CHAPTER 8
Myth and Symbol in Kofi Awoonor’s Poetic Art.
An aspect of Kofi Awoonor’s verse that has not yet received critical attention, perhaps because it has not been explored, is his extensive employment of myth and symbol to develop his themes of death, religion, and the conflict of cultures.
Collectively, all of these constitute the subject matter which this essay seeks to address. Awoonor is a formidable poet who, at each and every turn, develops his themes through the employment of appropriate aesthetic devices. This essay discusses the way he employs myth and symbol to develop his three major themes -- that is, death, religion, and culture conflict -- not only because they shed significant light on his poetic discourse, but because they illuminate and elucidate his work.
By myth, I mean the employment of images and metaphors and traditional African beliefs which are not immediately apparent or identifiable to the ordinary reader of a work of art. My discussion takes into consideration what Claude Levi-Straus characterizes as “the myths within each culture as signifying systems whose true meanings are unknown to their true proponents.”1 By symbol, I mean the employment of images which by and large take on a larger poetic significance than in ordinarily imagined or contemplated by the audience or the reader of the poetic artifact.
I
The theme of death features prominently in Awoonor’s “Songs of Sorrow” and “Song of War.” Of course the word “Sorrow” emanates from any instance of death or from any human or natural misfortune or disaster. Similarly the word “death” conjures images of sorrow. In the poem, “Songs of Sorrow,” Awoonor discusses the phenomenon of death from diverse perspectives.
Firstly, he discusses death from a philosophical point of view: when the incidence of death occurs, humans are, by nature, sad or sorrowful. Death, he says, “has led me among the sharps of the forest/Returning is not possible/And going forward is not possible.”2 Still speaking in philosophical terms, the poet goes on to describe the permanent and irreversible nature of death on the poem’s persona and on humanity in general:
The affairs of this world are like the chameleon’s faces Into which I have stepped
When I clean it cannot go
I am on the world’s extreme corner,
I am not sitting in the row with the eminent But those who are lucky
Sit in the middle and forget
I am on the world’s extreme corner
I can only go beyond and forget.
(MPA, p. 98)
Secondly, death is also viewed in physical and concrete human terms. Apparently, the death of some local chiefs is being mourned in the poem. According to D.I. Nwoga, the names of “Nyidevu,” “Kpeti,” and “Kove,” mentioned in line 48 of the poem, represent the dead “ancestors of the clan;” while “Kpeti,” who is cited in line 35 of the poem, is “the founder of the clan.”3 By mentioning these dead ancestors in the poem, Awoonor not only seeks to give credence to his work, he also wants to document the source of his unmitigating sorrow.
Finally, Awoonor views death from an imagined poetic construct, for example: the fear that death evokes grief on the psychological human mind; the fact that death is a reality that cannot be circumvented or wished away easily; the emotional and devastating effects it has on the loved ones who are being left behind; and the challenges involved with death, such as the performance of rituals and burial ceremonies and their associated costs.
In this poem, Awoonor alludes to the myth which childlessness causes in the indigenous African culture: for example, victims of childlessness may suffer the disgrace and ignominy associated with such misfortune.
Something has happened to me
The things so great that I cannot weep;I have no sons to fire the gun when I dieAnd no daughters to wail when I close my mouthI have wandered on the wilderness.The great wilderness men call life The rain has beaten me, And the sharp stumps cut as keen as knivesI shall go beyond and rest.
I have not kin and no brother Death has made war upon our house.
(MPA, p. 99).
In the passage above, Awoonor employs powerful symbols germane in the African traditional culture in order to drive home his message. They include “sons” and “daughters” “kin” and “brother;” these symbols connote good family relationships, and anyone without them is viewed as unfortunate or doomed or cursed by fate and the gods. Similarly, the images “stumps,” “knives,” the “great wilderness” and “death” are powerful symbols which are here employed to characterize a life devoid of hope and meaning. Towards the end of the poem, negative images which translate into powerful symbols (e.g., “snake,” the “crow,” the “vultures,” the “termites,” and the “broken fences”) are employed to counterbalance positive symbols e.g., the “offspring,” the “trees,” and the “fence” -- all of which highlight the poet’s consummate aesthetic skill. Earlier on, in the first quoted passage above, Awoonor employs the image, “chameleon faeces,” to symbolize the state of hopelessness which death wroughts on its victims. Without the employment of the above symbols, Awoonor’s subject matter would have lost much of vital rhetorical effect. If we look closely at the poem, “Song of War,” we also discover that Awoonor treats the theme of death from diverse aesthetic perspectives. In the first place, death is visualized in human terms, in terms of human loss and devastation. The death which is described in this poem is the one precipitated by war, by the colonialists who, in their mad ambition to conquer and exploit others, waged incessant wars upon unarmed local population, usually with sophisticated weapons and their devastating effects:
I shall sleep in white calico;
War has come upon the sons of men
And I shall sleep in calico
Let the boys go forward,
Kpli and his people should go forward;
Let the white man’s guns boom,
We are marching forward;
We all shall sleep in calico
Where has it been heard before
That a snake has bitten a child
In front of its own mother;
The war is upon us
It is within our very huts
And the sons of men shall fight it
Let the white man’s guns boom
And its smoke cover us
We are fighting them to die.
(MPA, p. 100)
War precipitates death, especially death that is imminent and where the invaders possess more military weapons than the unarmed local population. Here, in this poem, Awoonor projects a psychological state of death. Although there are no sounds and echoes of actual war being waged, the audience can imagine that, other than the speaker in the poem, the local population is psychologically dying from an imagined onslaught of the white man’s physical and psychological warfare. True, war has its psychological effects, perhaps more devastating than death itself. Iniobong I. Uko, commenting on the negative consequences if the Nigerian/Biafran War, writes:
It is around 40 years now since the civil war in Nigeria
The images which translate into poetic symbols which Awoonor employs in “Song of War,” in order to develop the poem’s subject matter, are the “white calico” and the “snake.” The “white calico” is a coarse cotton cloth made by the indigenous African natives who often used it to wrap a dead corpse before its burial. As a metaphor the expression, “white calico” symbolizes death, as is the word “snake.” The constant repetition of the expression, “I shall sleep in which calico,” suggests the imminence of death and the persona’s desire to be consumed by it.
Finally, mention must be made about the symbolism inherent in the word “Song,” which highlights the lyrics, “Songs of Sorrow” and “Song of War.” For Awoonor, the word symbolizes death or other “calamitous occurrence” in the Ewe traditional culture. He explains:
The song in the Ewe tradition is structurally the poem. Incantations, chants, salutations, and praise names are part of the same poetic conception. Its essential features are revealed in the statement, allusion, imagery, created through simile or metaphor, and repetition. The statement is generally about an event, a death or any calamitous occurrence that strikes the poet as important to be worthy of song. Allusion is employed… from which the poet draws his imagistic or symbolic reference5
II
If we turn now to Awoonor’s treatment of the theme of religion, we soon find the degree to which he penetrates the indigenous African religion vis-Ã -vis Christianity. If we start with Christianity, Professor R.N. Egudu’s description of the Christian missionaries’ motives would be a starting point. He explains:
. . . the early Christian missionaries came to Africa not to sow the mustard seed of the Kingdom of God in the African cultural soil, but rather to sow the ‘fireseed’ which would burn up the ‘grasses’ of African cultures. And in order to ensure that this unholy act against the cultures was accomplished, the agents of Christianity, incarnated in birds of prey, the eagles, invaded the habitat of the ‘Sunbird’ and the ‘twingods’ who constitute the bedrock of these cultures.6
Awoonor’s religious poems include “The Cathedral,” “Easter Dawn” and “The Weaverbird.” Awoonor and David Diop are perhaps the most satirical and scurrilous among the African poets who employ the theme of religion to denounce and repudiate Western colonialism and culture. For example, while Gabriel Okara employs mellow imagery like the “piano” to characterize Western civilization (e.g., in “Piano and Drums”) Awoonor employs scatological imagery like the “excrement” to describe it (e.g., in “The Weaver Bird”).
The weaver bird built in our house
And laid its eggs on our only tree
We did not want to send it away
We watched the building of the nest
And supervised the egg-laying.
And the weaver returned in the guise of the owner
Preaching salvation to us that owned the house
They say it came from the west
Where the storms at sea had felled the gulls
And the fishes dried their nets by lantern lights
Its sermon is the divination of ourselves
And our new horizons limit at its nest
But we cannot join the prayers and answers of the communicants.
We look for new homes every day,
For new altars we strive to rebuild
The old shrines defiled by the weaver’s excrement.
(MPA, p. 102)
The religious images in the quoted poem above include “Preaching salvation,” “prayers,” “divination” and “communicants.” These images are frequently employed by Christian priests and their followers. In this poem, Awoonor discusses the act of ingratitude displayed before our very eyes by the colonialists who, after being offered a temporary place to stay as tenants, now begin to claim ownership of the entire household.
The European colonialists came to Africa as explorers and visitors. However, with the passage of time, they began to display their true nature, denouncing and disparaging the native people’s religion and culture. They established schools and preached Christianity.
Furthermore, they started to exploit the natural resources of the people. While the poet employs the images of the “tree” and the “old shrines” to characterize the indigenous African religious culture, he uses the images of the “weaver bird,” “preaching salvation,” the “prayers,” the “divination,” the “sermon,” the altars,” and the “communicants” as symbols for the colonialists and the Christianity which they brought along with them.
As a poetic symbol, the “weaver bird” connotes plunder and dirtiness and every other thing that is evil in the extreme. Furthermore, the employment of the scatological imagery -- "excrement” -- suggests Awoonor’s profound disdain and dislike of the Western colonialists and the Christianity which they bequeathed to the indigenous population. It will be recalled that the poet changed his name from George Awoonor-Williams to Kofi Awoonor, apparently to demonstrate his repudiation of Christianity and Western civilization.
There is a sense of the employment of myth as suggested by the weaver bird’s behavior. In the traditional African context, there is the myth that the human mind is so deep and mysterious -- so much so that we cannot predict its ultimate behavior because it is subject to change at any instance. The behavior of the weaver bird, and consequently the colonialists’ attitude, is Awoonor’s reminder of this African mythos.
Awoonor’s “The Weaver Bird” demonstrates the poet’s serious indictment of the Western civilization. The lyric, “The Cathedral,” equally shows the poet’s reprobation of the Western civilization and culture:
On this dirty patch a tree once stood
Shedding incense on the infant corn:
Its boughs stretched across a heaven
brightened by the last fires of a tribe.
They sent surveyors and builders
who cut that tree planting in its place
A huge senseless cathedral of doom.
(SAP, p. 209)
In this poem, Christianity is symbolized by the phrase a “huge senseless cathedral of doom.” The “tree,” with its “incense on the infant corn” and the “fires of a tribe” are employed as symbols of the virile African religious culture. The “surveyors and builders,” agents of Western colonialism, symbolize everything that is ugly, destructive and ungodly. The contrast which Awoonor employs in this poem, as in “The Weaver Bird,” not only suggests his cynicism and disappointment about Western civilization but demonstrates his effective handling of poetic style.
The “dirty patch,” to which Awoonor alludes in the first line of the poem, is important: it symbolizes the legacy of the colonialists, indeed the entire corpus of the Western religious evangelism. The employment of the phrase within the first line of the lyric is deliberate, and suggests Awoonor’s desire to direct its audience’s attention to it and its consequent nothingness.
The images, “excrement” and “dirty patch,” which the poet employs respectively in “The Weaver Bird” and “The Cathedral,” may not only be seen as companion piece in their ugliness, but they confer verbal seriousness and virtuoso on Awoonor’s lyricism.
In “Easter Dawn,” Awoonor employs the myth inherent in the word “Easter,” that is, the yearly celebration of Christ’s death, to dramatize the way the colonialists and their followers lured away the indigenous Africans from their traditional religions into Christianity:
That man died in Jerusalem
And his death demands dawn marchers
From year to year to the sound of bells.
The hymns flow through the mornings
Heard on Calvary this dawn.
the gods are crying,
my father’s gods are crying for a burial --
for a final ritual --
but they that should build the fallen shrines
have joined the dawn marchers
singing their way towards Gethsemane
where the tear drops of agony still freshen, the cactus.
(MAP, p. 103).
For Awoonor, this kind of behavior is senseless and hypocritical: it symbolizes doomsday for the African society, just as the “cathedral” -- the symbol of Christianity -- is a serious mistake and a colossal disaster. The mocking tone explicit in the image, “that man,” suggests Awoonor’s defiance, as well as his strong inclination to distance or dissociate himself from the scene of the action both emotionally and spiritually. Further, the constant references to several images and symbols, important in the Christian orthodoxy -- "Jerusalem,” “dawn marchers,” “Calvary,” “Gethsemane,” “Easter Service,” the “resurrection,” the “hymns,” etc -- not only endow Awoonor’s verse with a formidable symbolic structure but suggest his acute knowledge of his subject matter.
III
The theme of the conflict of cultures is perhaps Awoonor’s dominant subject matter in terms of the intensity and vehemence with which he approaches it. Furthermore, in treating the subject, Awoonor demonstrates -- unlike Leopold Sedar Senghor, for example -- that there can be no room for reconciliation between Western colonialism and African traditionalism.
Awoonor’s lyrics which treat the theme of culture conflict consist of “We Have Found a New Home,” and “Harlem on a Winter Night.” All of these poems romanticize Africa and its cultural traditions while protesting against Western colonialism and its pernicious effects. In the poem, “We Have Found a New Home,” Awoonor documents, with remarkable sensitivity, the conflict between the indigenous African tradition and the foreign cultural values symbolized by Western colonialism:
The smart professionals in three piece
Sweating away their humanity in driblets
And wiping the blood from their brow
We have found a new land
The side of eternity
Where our blackness does not matter
And our songs are dying on our lips
Standing at hell-gate
you watch those who seek admission
Still the familiar faces
that watched and gave you up
As the one who had let the side down,
“Come on, old boy, you cannot dress like that”
And tears well in my eyes for them
Those who want to be seen in the best company
Have abjured the magic of being themselves
And in the new land we have found
The water is drying from the towel
Our songs are dead
and we sell them dead to the other side
Reaching for the stars we stop at the house of the Moon
And pause to relearn the wisdom of our fathers.
(SAP, pp. 211-212)
Two categories of people are discussed in this poem: the “smart professionals,” symbolized by the “three piece” suit; and the indigenous African natives, symbolized by “our songs” and the “wisdom of our fathers.” For the neo-African elites, who foolishly imitate or copy the Western cultural values, they themselves find no joy, no rest, and no respite because the European values they imitate say so (“Sweating away their humanity in driblets/And wiping the blood from their brow”). On the contrary, the new status, which the African natives find themselves, offers them permanent joy and happiness (“We have found a new land/This side of eternity/Where our blackness does not matter”).
Awoonor shows quite clearly how brutal and pernicious the European cultural values can be in the life of the indigenous African people who want to fight in order to protect and preserve their culture (“our songs are dying on our lips/…and we sell them dead to the other people”). And he demonstrates how a people -- that is, the Africans who seek to preserve their own cultural values with determination and fortitude -- can overcome every obstacle that may stand in their way (“We have found a new land/…Reaching for the Stars we stop at the house of the Moon/And pause to relearn the wisdom of our fathers”).
The contrast which Awoonor creates in the poem enhances the poem’s dramatic structure. The poem also gains architectonic effect through the use of repetition “We have found a new land,” which is first employed in the poem’s title, and is repeated in the fourth line. Also contributing to the poem’s effectiveness is the note of pathos which is truck by the lines, “Those who want to be seen in the best company/Have abjured the magic of being themselves” -- a satirical allusion to the hypocritical behavior of the African elites who foolishly imitate the Western ways (as symbolized by their “three piece” suit).
The mythic dimension of the poem is highlighted in the sixth line where the poet alludes to “our blackness,” which apparently -- in the poet’s mind – accounts for the reason why the indigenous African people are held in derision and subjected to exploitation and abuse by the “luckier races.” Awoonor may here be alluding to the “myth of blackness,” as symbolic of the crudity and evil, which lurks in the mind of every typical Western colonizer.
For Awoonor, apparently, it is a misleading mythos which cannot stand the test of time, for, as the poem’s persona defiantly points out, “our blackness does not matter.” The theme of culture conflict is developed further in the poem, “Harlem on a “Winter Night.” But it is culture conflict of a different kind.
Huddled pavements, dark the lonely wail of a police-siren moving stealthily
across grew alleys of anonymity asking for food
either as plasma in hospital jars,
escaping fires in tenement grown cold and bitter or seeking food in community carbage cans to escape its eternal nightmare.
Heard at evening Mean alleyways of poverty,
Dispossession, early death
In jammed doorways and creaking elevators
Glaring defeat in the morning
Of this beautiful beautiful America
(SAP, p. 219)
The culture conflict dramatized in this poem operates at four levels of meaning: from the point of view of the African visitor, conflicted between his African background, which of course is nameless, and the Harlem setting of America America
From the second level of meaning, we can visualize the grim psychological complex of the African American, conflicted by his sense of humanity versus the physical reality of his existence, where evil permeates the human society. For example, he lives in the greatest country of the world, but he must content himself (not by choice but by the force of circumstance) with “grey alleys of anonymity/…mean alleys of poverty/dispossession, early death”). The nightmare of his existence is both imaginable and existential.
The third level of meaning is the myth inherent in the vagaries of human existence, where, for example, the African visitor to Harlem sees all beauty in America, whereas for the African American, “Harlem” is the “dark dirge of America,” characterized by “Huddled pavements, dark,” “grey alleys of anonymity,” and “mean alleys of poverty/dispossession, early death.”
Furthermore, the symbolism of the word “Harlem ” enlarges the lyric’s mythic structure. First, Harlem is a district in New York
Finally, the symbolism of the phrase, “Huddled pavements,” is interesting and deserves some elucidation: it suggests the crowded mass of people living in Harlem , who perhaps are confined in time and space, with little or no room for movement or socialization. When considered along with the phrase, “jammed doorways and creaking elevators,” the symbolism of “Huddled pavements” becomes all-encompassing.
What does the employment of myth and symbol contribute to Awoonor’s themes of death, religion, and culture conflict? They expand the thematic and stylistic range of his poetic art. Further, they demonstrate his ability to employ diverse poetic and rhetorical strategies both to elucidate and illuminate the narrative of his lyrical structure.
Finally, they shed significant light on Awoonor’s development as a poet. (For example, how his discovery of the pernicious effect of European colonialism apparently contributes to his adoption of his African name of Kofi Awoonor, while rejecting his original name, George Awoonor-Williams). Kofi Awoonor met his untimely death in Kenya
Notes
1. Claude Levi-Strauss, in A Glossary of Literary Terms, ed. M.H. Abrams (Boston : Wadsworth
2. Kofi Awoonor, “Songs of Sorrow” in Modern Poetry From Africa, ed. Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier (Harmondsworth, Middlesex England and New York: Penguin Books, Ltd., 1966), p. 99. All quotations from this book will be abbreviated parenthetically in the text as MPA, followed by the page number(s). Similarly, all quotations cited from A Selection of African Poetry, ed. K.E. Senanu and T. Vincent (Burnt Mill, Harlow, England: Longman Group, Ltd., 1976) will be abbreviated parenthically in the text as SAP, followed by the page number(s).
3. D.I. Nwoga, West African Verse, an anthology chosen and annoted by D.I. Nwoga (London: Longman, 1967), p. 200.
4. See Iniobong I.
5. Kofi Awoonor, Guardians of the Sacred Word: Ewe Poetry (New York and London: Nok Publishers, 1974) p. 24.
6. R.N. Egudu, Modern African Poetry and the African Predicament (New York: Macmillan, 1978), p. 11.
Works Cited
Awoonor, Kofi. Guardians of the Sacred Word: Ewe Poetry. New York
Egudu, R.N. Modern African Poetry and the African Predicament. New York
Levi-Strauss, Claude. In A Glossary of Literary Terms, ed. M.H. Abrams. Boston : Wadsworth
Moore, Gerald and Ulli Beier. Harmondsworth, Middlesex England and New York
Uko, Iniobong I.
Nwoga, D.I. West African Verse. London
Senanu, K.E. and T. Vincent. A Selection of African Poetry. Burnt Mill, Harlow , England
I love this scholarly analysis. Please, keep it up sir!
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Thank you sir.
DeleteSuperb analysis. Keep it up.
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