Abena Busia
Abena Pokua Adompim Busia (born 1953) is a Ghanaian writer, poet, feminist, lecturer and diplomat. She is a daughter of former Prime Minister of Ghana Kofi Abrefa Busia, and is the sister of actress Akosua Busia. Busia is an associate professor of Literature in English, and of women's and gender studies at Rutgers University. She is Ghana's ambassador to Brazil, appointed in 2017, with accreditation to the other 12 republics of South America.
Quotes
[edit]"Interview with Abena Busia" (2015)
[edit]Interview with Abena Busia (2015) by RUcore: Rutgers University Community Repository retrieved 29 July 2022
- I came to the United States of America conscious of my African-ness, conscious of my blackness, I became conscious of women studies and became a feminist.
- A lot of work is being done by feminist because we have to think about breaking the glass ceilings and think about if the systems we have been living under will work for us what is different what to do.
- Thinking through what makes a leader, how do you communicate and how do you organize yourself.
- What makes a leader different is the different communication styles respecting different forms of leadership.
- Historically leadership and the concept has always been the top down one most of us who do leadership training we do the bottom up leadership you don't impose structure you figure out organically who the people are.
"Interview with Abena Busia" (2016)
[edit][1] (2016) by Women learning partnership: Interview on family law reform.
- The idea of family however conceived is at the root of old family structure and we leave in a world were those family structure are in the end the basis of the legal, religious,social and state laws under which we live.
- New family law can end violence against women.
- Violence is both visible and invisible.
"Extract from Liberation by Abena Busia"
[edit]- Dreamers remember their dreams when they are disturbed;And you shall not escape what we will make of the broken pieces of our lives.
- You cannot know how long we cried until we laughed over the broken pieces of our dreams.
- We are all mothers,and we have that fire within us,of powerful womenwhose spirits are so angry, we can laugh beauty into life and still make you taste the salty tears of our knowledge.
- For we are not tortured anymore;
we have seen beyond your lies and disguises, and we have mastered the language of words, we have mastered speech and know we have also seen ourselves raw and naked piece by piece until our flesh lies flayed with blood on our own hands.
- What terrible thing can you do us which we have not done to ourselves? What can you tell us which we didn’t deceive ourselves with long time ago?
- Hello everybody and thank you for joining us, wherever in the world you’re joining us from. My name is Abena Busia. I am a Ghanaian, very proud to be so, a Ghanaian writer and poet, and currently Ghana’s ambassador to Brazil. I am very, very honoured today, however, to be part of this festival and to interview a friend of mine, an extraordinary woman herself who today is best known for co-winning the 2019 Booker Prize with her eighth book, Girl,Woman, Other, making her the first Black woman to win it. But for some of us, her reputation preceded that.
- For some of us, she is a person who is a trailblazer and a visionary who has helped put Black women writers – particularly those writing out of Britain – on the map. She is visionary, she is feisty, and she has an acute sense of the politics of being and the politics of representation. Yet in all of that, her wit and her wisdom have brought to consciousness the place of those of us Black people of African descent growing up in England – the way we negotiate our identities, the way we negotiate the politics of space, the way we interact intergenerationally and between ourselves [which] has been, for some of us, the food of life.
- Her first non-fiction book, Manifesto, on never giving up, is to be published next month. And she has taken that wit and wisdom so many places, including, most crucially, the academy, where today she is professor of creative writing at Brunel University in London and vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature.
- Yes, and we will come back to that and the matter of your hidden histories. But I now want to ask a question about something that not many people think and talk about. And that is, what is a catholic grasp, if you like, of the place of Black writers in British society? I had the privilege of hearing you speak, five years ago, at [the] African Literature Association conference in Germany and I remember being struck by your keynote speech, about the way you could so clearly map the progress of Black writing, the recognition of Black writing and the issues that Black writers had taken on in the public space: naming the challenges and difficulties you face in the sense of not just what you wrote but that you wrote at all, that you existed at all. And I was wondering if you could share a little bit of that activist part of the collectivity before we return to the question of your personal creativity.
- Well, you did it very well, I must confess . You do succeed in bringing us along. To the point where I am about to send your novel to somebody facing that dilemma. Because it’s not easy on either side. And to be honest, yours was the first thing I read that made it so clear how difficult it was, but at the same time humanised the process both from the point of view of the person transitioning as well as the point of view of the people receiving them. Her grandmother’s responses, the point where her grandmother says, “Look, love, I was born in the 1920s” or whatever it was, you know, “You do your thing but it’s too late for me, I’m a hundred, take it or leave it!” (APAB and BElaughing) “I love you anyway, you can come to the farm but that... I’ve got other things to fight!” Which was also very [much] to the point. Her grandmother had had different things to negotiate, generations of displacement, fatherlessness or in her case, a father who didn’t get it, and looking for her daughter for seventy years. So, again, the complexity of the stories that get bound up in this vision of “This is who we are and need to understand”.
- There are a couple of people who have identified themselves [in the chat], including the person who invited us both here, Amina Mama, and I just want to read what Amina says because I think it’s important and it emphasises what you said when you introduced yourself and your origins. Amina has put up on the platform that she grew up between Nigeria and London, so the exactness of your portrayals hits her very deeply. And it is true that there was only Buchi Emecheta in those days, and [she’s] celebrating the fact that our daughters and mothers have you to read. So that was her comment.
- It’s interesting though. I had a similar experience very, very recently. I am working on an epic poem, in fact, of Black women all over the place, the spirit of a Black woman from what is now Ghana who is following her lost daughters in all these spaces and through time. And I was so excited to discover that book about Black Tudors, Black people in Tudor England.1 What excited me was looking at the timeline. I grew up in this little English country village outside Oxford which was part of the divorce settlement between Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves ... (laughs)... documented! And I found enough material in this book on Black Tudors to decide that one of my little daughters is going to get lost in Standlake in Anne of Cleves’ manor house!
- Yes, it is liberating and so wonderful to find the historians supporting our imaginative lives.
- Always, always, always uplifting to see and hear you, Bernardine. It matters to some of us that you are out there in the world, so keep on your journey, and thank you so much.
- Thank you! That’s a wonderful concluding statement. As always, moti-vating us to be inspirational and think about our own lives. On that note, I would like to thank all of you who are out there in different parts of the world, those of you who are in this room, for being here. This has been a privilege.
- It was a good piece because it creates the atmosphere and the vision. Carole is very interesting, of course, because she is the woman of disguises. The woman who has a secret that she needs to [or] feels she needs to keep quiet about in order to negotiate. I love her mother who is like, “I am a Nigerian and so are you, and we’re not going to get past this, so let’s...” The scenes with her mother and the ways in which the mother helps her re-find herself by dealing with, who is the person that you’re going to marry. I will ask you now about the structure of this particular book and the multiple voices, the twelve different voices, all of whom are connected – some intimately, some tangentially.
- I am one of these obsessive people that find myself going back, going “Oh! Oh! Oh yes! That was that person’s classmate” and “Oh yes! It’s the same teacher.” Going through all of that and trying to understand. I wonder, what inspired you to create the book that way and what was the kernel that made you in a sense move out and flourish from?
- And that’s important. I do want us to turn to your own writing, but I have to acknowledge that it is characteristic of you not only that you have been an activist but that you always acknowledge the people that you’ve been working with, and the importance of a collective voice and solidarity has always been part of your work which some of us really appreciate. I’m going to extrapolate something from that, that may or may not be true, and that is: I see that collec-tivity actually in the structure of your novels.
