Wow Blog! The Abeng and My Conscious Pen

There is no bet­ter feel­ing, in my expe­ri­ence than that which occurs when cre­atives truly vibe.

When you get into that push/pull–that gravity–which demands at all cost pro­duc­tion, and dare I say repro­duc­tion, you rec­og­nize some­thing of the divine at work (and play) and you feel in very good company.

This is the way it has been with writer and all-around cre­ative Kaya Omod­ele and his online plat­form The Abeng and My Con­scious Pen.

It might all make sense when you rea­son that Omod­ele, his mid­dle name is Yoruba for the “the son rises” and that peo­ple with the name Omod­ele have been called to “a deep inner desire to express their own power in a con­crete man­ner and thus achieve some­thing great for human­ity.”  Kaya has made me a believer.

His view of a Caribbean expe­ri­ence and peo­ple is exhaus­tive. His pen an explo­ration through prose, poetry and pos­i­tive rea­son­ings.  When I read his Spo­ken Word Griot Series or his His Mother to Son mis­sives or his recent Salute to Eman­ci­pa­tion Day,  or even and espe­cially the spell­bind­ing Seek­ing Makeda: Jour­ney… I know that there is a mind and heart at work, pre­oc­cu­pied with right­eous move­ments and I in turn feel led and inspired to Sound the Abeng!

I’ve been read­ing Edwidge Dan­ti­cat vora­ciously over the past weeks.  I have been aware of Kaya Omodele’s con­scious pen for quite some time, but when I actu­ally began read­ing The Abeng like devo­tion­als, I was also read­ing Danticat’s Cre­ate Dan­ger­ously: The Immi­grant Artist At Work.  Where the two–Danticat and Omodele–met and merged for me was in the following:

“The immi­grant artist shares with all other artists the desire to inter­pret and pos­si­bly remake his or her own world.  So though we may not be cre­at­ing dan­ger­ously as our forebears–though we are nor risk­ing tor­ture, beating,execution, though exile does not threaten us into per­pet­ual silence–still, while we are at work bod­ies are lit­ter­ing the streets somewhere.”

Kaya’s keen aware­ness of the con­tri­bu­tion his con­scious pen can make in the eman­ci­pa­tion of a peo­ple, and even his writer’s self, is appar­ent in his writ­ings and con­ver­sa­tion. He is a seeker, but he has a knowl­edge and experience-base that pricks ears.  The impres­sion is that you must hear him and you must lis­ten! And I can hear, as quiet as he can be, there is the under­cur­rent.  Time alone will tell where that leads.  So, it is at this fork in the road, where we all have the oppor­tu­nity and all rights to “remake” our “own world,” that we found our­selves caught out there, med­i­tat­ing on the pos­si­bil­i­ties of col­lab­o­ra­tion in the form of a reg­u­lar col­umn on DASHEEN.

I absolutely count that a priv­i­lege.  This jour­ney across words and lives lived is noth­ing if not eye-opening and brim­ming with oppor­tu­ni­ties.  How­ever, before I even get ahead of myself, I want to relay his responses to some piv­otal questions:

1. What is your ulti­mate goal/desire with your con­scious pen? What would you ulti­mately like to achieve there?

Well, I began with the goal of hav­ing a plat­form to pub­lish my books. I still see it as such, but also I real­ize that com­mu­nity can be achieved so that ulti­mately I want to cul­ti­vate community-oriented, inte­grated media.

2. What would you like to publish?

Def­i­nitely work that expresses the resilience of the human condition.

3. What does this mean for your community?

I think I should define com­mu­nity as it per­tains to The Abeng…I mean the African dias­pora. What it would ulti­mately mean is that peo­ple of African descent would learn about each other and hope­fully under­stand how rich our cul­ture is, how much it has influ­enced the world. I am con­fi­dent that this will trans­late into more over­stand­ing that will enrich the human expe­ri­ence, bridge divi­sions and petty trib­alisms. Our sense of human­ity must prevail!

4. So how has cul­ture fed your imag­i­na­tion Kaya?

I think cul­ture IS…Our cul­ture is at once his­toric and dynamic. It is so rich in Liv­ity that in my com­mu­nity cul­ture could not be dis­re­garded. It more than soaked the social fab­ric. And much of our cul­ture has been passed down through gen­er­a­tions. This fuels my desire to dream, to write, to Live, to carry on. I know who I am as a per­son, who we are as peo­ple. And this sparks con­fi­dence to aspire and dream and inves­ti­gate and learn and create.

Dan­ti­cat con­tin­ues in Cre­ate Dan­ger­ously: “Albert Camus once wrote that a person’s cre­ative work is noth­ing but  a slow trek to redis­cover, through the detours of art, those  two or three images in whose pres­ence his or her heart first opened.”

I can tell you that Kaya Omod­ele is on a very con­scious jour­ney through his art and life, and he is writ­ing it, here and there, as he goes.

Wel­come to the DASHEEN fam­ily Kaya Omod­ele, I am look­ing for­ward to read­ing you and meet­ing the man behind the pen. Bless!

ABOUT THE WRITER

Hi there, I’m Tynisha Leon, founder and Editor-in-Chief of DASHEEN mag­a­zine — the online des­ti­na­tion where cul­ture feeds imag­i­na­tion! I am a cul­tural war­rior first and fore­most; and for me that sim­ply means that I am a light bearer for all things intrin­si­cally cul­tural and Caribbean. If you seek to inno­vate, pro­mote and/or con­tribute to posi­tioning a Caribbean peo­ple and gen­er­a­tion most pos­i­tively then link me! Bless!

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