Saltwater Demands a Psalm

Kweku Abimbola’s stirring debut, Saltwater Demands a Psalm, draws on Adinkra, which are “proverb-laden symbols from the Akan and Gyaman peoples of Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire.” One such symbol, the Sankofa, reverberates throughout. A bird looks backward with an egg in its beak, embodying the proverb “[it] is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind. Go back and get it.”

This call guides Abimbola’s poetic enactment of an Akan naming ritual, endowing “soul names” in poems honoring seven Black Americans killed by police. The heart of these poems surfaces as he retrieves their stories: newly named “Sandra Annette Ama Bland” “belted up a storm” on the “globby mouthpiece” of a trombone in the Prairie View A&M Marching Panthers; “Freddie Carlos Kweku ‘Pepper’ Gray” “bought ice cream / for the whole block” of children at a “Mister Softee / ’round the corner.” Each poem ends with an impactful synthesis of concrete poetry and Adinkra: the poet shapes the Sankofa image out of the names of victims of police violence.

Abimbola’s storytelling enacts both lineage and lesson through these symbolic layers. “My mother and I are both spiders: arachnid / architects,” opens a poem titled with the Adinkra symbol for the proverb “he who does not know can know from learning.” The mother “kneads” the newborn’s “frontal and parietal bones”: “This is the first lesson / your baby must learn at your hands.” Elsewhere, in “Light-off,” as a father’s hands make shadow animals, another aspect of the speaker’s inheritance emerges:

I shriek and beg an encore,
but Daddy tucks the octopus,
hawk, and wise frog back
into the pouch of his hands.

I learn: this is how Daddy’s
hands hit so heavy, so many
creatures choked inside.

Rich in the tonal shifts of memory, encompassing both elegies and odes to “Stank face,” DJs, and “my durag,” the collection erupts in celebration in a poem titled with the symbol for chief, which opens, “Black joy circles. / Black joy ellipses.” The poem’s whirlwind of movement concludes:

     They remind us that the body is a prism
     of rhythm, that the beat entering a black body

     cannot leave unchanged. Our songed suns
     make sculptures to time. See our animate shrines.

     See our lyrical bodies:
     time come, body time.