Biography
Nii Ayikwei Parkes is a writer, editor and publisher, who has won acclaim as a children's author, poet, broadcaster and novelist. He is the author of the poetry chapbooks: eyes of a boy, lips of a man (1999), his début; M is for Madrigal (2004), a selection of seven jazz poems; and Ballast (2009), an imagination of the slave trade by balloon. His poem, ‘Tin Roof’, was selected for the Poems on the Underground initiative in 2007, followed by the poem ‘Barter,’ chosen from his first full collection The Makings of You, published by Peepal Tree in 2010. His novel, Tail of the Blue Bird (Jonathan Cape, 2009), hailed by the Financial Times as ‘a beautifully written fable… simple in form, but grappling with urgent issues,’ was lauded internationally, becoming a bestseller in Germany and notably winning France's two major prizes for translated fiction – Prix Baudelaire and Prix Laure Bataillon – in 2014. He is also the author of two books for children – The Parade and Tales from Africa – under the name K.P. Kojo. Nii Ayikwei is the Senior Editor and publisher at flipped eye publishing, serves on the boards of World Literature Today and the AKO Caine Prize and has served as a judge for several literature prizes including the Commonwealth Prize, the NSK Neustadt Prize and the Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize. In 2014 he was named one of Africa's 39 most promising authors of the new generation by the World Book Capital Africa 39 Project. His latest books are The Geez, which was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and was a Poetry Book Society 2020 Recommendation, and a Ga language book, The Ga Picture Alphabet; which was longlisted for the 2021 Jhalak Children’s & YA Prize
Critical perspective
As the title of Parkes’ eyes of a boy, lips of a man (1999) would seem to suggest, the young Ghanaian’s debut collection is preoccupied primarily with issues of duality.
Duality appears in these poems less as an irreconcilable opposite or gothic doppelganger, more as the embodiment of beauty; a bewitching combination that holds the gaze, or that troubles the fixity of classification. As Parkes himself reflects:
‘Perhaps it was because I had just returned to Ghana and been struck by the easy way in which we reconcile blessings and curses, good and bad, without having to resort to definitive, classifying labels.’
In ‘Day and Night’ the speaker foregrounds the difference between ‘blinding blue skies’ and the ‘iridescent grey’ of evening before qualifying his thoughts: ‘Yet even they embrace / in the sensual softness of sunset - / a passionate blaze of glorious red-orange.’ In ‘Ghana by air’, a few pages later, the speaker urges the listener to become one with the elements, to be dragged along by the savannah winds, to float free. Fleeting scenes and scenarios rush by as blurred glimpses (boys on bikes, eyes, a married couple) while sounds, the constant questions of the speaker suggest, are equally indeterminate:
'Did you hear the blaring
horns - sometimes angry,
sometimes friendly?
Did you see two lovers
heading for Labadi beach?
Follow them
lift the hem
of the sea
plunge ...
you have reached
the centre
of the world.'
These short lines suggest both a lack of clarity and connection (‘Did you hear … Did you see?’) and the reconciliation, transcendence, or union of contraries (angry / friendly horns) through sensuality, through sex, and through spirituality.
Air and the elements are also central to Parkes’ highly original sequence of poems ‘Ballast’ (see ballast: a remix, 2009 and The Making of You, 2010). Described as a ‘tour de force of defamiliarisation’, the sequence rewrites the middle passage and the story of the slave trade by imagining the vehicles of transatlantic movement as hot air balloons rather than ships:
'Our planked fathers drowned simply
Because weight is whatever we keep inside.
Within the coffin confines
Of blood-lined breathing space
They inhaled death and hate,
Extracted pride, then exhaled hope.
And the same way balloonists
Couldn’t contain within paper and silk
The fiery resolve of burning straw,
Cast iron couldn’t collar their spirits'
Parkes’ felicity with the written word, with verbal economy and form, is all the more impressive given his reputation for performance poetry, and a mode of delivery that has sometimes treated textuality as secondary. This is not to underestimate the oral qualities of Parkes’ poetry. He has said that one of his main preoccupations in writing is ‘the reinterpretation of language’ and there is a strong musical note running through both eyes of a boy, lips of a man and, more explicitly, M is for Madrigal (2004): ‘a selection of seven jazz poems’.
Parkes’ first substantial poetry collection, The Makings of You (2010) is a highly personal record of childhood and family, creativity and creation and, simultaneously, a meditation on movement and migration. Here are the opening lines of ‘Crossing Borders’:
'I can scarcely remember
my first crossing of water,
borders, dare-lines or fingers.
All I have seen is pictures preserved
by Mom
in envelopes and matching albums:
me, in snow, lost in a bright yellow coat,
me, skipping careless in some vast green park,
me, exposed to December sand and sun,
my surroundings Sahelian
like old memories.'
Childhood memories and migration merge in these poetic snapshots where borders are both countries and cracks in the pavement. There is nothing emphatically epic or solemnly elegiac about Parkes’ travel lines, the memories have an everyday quality, and like the speaker’s bright yellow coat, are worn lightly.
The title of this collection is a riff on the lyric by Curtis Mayfield, the African American soul, rhythm and blues artist. However, if this is a collection about identity and subjectivity (and clearly it is on one level), then it refuses any easy offerings on the subject of race. It is telling then that skin is that which conceals rather than reveals in this poem: ‘All these things that make you the man / that you are, you tuck beneath your dark / skin and never share: so nobody really knows you …’
In Tail of the Blue Bird (2009), Parkes moves from poetry to fiction. The novel is a literary whodunnit set in rural Ghana. Like much classic detective fiction, the plot dwells upon the divisions between modernity and tradition, science and superstition, while removing these themes from the metropolitan heart of empire and putting them down firmly at its edge. Kayo is a forensic pathologist, recently returned from study in Britain. He is brought in to get to the bottom of the mysterious remains found in the village of Sonokrom. However, scientific rationalism utterly fails to throw light on the dark world he encounters. Through the detective genre of his novel, Parkes again questions the classifying labels he first interrogated in eyes of a boy, lips of a man.
Tail of the Blue Bird was praised by Jonathan Gibbs in The Independent as ‘… a delightful book that combines the basic tug of the whodunnit with the more elegant pleasures of the literary novel. Like the best detective stories, it has a questing hero, and a vivid sense of locale.’
More fundamentally than this, Tail of the Blue Bird draws on Parkes’ reserves as poet to represent Ghana in a bold and fresh vernacular that both conveys a rich and apparently spontaneous regional humour while insisting we see the region anew. With its penchant for proverb and its sophisticated reshaping of standard English, the novel deserves comparison with Chinua Achebe’s 1950s classic, Things Fall Apart.
Dr James Procter, 2010
Awards
Author statement
I have come to see my writing career as the job of a middleman, or the equivalent of a brand; seeking stories, packaging them in my language or brand, and passing them on to whoever wants to buy into my rendering of the truth. I focus on the voice of my characters, and relinquish the control of the truth to them, although it can only be told within the limits of my vocabulary. I also rely heavily on the ability of my audience to be able to afford – by dint of taxing their imaginations and preconceptions – the products of my search. As part of my branding toolkit, I count on the 14 languages that float around in my head for weight; the five I speak fluently for depth; maps that I have pilfered from writers I admire such as Chinua Achebe, Saul Bellow, Walter Mosley, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Mario Vargas Llosa, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Mariama Ba, Ernest Hemingway, Ayikwei Armah, James Baldwin, W.B. Yeats, Atukwei Okai, Li-Young Lee and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for direction; and the growing lexis of my own experiences.
