From the June 2026 issue of Apollo.
Not many driftwood men become world famous, but these might have. I met them in the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, about an hour’s train ride up the coast from Copenhagen, when I turned a corner in the North Wing. Twenty-eight figures were standing on a platform, not going anywhere but about to, or maybe taking a short break from what was clearly a gruelling journey. Each was a piece of scarred and seaworn driftwood, plus a head; even without arms and legs, something about their postures, their huddling together in groups or boldly striking out, the different directions the heads were facing, meant the whole ensemble created the unforgettable sense of a community buffeted by history and fate. The wall text told me that these were Akua’s Surviving Children (1996), by the Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui.
He had been invited to Denmark for a residency commemorating the 200-year anniversary, in 1992, of Denmark’s abolition of the slave trade between Ghana (then the Gold Coast) and the Danish West Indies. He was working at Hammermøllen in Hellebæk, about 16km north of the Louisiana and not far from Hamlet’s Elsinore. Now a picturesque water mill and museum, Hammermøllen once made ‘Dane guns’, the low-quality muskets traded to African slavers, or sometimes manufactured in Africa from exported parts.
Walking along the coast, Anatsui found driftwood from Øresund, the strait separating Denmark from Sweden, which made him think of the victims of slavery who had been, in his words, ‘Torn from their land source into wild, hostile sea, tossed about, eventually returning to land with experiences of their ordeal.’ He walked for miles along the shore, collected more driftwood, scorched the pieces that would become the figures’ heads – burning is a cleansing ritual still in use against curses – and made the nails to attach the black heads in the same Hammermøllen foundry that had once made the guns that subjugated Africa.
An ‘Akua’s child’ (Akua’ba) is a wooden fertility doll inspired by a traditional Ghanaian story about a woman named Akua who couldn’t conceive until she was told to carry and care for a wooden doll as if it were her child. El Anatsui’s ‘Akua’s children’ – now grown; now a clan of survivors from the transatlantic slave trade washed up from the sea – were first shown at the Images of Africa festival in Copenhagen. Three decades later, they have returned to the coastline where they were found.
I had drifted to Denmark for the first time on my way back from a literature festival in the Faroe Islands, where I’d been invited because I am co-translating the great Faroese novel, Jens Pauli Heinesen’s Rekamaðurin. Told in a funny, vivid, gripping voice, the book is about a man on the literal fringes of Faroese society, neither a farmer nor a fisherman, who walks the shore collecting what comes from the sea. He thinks of himself as a traditionalist, but actually he rejects social norms and values and is mean to his family and to women in general, and just generally delusional and toxic. In what little that has been written about the book in English, it is called The Beachcomber – the dictionary definition of rekamaðurin – but this is a terrible title, suggesting hippies, straw hats and marijuana in Malibu, not the windswept North Atlantic and a man adrift in the world. I decided the book should be called The
Driftwood Man, and now it opens like this:
Not many driftwood men become world famous. They comb the beaches, searching and searching for driftwood, flotsam, sea creatures washed ashore, or anything else they might find, and they lie awake at night for fear that the greatest discovery of their life might drift back out to Aldans Fjord with the current and no one there to salvage it. Now take Columbus and his glorious claim to fame – was that really anything to write home about? It’s not like he could have missed bumping into America. Or what about Vasco da Gama, everyone knows Africa has to end somewhere, you just have to keep sailing long enough and know how to steer, what’s so impressive about getting around the southern tip and landing in Malabar? Yet there they are in the annals of world history, while the feats of the driftwood men, no matter how great, never reach such heights.
From the June 2026 issue of Apollo.
