THE
EDUMFA LIBRARY
The
Private Library of Kwesi Kay, Poet, Playwright, Theatre Practitioner
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THE
EDUMFA LIBRARY |
The
Private Library of Kwesi Kay, Poet, Playwright, Theatre Practitioner |
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| THE KWESI KAY PROJECT | ||
| THE PLAYS | ||||
The
Plays of Kwesi Kay are first and foremost
targettted at an African audience. He has very often tended towards the
well-made play since he came under the influence of Greek playwrights,
such as Euripides and Sophocles and the European playwrights, such as
Racine, Molière and William Shakespeare. Most of his early plays
were experimental, exploring different styles in an attempt to achieve
his own distinctive style. The first inkling that he might be able to
achieve this was exemplified in his second play, Maama, a short play set
in an African village, dealing with the changing and evolving cultures
of the Ghanaian society as it struggles to marry native traditions and
European culture imposed by colonialism and imperialism. His first play,
The Treasure Chamber, certainly showed in its first draft a lot of influence
from the Western films of Hollywood but the final draft had shed a lot
of the swagger and introduced a lot more African and Arabian philosophical
mysteries by the time it came to be published. |
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| THE NOVELS | ||||
There is at present only one novel of Kwesi Kay which is ready for publication, and that is "African Tango". The vividness and power of the novel has led those who have read the draft to assume that the play is either autobiographical or semi-autobiographical. The characters are drawn from people that the Author has met in various walks of life but the novel is certainly not an autobiography in any form. His current project "The Edumfa Chronicles", which records the life and times of three generations of a Ghanaian patrician family certainly will relate to some part of the Author's own life and genealogy but once again the volumes are infused with social and political history of the Gold Coast's journey into Ghana, as we know it today. There is a lot of issues about the condition of the African that the Author would like to pursue in both his novels and plays but he is also very much aware that these can only be fully realised in the context of an ever diminishing world where the gap between the have and the have-nots continues to grow wider. |
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| THE POEMS | ||||
Kwesi
began writing poems at an early age and
his first two poems, "Muse of Africa" and "Africa My Land"
showed not only a lot of promise but a maturity above his years. Muse
of Africa was written to the rhythm of the drumbeat and it is only to
be regretted that the poem has not survived but a fragment will give the
reader a sense of what the young Poet was capable in his teens. One of
the factors not taken into account in assessing the works of writers like
Kwesi Kay and his generation was that English was not their mother tongue
and in fact the young Kay did not begin to learn English until he was
ten years old, due to the quirks of the Gold Coast education under British
Colonial administration. Furthermore, in those days, the only time that
the native African spoke English at all was in the classroom since outside
the classroom he had no reason to talk to his mates or family in English. |
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Kwesi
can not explain why he stopped writing poems in the late seventies. He
had been a very successful contributor to the BBC World Service who described
his poem "Sanctuary" as one of the best poems that the Corporation
had aired on the waves. His love of the English language and his strict
Biblical upbringing certainly contributed to his creative output and it
is possible that family responsibilities may have left him with little
time to pursue his creative talent for some considerable time. |
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| Novel Section | ||||
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