Poetra Asantewa, also known as Ama Asantewa Diaka, is a multifaceted Ghanaian performer who combines smooth-like-butter neo-soul beats, lyricism informed by pointed social critique, and heartfelt vocalisation to deliver spoken word pieces that speak to the circumstances of topics like migration, mental health, and self-acceptance. 

Upbringing

Poetra Asantewa is a creative powerhouse, writing to performing to creating and facilitating spaces for other women artists to explore and hone their practices. Asantewa comes from an artistic family who supported her as she leaned into her own crafts. "My parents are artists, and because the economy, or the country, isn't set up for artists, they had to find other ways to survive, but they are artistic people. My mother paints, my mother sews. There's absolutely nothing creative my mother can't do. My father writes. He has a writing project that, for him, is just a thing to do. He doesn't necessarily see it as writing, but he is actively writing", she tells AMAKA.  

From corporate to creative 

Growing up with the idea that Ghana was not particularly fertile ground for career artists, Asantewa wasn't in a position to believe that a livelihood could be made from her passion for storytelling. She completed her undergraduate degree in Business Information Systems while working a full-time job at an accounting software company. Though her studies seem a world away from her life path today, Asantewa approached her chosen degree with genuine interest and enthusiasm. "To be very honest, I have always kind of had an interest in manipulating things, so I guess that the whole concept of technology is something that has always drawn me in and continues to draw me in", she tells us.

Technology played a significant role in Asantewa's journey as an up-and-coming writer and spoken word artist when she started sharing her poetry on Facebook in 2010. She shares, "I was posting a lot of poems, and, at that time, I was really experimenting. I would see any prompt online and do it. I was writing so often; it was crazy. I guess just by posting, I'd garnered a lot of attention online, and people were interacting with the work." Asantewa then discovered Ehalakasa, an open mic night in Accra which provided a space for poets, singers and oral artists of all kinds to perform and share their work in a safe and comfortable setting. After attending the bi-monthly event a few times, Asantewa decided to take the stage herself. She says, "To be honest, it was a flop. I struggled to remember my lines. In fact, it took me a very long time to be able to memorise a poem perfectly, but that began the journey of my artistry as a stage performer and audio artist. Ehalakasa was the beginning of me sharing my art to an audience, a physical audience."

Asantewa's transition from the corporate world to the publishing industry came when a friend encouraged her to apply for FEMRITE (2013), a residency run by the Uganda Women Writers' Association. On a whim, Asantewa applied for Femrite and got accepted. Her experience here planted the seed of confidence to pursue writing full-time. After completing the residency, she returned to Ghana and applied for an editorial role at Glitz Africa Magazine, which solidified her career pivot. She relays, "During my time at Glitz, I was writing a lot. It was a full-time job. It was nine to five. Sometimes I worked in the office till 10:00 PM. It was gruelling. But I still managed to write a lot because I told myself, 'I am a writer now. If I have been able to be selected for a residency, I can write for anything.'" 

From Law to Music: Lindsey Abudei Is a Songstress Subverting Nigerian Career Norms

On diverse expression

As her writing career blossomed, Asantewa started performing regularly at open mic nights across Accra, recording her spoken word shows for release. Her first EP Motherfuckitude was released on Soundcloud in 2015, with a title inspired by words from American author and former advice-columnist Cheryl Strayed: “write like a motherfucker”. Asantewa reflects, “I remember so clearly thinking that I'm a new artist and I need to have a name for this EP that really introduces me to my existing audience and to my new audience as well. Just to say I know that I've been performing for five years and, finally, I’m here”. By releasing her EP Asantewa set a precedent for young writers, performers and poets across Ghana. Her presence was and still is impactful in the way it creates and contributes to visibility for aspiring Ghanaian, and African, artists. In Asantewa’s words, “the essence of motherfuckitude is to just fucking do it!” She reflects on spoken word as a difficult genre to garner an audience with in general, and especially at that time in Ghana. “Yes, there were a lot of poets. There have been poets before me, decades before me, but there were very few who had released a body of work and categorised themselves solely as a poet. So I was one of the first people to release a poetry EP in Ghana”. 

2016 was a pivotal year for Asantewa. In the aftermath of Motherfuckitude, she continued writing, performing and applying for opportunities until she was accepted into Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's creative writing workshop Purple Hibiscus Trust (formerly Farafina Trust), which provided her with a community of writers that she remains in touch with today. "Workshops and residencies are important for any writer or artist, regardless of what stage you are at because it affirms your right to call yourself what you think you are, as well as giving you more exposure, room for collaboration and a great network."

In the same year, on the recommendation of a stranger who had seen her work online, she applied and was accepted into the OneBeat residency program. This US-based initiative invites young musicians to discover new ways of thinking about how music and artistic expression can help us collectively build healthier communities. As Asantewa puts it, "You aren't just creating for yourself. You aren't just creating in a vacuum. There is a world outside of you that you should think of in creation". With the momentum of OneBeat and Adichie's writing workshop, Asantewa developed a deeper trust in her journey. "2016 was a big year for me. It really affirmed that there is a path for me as a writer. A path that I can put my faith into to develop both my life and my community." 

Community organising and visibility

Becoming a OneBeat fellow and alumna acted as a springboard for Asantewa to develop her own residency programme, passing on the knowledge she'd gained to a new generation of Ghanaian artists to develop their practices. She recalls, "OneBeat was intentional about guiding us to think about how we can then impact our communities back home. You are not your own. You don't just belong to you. You belong to a community. So how can you influence that community in the smallest way possible?". In tandem with her career as a writer, performer and recording artist, Asantewa became the founder and director of the NGO Black Girls Glow, which is described as "an initiative to foster collaborations among women artists and explore ways that art can build community." Founded in 2017, the organisation hosts an annual residency in Ghana. Speaking on the needs for the initiative, Asantewa comments, "There's an imbalance. I think this imbalance is worldwide, but particularly in Africa, there are more men portrayed in the arts than there are women portrayed. There's always this competition. Like there has to be only one woman on the throne, so to speak. And so I just thought, 'this is for the Black women, this is for the Africans, this is for the Ghanaian women."

During her Creative Writing master's program at the School of the Arts Institute in Chicago, which she began in 2017, Asantewa was tasked with creating a publication. Titled Tampered Press, it is a Ghanaian literary arts journal that's been running since 2018. She was inspired by the realisation that many, predominantly Western, publications were rejecting her submissions because they could not appreciate the cultural tone of her work. She says, "The only way we can recruit international audiences or international platforms is if we have nurtured a local. And I just knew that there had to be an existing platform for Ghanaian writers or African writers to show their work."

You Too Will Know Me and Woman, Eat Me Whole

Asantewa's first commercially published project is her chapbook You Too Will Know Me (2019), which was released under her pen name, Ama Asantewa Diaka, by Akashic Books in collaboration with the African Poetry Book Fund. In the early days of her journey to publishing her first manuscript, Asantewa applied, by recommendation, and was rejected by the African Poetry Book Fund. Yet, her determination overpowered her disappointment. She expresses, "I think those rejections kind of fired me up to keep going in for more, even if l had a list of rejections. So I just kept going." When Asantewa was recommended for a second time, she put the hurt of her first rejection aside and reapplied: "I named my book You Too Will Know Me because I told myself, you too will know about me because I've been here for a while, but now you will get to know me. And I got picked this time!"

Through her writing, Asantewa encapsulates the human experience in a beautifully honest and relatable way. When asked about the origins of her writing, Asantewa shares, "My writing started from home. I was nurtured as a reader. I fell in love with writing because I was always surrounded by books. I was always reading. It was part of my upbringing and my culture when I was young. My love of books created a world which I could enter. And just being in that world, I guess, triggered the need to also create other worlds, including mine and what I want to see."

Mary Akpa on Vulnerability, Self-Acceptance, and Self-Love

From Motherfuckitude to Stripped

Since her debut EP, Motherfuckitude, Asantewa has released two EPs, an album and several singles. Through frequent collaborations with Ghanaian Afrobeats producer NiiQuaye, Asantewa has experimented with different sonic worlds to underpin her heartfelt storytelling. Her most recent EP, Stripped, which was released in November 2021, strips back the soundscape of her most loved previously released tracks, allowing her vocal performance to take centre stage.  

Looking to the future

Asantewa's next big project, Woman Eat Me Whole, is summarised as "a bold, mesmerising debut collection exploring womanhood, the body, mental illness, and what it means to move between cultures" and will be available from the 5th of April 2022. Asantewa says she's using this release to explore Ghana's female history, saying, "It's almost as if there were no women in the universe in our past. And so, I was thinking about that intersection of women in the past, the present, and in the future, and that was what inspired me to start writing Woman Eat Me Whole".