Mid life: Views and Poetics: talk by Nii Ayikwei Parkes, 20 November 2020

 The Lit. Soc. assembled in their now customary cyberspace huddle to hear from Nii Ayikwei Parkes whom pre-match billing had presented as a true Renaissance Man – novelist, poet, publisher, embodying the distinct cultures of Britain and Ghana and trailing clouds of glory from a fistful of glittering, international literary prizes.  Our 46 year old guest had chosen to address the topic of midlife, offering his views and analysing its effect on his work through some of the elements of Aristotle’s Poetics. 

Significantly divorcing it from its loyal attendant crisis, Parkes offered a thoughtful view from his own experience of midlife.  He saw it as the start of his life after the watershed of his children growing up and reinforced the notion of transition by commenting that although the ingredients of his life – work, reading, writing – remained the same, somehow the finished dish tasted different.  He quoted the example of Brazilian and Cuban cooking where identical ingredients yielded markedly different end products. 

Nii displayed his abilities as a performance poet with readings from Aminatta Forna’s Happiness  and the St. Lucian, Sir Derek Walcott’s The Bounty, using the latter as a platform to introduce the analytical elements of Poetics.  To illustrate the concept of shapeshifting in this Caribbean setting, he used the transformative role of the tide in the metamorphosis of a reef to a series of small islands.  Shapeshifting of  familial roles altered the nature of  his own  literary output, notably fatherhood and then  losing his own father.  He corroborated this with readings from The Making of You  and Caress from his poetry collection The Geez, both readings linked by a gardening theme.  Fatherhood also shifted his interpretation of actions having him now always  seeking the purpose or motive behind them.   

Employing the workshop approach, our guest solicited questions from the audience which demonstrated their intent to trap that elusive wraith, creativity.  Nii confessed that his ideas germinated from random seeds borne on the wind, overheard snatches of conversation, trawling bursts of song from the depths of memory, similes conjured from subconscious associations, exploiting the altered language and geography that were the legacy of a dual national heritage.  These struck the creative spark that fired the imagination to write the plot or mythos and summon the characters (ethos).        

Pressed on the difference between writing Prose and Poetry, Nii likened the former to building a house and the latter to decorating it.  As the simile implies, prose needs more stamina and self-belief requiring a leap of faith to start the process and the conviction that you would see it through    The plot forms round the kernel of your preliminary ideas and about half way through you achieve critical mass and sufficient momentum and self confidence to carry you through to the end.  Intermittent reading aloud (lexis) helped sustain the creative impulse and Parkes likened the acquisition of that critical, creative momentum to driving as a teenager during a severe petrol shortage where opportunities to freewheel on long descents were seized with an exultant alacrity.  A different Muse fostered Poetry in a more seductive process whose origins lay in feelings rather than ideas.  Music or melos could be influential donating an evocative phrase from the lyrics of a song or altering interpretation; a butcher – of what, livestock or men?  The ability to draw from  the wellsprings of both English and West African cultures was an asset.  There was no conflict and the range of different tongues widened his linguistic vocabulary. 

The Lit. Soc. had enjoyed a stimulating and thought provoking evening delivered in a novel format and as one audience member observed lockdown’s deprivations  had made space for Nii’s material – thereby obviating the need for preliminary catharsis, Aristotelian or otherwise.  Whew!       

By William Doherty