A Caine trip to Ghana for 12 writers who finally found themselves

In April, 2015, I was invited to the Caine Workshop in Elmina, Ghana. Elmina hosts Elmina Castle, a prominent orange-yellow building that overlooks a bustling town with narrow streets and wide markets which sell everything from dried hibiscus flowers to toys, to forex. Inside Elmina Castle, enslaved Africans forgot themselves. They were confined to tiny cells without light, given spare rations and continuously whipped. They would stay inside for as long as three months, and when a ship came, they would trail out. In their hasty steps, they would let go of their ethnicity, their name, their language, their songs, their memories, every love they had ever held onto; they would sail waiting to be given a new language and new names.

So it was quite uncanny that it was at Elmina that 12 African writers gathered to ‘find themselves’. That privilege we had scared me at night as I struggled with my story, because I kept wondering about all those slaves who never got to tell their stories.

The story I chose to write was titled Princess Sailendra of Malindi. It spoke of a drug-addicted, homeless girl in Malindi, who wanders about the beaches of Malindi, telling everyone she meets that she is an actual princess. The story needed The Coconut Grove Hotel in Elmina, Ghana. Why? Because of its perfect beaches, which I would walk on in the morning, and at times stumble upon a shell. Or the fact that at dawn, I would just sit by and watch fishermen pull in their catch of the night. Elmina gave me the stillness necessary to reach this drug-addicted girl and to tell her story with honesty and truth.

We were not just writing stories, however, but we were critiquing each other’s stories. We would meet in the evening with our incomplete stories printed out. A writer would read his piece and we would listen, then give feedback. We were sincere and forthright. We bothered about sentence syntax and the sincerity of dialogues. But we also uncovered deeper lessons.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING PRACTICAL

For example, Akwaeke Emezi, a brilliant Nigerian writer, told us about the importance of being practical as a writer, which means accepting your inability to control anything else in the writing industry apart from your writing. That to bother about winning award or prize XYZ is wasting energy, which can be spent writing your current story to the best of its ability. I also learnt that story ideas, once discussed, get owned by everyone, and expand and become larger than the writer himself. At the workshop, we expanded our individual stories, making them even more complex.

Surprisingly, the stories we told were beyond the usual staples of war and poverty. We wrote about lizards distracting African pilots on the plane, and about lonely women being seduced by their cats. This signified that Africans now wanted bigger stories, beyond what they were previously allowed. There was this desire to test and push the possibilities of being an African in the continent, and to reach for stories that were once considered beyond our scope.

Then there was the greater sense that our writing had finally rewarded us. We were at Coconut Grove hotel because we had decided to commit our lives to telling stories. It is strange — that feeling — where your writing rewards you, just because you chose to trust it.

Or maybe it was the food. Ghanaian food is spicier than Kenyan food. Kenkey, a form of fermented ugali, I could handle. Kenkey with red pepper fish. Kenkey transformed my body and my ideas. I felt dislocated from who I had always been. I was removed from the familiar, but even more strange I trusted this new unfamiliar because it meant meeting new people, making new networks, finding new voices. Almost as if I was meant to push aside all that was me, in order to finally become a writer and create meaningful work.

So, I came to the Caine Workshop to search for stillness that I had only found in bits and pieces before; 30 minutes before taking tea in the morning, on my phone while stuck in traffic, sitting up at night to type away on my laptop. I treasured these seconds and minutes that I piled up. I used them as tokens of time which allowed me to finish the manuscript for a novel.

But I found more than stillness. I learnt that the idea of an ‘escape workshop’ is to remind you that creative energies exist independent of yourself, and they are constantly seeking for other similar creative energies. When these energies meet, they become bigger than the sum of all the artist involved. So to trust your writing is to find your voice; it is to find your belonging in this world; it is to say I am here. Standing in the centre of that belief brings along so many chances of escape into a world that is ruled to by a creative force. Because at the end of it all, what better thing it is, than to just say; I have been here in this world; I have seen it with my own eyes; I have met these emotions; I have loved this way; I have seen this kind of hate; this is the story that I want to share.

Kiprop Kimutai was the second runner’s up for the Kwani? Manuscript Project for his story The Water Spirits.