A WALK IN MY LIBRARY:
PARIS, NOV. 6, 2020
ABËTËI by Ishmael Fiifi Annobil

LOOKING FOR COURAGE

Mark the moment. A sick feeling in the pit of the stomach comes from political upheaval. Waking in disbelief, Wednesday at dawn, again like the morning of Trump’s election in 2016, on the heels of the Brexit vote in the UK. Not like the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was still in NYC. Events we can’t absorb in real time, like Sept. 11.

This afternoon at my desk waiting for votes in Pennsylvania, my state before the art world and New York became home. Counties I remember names playing field hockey against their teams in Junior High School. Biden from Scranton. I am from Meadowbrook a northern suburb, known for Abingdon vs Schempp which took Bible reading out of public schools across the country in 1963, the Fall my mother took us to Jenkintown to watch JFK campaign.

Recently we watched mass rallies of Trump followers mask-less and closely packed together. Strange in light of record cases daily across the USA. Here, lock-down again across Europe we stay far from each other, faces covered dutifully protecting everyone… A disconnect between what we see and what we know, wider each day. I want to scream at the top of my lungs. A friend explains VPN so I watch MSNBC in real time and ballot counting in real time while my European clock carries on. What about the terrorism in Vienna, I ask, and weeks before here in France.

Flailing, trying to make sense of so many people voting for Trump. I feel surprised by my naive panic. A country divided. I wait for Biden to win, each ballot counted like gold. “We take voting and elections seriously”, brave public servants say into the cameras. Dutiful normal men and women sort, scan, move ballots from one tray into another. This is democracy. I am proud and humbled. Still terrified.

Part I

ABËTËI, Ishmael Fiifi Annobil

Tossing and turning around myself in these fraught days I reached out for this extraordinary volume of self-created emblems. I have spent more hours this week than usual looking for signs, that all would be well maybe, eventually. Reaching for this book and its teachings, which I share with you in small part here, is an attempt to connect with powerful forces for good, needed in large measure now. Ishmael sent me this book months ago, and it has been just an arm’s length from where I am sitting now, looking out the open window to a bright still sunny Paris afternoon.

On the inside cover he writes: “Apart from the sayings, Saa Damöshi, Akãko Nö, Ashiedu Këtëkrë (which is an extension of Ashiedu Këtëkrë, the Efutu nickname for the Ga people), Miñjaa Dzi Shigbeemö, Ana Të Anaaa Ñwë, and Wöböle Kutu Wökpe, (which are old sayings of the Gadangme people, at large), all proverbs, adages, sayings, dicta, aphorisms, maxims, and slogans in this monograph, and all their accompanying emblems, including those accompanying the said old sayings, were created by Ishmael Fiifi Annobil in 2004”

“You, somnambulist/with open palms/Are swatting the frippery of cares/And facing me, your broken mirror/With a half sentence/Of which I never knew/But will finish.” (From The Ark, Seven Horn Elegy by IFA.)

I reach out for these emblems because I wanted to believe there was still something of the goodness I don’t see around me here, in the connections we take from the invisible. Ishmael has conjured them here, these traces of ethics, wisdom and uncanny grace. His capacity to incarnate these thoughts and truths from his deepest personal history and those of his ancestors brings me a kind of peace today that I want to share, because I know I am not alone in my unsteady fear. I turn to these signs and short bursts of human incantation that reads like prayer.

Part II

ABËTËI, PREFACE

“Artists are wired to receive suprarational signal. It is a mind and spirit interface thing. We do not question that signal because our souls agree with it. In time, we learn to decipher it for the world, and thereby articulate the essence of human consciousness: totem. Cave paintings of all periods attest to this fact.

Except, in the case of emblem art, the deciphering process is particularly ‘demanding’. This is because an emblem is a fusion of visual and verbal factors in a dialectical relationship – abstract but eloquent, tangible but enigmatic, rarefied but functional, and high-minded but vernacular. Moreover, an emblem is never fictive because it is a philosophical entity; thus, it cannot abide formalism or the luxurious reticence of post-modernism.”

There is a story that needs telling here, the creation story for these emblems that relates to the lost language and designs of the GaDangme Kpamo emblems that once adorned gateways and canoes of old Accra and flew through the air in Annobil’s childhood……”with their surviving twin form, Abe Buu (Proverbialism). A unique oratorical form, characterized by electric repartee, allegory, metaphor, allusion, insinuation and wit. It imposes decorum and circumspection on GaDangme family or clan, assembly. It helps move things ‘behind closed doors, as it were. I was lucky enough to witness this expressionistic art throughout my childhood.”

Part III

It took the poet until 2004 to rise to the task of creating GaDangme emblems,

“Many of these emblems started life as doodles on paper, which I then replicated digitally as vector images, for the sake of structural integrity. In due course, I mustered the courage to realize pieces directly in the digital medium. I sealed myself away working fervently for fear of waking from the trance. Seven days and forty-four emblems later, I finally lifted my head. Why I stopped at forty-four I do not know but I suspect some kind of symbolic significance.”

The proverbs and adages underpinning the ABËTËI represent aspects of GaDangme cosmology, moral codes and credos, as I have understood them since my childhood. I have striven to uphold the ideals of spiritual and material dualism, hospitality, territorial and political restraint, social balance, tolerance, probity, the centrality of motherhood, and above all, the omnipotence of The Deity. I therefore feel confident enough to present this work to the GaDangme people, to all Ghanaians, to all Africans, to the African Diaspora, and to the world at large.”

All emblems and images by Ishmael Fiifi Annobil from “ABËTËI”, published in 2016 by Totem.