Cynthia Amoah to explore concepts of identity, lineage in Aminah Robinson residency

The first time Cynthia Amoah set foot inside Aminah Robinson’s East Side Columbus home on May 1, she took a quick tour to familiarize herself with the space, peeking inside the late artist’s second floor writing room and then quickly settling in the dining room, where she stayed for the bulk of her initial two-hour visit.

“And then yesterday, I spent time in the living room, looking at her bookshelf, trying to get some work done,” Amoah said in an early May interview at the home, which will serve as the poet’s part-time abode for the next three months as the Columbus Museum of Art’s most recent Aminah Robinson Writing Resident. “And today it’s in the studio. So, I think I’m just going to hop around, seeing what the different rooms are like and trying to make the space mine.”

Each resident I’ve interviewed over the last few years has taken a different approach to the space. Beverly Whiteside adopted a more hands-off approach, concentrating her work to the art studio in the rear of the home and leaving the rest of the space largely untouched. Richard “Duarte” Brown, in contrast, embraced the dwelling as though it were his own, telling me as his residency kicked off in January 2022 that a home should have “the clutter of life” and then moving to introduce exactly that as he filled the living room shelves with handmade knickknacks and stretched long fabric scrawls across tables in the dining room and the basement.

Amoah, for her part, sounded as though her approach might lean closer to the latter, the poet speaking about the potential of cooking in Robinson’s kitchen, where even the tiled floor is embedded with her creative handiwork.

“When Deidre [Hamlar, Director of the Aminah Robinson Legacy Project] first gave me the tour, I almost didn’t want to touch anything, because it felt so sacred,” Amoah said. “But I think my approach is more so wanting to commune with the space, because I need it. … I need to commune with the space in order to produce the work that needs to come through in this residency. So, cooking in the kitchen? I might, yeah.”

Coming in, Amoah said her plan is to create a larger poetry manuscript that explores concepts of lineage and identity, based heavily on conversations with her mother and her late grandmother, a Ghanaian who spoke virtually no English. “So, oftentimes my conversation with her was me trying to find my way through my native tongue, and her trying to find her way through English, and us connecting in that way,” said Amoah, who has preserved the memory of the these exchanges, which included both family stories and folk tales passed down by the elder about figures such as Anansi, a trickster from Ashanti mythology who can take the form of a spider.

Amoah’s mother, in turn, has shared with her daughter reams of wisdom, most recently advising her on “the cultural ways of wifehood or making a home,” said the poet, who is set to marry next month. Amoah’s mother has also relayed her experiences growing up with parents who didn’t speak the country’s language, and the sense of respite she found in academia and to which the poet has also found herself drawn. 

“Even when the world outside her looked chaotic and loud, my mom always leaned into wanting to learn things,” said Amoah, who is taking a similar approach with this residency, embracing Robinson’s home as a place of calm in a life that is currently anything but. “With the chaos of everything happening in my other world, this has been such a refreshing and welcoming space for me to just stop and breathe.”

As a poet, Amoah has always been concerned first with how her verses resonate when read aloud – “I need to be convinced of the beauty of the sound of a poem before I can actually write it down,” she said in an August 2024 interview – and in touring Robinson’s home, she has given some consideration to the sonics offered by each room.

“And I haven’t read anything aloud here yet, but the orating or reading aloud of something is very much part of my process,” said the poet, who allowed that the house’s different pockets could elicit different feels and tones in the writing as it takes shape over these next two months. “And that’s why I’m spending so much time in each room now, because I want to see what the energy of each room feels like. Then when I’m writing, if I need a particular energy or motivation, I might have a better sense of which space can give me that.”

Amoah described this first month in the home as “a feeling out period,” during which she intends to research and read, giving a particular focus to Ghanaian poets such as Ama Ata Aidoo and Yaa Gyasi. She then plans to move into the residence full-time for the month of June, during which her intention is to write the bulk of this larger poetic work deeply rooted in identity and family, as well as in the ways the past can help to prepare us for the future.

It’s within this latter concept that Amoah feels most connected to Robinson, sharing how within Ghanaian culture there exist Adinkra symbols ascribed with different meanings, one of which, Sankofa, the late Columbus artist utilized in her own creative output. “Aminah worked with the symbol called Sankofa, and that’s to return to where you came from, so that you can know where you are going,” said Amoah, who within Robinson’s home believes she has found the seclusion needed for the seeds of this idea to reach full flower. “There’s something to be said about the quiet of this space and the focus of this space. And by immersing myself in that, I imagine it will help the work arrive to where it needs to be.”