Can You See God?

It was late, near midnight, and I was in the library, trying to finish a paper whose deadline (midnight) I wouldn’t meet anyway, and overdosed on coffee to the point of mentally hyperactive discomfort. The paper I was writing was far less exciting for me than the project of passion that I was working on simultaneously with the team over a long distance: the Solitaire EP.

Moving to California for school caused a lot of complications and coordination problems with the Vision Inspired team back in Ghana, not least of which was the 8-hour difference between us. This was early in the morning in Ghana, around 7 or 8 am, and Tronomie had just sent me a Whatsapp audio of the final arrangement of Dear God part 2. He hadn’t slept all night. Of course I halted my work immediately to listen to it. And. I. Loved. It. I think that was the moment I actually began to get excited about the whole EP. I think this is how Tronomie became my favorite singer. The only person who loved it more than I did was my manager/CEO, Ekko, who had, as usual, offered his creative input and direction – in this case, his suggestions had worked such that Dear God had begun to sound not just like two songs, but like three.

Before these Vision Inspired Magicians did their surgical sorcery to Dear God, it had existed as a classically angsty Akotowaa spoken-word-on-beat with all the enthusiastic anger my performances are known for.

“I feel caged by expectations, grades, examinations, the range of practical occupations” – Akotowaa [Dear God]

And it was very short – barely even 2 minutes long. Also, it wasn’t supposed to be part of the Solitaire EP. Ironically, now that Tronomie is on it, I think it’s the longest Solitaire track.

When I got the “final draft” of Dear God, it was the first time I’d heard that final bit of the song; the Ekko addition that made the song sound like three instead of just two. The aim of all the light production and the BVs was to end the track on a sonically significantly happier note than the one it began with. When Ekko asked me what I thought about it, I said, truthfully, that the sound I was hearing did not fit my perception of something that should come out of God. (And for those of you who still haven’t gotten the clue that Tronomie is the voice of God on this track, here’s your chance to pretend like you knew it all along.)

As horrified as I was to admit it, it was true. Despite my intellectual awareness of the complex nature of God, I still had a fixed, streamlined vision of Him in my mind – one that was very much captured by the production vocals Tronomie had created at the beginning of Dear God part 2. The sudden, powerful drums. The vocals swinging through crescendo and diminuendo to give me the impression of a dark room, smoke and an invisible, invincible, untouchable, out-of-reach force. That was God. The sweetly-singing “Love me” person just wasn’t adding up to the one whom I’d heard sing before him, in my brain. Problematic? Indeed. (Ironically, I had written the lyrics, and I don’t know how I expected the words “love me” to constantly sound booming and menacing, more like a command and less like a request.)

I had another poem in the works by this time, one I was to perform at the VIM concert on the 23^rd of December. It was supposed to be a Christmas poem. I’d been working on it for a while but it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. It was one of those unfortunate projects that felt like everything that was coming out of my pen was trash. I was trying unsuccessfully to turn the Biblical story of Jesus’ birth into a poetic narrative, but it lacked any meaning I could identify… until after this incident with being asked about how I felt about the end of Dear God.

When I began I See God, I didn’t know it was going to be my Christmas poem. It was merely a story I was telling of a man who could only see the harshest side of God, being introduced to the loving image of Him. The God of John 3:16.

“I see God in the rolling thunder,

The crashing of the waves and them pulling under

Everything that cannot withstand

The fearful power of the ocean’s command” -Akotowaa [I See God]

In the beginning, this fictional man’s rant to the stranger who has joined him seems harmless. You see God as impressive and powerful; is He not these things, anyway? Will every knee not eventually bow to him whether it desires to or not? But then later, you start to see how destructive this kind of image, when held in isolation from the whole nature of God, begins to get.

“I see God as an icy God

A block so cold proximity burns

A rock so old it doesn’t age

The God that sent Egypt the plague

…A God that, by nature, pushes people away.” -Akotowaa [I See God]

When this carries on, the image of invincible power turns into an image of unbridled cruelty. Such a Being becomes unapproachable and incapable of love, much less getting others to love Him. He is indeed a God who pushes people away. A Being like that is someone I’d be careful to keep my distance from because I’d be terrified of what He could do to me if I even breathed the wrong way.

The stranger whom the man in my poem is showing his God off to remains unimpressed. You can tell that the man who spoke was proud of his speech. The might of his God probably fed his ego; made him feel special and conceited, for belonging to a religion whose God would effortlessly smite the gods of any other person’s religion. I can only imagine how he expected the stranger to look at him with starry eyes, envying this man his religion and even fearing him a little for being a worshipper of Someone so fearful. But then the stranger says to the man what I would now say to myself:

“Your God sounds like a terrorist

A God without rhyme,

A God without reason

A God that only knows the harshest season

A God of power but not of love

A God as a vulture, never a dove

The God of the flood,

But not of the rainbow

That’s the God that most of us claim to know.” -Akotowaa [I See God]

The question, as I was thinking of all this dialogue between the two men, was where had I seen evidence – plain, undeniable evidence – of the loving, soft God that would croon “Love me” softly to me? Where could I find evidence of the John 3:16 God who “so loved the world that he gave His only begotten son…”? Well, in the circumstances of John 3:16, of course!

If God loved us enough to send His son to save us, in what manner would His son be sent? In a tornado, perhaps? The falling of the sky? For goodness’ sake, this is the entrance of Jesus we’re talking about. Jesus, who is a son of the terrifying, all-powerful God; Jesus who is himself God. Surely, the earth would at least quake a little. But Jesus showed up in a way I’d have never, ever expected an omnipotent being to show himself to mankind: naturally, as a baby, naked, small and defenseless, pulled from a woman’s vagina into a manger. It really doesn’t make any sense. If you showed me a naked, newborn baby and told me that he was God, I’d probably laugh in your face. Interestingly enough, that isn’t what the shepherds did. I would really love to know what those guys were thinking that night. I wonder how difficult it was to accept everything that they were experiencing.

“What if he looked naked?

And quiet?

With the facial features of an Israelite

With baby skin not made of iron

covered in blood and prone to crying

The one who made us in His image

taking our image and making it His

defying your notion of a superhero

and speaking to people just like this?

A lamb to complement my argument for the lion

the one who forgave and healed and saved

and became a shoulder to cry on” -Akotowaa [I See God]

Yes, God is mighty and supreme. It is impossible to ignore this aspect of Him. But God is also meek and humble. It is impossible to ignore this side of Him. To hold the image of a perpetually angry and mean God will push you away. However, to ignore Him as a supreme holder of power in favor of the loving image, to believe that every single thing you do would be looked upon favorably no matter what, will also condemn you. Be careful how you see God. I do not have enough expertise in theology to explain this to a greater extent yet, but hopefully you understand what I’m saying.

When I stopped to think about it, that image of a superpower-less, naked baby countered my perception of a solely huge, unapproachable and severe God. And since the circumstances around this were the ones for which Christmas is celebrated, well, I finally had subject matter for my overdue Christmas poem.

I merged I See God with the as-yet-titleless poem I’d been constructing, and I’m happy to say that I wrote a poem that would have changed (some part of) my life if I hadn’t written it myself. As a matter of fact, something about my life (i.e. my vision of God) did indeed have to change before I could even write his poem. I’m proud of I See God. I think it’s excellent content-wise. (The sonic quality is questionable, given that it was recorded on my phone, and the VI guys did their best to enhance it so that it didn’t sound entirely like trash. Shout-out to Reynolds TheGentleMan for the dope production!)

I don’t know how many people have the same problem with how they see God as I did. Whoever they are, wherever they are, I hope they somehow get to hear I See God and be as impacted by listening to it as I was by writing it.

-Akotowaa

For complete lyrics of Dear God, click here.

For complete lyrics of I See God, click here.

When Your Male Best Friend Becomes Someone Else’s Boyfriend

Author’s note: I experienced an overwhelming desire to go and look for this thing that I wrote in my journal at the beginning of 2015 (I can’t believe that was two years ago!), due to sentiments I experienced today that reminded me of the sentiments I had while I wrote it. In fact, the subject of this entry is the very same as the recipient of my spoken word letter “Ephemeron“.  I haven’t edited it. All the saltiness of that time deserves to be displayed in it. Also, I feel like you can tell that my 2015 voice is different from my 2016 voice – but maybe that’s just me. For some reason, I think I’ll be psychologically freer if I share it. So I quickly typed it up a few minutes ago, and here it is.

 

When Your Male Best Friend Becomes Someone Else’s Boyfriend

When your male best friend becomes someone else’s boyfriend, you should know beforehand that a lot of things are going to end between you. I’m sorry. Not even your “best-friendship” can save it. It’s gone. A lot of things that weren’t important are going to suddenly become big deals that blow up in your face. A lot of things that merited the utmost importance are suddenly going to fall into the category of “trivial” – at least for him.

And half the time, it’s not even his fault.

But he had the power to save the friendship, and he didn’t.

Actually, it’s always his fault.

No. It isn’t.

But don’t get mad at her. Of course it’s all her fault, but also, it isn’t. It’s the fault of the desire to possess, to seek the merit of priority, to own everything. Power. Relevance. Megalomania. It’s not her fault. She’s new in the system. She had no idea what she destroyed. She can’t feel it. It wasn’t even her intention to destroy anything in the first place, you know. It just happened – and it’s not a recognizable problem in her world, because she’s happy.

When your male best friend becomes someone else’s boyfriend, a lot of things are going to end. Like your gradual refusal to keep employing the title “best”. Like the amount of time you even spend being friends. Because you are female, every hug between you is infidelity. Every look longer than five seconds is infidelity. Every shared inside joke, every tickle, every poke, every phone call longer than five minutes is infidelity.

When your male best friend becomes someone else’s boyfriend, a lot of things are going to end. He won’t continue to tell you everything because he doesn’t owe you all of his honesty anymore. You won’t tell him everything anymore, because why give out everything when you can’t get anything back? When he becomes her boyfriend, he’ll look for you less. You will wonder if it’s because he’s suddenly left the social circle and then you’ll see him with her.

You will get tired of being neglected and you will confront him. He will acknowledge that he is at fault. He will acknowledge that there is a problem. Then he will begin to say “hi” to you two more times in the week than he usually does – and nothing else will get done.

Eventually, you will give up because you can see that he is happy. You will feel like a selfish jerk for resenting being abandoned for his own happiness. You will also resent others for telling you that his girlfriend is more important than you are. You will get tired of being told that when you find your own significant other, you will understand. You will get your own significant other. You will still not understand.

When your male best friend becomes someone else’s boyfriend, you will wonder when the precise moment in history it was that the strength of ordinary friendship lost its value.

-Akotowaa

P.S. I found the genesis of the actual poem Ephemeron, only a few pages before the one this post itself was on. I was looking for numerous ways to express myself. I didn’t actually finish Ephemeron the poem until more than a year after I began it.

It’s so interesting to see Ephemeron’s genesis. LOL

Solitaire was a huge experiment…but apparently, it worked

[Hi – please, if you haven’t listened to Solitaire, my debut spoken word project, please go and do that and come back. Thanks.]

I was madly nervous during the listening session. This was 2 weeks before Solitaire was due to drop. I had invited some of the coolest people in Accra that I knew and trusted to come witness and give me feedback for the biggest and riskiest thing I have ever done in my life to this point. Because they were my favorite people, I wanted to know how they’d respond as I believed it would give me an idea of how people as cool as them (AKA my target audience) would respond.

Surprisingly enough, the thing I was most concerned about was people hearing my words and realizing how wack and corny my lyrics were and finally see what a fraud of a writer I was. LOL. Imagine – my writing was just about the one thing nobody complained about. So what’s wrong with me? (BTW, all Solitaire lyrics are available on Genius.com.)

Solitaire is a huge experiment. And it wasn’t intended to be, as unbelievable as that may sound. I have never heard a project that sounds like Solitaire before, true, but I realized that after it was completed. I didn’t start out from the beginning thinking, “Okay, for this project, I’m going to try my best to go all out in breaking all the rules.” It seems befitting to my personality to have done something like that, but that isn’t what happened. Solitaire came to life mostly organically. I described the circumstances around its lyrical composition over-dramatically in the blog post “Where did Solitaire even come from?”

Solitaire (the poem itself) was written while I was blanked out in math class. Ephemeron was written in my room in boarding school during very hormonal moments. It was cathartic, though. Imagine harboring hurt for 2+ years from people whom you are forced to see nearly every day anyway. Dear God was written under high duress (that is, Part 1). I don’t know why it ended up following a regular beat. These things just happen to me. I think Dear God was one of those casual voice notes I sent my manager like, “Look, Ekko, I wrote something.” It wasn’t even originally part of the tracklist. We decided to replace one of the originally intended tracks with Dear God very late in Solitaire’s compilation stage. I wrote Part 2 when Ekko and I decided that Tronomie should sing more than just background vocals. I’m glad he did. It gave the poem a sense of further completeness. And his voice is amazing. Love you, Solitaire God! ❤

To Be has an interesting backstory. It was not originally a poem. I had written a blog post called Comfort as Yourself, and during Ekko’s daily rounds of Akotz Stalking Sessions (back when he actually had time to recreationally care about my life), he found the blog post and sent me a Facebook message immediately, telling me to turn it into a poem. That’s why, to some extent, I feel like he wrote it rather than me – even though he never touched my pen or my words. Maybe we both wrote it in a way.

During the listening session, someone asked me if I had tried saying Undeath of the Artist, as more like a poem and less like a rap. I had forgotten about it then, but in fact, I had tried. In February, I took a break off from school to record demos of every intended Solitaire poem in the studio with Tronomie. He pressed record and stopped halfway through, like “No. This needs a beat.” Um…well, I knew that. A few months later, I met EDWVN for the first time in person. I had been following him for a while on Twitter and had finally mustered up the courage to enter his DMs and ask whether we could be friends. The first day we met, he played a bunch of stuff he’d produced for me (the only productions of his I’d ever heard before were from Sutra’s mixtape, The Art of Being. I’d been stalking Sutra for a while then too.) I hadn’t even paying attention to his music; I’d just thought he was a cool person from his tweets. But then when it finally came to time to start thinking about production, well, I thought, if EDWVN didn’t produce it, anka who would produce it? And as you can see, the production is cooler than the poem itself. So maybe I made a wrong move. LOL

Solitaire is a freaking hybrid.

• The Curse of They is literally a sonnet said out loud.
• Undeath of the Artist is a thing most people can’t fully classify as rap or spoken word.
• Ephemeron fits classical perceptions of what spoken word should be but yo – have you heard those sound effects? (Shout-out to Ekko and TheGentleMan for making that poem sonically pregnant with creativity.)
• Solitaire is a poem made out of a freaking card game. That’s not normal. This is how I know I’m mad.
• IWITP is a spoken word song. WTF is a spoken word song anyway?
• Dear God is a prayer-rap-call-response-poem-song in 2 parts. Whoa.
• To Be is a poemified blog post. That’s weird.

The whole project ended up being strange, even to me. But maybe that’s just the only way it would make sense because I’m strange. I don’t fully understand myself, much less am I able to understand or predict the nature of the art that comes out of me. Solitaire was a huge experiment…but apparently, it worked.

-Akotowaa

Where did Solitaire even come from?

Solitaire is a French word. It means “lonely”/”alone”/”isolated”.

Solitaire is a computer game, designed to be played alone.

I sat in math class almost 2 years ago, and as usual, every single thing was flying over my head. I opened my notebook and saw parabolic graphs I didn’t understand. I would rather have been anywhere but that class; several times rather have been playing Solitaire on my bed. In my room. Away from people and life.

Solitaire was my escape strategy. It was the computer application I went straight to when I didn’t want to think. Thinking was too hard but Solitaire was mindless enough. The Microsoft Collection had about 6 different types of the game, making it nearly impossible for me to get bored of it. And as I sat in that IB Higher Level Math class, I definitely didn’t want to think. However, the class had an unspoken no-computers policy. So instead of Solitaire, I started to scribble words on top of my parabolic graphs.

Perhaps I should have been more concerned about how I fared in that subject, but I genuinely couldn’t bring myself to care. I had my eyes on graduation. With math in particular, I just needed to hit the pass mark and pass on to graduation. Excelling in the subject was out of the question. If I managed to just get by, that alone would be a miracle.

I zoned out completely. Writing it was a mindless endeavor, and it was nearly as much fun as playing the game itself. I had made a new game: a Solitaire word game. Ace. Two. Three. Four. The paragraphs began to form all over the page, squeezed into corners between equations. I was about halfway through by the time the class ended and hadn’t learned a thing. I forgot about my Solitaire word game.

Another math class. I opened my math notebook and saw the paragraphs of my word game. Well, if I hadn’t gotten anything from the last class, what were the chances I’d benefit from this one? I might as well continue writing. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.

At some points, I would walk to school alone. The most popular girl in my class never walked alone. She literally had the nickname of “queen”, possibly because of her influential online presence and general reputation. I wasn’t the biggest fan of her friends but their appearance of untouchable “royalty” still intimidated me. I tried to ignore them as I walked. I did not always succeed.

This was the period of my intense obsession with Janelle Monae. Nearly every time I put my earphones in, I would go straight to this one album: The Electric Lady.  For a while, my favorite song was QUEEN. I loved these lyrics:

“Even if it makes others uncomfortable, I will love who I am.”

I wanted to be QUEEN. I wanted to love who I was. Jack. Queen. King.

My word-game had turned into a poem now: “Solitaire”.

***

In this period of the Electric Lady and Solitaire addictions, one of my roommates was an artist. The previous year, we had taken IGCSE Art together. She abandoned art for humanities in the IB Diploma Programme. I left it too, for Mathematics and Physics. In the months and year after we left Art, she would periodically ask me, “When was the last time you drew?” If my pencils were food, they’d have gone to rot from having remained untouched and stale for so long. The artist in me felt like she had died.

But I refused to let her go. As Dylan Thomas said,

“Do not go gently into that good night

Rage, rage against the dying of the light”

If the artist in me had died, she must by all means be revived: “Undeath of the Artist”.

***

I used to think the friends I had the first year would be my friends forever. Our bond seemed so strong and permanent. I didn’t know how ephemeral the whole thing was going to be. The close circle broke up. I wrote my pain. I vented privately. I vented publicly. In very unpoetic words and several expletives. Finally, about 2 years later, when I’d calmed down a little, something else came out, in the form of something that finally resembled poetry. I used it to let go of my harbored hurt: “Ephemeron”.

***

The last year of high school was the one where my classmates wanted to make memories. Selfies and group pictures were taken nearly constantly. I felt disconnected. It was a struggle between wanting to fit into a community and knowing that this community was not meant for me to fit into anyway. There were many pictures. For the most part, I wasn’t in the pictures: “IWITP“.

***

Outside of the math classroom was the balcony. The classroom was on the second floor. I stood there and looked down at the mostly-empty car park. A classmate of mine was standing next to me. “If I jumped from here, do you think I’d die?” I asked.

“Yes,” he responded. And maybe he told me something along the lines of “don’t do it”; but by that time I wasn’t listening anymore. God, I had questions. God, I needed answers.

Dear God, I began to write, as I sat in a teacher’s office perhaps a few minutes later. I did not want to be in school. I did not feel like doing life. What did all of this mean? What did God want from me?

With a backlog of homework, a bucketload of tears and a series of abysmal scores on tests, I found myself in the wardrobe room of my dorm some time later. It was small and cramped, and there were no chairs. My heart was extra-heavy and I plopped down on the floor. There was no one to talk to. No one but God. There, on the floor, at my lowest, I continued my letter to Him: “Dear God”.

***

I walked into the dining hall, went in line for my food and sat down at an empty table to eat. As I observed the woefully microcosmic world around me, I wondered when I’d become so comfortable with this phenomenon of eating alone. I watched others freshly out of the food line looking nervously around the hall for familiar faces that would welcome them to the hopefully empty seats at their tables. I genuinely wondered how come they weren’t as comfortable as I was with eating alone. Did they not see the liberation in it? What was all this anxiety about being seen as solitary in room full of people? Maybe the experiences that had forced me to be an hardened outsider had simply led me, after all these years, to become an expert in keeping myself company: “To Be.”

***

Every time I performed Solitaire, at least one person would ask me one of two questions:

1. How do you memorize all that?
2. Where can I find a recording of Solitaire?

The answer to the first question was: it’s easy. It follows a sequence, and it has moments of rhyme. If you know what a pack of cards looks like, Solitaire’s lyrics are easily crammed.

The answer to the second question was always: nowhere. (Until now.)

I present to you my spoken word project, Solitaire, on 19th December 2016.

-Akotowaa