Two months ago, I celebrated my birthday with one of the most audacious things I’ve ever done: putting on what amounted to a private Akotowaa concert, within three days. In the middle of Asylum Down, on a rainy May night, while a noise-making ban was in place, several people gathered in an upstairs room in Palm Moments to hear me perform released and unreleased original poetry and music, accompanied by the incredible TSIE, and read excerpts from some of my prose projects. Partly because of how rushed it was, I designed the evening as a low-key production, and called it Draft Zero.
My legendary writer-friend Nana Darkoa Sakyiamah wrote of the night:
Halfway through the night I found myself thinking, “Wow. This is audacious. Imagine curating a two hour set and inviting your friends to witness your brilliance. I could never.” But why couldn’t I? And more importantly, why can’t you? If you’ve been putting in the work, writing quietly over the years, recording songs, poetry, making art - let your work shine. Show it to the world.
That’s how I know I did achieve my Draft Zero goals. I may have been working a little too quietly over the years. Shying away from the light when I should have been the light; shrinking myself when I should have been standing up for myself; hiding from eyes when I should have been building an audience. There are pains that have been compounding within me since childhood and which have manifested as various shackles in adulthood. I decided this year that I would like to start getting rid of them and therefore bestowed the theme #YearFree onto my 2026—a significant contrast to 2025’s #GorillaYear.
In believe I have a more acute case of shame sensitivity than anyone else I know, while somehow masking it convincingly. I hide from the world more than others can tell, sitting on my talents, my stories, my privilege, my future. Draft Zero was the beginning of the end of that. It was the freest thing I’ve done this year.
It was also the first artist event I have ever initiated and executed by myself. Every poetry/literary/musical performance I have ever done, prior to Draft Zero, was at somebody else’s request. A head girl in high school. An older poet with a more established career. A festival organizer. A colleague with high levels of initiative. Never Akotowaa herself.
I’ve always been a writer, but putting things down on pages and publishing them online doesn’t count as putting on events. I barely know how to market myself. Throughout my career, enough opportunities have arisen for me that I’ve never felt pressed to make them happen for myself. The unfortunate side-effects of such a history include laziness, complacency, entitlement and fear. I was afraid that putting on my own event was a little too audacious. Who was I to demand a live audience for art that I’d hidden way in some cases for almost a decade?
I chose audacity anyway, because, #YearFree🪽.
My birthday—and therefore the Draft Zero concert—fell on a Friday. Three days earlier, on Tuesday, I was working remotely from the Asylum Down branch of Palm Moments. At the time, I had no concrete birthday plans and was on the verge of a significant transition. Furthermore, a medical emergency the week prior had me thinking of mortality and finitude more than usual. It deepened the significance of the #YearFree theme and pushed me to at least explore the idea that had occurred to me in whispers refused to leave me alone.
I found my way into a surprisingly easy discussion with Tasia, queen of Palm Moments, and before long, I had a potential venue for a last-minute birthday concert. I returned to my seat and reached out to TSIE, one of Ghana’s greatest musicians (don’t sleep on him or on Lagos in Paris, please) and a man with whom I have had the pleasure of being friends with for several years.
Honestly, I expected him to turn down my haphazard proposal, not in the least because of the ridiculous time-crunch. Even if he was interested, we had barely 3 days to prepare. He didn’t know my set list, and frankly, neither did I. But thank God for creative friends who can match your crazy.
Rehearsals after work with TSIE in his studio on Wednesday and Thursday night were some of the most enjoyable, most comfortable moments of connection I’d experienced all year. His easygoing personality was a welcome contrast to my high-strung anxiety. His creative instincts, vastly different from mine, made the process of teaching him how to accompany me on my compositions quite an experience for both of us. Those moments, for me, were precious and liberating.
In the meantime, I was working through another of my fears: the fear of singing in public.
I was about halfway through high school when I got signed to a nascent record label as the only poet/spoken word artist among singers and music producers. The joy of belonging to a squad of some of the coolest creators in Accra soon went to war with the discomfort of being the odd one out, as the only non-musician… which is silly, because I’ve been a musician longer than I’ve been an author. Ironically, my identity as a musician is something I only began to deny after I got signed to a record label.
I began classical training in piano at age 3. I can sight-read, I excelled academically in musical theory throughout primary school, had begun teaching myself acoustic guitar as a pre-teen. I’d been composing songs since age 7, whereas I only started composing stories at age 10. I’m not tone-deaf. I can hold a note and instinctively understand basic harmony. A listener does not feel the urge to run screaming when they hear my voice. Singing is certainly not where the best of my natural talent lies, but that is not the same as being legitimately bad at it. But there was something about being surrounded by people with spectacular singing voices that made me feel dismissed—in addition to some offhanded comments and decisions the folks at the label made, even if they all lacked malicious intent.
At the same time, there was something about being surrounded by musical talent that continuously renewed my own musical creativity. While a member of the label, I became simultaneously the most insecure about my musical craft and the most emboldened to experiment with it. Composition-wise, I was the most prolific I’ve ever been. Yet the fear of singing in public deepened. Leave that, I always told myself, to Real Singers™️. I was just a writer who should stick to the page as much as possible, and when on stage, stick to performing poetry.
The fear and its associated narratives followed me from 2015 through 2024, when I entered a Black Girls Glow Koshka Sound Residency cohort. Again, I identified myself as the only non-singer in a cohort of sound artists. If you listen to our collaborative album, Don’t Lose It, you might notice how, except for the first song, all of my vocal contributions to the album involve either speaking or rapping.
The truth is, the narrative that that I can’t sing and shouldn’t sing in public has always been a part of a coping strategy to deal with my acute shame sensitivity. Whenever I composed melodies or harmonies, it was for other people to sing. There were compositions I had been sitting on since 2017, which never had a chance to come out before the record label I’d been signed to folded, and which I’d never performed independently because… who would sing the sing-y parts? My 2023 single, Heroes, was one of such compositions. (In that instance, two of my favorite musicians, KiKie and Tommy WÁ, sang the sing-y parts for me.) During Draft Zero, I sang them all myself. Better singers would, obviously, have sang them better. But when I did it, on my birthday? I was breaking my own chains. That night, I performed many of my old compositions to an audience for the first time.
There is hardly a better time to center yourself—especially concerning things you may not necessarily excel at—than your birthday. There is also hardly a better time to gather an audience of people who may be friends with you, like you, or know of you, but may not necessarily be your fans. I’m glad I seized the opportunity.
It probably helped that I kept the event free, chose to bear the costs of sound setup, food and drinks for guests, and the preservation of my honor by making sure TSIE did not lend me his time and talent completely without compensation. Thankfully, I was cushioned by contributions from friends and family, but I’ll tell you, my personal finance spreadsheets for May 2026 are still kind of nauseating. Nevertheless, what I got was worth the cost.
The rainy season in Accra is often not as bad in May as it is in June, but even so, I am doubly grateful to everyone who braved the weather on my birthday to come and celebrate with me when they could have been anywhere else—especially given that they’d received their invitations anywhere between a few hours to a couple of days before the event itself. Given the circumstances, I don’t blame anyone who wasn’t able to honor the invitation.
Maybe one day I’ll graduate into planning things well ahead of time. For now, though, let it be known that somewhere around 22nd May 2026, #YearFree began in earnest for me. In small ways, I am learning to release many of the shackles, much of the shame and the fear that hold me back from realizing my own potential. I am more fully releasing my creative persona, shining more light on the artist who finds shadows safer, reducing my reliance on other people to make my creativity public, and maybe, dusting off more of the hidden treasures buried in my archives. Selah! 🕸️
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