Ghanaian poet and English language teacher with a deep passion for African literature. She co-won the Adinkra Poetry Prize in 2023, placed as second runner-up for the Abena Korantemaa Oral History Prize in 2020, and was shortlisted for the Samira Bawumia Literature Prize that same year.
Her poems and essays have appeared in Writers Space Africa-Ghana and the Journal of the Writers Project of Ghana. Estella is also the founder of Upstage Edutainment, an initiative that nurtures young talents and uses performance and literature to spark critical conversations in schools.
To them that bleach because life is not fair: – Ancestors Answer Me
They should pour libation. Solid, Solid Libation into the red-green grass stained by my blood/BLOOD is not thicker than a taboo/It happens to be a liquid door in the middle of an empty riverbank. /Let us call this river, Pra/Fear has strived meticulously to become the lonely pimple on my sister’s face/plus, she wonders if her menarche will be the end of her/minus, the hospitals on the other side of the river/surgeons of my soul! / Am I bleeding? Or I was BLEEDING! /Unclean girls, you say? cannot cross this river? /Period is unclean, period. /
This grief is so painful it doesn’t even have a name. Potomanto – A woman who has lost her daughter is called ………?
My sassy soul stands, my subtle spirit soars, watching as my mother shouts, swallowing her grief like fufu/She throws herself into the river /the river coughs her out /A taboo that is a taboo, is a taboo//The doctor that lives in my mind, sings halleluiah and hypermenorrhea interchangeably/I want my mother to stop crying and ask Kwame Nkrumah and all those legends who have died in their glory/why they are smirking proudly, breaking bottles with the galamsey people./
NB: Hot small-scale miners are in town, so Pra has bleached her skin yellow, and Ankobra is bronzing. We surely must drink millet porridge each morning and ask if yaanom are out of taboos.
