I dwell upon the page, in the profoundness of language, any language; its ability to transform something beyond the thing itself. I believe that a poet should have a multi-focused-vision, capable of rendering the extraordinary things of life accessible to the ordinary person; of making what is ordinary rise beyond ordinary limits. Those who live along the ocean see the ocean’s rising and falling, but it is the poet who can possess the ocean so that its rising and falling becomes something more profound than the rising and falling of ocean. It is the poet who must transform the ocean into millions of foamy bubbles or angry waves or whatever, so that the ocean’s flapping and slapping is heard in the deep recesses of those who do not live along the ocean. It is I who must make the ocean more beautiful, more profound by the use of images and literary devices so that what is experienced in my mind becomes a thing that anyone can attach to. Robert Frost said, “every poem is a new metaphor inside or it is nothing.” I believe that human experience in all of its pain, sorrow, joy, its successes and failures, is a beautiful metaphor.

Anything as ordinary as a moving car, the touch of wind, news on the radio, a book I’m reading or an idea stored within my subconscious can stir up inspiration in me to write a poem. On the average, I write a poem a week; often, a whole poem or two at once, to be edited later. I have a file of poetry scraps—unused images, like pieces of fabric that I pull out when I need them. Writing is a talent, a gift, which when cultivated, can bring enjoyment both to the writer and the reader. I write first, because I love to write. I find laughter when I bury myself in a new poem. Often, I rediscover myself; all my failures, my fears, my anger, my joy when I’m writing a really beautiful poem. I know it when a poem I’m writing is beautiful and when I’m writing a really ugly one that will drain all life out of me. I abandon such a poem to posterity. One day someone more intelligent may edit it, maybe not.

Many of us have written since elementary school. Those who are writers will never quit writing because for them, writing is not just a hobby, but also a lifestyle. There is within us that drive which Samuel Taylor Coleridge calls “‘Imagination and Fancy’– a power higher than the understanding . . . that synthetic and magical power.” It has the ability to create balance, to reconcile unlike and discordant qualities – that power of the sublime to unite sameness with difference, to put together the idea with the image. Some people are born with that power; others work a lifetime in search of that power. That power, for me, comes from God. He gives me the inspiration to connect what I see, hear or feel to images, which in turn become poetry, transported to the reader. It is this power which allows me to write poetry capable of bringing both tears and laughter to an audience during the same poetry reading.

I am constantly aware of my “triple heritage,” my Diaspora heritage. My parents must have foreseen my destiny when they gave me the Grebo name Dawanyeno which means “stranger woman.” As an African, a Liberian, a “westernized” Grebo woman, I look at my multi-cultural heritage as something powerful and unique. I too can claim the words of world celebrated African author, Chinua Achebe, who once said “English is not the exclusive property of the English man.” Like him, I believe that English can be made to conform to my cultural tendencies; my dirges, translated into English from the Grebo tradition can add beauty to what I have to say in a new way. Three years of my adolescence spent in my home town of Tugbakeh taught me to claim every part of my history – my Grebo heritage and traditions, my life, growing up in Monrovia with its multi-traditions, my westernized, borrowed tradition, my everything. I therefore strive, sometimes, failing, to write about my people’s traditions, the atrocities of their wars, my life as a mother, our experiences in the Diaspora. For more than twenty-five years, I was influenced by great African writers like Nobel Prize winning Nigerian author Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Lenrie Peters , Kofi Awoonor, Sembene Ousmane, Okot p’Bitek, and Dennis Brutus among others. I am also indebted to a much closer group of writers, Liberian writers not so well known to the world. They are my original teachers and mentors because whenever I lose step, I find myself returning again and again to those stories by Robert H. Brown, S. Cordor, and Wilton Sankawulo among others.

It is a challenge to write outside one’s cultural setting, especially when the experiences being captured are that of one’s homeland. I face the temptation like hundreds of other immigrants before me to give up and take on the new skin, like a snake casts off its shell, to move on and be American – imitate the new culture. That’s when I reclaim my triple heritage; all of me will not let go of me. So I write traditional poems when an idea is better expressed traditionally. When my experience is western, I employ another style without thinking about it. As I relish other influences upon me by American writers past and present like e. e. cummings, August Wilson, Nikki Giovanni, Yusu Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amy Tan, Stu Dybek, Herb Scott, I’m constantly guided against losing myself, the voice of my people, their nuances, their ways of making music in poetry, their anger against centuries of abuses: their pain, their struggles for freedom, their spirit of laughter, of song and dance.

I want my poetry to transcend Africa without losing Africa in its crossings. I am guided therefore, in the way I hear things by continually reliving childhood, reliving my hometown, reliving the spirit of my people while at the same time being aware of where I am and the people I now live among. Sometimes I’m accepted by America; sometimes I’m rejected. I’m never afraid of either because I have my roots, where I retreat. Another challenge I face is how to write around my place as a mother, wife of a minister, teacher, student. The life of a woman is never easy, no matter where, but this is another of my circumstances, which I celebrate. I find delight in my family, my ‘not always lovely’ children. They give me a sense of wholeness as I write. I write around them, often at 2 a.m. or standing in a store aisle, in the kitchen, while cooking, in the car, wherever. I have written many poems while sitting in class or in church, and have lived to see them published. My place as a mother of four and a war survivor allows me to be vulnerable. I relish in my imperfections because I have a long way to go to be what I need to be.

Many writers, including my students cry about writers’ block. Do we suffer from writers’ block because of our fear of being vulnerable? We shy away from our pain, our fears, the violence in our communities, those who are different from us. A freelance journalist who interviewed me recently put it this way: “Many people here have nothing to write about, but they want to be bestsellers.” On the contrary, I believe that people have a lot to write about, but are too afraid to confront themselves. Chinua Achene’s Things Fall Apart is a world classic today because he confronted the theme of the “European invasion of Africa” in a novel. Langston Hughes, Phil Levine, Yusu Komunyakaa, August Wilson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nadime Gordimer, Okot p'Bitek, Bessie Head, and a great many others here today and gone became great because they were vulnerable enough to allow us into their world, so that we could also claim what was theirs.


This essay first appeared in the Kalamazoo Gazette, Kalamazoo, MI, USA, March 30, 2003.