By Jakeob Anderson 

Over the past weeks, I have continually revisited Kobena Ampofo’s poem titled ‘This God Must Be Fed’, found in the second issue of LGBT+ Rights Ghana’s Pride Anthology. It has resonated with me since I first read it.  This is partly because it is a unique take on a sonnet and also because it explores themes that have been the subject of my waking thoughts. Thus, I have turned it over in my mind many times, contemplating its gravity and how it is a fitting poem for the anthology. 

The Initiation

Before you arrive at the sonnet proper, you are greeted with an epitaph, the scripture John 1:1–2, as if to say this is where all our problems begin—the word, or God, or religion. And then we enter the sonnet proper, and Kobena exposes,

With

God the Father, as God

God the Son, Godson, 

and God the Holy Spirit, the word

This God, this trinity, this community, his story, their story—a very queer one—is why we are here. They are the word, thought, definition, story. Whether or not we care to admit it, religion, the paramount of which is Christianity, is almost the primary bane of all queer existence. 

The poem posits a moral arbiter, a ‘God’, who determines all things and whose rules we must all follow.  Kobena’s title fittingly conveys that this entity “must be fed,” but by whom and with what? When Kobena expresses that this is the story “Of how one god swallowed all the rest,” I reckon that he’s drawing our attention to a troubling quandary.

Due to the elevation of Christian myth as the utmost truth, what has happened to our own myths, legends, religions, and gods? Has he not swallowed them all? And is that not how we arrived here? That for his supposed all-consuming cause, we are persecuted—we queer people?

The Turn

It is at this point that the sonnet turns :

As rain falls into the ocean,  

As moonlight glistens through droplets

As dolphins hunt sharks and

Whales sing in delirium

Be still

Be moved

Be touched

In these powerful lines, Kobena flips the script so aggressively as to inspire a dogged hope that in all the turbulence, beauty will shine through. As improbable as it seems, the queer body will win and the dolphin will hunt the shark. And as all this happens, let yourself be still, be moved, and be touched in all the ways you so desire.

In the last line of the poem, Kobena signs off on what is a most powerful question the reader should ask themself, “How will we tell our story?” In this line, he draws an incredible parallel with the lines, “Or the story/ Of how one god swallowed all the rest” (5-6), calling back the idea of how this one god has swallowed perhaps not just our other gods but us too. The implication here is that we are gods, and there is an incredible poetic dance occurring in this parallel. 

On one hand, this one god swallowed us, but that’s exactly the point; we are gods, so we also get to tell our story, determine where we go from here—whether we stay in the belly of the delirious whale or we bite back. And so he asks, “How will we tell our story?”