Ghanaian poet and spoken word artist, Ama Asantewa Diaka, popularly known as Poetra Asantewa’s will be releasing a new book titled ‘Woman, Eat Me Whole: Poems’ on April 5, 2022.
The book is a bold, mesmerizing debut collection exploring womanhood, the body, mental illness, and what it means to move between cultures
Renowned for her storytelling and spoken-word artistry, Ama Asantewa Diaka is also an exultant, fierce, and visceral poet whose work leaves a lasting impact.
Touching on themes from perceptions of beauty to the betrayals of the body, from what it means to give consent to how we grapple with demons internal and external, Woman, Eat Me Whole is an entirely fresh and powerful look at womanhood and personhood in a shifting world.
Speaking in an interview with Ghana Weekend TV, she said one of the reasons she wrote the book was that she was researching on women in the past and realised just a handful of them had been documented.
“It feels like in the past, no woman existed in Ghana. I mean, you can’t see women in our history books. If you ask people to mention one of the women before independence, the only name they will mention is Yaa Asantewa,” she said.
According to her, this prodded her to raise questions about these women of the past, the women of the present and the women of the future.
Moving between Ghana and the United States, Diaka probes those countries’ ever-changing cultural expectations and norms while investigating the dislocation and fragmentation of a body—and a mind—so often restless or ill at ease.
Watch Poetra’s interview with Ghana Weekend TV below:
