Kente and  
Kinship

a StoryMap

This narrative digital map embarks on a journey of kinship, longing, and reconnection that emerges from the pages of Ghanaian poets. Through their words, we trace their engagement with space expressed through memory and connections to people, particularly African diasporans in the United States. Scroll through our sections to revisit sites of engagement and elucidate new connections. If one passage particularly interests you, click to view the full chapter narrative.

Chapter 1: Born Borderless

Atlantic Ocean

“I was born borderless,” writes Aja Monet, a surrealist blues poet, in her poem “cast away”. Stark depictions of shipwrecks in the ocean, alluding to histories of transatlantic slavery, precede this declaration. The Atlantic Ocean is a liminal space between Africa and the USA: the site that connects the present to the past. As the site of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, it holds a devastating significance in the history of the Black diaspora. Between 1501 until 1866, at least 12.5 million enslaved Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic to the Americas. Approximately two million Africans – about 15 percent – died during the traumatic journey across the Atlantic, known as the Middle Passage.

1.1 Witness

Atlantic Ocean

In various poetry collections, the Atlantic Ocean is personified as a witness to history, seeing, writing, and roaring amongst other actions. For Dannabang Kuwabong in “Burning in Maroon Camp”, in Voices from Kibuli Country, the ocean is a site that holds access to history as it is personified to actively participate in the process: “where the seabed writes our history on its waves”. There is a promise to keep the memory of the maroons – enslaved people who escaped – active. This is located in the seabed, right at the bottom of the ocean. Using this spatial image, he locates the history of transatlantic slavery as foundational to the Atlantic geography, its effects seen in the “waves” created on the surface.

Nile River

The Nile River is another body of water that, like the Atlantic Ocean, incites historical memory. For Gabriel Awuah Mainoo, its waters are sacred – fit for “baptism”, a place to connect with ancestry and community. Its sacredness is its access to lineage: to have “bodies washed in ancient semen.”

1.2 Routes

Hudson River

Rivers continue to function as places of liberation and rebirth for the African diaspora in the USA. The Hudson River’s mouth in “News from Harlem” (from Kwame Dawes’s collection City of Bones) is filled with images of Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Liner ships. These ships are extensive, stretching over the horizon “as far as the eye can see.” They appear to be in constant motion towards the shore seen in the repetition, “coming in, coming, in coming in.” This rhythmic line is almost musical, suitable for the celebratory tone of the poem which centers around Marcus Garvey’s leadership and ideas of Pan-Africanism. The Black Star Line, a shipping company established by Garvey, operated from 1919 to 1922.

Harlem

Harlem is a central location for activists and the celebration of black art. Marcus Garvey used the Association’s Liberty Hall in Harlem as his platform for the UNIA. Garvey was active during the The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, a cultural movement of Black arts, music, and literature. The celebratory nature of the period encouraged pride in identity, the will for liberation, and self-determination, propelling the Civil Rights Movement. The Harlem Renaissance promoted “a diasporic consciousness that embraces the Euphrates, the Congo, and the Nile as rivers of Black geography.”

Mississippi River

At the delta of the Mississippi River, however, liberation has not yet been found. In the epigraph to “Penitentiary”, Kwame Dawes quotes a scene from journalist Mark Colvin’s book Penitentiaries, Reformatories and Chain Gangs, which looks into criminal punishment in America. In the image of “rows and rows of black prisoners”, monitored by armed officials, Colvin questions “has slavery really been abolished in the South?”

Parchman, Mississippi

Following the epigraph from Mark Colvin, Kwame Dawes, in his poem “Penitentiary”, questions what emancipation means, recognizing, as the epigraph suggests, that contemporary systems of exploitation mimic those conditions of slavery. Parchman, mentioned at the end of the poem, is a reference to the Mississippi State Penitentiary – a maximum security prison for men that was built on the Parchman plantation. Here, today’s prisoners “learn the names of their brothers… lament of their brothers”: they are a community that grieves.

New Orleans

Further down the coast, we find the “bayous”: a term commonly used in the South, referring to the swampy part of the river. Ama Ata Aidoo’s poem “For a Zulu in the Bayous” in her collection Someone Talking to Sometime describes it as “foggy murderous marshes of this corner of the world” where “our people have labored / suffered so long and so uselessly.” The run-on-line emphasizes the continuity of this exploitation. Harsh m-, r-, and g- consonant sounds create friction, a sense of strife in this environment. The description of heavy fog increases the anxiety of this image as, not only is the marsh characterized as “murderous”, but the lack of visibility implied by “foggy” adds to the disorientation. Like the Mississippi River, this body of water is associated with the pain of exploitative Black labor.

New York

While New York City is home to the activists and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, it is also a central location in the capitalist system of the United States. Like Ama Ata Aidoo, Gabriel Mainoo’s poetry elucidates these conditions through material comparisons. 

Poets such as Sylvia Plath have used mushrooms as images representing the resistance of the masses. For Plath, this was a sign of women’s resilience; for Mainoo, this is a reference to Black unity. The rhetorical question posed at the beginning of the poem “Mushroom Shade” can be read as a challenge – and is suggestive of this kinship’s extensiveness: “how broad is your citadel for shield?”

Chapter 2: Struggle for Home

Jamestown, Virginia

Following Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts”, themes of finding, making, and losing home are deeply tied to archival violence. If the archive cannot fully account for the lives of the enslaved, then history alone cannot be home. Home must instead be created outside of it, in the imaginative and affective spaces opened up by literature, poetry, and art; carried by remnants like cowrie shells, musical traditions like blues and gospel, or in fabrics like Kente. The process of making home, then, becomes a fugitive act that refuses the boundaries of what the archive deems sayable.

2.1 New Territory

Jamestown, Virginia

In Gabriel Awuah Mainoo’s “Currency for the labourers”, “cowries [are traded] for green cards.” The poem centers labor and exploitation – mines, sapphires, gas pipelines, factories, grape plantations, and nursing homes. Mainoo blurs historical and present exploitation. The poem presents realities of capitalism and what Hartman calls the “afterlife of slavery”, globally entangled and reflected in material histories of exchange. Mainoo reflects on the (often forced) labor, travel, and exchange represented in the material histories of objects like the ivory bracelets and cowrie shells, inscribed with violent histories of travel.

Charlotte Airport, North Carolina

At the liminal space of the airport, in the moments of waiting to leave and to arrive, we see the vulnerability of migrants. In Voices from Kibuli Country by Dannabang Kuwabong, a poem titled “Woman Waiting at Charlotte Airport” tells the story of a woman stationed at the arrivals area at the Charlotte Airport. She is expecting a man flying from Dallas, her fiancé, to arrive. By the end of the poem, he has not appeared and the woman despairs as she watches a CNN reporter on the television announce that the man, an American citizen, was deported to Mexico under what is presumably the “Alien Enemies Act of 1798” (which is referred to in the poem as the “Undocumented Alien’s Act”). We do not find out what happens next as the speaker, our narrator and witness, leaves to board his plane to Puerto Rico.

Athens, Ohio

While the airport is one such liminal place that preempts travel, cross-state travel brings various modes of movement: driving through roads, alongside the flow of rivers, and requiring a GPS to pass by plantations. 

For both Dannabang Kuwabong and Gabriel Awuah Mainoo, Ohio brings certain dangers that they are conscious of as they “travel” through the state. For Kuwabong, in “Approaching Athens, Ohio”, the river is personified as a traveler or migrant “looking for entry to the Ohio”. It appears to be barred from entry but determined to cross the threshold as it “runs in brown circles” while “hugging” the Appalachian mountain range. The constant circular movement and quick-paced action indicates vexation.

Cincinnati, Ohio

Cincinnati is described, ironically, by Mainoo as “a city too dark for black bodies”: alluding to the alienation of Black communities. The use of diction, “bodies”, shows the dehumanisation of Black people as people – seen, instead, merely as a body and by implication, seen in terms of labor. 

Land, air – and also the meeting with water, is another area of transition. In “Gone – Harbour Blues” contemporary migration evokes the memory of the slaves' travels at the harbor in Cincinnati. 

Nebraska

In building a new home and moving to a new territory, the transition is one that brings on a state of “moulting”. In Mainoo’s poem “We are Moulting Birds I” the transformation brought by migration is shown in their comparison with birds that moult. This situates the transitional state as ongoing since birds moult multiple times a year and throughout their life – positioning the migrant in perpetual liminality. Moulting occurs too, regardless of location – it is embedded in the bird’s physique and so it is a state that is carried by the body. A dimension of this moulting includes racial identity. In this poem, there is a sense of kinship established across “black bodies” under scrutiny: “somewhere in Nebraska a brown brother maintains his discrete identity.” For Mainoo, he does not need to know the precise details of the migrant to identify with his plight and to identify with him as a “brother”.

The Bronx

Around 30,000 of the 235,000 Ghanaian migrants have found a home in New York City, with the biggest portion living in the Bronx. This location is centered in Afua Ansong’s Black Ballad as a place inhabited by the Ghanaian diaspora. Ansong, reflecting on life in this suburb, acknowledges the idealism and disappointment both in America and in Ghana. In “Your first time in America” the poet tells the story of daughters reuniting with their mother in America after six years of not seeing each other. The American city is characterized as deceptive and dangerous: it is said to have “fangs” which are hidden by the darkness. America is personified to hide “its ugly with lights” – its modernity and flashiness is a mask. Yet, Accra, which the speaker has forsaken, is also depicted as an unpleasant and empty place: filled with “darkness”, “no charms”, and having “a few unwanted prayers”.

2.2 Making Culture

Accra Bus Station, Accra

In the space between countries, between Ghana and America, between Jamaica and America, lies the memory of community. “Migratory Wings” by Gabriel Mainoo is set in the context of Covid-19, which seems to never end as we see in the phrase “C-o-v-i-d-19-20-21-22”. The hyphens elongate the word, each number points to this stagnant state stretching into another year – typographically showing the feeling of the pandemic’s endlessness. There is the “wish… for the wind to adopt them as birds” but they are unable to fly: “but the wings deny you”. They are truly “in exile”, unable to return home. The title, pointing to flight, is ironic because the migrant is unable to travel. 

Drama Studio, Accra

In Ama Ata Aidoo’s poem “In Memorium” she questions what “home” means. On the speaker’s return to Ghana, the Drama Studio, established in 1961 by Ghanaian playwright Efua Sutherland, is “razed to the ground”. Sutherland is an important figure who sought to make theater accessible to the public, a means to revive community. However, the Drama Studio was demolished to make way for a more modern theater building – a dream that belongs to “someone’s notion” of what one should wish for.

Accra, Ghana

What does home smell like?

Petrichor is the scent after the rain has fallen on dry soil – a pleasant, earthy smell. In Afua Ansong’s poem named after this precise sensation, this is one of the scents the speaker dreams of but the comfort elides them: by the end of the poem the speaker dreams of Ghana “where you know what settles beneath the erupting earth.”

St. Mary, Jamaica

Being a migrant, one must contemplate where you would like to be buried and how you envision the end of your life. Death is a moment of truth: of home and community. It is a time when one reflects on the past, on one’s roots, and the fleetingness of life. 

Kwame Dawes’s collection Nebraska contains these questions in “The Immigrant Contemplates Death”. The repetition of warmth connects the land of Accra (Ghana) and the soil in St Mary (Jamaica), two regions that Dawes has called “home”.

Sturge Town, Jamaica

Poet Kwame Dawes remembers his father, Neville Dawes, whose parents were Jamaican and who was politically active in Ghana. Sturge Town is depicted as a place of community within a rural landscape. “Breadfruit leaves”, a common plant in Jamaica, are said to fill the hills. Amongst this, is a “donkey cart”, a “cricket ball” (reminiscent of British colonialism which brought the sport to the country in the 1800s), and details of the “old molasses and white rum” – sweet and strong smells – that are present amongst gatherings, as these smells are “thick in the nostrils of friends”. The communal meetings smell, then, of conviviality. The cricket ball swung with a strong wrist emulates the flight motion of the poem and cricket too, is a game requiring numerous players – a team sport furthering the themes of kinship.

2.3 Resistance and Rebellion

Kingston, Jamaica

Resistance through music occurs in the poets’ references to reggae, blues, and jazz all of which historically and presently form an essential part of African American identity. The poems’ forms draw on music as a means to connect, to remember, and to form identity. Writer and critic Sam Reese, writing about jazz specifically, explains, “As a musical form that developed “from a participatory and distinct black music culture,” jazz attracted those who felt marginalized from, or opposed to, the white mainstream, so that “the music itself and the circumstances under which it was performed embodied social change.”

Georgia - Chicago - Nebraska

As he takes refuge in his car during a harsh Nebraska winter, the mood is ominous: the “sky [is] heavy with portents of snow”, it is “cold”, and “blue gloom” of the morning sets on the scene. However, the initial melancholia of the season is offset by the title’s allusion to dawn, which brings hope, and by the presence of fierce emotions generated by Gospel music. Certainly, the final lines of the poem show resilience and optimism with its intertextual lyric from James Cleveland’s song “I Don’t Feel Noways Tired” in which the singer declares, “I don’t believe he brought me this far, to leave me”. Gospel is the means to resist the impending gloom that is setting in – these are words, rooted in faithfulness and destiny, that bring hope, strengthening the optimistic connotations that accompany dawn.

Ghana - Sierra Leone - Egypt - France

For other poets, the relationship between healing and music is also connected to justice. “People in Me”, a song by jazz singer and songwriter Abbey Lincoln and title of Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang’s poem, celebrates kinship and community. The poem becomes one with the song signalled by the musical jargon used throughout the poem: “refrain” and hailing the poem a “song of freedom, song of justice.” Jazz in the USA has always had links with kinship: Sam Reese in Jazz, Literature & Loneliness describes the genre as “a form of expression that allows its audience to transcend their own sense of being alone.”

Alabama - Georgia - Arkansas - South Carolina - Mississippi

For other poets, the relationship between healing and music is also connected to justice. “People in Me”, a song by jazz singer and songwriter Abbey Lincoln and title of Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang’s poem, celebrates kinship and community. The poem becomes one with the song signalled by the musical jargon used throughout the poem: “refrain” and hailing the poem a “song of freedom, song of justice.” Jazz in the USA has always had links with kinship: Sam Reese in Jazz, Literature & Loneliness describes the genre as “a form of expression that allows its audience to transcend their own sense of being alone.”

Alexandria, Egypt

Imaginations of Ancient Egypt emerge across the poetry collections. For Dannabang Kuwabong and Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang, the looting from Egypt is an analogy to explain colonial usurpation; for Ama Ata Aidoo, the Sphinx is a means by which she critiques imposed beauty standards, and for Kwame Dawes, Ancient Egyptian imagery is an opportunity to deliberate the limits of the global, Black community.

The Sphinx, The Pyramids, Cairo

The metaphors of the Sphinx show a struggle over autonomy. In “Images of Africa at Century’s End” Ama Ata Aidoo uses various descriptions of the Sphinx, Princess Nefertiti, and King Tutenkamen – iconic leaders and monuments – as metaphors to confront imposed beauty standards. Princess Nefertiti and King Tut “were dragged to Michael Jackson’s beauty doctor” and the Sphinx is “being redone” because a Corsican general shot off its nose for being “very thick-lipped very flat-nosed”. The “new”, reconstructed Sphinx, she guesses, will have thin lips and blue eyes.

Nile, Egypt

Other poets have drawn on metaphors of Ancient Egypt precisely to assert liberation, authenticity, and Black pride. In “King Tut in America”, Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang relays images of King Tutankhamun’s facial distortion: they “lifted his face” and “fixed his nose”. However, Tutankhamun’s true form remains “beneath all that make up”: his Black identity cannot be erased despite those who tried to “bleach[ed]” his skin and paint his face. Using these images, there is a call to pride in Black identity through resisting imposed aesthetics. The final line of the poem reads, “After 3000 years he has not paled so why should we?” A rhetorical question – a call to not hide nor submit to colonial distortions.

Cherokee Country

In Someone Talking to Sometime, Ama Ata Aidoo references Cherokee Country which spanned parts of the southeastern United States, including Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama. These lands were home to the Cherokee people before they were forcibly removed and relocated to Oklahoma in the 1830s during the Trail of Tears. Aidoo highlights the violent displacement of Indigenous peoples, likely referencing the Battle of the Little Bighorn, also known as Custer's Last Stand, of 1876, in southeastern Montana Territory. It was a conflict between the United States Army and a coalition of Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors.

Long Island, New York

In 1839, Spanish plantation owners Pedro Montes and Jose Ruiz shipped 53 abducted Africans from Havana, Cuba, to Puerto Príncipe (now Camagüey), Cuba, intending to enslave them on sugar plantations. They had already endured two months at sea under horrendous conditions during their forced transport from Sierra Leone to Havana.

During the journey on board the Amistad, Sengbe Pieh led a successful overthrow of the slavers and ordered the captain to sail into the sun, back to Africa. “Sengbe Pieh” in Cape Coast Castle tells that exact story of how slaves overthrew their oppressors on a ship. Pieh reportedly used a nail or file to free himself and others from their chains. At night, the Africans armed themselves with sugarcane knives found aboard the ship. They first killed the cook who had insinuated that the Africans would be killed and eaten. In the struggle, the captain managed to kill two African revolters before being overpowered.

3 Remembering the Future

Fowler Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, California

Afua Ansong makes visible that in order to know African history, we have to look in unexpected places. Much of African history has been displaced in the course of colonialism. In 2024, the Fowler Museum returned seven artefacts to the Asante ruler Otumfuo Osei Tutu II – including a gorget (royal necklace), a sika mena (elephant tail whisk), and an asipim (ornamental chair). British forces had looted the items from the Asante Kingdom when they raided Kumasi during the Third Anglo-Ashanti War in 1874. Some of the items were given to the British forces as part of the indemnity payment of the Treaty of Fomena in which Asantehene Kofi Karikari was forced to pay 50,000 ounces of gold. The objects were then sold at auctions in the United Kingdom. Many landed in the collections of pharmaceutical entrepreneur and artifact collector Sir Henry Wellcome

3.1 Sankofa

Gyaman Kingdom of present-day Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire

The Akan Adinkra symbol of Sankofa draws on the phrase "Se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenkyi," which means, "It is not wrong to go back and fetch what you have forgotten." This can be understood simultaneously in terms of time and space – drawing on the past and returning to a place. The concept is often depicted by a bird with its head turned backward while holding an egg in its mouth, retrieving wisdom from the past.

Mande Empire, Mali

Griots are the embodiment of this storytelling tradition. As storytellers, poets, historians, and musicians, they pass down oral history. Often, their stories are accompanied by instruments like the kora, a string instrument made of a calabash. Originating in the Mande Empire of Mali, they spread throughout West Africa.

3.2 Living Memory/Ancestries

Elmina, Ghana

History is alive in the town Elmina. Opoku-Agyemang writes, “The past is now, it smells Of kerosene, rotten fish barrels”. The title of the poem, “Elmina has no Twilight”, continues the idea that the town has not escaped the past. Twilight occurs at the end of day, at dusk, as it shifts into the night. Given the traumatic history of slavery, one may understand this temporal reference as being unable to undergo the transition into the next “season”. There is “no past” because the past is “now”.

Beaufort County, South Carolina

When we speak about ancestry and land, slavery continues to mediate memory today. Poet Kwame Dawes pinpoints Beaufort County, part of the Gullah-Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, an area stretching from North Carolina to Florida. He describes it as a land rich in minerals with large expanses of green, brackish water, fertile earth, and oak trees. But this image contains traces of unease: the air “thickens”, the crabs are “colonies” and the green is “encroaching” – signs that this place may too suffocate. Alienation is confirmed when the speaker says, “you know you are a stranger”. For the descendants of slaves in the USA, disenfranchisement, loss, and memory are embedded in rice and cotton fields.

Accra, Ghana

Even today, migrants undergo a journey that is reminiscent of slavery’s legacies. 

“Odo nnyew fie kwan love never loses its way home,” writes Afua Ansong in the final pages of Black Ballad. The poem opens with sensory depictions of memories from Accra. Cocoa seeds are described as “heaven’s fruit” while the rain in the city is soothing to the Harmattan period, a season of the year characterized by dryness. When the speaker leaves Ghana, the sadness too is comforted by “Accra’s red moonlight” which “drowns” the “wails”.

Denver, USA - Sandema, Ghana

Kinship is represented in the sharing of food – the “warm ladle” is shared by various figures who all count as “one mouth”. Anthems “beginning & ending with our lover’s names” establish a sense of allegiance to generations before. In Gabriel Awuah Mainoo’s “We don’t get muscular in large numbers”, the community of people is also “sucking the teeth of 1000 bodies & their cavity” as they gather around and eat from the pot. This kinship is specific to African histories (to “warrior songs”).

Sandema, Ghana

On the continent too, kinship underscores survival. For Kwesi Brew, resilience is a value held by the collective members of the Ghanaian community: although they “take the blow”, “seem unhurt”, and remain “speechless” they are aware of what is happening (“watch and wait”). This resilience is made possible by unity and kinship. As the speaker explains, “Love of family kith and kin and brother-keeping Has cast us in this mould”.

3.3 Diasporas

Assin Manso Ancestral Slave River

Before making their way to forts like Cape Coast Castle or Elmina, many enslaved Africans from the northern parts were transported to the Assin Manso Ancestral Slave River, a slave market. It was here that enslaved people were bought and sold. It is also where they took their last bath – in chains and shackles – before being shipped across the Atlantic. When being sold, they were branded as property using hot metal. The location also holds an ancestral graveyard where those who were not sold ended up. Today, the river serves as a site of healing and remembrance, offering a “first bath of return” for descendants and returnees reconnecting with their ancestral roots. 

Cape Coast Castle, Ghana

Kwesi Brew dedicates his poem “The Return of the Native” to Maya Angelou. Interestingly, Maya Angelou intentionally did not seek out Cape Coast Castle during her time in Ghana in the 1960s: 

"I didn’t want to remember that I was an American. For the first time since my arrival I was very nearly home...I drove into Cape Coast before I thought of the gruesome castle and out of its environs before the ghosts of slavery caught me. Perhaps their attempts had been halfhearted. After all, in Dunkwa, although I let a lie speak for me, I had proved that one of their descendants, at least one, could just briefly return to Africa, and that despite cruel betrayals, bitter ocean voyages and hurtful centuries, we were still recognizable."

4 Roads Not Yet Mapped

Anaafo Beach

"It is nine in the morning,
the sun has crossed the sea
And shines now just behind
The ramparts of the Castles."

This is how Kwesi Brew describes Anaafo beach and the fishermen that gather on it in the poem "My Town - Our Town." As we stand at the end of this journey, we return to a borderless sea. Much like a horizon limits our view of what stands in front of us, the Map remains incomplete; an attempt at conceiving a complex reality. As we have visited these territories and landscapes, our hope is that some of them now stand resignified, witness to the connections that subvert distance. Therefore, this digital narrative map does not seek to recreate the past, but rather to bring forth new reflections that from the confines of our bodies would sit beyond the horizon.