The Adinkra Poetry Prize began in 2022 as part of a public humanities project conceived through the UNH Summer Institute in Public Humanities. The aim of the Prize is to engage writers with Adinkra symbols while fostering an international writing community among Ghanaians in Ghana and across the diaspora. Each year, one of the 200+ Adinkra symbols is selected, and writers are invited to submit original poems in response, making both creative and personal connections to the symbol.
In its first iteration, I collaborated with the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora (LOATAD) and the All African Women Poetry Festival (AAWPF) in Accra, Ghana, to promote the Prize and host the final award ceremony. We continue to partner with Tuniq Africa LGB to host workshops in Accra, and with AAWPF to celebrate the final ceremony.
I am deeply grateful for the support of the University of New Hampshire and the Mellon Foundation. Their generous grant made it possible to launch this initiative and celebrate the voices of Ghanaian writers who beautifully engage with Adinkra symbols through poetry.
Let’s begin in Accra, Ghana. I am twelve years old sitting at Kotoka International Airport with my sister and father, in anticipation of my reunion with my mother now living in the Bronx. We begin here because everything before this year is not relevant to my transformation as a migrant subject who now struggles with moving between the geographical and liminal spaces of a home.
But my beginning is also influenced by my name, Afia, a Friday born—the name my ancestors believe Nyame, God, gave me before I was christened into English, first and surname. I share lineage with Kwahus from my father’s side, who belong to the larger Akan ethnic group. When people ask me where I am from in Ghana, I say I am of the Kwahu people. In the United States, when people ask me where I am from, I list the places I have lived for more than a year, even though these places may not have lived in me—the Bronx, Southampton, New York, and Kingston, Rhode Island. I begin with the Duafe Adinkra symbol I recognized in a documentary by Henry Louis Gates while teaching an Introduction to African Literature class at Stony Brook University. This documentary led me through a metaphorical door of no return(thinking of Dionne Brand), and into a world of ancient African art objects and oral-literary texts— Adinkra symbols—that have no defined origin but have permeated West African and African Diasporic cultural spaces. Rediscovering Adinkra symbols has allowed me to complicate the issue of origins, of my beginning, as I begin again, as a writer and scholar who seeks to archive the symbolic language for people of the African diaspora.
I am currently an Assistant Professor in Africana Studies at the University of Rhode Island(URI). Before coming to URI, I completed a postdoc in Africana Studies at Mt. Holyoke College. I have a background in English literature and Business. My poems have been published in both national and international journals and my poetry collection was recently listed as a finalist for the National Poetry Series. I have three chapbooks, Black Ballad (Bull City Press, 2022), Try Kissing God (Akashic, 2020), and American Mercy (Finishing Line Press, 2019). More of my work is at afuansong.com.