Poetry and Infrastructure: Kojo Gyinaye Kyei & Hannah Schreckenbach's No Time to Die

• In Event: African Sexualities and Textual Practice

Description for Program

This talk examines the intersection of poetry and infrastructure through the mobile space of Ghana’s tro-tros (mid-sized vans), as explored by the Ghanaian poet Kojo Gyinaye Kyei and German architect Hannah Schreckenbach. Drawing on their ekphrastic exercise of creating poems about slogans and inscriptions on tro-tros, I argue that their work shows these moving vehicles serve as both poetic surfaces and cultural signifiers, offering insight into a society in flux.

Departing from Western-centric lyric traditions, this analysis highlights how poetry emerges in unconventional forms, challenging theories that privilege static or isolated textuality. By focusing on the materiality of infrastructure—here, the tro-tros—as a site for poetic production, I explore how No Time To Die highlights the dynamic, mobile nature of these vehicles, and reflects and responds to the cultural, artistic, and transnational dimensions of Ghanaian life and transnational engagement.

This paper situates tro-tros within an interdisciplinary conversation, proposing that Kyei's poetry, when tied to physical infrastructure and local infrastructure, embodies a tangible, community-centered medium that captures local and transnational experiences and aspirations. In doing so, this talk highlights how infrastructural poetic forms can foster new ways of understanding poetry’s role in societies undergoing transformation.

Author

• Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu, Washington University in St. Louis