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My first Sunday evening with the Ghana Association of Writers took place way back in October 2012 and after blogging about it, I promised to be attending regularly and keep you guys updated. Unfortunately circumstances did not permit me to do so until yesterday when I attended the June event .
Ghana Association of Writers (GAW) Sunday is a Literary and Cultural Event by the GAW held every first Sunday of the month at PAWA House, Roman Ridge, Accra.
This time I attended the event with a dear friend of mine, Mrs. Charity Boateng who is also the head of the Languages department at the University where I work. The evening, which took off at 4.50 pm (that is quite late for an event that was to start at 4.00 pm; but this is quite normal in Ghana :-)) was in memory of the late Chinua Achebe, the trail blazer and icon of African Literature.
The audience was treated to poetry recitals by students and pupils from the Accra Girls Senior High School and Maamobi Prisons Primary and Junior High Schools respectively. There were also pupils from Jack and Jill School at Roman Ridge. That GAW provides the opportunity to the youth to showcase their talents is a laudable thing. Interestingly and in line with the theme, the students recited famous quotes from Achebe’s much acclaimed Things Fall Apart. I particularly liked the following:
- Procrastination is the lazy man’s apology
- If you don’t like my story, write your own
Kudos to these fine artistes in the making. There were also readings by some fine poets including Doris Kuwornu; the president of the GAW, Mr. Gyan Apenteng, and the award-winning Ghanaian journalist Kwaku Sekyi-Addo.
The highlight of the evening was a book launch. The Business Promoter, written by Lindsay Isaac Yaidoo, is as the title suggests a business book on micro finance.
An an elderly gentleman who works as the Metro Director of the Ghana Education Service, but whose name I could not quite make out, recited a haiku he had written in the seventies. 🙂 Oh yes! He started by explaining what a haiku is, giving the 5-7-5 formula and saying it was a Japanese form of poetry and then he went ahead and recited his haiku based on an old man. I was like wow! And the audience gave audible ‘oh’ when the gentleman finished reciting his words. They obviously wanted more. 🙂
Unfortunately I was not able to print any of my poems from the blog to read at the event due to power failure. Please don’t laugh but I don’t have any of my works committed to memory, not even the short Haiku so I could not read extempore. Never mind, I will have a better story to tell next month 🙂 especially if the elderly gentleman happens to be there. The two of us may just rock the place up 🙂
Reading Pleasure 