Poet Nii Ayikwei Parkes Interviewed at LARB

At LARB, poet and novelist Nii Ayikwei Parkes talks to Tom Zoellner about his novel, Tail of the Blue Bird, which is "set in a remote Ghanaian village where nothing is quite the way it seems." From the interview:

It’s hard to read this novel without thinking of two Ghanas — the tension between modern societies and traditional chieftaincies.

That’s the reality. It goes beyond this nation, because we all have it in us. We have words — serendipity, charm, luck — but it comes down to our inability to be completely in control of our world. Some of us may find it harder to admit than others. People in villages are so much more relaxed about things, because they don’t find the need to explain everything. And I find the same thing in every country I visit. There are two Englands, two Americas: a sliding scale from the urban to the rural. All novels even in their specificity are about the human condition. I have met Russians who will read coffee grounds in a way that’s at odds with the space program. People solve their problems with what’s closer to them. And in Ghana, the state structures of justice don’t reach into the villages. Somebody in a village is almost guaranteed not to seek redress in court.

Sometimes novels written by poets are held in suspicion, because the readers assume that it’ll be off in the atmosphere, and about language, and about things that are not grounded. But whenever Kayo is on the page, it was extremely straightforward.

I had a great mentor in England, Courttia Newland, who had a residency at a theater. He returned one of my first stories with a bunch of red marks. And I realized that the language wasn’t necessarily a problem, but it had to have a focus, a directionality. Once I understood that, I think I gradually honed what is I suppose an already prevalent tradition of storytelling in Ghana. When I was a kid, I would describe a film to my friends who hadn’t seen it, and they would do the same, and so we had to be very detailed. Yes, I was exaggerating at times, but it was driving the story forward.

Read the full conversation at Los Angeles Review of Books.