Ghanaian poet to receive inaugural book prize
The inaugural Peter Tillou-Venture Smith Book Prize, which was created to honor West African authors writing fiction, nonfiction or poetry in English, will be awarded to Ghanaian poet Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang on Nov. 3 at the Connecticut State Library in Hartford.
The prize is named after two Connecticut men, one a former prince and slave, the other a historical preservationist.
Smith, a West African prince who was enslaved and brought to New England, bought his freedom and published a memoir in 1798, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture.” Smith became a prosperous businessman. He died in 1805 and is buried in Haddam Neck.
A retired Connecticut historical preservationist, Tillou's name is included in the award for his support of the Documenting Venture Smith project, a Torrington-based research organization dedicated to telling Smith's story.
Robert Pierce Forbes, co-director of the Documenting Venture Smith Project, says the book prize, which he expects to be awarded annually, has two purposes: to honor writers and to get them exposure and funding to publish their works in the United States.
“Many very fine African writers have very little opportunity to have their work published and brought before a significant readership,” Forbes says. “This was something we could do to make a concrete contribution to expanding the reach of West African scholarship and literature.”
Opoku-Agyemang's book, “Wise Eyes: The Anomabo Poems,” is named after the coastal slave-holding fortress in Ghana where Smith was kept prisoner before being shipped across the Atlantic Ocean. Opoku Agyemang, a professor in the English Department at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana, was inspired by write the poems by reading “The Freedom Business,” a book about Smith by former Connecticut Poet Laureate Marilyn
Nelson.
“The protagonist in the poems is
Venture Smith. Each of the poems either makes direct reference to events in his life, or is built on a theme found in his life story,” Opoku-Agyemang wrote in an e-mail interview from Ghana. “In the broader view, the poems constitute an attempt to plumb the meaning of chattel slavery, what it means to be property belonging to someone else, and Venture Smith's bid to overturn that condition.
“What endures about this man who was enslaved is that at no point in the narrative does he show that he has internalized his situation as a slave. Venture Smith's self-belief never seemed to wane,” he wrote.
Here is one of the poems in “Wise Eyes.” I, too, have followed the spoor
From the jungle to the clearing
And, drunk, have read
The entrails of the wind
But can a crooked mind
Measure a crooked world?
Whoever sowed our world
Today lies in the prison-house Of our desires:
There is always
The nut of another metaphor Awaiting the crack of a wiser mouth Perhaps to understand
Is to cease to measure
And measure with the heart.
THE PETER TILLOU-VENTURE SMITH BOOK PRIZE