LIT 420: MODERN
AFRICAN POETRY
Lecture IX
3/19/2024
KOFI AWOONOR
Poetry
E.Wanjau 2
Background
• Kofi Awoonor, poet/scholar/teacher/diplomat, original name George Kofi Awoonor
Williams, (born March 13, 1935, Weta, Gold Coast [now Ghana]
• He was a Ghanaian novelist and poet whose verse has been widely translated and
anthologized.
• After graduating (1960) from the University College of the Gold Coast (now the
University of Ghana, Legon), Awoonor studied at University College, London (M.A.,
1970), and the State University of New York at Stony Brook (Ph.D., 1972), where he
remained on the faculty until he returned to Ghana (1975) to teach at the University of
Cape Coast.
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Background Cnt’d…
• He also lectured in English and African literature at the University of Ghana, directed
the Ghana Film Corporation, founded the Ghana Playhouse, and served as an editor
of the literary journal Okyeame and as an associate editor of Transition.
• In the early 1970s he served as chairman of the department of comparative literature
at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
• He returned to Ghana in August 1975 to teach at the University College of Cape Coast.
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Background Cnt’d…
• In December of that year he was arrested on charges of harbouring an army officer
accused of attempting a government coup. He was found guilty, but his sentence was
remitted in October 1976, and he resumed teaching.
• He later served as Ghana's ambassador to Brazil (1984-88), Cuba (1988-90), and the
United Nations (1990-94).
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Literary Background
• Awoonor's volumes of poetry include:
• “Rediscovery and Other Poems” (1964),
• Night of My Blood (1971),
• Ride Me, Memory (1973),
• The House by the Sea (1978),
• and Latin American and Caribbean Notebook (1992).
• His collected poems (through 1985) were published in Until the Morning After (1987).
• A posthumous collection, The Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems, 1964-2013,
which included work unpublished at the time of his death, was released in 2014.
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Literary Background Cnt’d…
• Awoonor also wrote a novel, This Earth, My Brother (1971), and two short plays.
• His nonfiction work includes The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Culture, and
Literature of Africa South of the Sahara (1975),
• Comes the Voyager at Last: A Tale of Return to Africa (1992),
• The African Predicament (2006).
• Kofi Awoonor was killed in the September 2013 attack on the Westgate shopping mall
in Nairobi, Kenya.
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Literary Background Cnt’d…
• Awoonor sought to incorporate African vernacular traditions--notably the dirge song
tradition of the Ewe people--into modern poetic form.
• His major themes include:
• Christianity, exile, and death. These themes are enlarged from poem to poem by
repetition of key lines and phrases and by use of extended rhythms.
• Each poem in his collection, “Rediscovery and Other Poems” (1964), for example,
records a single moment in a larger pattern of recognition and rediscovery.
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AWOONOR’S
POEMS
E.Wanjau 9
Song Of Sorrow
Dzogbese Lisa has treated me thus I am on the world's extreme corner,
It has led me among the sharps of the I am not sitting in the row with the eminent
forest
But those who are lucky
Returning is not possible
Sit in the middle and forget
And going forward is a great difficulty
I am on the world's extreme corner
The affairs of this world are like the
chameleon faeces I can only go beyond and forget.
Into which I have stepped
When I clean it cannot go.
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Song Of Sorrow Cnt’d…
My people, I have been somewhere Something has happened to me
The things so great that I cannot weep;
If I turn here, the rain beats me
I have no sons to fire the gun when I die
If I turn there the sun burns me
And no daughter to wail when I close my mouth
The firewood of this world
I have wandered on the wilderness
Is for only those who can take heart
The great wilderness men call life
That is why not all can gather it.
The rain has beaten me,
The world is not good for anybody And the sharp stumps cut as keen as knives
But you are so happy with your fate; I shall go beyond and rest.
Alas! the travelers are back I have no kin and no brother,
All covered with debt.
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Song Of Sorrow Cnt’d…
And Kpeti's great household is no more, Agosu if you go tell them,
Only the broken fence stands; Tell Nyidevu, Kpeti, and Kove
And those who dared not look in his face That they have done us evil;
Have come out as men. Tell them their house is falling
How well their pride is with them. And the trees in the fence
Let those gone before take note Have been eaten by termites;
They have treated their offspring badly. That the martels curse them.
What is the wailing for? Ask them why they idle there
Somebody is dead. Agosu himself While we suffer, and eat sand.
Alas! a snake has bitten me And the crow and the vulture
My right arm is broken, Hover always above our broken fences
And the tree on which I lean is fallen. And strangers walk over our portion.
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Song of Sorrow Analysis
• Kofi Awoonor's Songs of Sorrow is a dirge in which the persona laments the calamity
that has befallen himself and his entire household, blaming his dead ancestors for not
doing enough from the land of the dead to protect their legacies.
• Although the poem is divided into two parts, both parts are similar in that they express
the lamentations and hopelessness of the persona whose calamity deepens as the
poem progresses. In the very opening lines of the poem, the obviously frustrated
persona whimpers aloud, "Returning is not possible. And going forward is a great
difficulty
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Song of Sorrow Analysis Cnt’d…
• He then goes on to figuratively express specific hopelessness,
• If I turn here, the rain beats me
If I turn there the sun burns me
• The persona regrets that even members of his households who are travellers,
and can possibly be the last hope of his households, are back but covered in
debts. All hope appears to be lost. Here is how he puts it,
• Alas! the travelers are back
All covered with debt.
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Song of Sorrow Analysis Cnt’d…
• It is interesting to note that while the lamentations go on, the death of Agosu,
a prominent figure, who could probably rescue the falling household of Kpeti is
announced. To this the persona sharply responds quite emotionally:
• Alas! a snake has bitten me
My right arm is broken,
And the tree on which I lean is fallen.
• In the concluding part of the poem, the now completely frustrated persona
sends the now dead Agosu to the ancestors who have gone before him. He
tells Agosu, in consonance with traditional African beliefs, to ask the ancestors
why they fall asleep and stay idle, falling short of their responsibilities of
protecting the living.
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Song of Sorrow Analysis Cnt’d…
• A series of other images closely associated with desolation, destruction and even
death, are used in successive parts of the poem.
• References are made to the images like the “Sun and rain” that “burn” and beat
respectively; the sun that can no longer be fired because there are no sons; other
plants and animal image such as “the sharp stumps, the falling “tree” which also
symbolizes the death of Agosu, an important family elder, the “broken fence; the
“snake” the “crow” and the “vultures” which are all destructive creatures.
• The “wilderness” is not spared in reference to its desolation.
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The Weaver Bird
The weaver bird built in our house And the fishers dried their nets by lantern light
And laid its eggs on our only tree Its sermon is the divination of ourselves
We did not want to send it away And our new horizons limit as its nest.
We watched the building of the nest But we cannot join the prayers and answers of the
communicants
And supervised the egg-laying.
And the weaver returned in the guise of the owner We look for new homes every day,
Preaching salvation to us that owned the house For new altars we strive to re-build
They say it came from the west The old shrines defiled from the weaver's excrement.
Where the storms at sea had felled the gulls
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The Weaver Bird Analysis
• The poem deals with the theme of occupation and colonization from the perspective
of the native people. The poem uses the first person plural pronoun “we”, to show that
is dealing with a collective experience.
• The main metaphor used in the poem is the metaphor of the weaver bird that is used
to explain the behaviour of the white colonialists.
• In fact, this metaphor is so central to the poem that the author chose it as the title of
the poem.
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The Weaver Bird Analysis Cnt’d…
• Like the weaver bird, the white colonialists arrived in the speaker’s native country and
started to settle there:
• “The weaver bird built in our house and laid its eggs on our only tree.”
• At first, the native people did not mind this, so they did nothing to stop the colonial
encroachment, instead they just looked on to see what was happening: “We watched
the building of the nest.”
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The Weaver Bird Analysis Cnt’d…
• Just like the proverbial camel, the metaphorical bird then suddenly took over house
leaving the owner destitute.
• The house thus becomes another metaphor in the poem which represents the
country. Like a house, the country used to provide its people with a feeling of security
and belonging. However, this begins to change with the arrival of the colonialists.
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The Weaver Bird Analysis Cnt’d…
• In the poem, the bird tries to change the way the local people live: it is "preaching
salvation." This is clearly a metaphor for the way the colonialists behaved as rulers,
dictating life to the locals and trying to implement the Christian faith in the colonies. As
a result, the speaker feels that this has ruined his metaphorical house and made it
uninhabitable: "We look for new homes every day . . . defiled by the weaver‘s
excrement."
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REDISCOVERY
When our tears are dry on the shore It cannot be the music we heard that night
and the fishermen carry their nets home That still lingers in the chambers of memory.
and the seagulls return to bird island It is the new chorus of our forgotten comrades
and the laughter of the children recedes at night, And the halleluyahs of our second selves.
there shall still linger here the communion we forged,
the feast of oneness which we partook of.
There shall still be the eternal gateman
Who will close the cemetery doors
And send the late mourners away.
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Rediscovery Analysis
• By saying ‘our tears are dry’ (line 1), Awoonor is telling us that his poem has something
to do with mourning but then also, it is about hope. He goes on to paint different
images of mourning for us, about “fishermen [carrying] their nets home” (line 2),
“seagulls [returning] to bird island” (line 3), and the recession of the laughter of children
at night (line 4).
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Rediscovery Analysis Cnt’d…
Rather than be only about mourning, this poem is about hope, for which reason it is
titled, ‘Rediscovery’. Awoonor says that after all the mourning has been done, there still
will remain “the communion we forged” (line 5). The word ‘communion’ belongs to a
class of words known as kangaroo words, being that, they contain another word which
has the same meaning as themselves. In this case, ‘communion’ contains ‘union’ and
they both mean same. Awoonor stresses that after those persons who we mourn have
gone and we have left the mourning grounds, there will still remain the “feast of oneness
whose ritual we partook of” (line 6), with them while they were alive with us.
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Rediscovery Analysis Cnt’d…
• The parting will not be easy, so that “the eternal gateman” (line 7) has to “send the late
mourners away” (line 9). Awoonor’s staunch belief in a man on the other side of the life
and death divide is also seen in his poem The Journey Beyond. He talks about
‘Kutsiami’, a boatman who will ferry him across to the other side. Going on here, he tells
us that the memory of what will remain most, after the communion feast we shared, will
not be the music that accompanies their funeral but rather “the new chorus” (line 12)
of those who have left us, “our forgotten comrades” (line 12) and in response, “the
halleluyahs of our second selves” (line 13).
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Rediscovery Analysis Cnt’d…
• The ‘forgotten’ are not forgotten literally but he uses the word to say that they have
passed on. These last two lines allude to the Christian belief that anyone who dies and
makes it to heaven, will spend eternity with the host of heaven, singing new songs.
• The ‘halleluyahs’ he refers to, comes from a Hebrew word that breaks down quite
literally to Hail-Yahweh”, which translated response churches usually give as “Praise the
Lord” after a song has been sung. The second selves Awoonor talks about persuades us
to believe that he meant that with every person that we lose, we still stay connected to
them by an inner, higher being, or the better us, responding to the chorus they are
gone on to sing.
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THE JOURNEY BEYOND
The bowling cry through door posts
carrying boiling pots
ready for the feasters.
Kutsiami the benevolent boatman;
When I come to the river shore
please ferry me across
I do not have on my cloth-end
the price of your stewardship
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