AFUA
ANSONG 

SANKOFA- “go back for it”/return for it” In the naming of things after things you are named after no one; not the red-eyed crab or the shooting gun. Your sister carries her ancestors' names the way a fighter carries praise for war. She is named after the living and the dead. She is the afterlife and you are the present. When she raises her lower lip so high it almost touches her nose, you see your grandmother and your aunt and her. Others see it too and say how you don’t take her face but how you stole the ears and chin of your mother. At least your large forehead belongs to you or was it a gift of excess clay? You were not even named after a tree giving solace to the sacrificial goat. So how would they know where to return you when the thing that loves you calls you home? Written by Afua Ansong Video by Hanspiere

Viewpoints is The Watermill Center’s year-round conversation series, granting artists and art enthusiasts the opportunity to gather and discuss creative themes vital to the contemporary moment. Hosted at both its East End campus and online, Viewpoints engages with the community through intriguing dialogue, artist talks, and lectures that span across disciplines. Afua Ansong is Ghanaian American writer, artist, and scholar. Her work interrogates the challenges of the African immigrant in the United States, exploring themes of transition, citizenship, and blackness. She recently completed her MFA in Creative Writing & Literature at Stony Brook University, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Rhode Island. Her chapbook American Mercy is with Finishing Line Press and her other works can be seen in Prairie Schooner, Frontier, Newfound and elsewhere. Afua was a 2019 Artist-in-Residence at The Watermill Center. Rashaun J. Allen is an Instructor of English at Westchester Community College, who was also the first Fulbright scholar in SUNY Stony Brook’s MFA in Creative Writing & Literature program history. A Vermont Studio Center and Arts, Letters, and Numbers residency recipient whose three independently published poetry chapbooks: A Walk Through Brooklyn, In The Moment, and The Blues Cry For A Revolution became Amazon Kindle Best Sellers in African American Poetry. He was a Finalist for the 2021 Zone 3 Press Creative Nonfiction Award and longlisted for the 2020 Dzanc Diverse Voice Prize. He has been a 2019 Tupelo Press 30/30 Project Poet, nominated for Sundress Publication’s 2018 Best of the Net Anthology in Creative Non-Fiction and was a 2017 Steinberg Essay Contest Finalist in Fourth Genre. His writing has appeared in The University of Hell Press’ 2020* The Year of the Asterisk: American Essays, TSR: The Southampton Review, Tishman Review, Rigorous, Auburn Avenue, Poui and River Styx. Streamed December 1, 2021