Collective Survival in 'How to Write My Country’s Name' [Review]

In a time where a pandemic is throttling the global economy and there’s an increasing attempt to quantify and mitigate loss, I find myself thinking about home now more than ever, seeking updates about the cases, following government intervention and subconsciously comparing the two realities- how different would things be if I were home? Will I be more terrified knowing there’s a lack of resources to survive the crisis or will I feel safer knowing I’d be surrounded by family and friends? Striving towards a vision to interrogate the ties between a country and its people, How to Write my Country’s Name manages to shift seamlessly between national pride and rebuke by providing a critical and yet, intimate look into the surreal chaos of living in a developing country while heralding a new world of hope, to emerge fully alive, no matter the cost.The collection brings together emerging voices in poetry and fiction and what unites each piece is the theme of survival that permeates the work, making each narrator appear to be steering towards one goal, and longing for the same thing. And perhaps it is in this accord that we come to understand how fundamentally human we are in wanting the same things and how absence and lack of any kind happens to us all. In Recourse for the Dying, while the narrator’s mother shows her all the ways to die from an act as ordinary as shopping, they learn that everything is a “tinkering for some kind of death” and this knowledge of evanescence is captured in the poem, Homemakers when the narrator builds a world of gratitude around a family meal. Within this space of mundane accounts lies a subtle awareness, an awakening to the world around them, even their immediate and small worlds.What I find intriguing is how the language employed by the writers is not restricted only to the meaning of a country as we know it, its territory and mark as one’s birthplace. There is more to the borders of identity; more to being a boy on the streets of Accra, disheveled and distraught, and this is captured passionately in This Revolution will Not be Televised:

“When your mother dies giving birth to you – pupils/ meandering towards an unknown place, your grandmother’s defeated gait treading the halls,/ your father quaffing akpeteshie while counting his mistakes with one hand - your mother the/ index finger and you the thumb - your breastbones nestle the pain of being born into a time of/ relentless pain and insatiable men.”

There’s a near surgical exploration of self, unhooked from where one is perceived to belong, and how one is expected to turn out. I find that the voices are anchored on loss, just as much as hope, and on pain, just as much as love. When I read the account of a man returning home after failing to land a job in the city, with barely any money to survive on, in However Long the Night, I am not only brought to terms with the hardship stemming from a crippling economy but also the distress of having a dream compromised and the unrelenting pursuit to not be warped by one’s circumstances when the narrator remarks, “But as we no die, morrow always go be another day for trying.” In a world where girls spend most of their lives running, a young narrator confesses in Red Means Run:

“I am clothed by the guilt of my existenceI am taken aback by the audacity of this life growing inside me”

The poems and stories are rife with internal conflicts and an enduring courage that inhabits a wrestling mind. In reading this collection, I alternate between reflections on affliction and contentment and in both extreme worlds, a declaration for survival abounds. The aesthetic command each writer wields is daring as they demonstrate a blend of styles, drawing elements from prose, lyric poetry, to religious imagery. There is a successful experimentation to retrace the narrative to the local dialect by the use of Pidgin, Ga, Twi- a painstaking effort that makes for a literary space aimed at its own people, one that reshapes existing boundaries and calls for a deeper engagement by dwelling on persistent questions: Who are we? What is the language of love if we are not speaking it? Who do we confess as God?How to Write my Country’s Name is an anthology curated by the Contemporary Ghanaian Writers Series and edited by Jay Kophy. It is set to be released in June 2020.