founder and publishing director, of Cassava Republic Press, which marks its 20th anniversary this year, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, it is telling that African literature is often pronounced dead in recent years, when more women and queer voices are becoming more prominent: ‘The loudest obituary writers about African literature tend to be men. These elegies seem to come from a tacit sense of personal or generational displacement rather than from the actual state of the field.’
Nigerian poet, novelist and author of Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Broken-Hearted, Ben Okri, argues that Nigerian literature doesn’t always have to be about Nigeria: ‘Nigerian literature limits itself to Nigeria and then limits even the ways in which the country can be written about. What we want is a vast literature, a great literature…that speaks to all humanity.’
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