How Poems Work #7 - Rob Taylor on Daniel Karasik's "The Pilgrim Looks Up"

The Pilgrim Looks Up – Daniel Karasik

Of a book I read last week, on the theme of memory,
I’ve forgotten everything, except for a brief description
of how the narrator, on returning to his Tyrolean childhood home,
was remembered by acquaintances of his early years
for his habit of always,
upon stepping outdoors, looking up
to observe the sky’s condition.

When travelling
I too have often done this.

On the African coast, in harmattan season,
the sky would stay so perpetually hazed
that no amount of looking would make that pilgrim’s art
make sense.

A proud, even a hostile sky,
as I remember it: so utterly unwilling to reveal itself.
For three months I could look at nothing else.

When I approached Daniel Karasik with a request to republish his poem "The Pilgrim Looks Up" on One Ghana, One Voice, I mentioned that I was also considering writing a “How Poems Work” essay on it. Daniel sent me a reply confirming he was happy to have the poem republished, and even went so far as to offer me his own take on a “How Poems Work” essay for “The Pilgrim Looks Up.” It was two words long: It doesn’t.

It was a surprising comment on a poem Karasik had chosen only months before to include in his first poetry collection, Hungry (Cormorant Books, 2013). One can probably chalk it up, in large part, to Karasik’s humility and good sense of humour. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he felt there was a little bit of truth to the statement, as well (a disappointing thought considering the excellence of the poem). I remember how quickly I turned on a few of my own darlings (only sometimes deservedly) after finally seeing them in publication in my first poetry collection. Set in their new home within a larger collection, some of them having until then gathered dust in a drawer for 5+ years, a few of my poems seemed out of place, unable to hold their own. And the poems most likely to disappoint me were the ones I was now most distant from, both in the length of time since I’d written them and the physical distance I’d put between the “me” of here and now and the “me” of then and there (hunched over my notebook, scrawling out first drafts).

Our feelings about poems, especially our own, are elusive and ever-changing. Over time and space we return to these texts, inevitably older and hopefully wiser, and they become new things, the wisdom contained within them growing or shrinking or transforming. The poems we read while travelling the world take on different import in our minds than the ones we read in the comfort of our living rooms. Our relationship with poems we read at 20 or 30 or 60 years old are fundamentally different because of that change.

So maybe Daniel was being humble. Maybe he was being serious. Possibly (probably, I suspect) a little of both. To ask him, though, would ruin the fun of speculation. And from what better vantage point can one consider “The Pilgrim Looks Up” than from one clouded in uncertainty?


“The Pilgrim Looks Up” is a meditation on uncertainty, specifically on the key ingredients that make our understandings of the world less-that-assured: memory, place and perspective. The triangular relationship between these three forces is built throughout the poem, with a particular emphasis on one or the other presented from stanza to stanza. Running through the poem, also, is the establishment and merger of two separate narratives: the story of the speaker of the poem (the “speaker” for the purposes of this essay) and the story of the book-within-a-poem’s narrator (the “book’s narrator”). All of this builds to Karasik’s conclusions, on how we live in and embody uncertainty, in the closing fourth stanza.

Right from the first line, Karasik inserts his theme of “memory” into the poem. He does this by injecting it into the (fictitious?) book his speaker had been reading the week before the poem’s “action” takes place. Specifically, he brings in the theme of memory’s evasiveness – how most of what we experience slips away, leaving only touchstones (which themselves may not necessarily be “accurate"). In this case it is the book’s narrator’s habit of “looking up / to observe the sky’s condition” that remains in the minds of his childhood acquaintances. It is a habit that the speaker will come to embody by the end of the poem, as the meta-story creeps steadily into the poem’s central narrative.

The second stanza, a single brief sentence over two lines, performs an essential function. It propels the lives of the speaker and the book’s narrator further toward one another (both are “travelling”) and in so doing establishes that a sense of place and placelessness (a sense most clearly highlighted when one travels) is a concern not just of the book’s narrator, returning to his Tyrolean home, but also a direct concern of the speaker.

The third stanza provides for us the speaker’s place of travel, “the African coast,” and introduces the touchstone memory of the speaker’s story: the dust-filled harmattan sky. This touchstone fits well with the touchstone of the book’s narrator’s story – “looking up / to observe the sky’s condition” – preparing us for the closing fourth stanza, and the full merger of the two storylines. The third stanza also aggressively introduces new perspectives into the poem, which play with how we are to see, and approach, the poem. Until now, all we’ve known about the poem’s location is that it probably isn’t set in Tyrol (an international region in the Alps that includes both the state of North Tyrol in Austria and the province of South Tyrol in Italy), which seems “outside” the speaker’s world – a far off place read about in a book. But in stanza three we are not only given our first grounded place within the speaker’s world, “the African coast,” but also a clear perspective from which to view it: outside. “On the African coast… the sky would stay…”. We are viewing Africa from a distance, both of time and place (that place, I assume, being the Western world).[1]

Harmattan, West Africa
(Photo Source)

And yet a twist is thrown into that structure by the introduction of the word harmattan.[2] Harmattan is such a foreign concept to Western audiences that the word itself is underscored by a red squiggly line each time I type it into my North American word processor. (Do you mean Marmaton? it asks when I right-click – my word processor knows the name of a tributary of Kansas' Little Osage River, but not the name for a major recurring environmental event which affects the lives of hundreds of millions of people annually). Here in Karasik’s poem, though, harmattan is mentioned without explanation. And in making that choice, Karasik welcomes in another perspective to the poem: the West African insider, the person for whom “harmattan” does not need quotes or italics or a red squiggly line. The poem is instantaneously shot into this new moment and place, as if the author is saying “We all know what’s going on here. If you feel left out, you can Google it.”

Marmaton River, Kansas, USA

The poem also enters, in this moment, into dialogue with the volume of West African poems written on the subject of the harmattan, and some of the dominant themes such poems often embody – confusion, mystery, deprivation of one sort or another.[3]

So here in stanza three we reach the height of the poem’s kaleidoscoping perspectives: we see from the vantage point of the speaker, reading a book; then the book’s narrator, travelling to Tyrol; then the book’s narrator’s Tyrolean acquaintances, remembering back; then the speaker travelling “away”; then the speaker in place, the “away” becoming the “here”, the language assumed and comfortable. We are speaker, narrator, acquaintance, foreigner, native.

It should be noted that for all these locales and perspectives, most of which are affixed to particular geographic places, Karasik’s language avoids specificity. The childhood home is “Tyrolean,” which could refer to any number of specific places on either side of the Austrian-Italian border; the location for the harmattan is simply “the African coast.” Bearing the outside knowledge that Karasik once lived in Accra, one can assume that the poem is situated there. In the version of Karasik's poem “A Wrapping Ceremony” which appears in Hungry, Karasik doesn’t shy away from adding a locational tag as an epigraph to the poem in order to specifically locate the events in Ghana. Yet here he resists that impulse, and instead goes as far as to even strip the “West” off of “West Africa,” making it appear the poem could be situated anywhere on the continent (though, of course, most of Africa is harmattan-free). This seems to be an intentional choice of Karasik’s: to keep the exact locales of the poem, the exact places and perspectives and memories, as hazy as the harmattan sky itself. To keep us unfixed and borderless, as both travel and the harmattan encourage.


In the closing stanza Karasik merges the two narratives, and the two characters, in the poem. The “pilgrim” of the book and the “pilgrim” that is the speaker become one through their common motion: the speaker looks up into the harmattan sky “so unwilling to reveal itself.” The poem about reading a book about memory becomes a poem that has fully absorbed the book and become simply about the core thing – memory itself.

As the two characters become one in that closing image, our perspective, as readers, becomes clear as well. We find ourselves watching the speaker watching the sky, we as readers positioned both outside the speaker’s world and somewhat present in it, viewing the speaker through the very haze that he/she is staring up at. A triangular relationship is formed between the reader, the speaker and the harmattan, mirroring the triangular relationship between memory, place and perspective that has been explored in the poem.

But Karasik doesn’t simply leave us with these observations and connections as neutral thoughts – the speaker specifically ends the poem emphasizing how fascinating he finds all this fog and forgetting and uncertainty, essentially prodding us to be fascinated by it ourselves. And when we do that, the questions posed by the poem come spilling out: What are we looking at when we look into the haze of memory, mired as it is in different perspectives, cultures, and histories? Can we see a memory from different angles, once it’s been made? If memory is reduced to touchstones, can it ever be expanded again? What can we see? What can we know? What of our experiences can we really retain? What can we retell?

Memory fades. Perspective is always limited. Travel for insight alone is ultimately fraught. In the end all our efforts result in some kind of imperfection, some level of failure. This, of course, brings in the alternate reading of the poem’s last line: “I could look at nothing else,” not because the speaker was fascinated, but because he had no other choice. The harmattan would not permit another way of looking. Regardless of all this thinking on the matter, the outcome is the same. Everything results in haze, in harmattan. To some extent the answer to the question “How does it work?” is always It doesn’t. But, as Karasik asserts, each morning we inevitably step out the door and look up nonetheless, fascinated pilgrims that we are.

[1] The common thought here being that any inter-continental dialogue between Africa (especially English speaking Africa) and an outside force occurs with “the West,” most often Europe. As Ngugi wa Thiong’o put it recently on the Chimurenga blog:

The links between Asia and Africa and South America have always been present but in our times they have been made invisible by the fact that Europe is still the central mediator of Afro-Asian-Latino discourse… In my case, I had always assumed that my intellectual and social formation was tied to England and Europe, with no meaningful connection to Asia and South America. There was a reason. I wrote in English. My literary heroes were English. Kenya being a British colony, I had learnt the geography and history of England as the central reference in my widening view of the world. Even our anti-colonial resistance assumed Europe as the point of contest; it was we, Africa, against them, Europe.

This is changing, of course, with Asia’s steady advancement in Africa. But for now, and for the purposes of this poem, the presence of the West-Africa dynamic seems a fair assumption.

[2] For unfamiliar readers, the harmattan is a seasonal West African trade wind which blows dust from the Sahara down into the Gulf of Guinea. You can read other OGOV poems about the harmattan here.

[3] For a classic sample, read Kwesi Brew's "The Dry Season".

Rob Taylor is the editor and co-founder of One Ghana, One Voice.

How Poems Work #6 - Prince Mensah on Darko Antwi's "The last words of Aunt Araba"

The last words of Aunt Araba - Darko Antwi

I am going...
when I am gone,
tell Kojo to put away the bottle
else akpeteshie will take a photo of him

I am going...
when I am gone,
tell Birago not to put her head on her husband
for I have not seen a pillow in that man

I am going...
when I am gone,
tell Asantewaa to knock at Esi's door
for she owes me five okra and an onion

I am going...
when I am gone,
tell Ebo to dig a foot deep around the odum
for I have hidden dozens of stones

I am going..
when I am gone,
tell Kakraba not to marry from Manso-Krom
for their women are lions and scorpions

I am going...
when I am gone,
invite Kuntu and offer him some drink
tell him: he has my pardon over the land dispute

I am going...
when I am gone,
tell Aba: I don't need her shadow at my funeral
for the arrows of her falsehood have crushed my soul

I am going...
when I am gone,
be faithful with your vows to Nananom
that you may have their blessing and avoid their wrath

I am going...
ah... oh... oh...

When I read poems such as Darko Antwi’s "The last words of Aunt Araba", my hopes surge for the rapid ascendancy of modern Ghanaian literature. This poem consists of eight quatrains and one couplet. "The last words of Aunt Araba" reminds me of the works of older poets like Brew, Okai and Anyidoho. There is a sense of urgency in a place of calm. These are the words of a dying woman who is attempting to keep her hopes and dreams (and fights) alive.

The first line of each stanza is a fading reminder that the speaker is losing the strength to speak, that time is running out. It is like someone or something is beckoning Aunt Araba to come over, similar to Gabriel Okara’s "The Call of the River Nun" which states that -

         each dying year
brings near the sea-bird call,
the final call that
stills the crested waves
and breaks in two the curtain
of silence of my upturned canoe.

The next three lines of each of the eight stanzas in Antwi’s poem contain instructions to conclude the speaker’s unfinished business in life. This is a poem of nakedness and we are voyeurs to the many crooks and curves of the human soul. Leopold Senghor’s "Black Woman" captures this kind of nakedness –

I sing your beauty that passes, the form
that I fix in the Eternal,

Before jealous fate turn you to ashes to
feed the roots of life.

Darko Antwi captures the perceptions, peeves and personality of the speaker in her succinct directives (and comments) to the nine people mentioned in the poem. There are four women (Birago, Asantewaa, Esi and Aba) and five men (Kojo, Birago’s husband, Ebo, Kakraba and Kuntu). Each person is entreated to take an action that will lead to a better result for all involved. One can deduce that the speaker, Aunt Araba, holds a matriarchal status in her society. She dishes out advice and warnings in what reads like a last will and testament. With so much salvaging to be done among those she is leaving, Aunt Araba’s predicament becomes like that of the speaker in Kofi Awoonor’s "Songs of Sorrow" –

Returning is not possible
And going forward is a great difficulty
The affairs of this world are like the chameleon’s feces
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

I am going to delve into this poem by deconstructing it stanza by stanza, both to look more deeply into the poem, and to show the many intersections this poem shares with its predecessors written by the greats of African verse.


Stanza 1:

I am going...
when I am gone,
tell Kojo to put away the bottle
else akpeteshie will take a photo of him

In her first directive, Aunt Araba harps on personal responsibility, a critical and universal element to a successful life. She finds it a top priority to dish out a word of caution to Kojo about alcohol. He has to quit drinking or else akpeteshie will take a photo of him. For the non-Ghanaian, akpeteshie is the local alcoholic drink. It is cheap but has a corrosive effect on its drinkers. Heavy consumers of akpeteshie usually become physically unappealing, hence Aunt Araba’s warning that akpeteshie will take a picture of Kojo.

Aunt Araba is not only concerned about Kojo’s present state of alcoholism; she is also worried about the possibility of a disfigured future. It is interesting that she chooses to tackle alcoholism first. This might be due to the fact that alcoholism is a silent epidemic that is stealing a lot of dreams in our nations. Alcoholism stalls potential, rips families apart, and transmogrifies its users into physical and mental unattractiveness. Aunt Araba is concerned that the bottle can become the bane of Kojo’s existence and all he will be left with is a portrait taken by akpeteshie.

The sense of foreboding both in the speaker’s imminent death and Kojo’s alcoholism reflects similar sentiments expressed by Ikemefuna in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (Chapter Seven) –

King, if you eat it
You will weep for the abomination
Where White Ant installs king
Where Dust dances to the drums

There is a lingering suggestion in this stanza in that it is very likely that Kojo might not heed Aunt Araba’s warning, thus subjecting himself to the consequences of being an alcoholic.


Stanza 2:

I am going...
when I am gone,
tell Birago not to put her head on her husband
for I have not seen a pillow in that man

In her second directive, Aunt Araba talks about self-reliance among women. She becomes a marriage counselor, albeit a cynical one. Her advice is counter-intuitive – why shouldn’t a wife ‘put her head on her husband’? Isn’t that one of the many purposes of marriage? Aunt Araba’s reason is that she has ‘not seen a pillow in that man’. She sounds like a post-modern feminist, a realist with years of experience studying how some husbands will never become ‘pillows’ for their wives. Birago is warned not to seek comfort or security from her husband because, according to Aunt Araba, the man is incapable of providing that. This stanza is a clarion call to women, from an older African woman to younger ones, to stop depending on their husbands as ‘pillows’. It is a jolt to the status quo where the wife is expected to ‘put her head on her husband’, regardless of whether there is ‘a pillow in that man’ or not. Interestingly, Aunt Araba does not ask Birago to leave her husband; she only asks her to become independent.

With these few words, the poet probes into the hidden realities of a typical marriage. This stanza is an indictment against our culture’s stagnation of women’s potential and the subsequent juxtaposition with male nonchalance towards their needs. Sadly, being a woman herself, Aunt Araba can only dish out her point of view on her death. This is where she becomes valuable to everyone around her. This is where she receives rapt attention. Why doesn’t our society use the wit and wisdom of the many Aunt Arabas while they live? Perhaps Birago’s marriage is a microcosm of many marriages – even a reflection of Aunt Araba’s. The dying woman finds it imperative to ask for the discontinuation of marital dysfunction. Note that there is no word to a husband by the dying woman, no lingering love towards a lover. Araba is alone. Alone in life and death. Perhaps she never had ‘a pillow’ in her love life.


Stanza 3:

I am going...
when I am gone,
tell Asantewaa to knock at Esi's door
for she owes me five okra and an onion

In her third directive, Aunt Araba focuses on trustworthiness, even though she sounds petty and vindictive. She is trusting Asantewaa (a possible allusion to Yaa Asantewaa) to collect a debt of ‘five okra and an onion’, and trusting Esi to pay that debt. Note that in the two previous stanzas (and throughout the poem); Aunt Araba is not specific about the person who would be delivering her messages. However, in this stanza, she elects Asantewaa, presumably a no-nonsense and aggressive woman, to collect a debt. It is almost ridiculous when one considers the debt – ‘five okra and an onion’. Yet there might be an unstated reason behind such vindictiveness. Is Aunt Araba peeved at Esi because she is not by her death bed? Is she trying to expose Esi as someone who borrows and never pays back? Is she trying to make Esi as uncomfortable as she can, even from beyond the grave? Is Aunt Araba someone who never forgets (and forgives) anything?

There are things in one’s life that stick with us until death. Whatever Esi might have done to Aunt Araba – apart from borrowing ‘five okra and an onion’ – might have stuck too long on her mind. To have Asantewaa knock on Esi’s door to collect a debt of ‘five okra and an onion’ is actually problematic. Esi might find it an affront to her own character because, for all we know, she might have forgotten about that debt. Asantewaa, in executing a dying woman’s wishes, will be unrelenting and abrasive. This is a set-up to one bad argument or, even worse, a fight. Why is Aunt Araba producing acrimony where it did not exist?

Another look at this stanza reveals how things are different to different people. At first glance, one will brush Aunt Araba as vindictive. However, who knows, in her village, ‘five okra and an onion’ might be worth a lot and that it may be important for her to get the items back to her family. This stanza challenges our concept of what is worthy and what is not. To some, a debt of one million dollars is something you will instruct a person to collect. To Aunt Araba, the debt of ‘five okra and an onion’ is too important not to collect.


Stanza 4:

I am going...
when I am gone,
tell Ebo to dig a foot deep around the odum
for I have hidden dozens of stones

In her fourth directive, Aunt Araba is suddenly generous. In a quick turnaround, the supposedly vindictive Aunt Araba is giving Ebo ‘dozens of stones’. But isn’t she telling everybody that there are ‘hidden dozens of stones’ ‘a foot deep around the odum’? This is intentional. Aunt Araba is letting everyone know that Ebo has the right to access the treasure. However, if Ebo does not exercise that right, everyone knows where the treasure is. In the event of his reluctance to ‘dig a foot deep around the odum’, the stones could be used to benefit the community. Even though Ebo has been given a treasure trove, he has ‘to dig a foot deep around the odum’. Nothing ever comes easy. Even free things.

This stanza is an allegory for the state of modern Africa. Aunt Araba is a miniature Mother Africa and we are the collective Ebo. We sit on a continent that is blessed not only with ‘hidden dozens of stones’, but with every ingredient needed to build a prosperous future. However, most people do not want ‘to dig a foot deep around the odum’. Most people want shortcuts through get-rich-quick schemes, bribes, embezzlement, armed robbery, 419 scams et cetera. The reality is everyone in the world knows that Africa sits on more wealth than it can imagine. So if Africans are reluctant ‘to dig a foot deep around the odum’ in order to access their God-given wealth, the rest of the world is more than eager to do so.


Stanza 5:

I am going...
when I am gone,
tell Kakraba not to marry from Manso-Krom
for their women are lions and scorpions

The fifth directive deals with perceptions and names. The place, Manso-Krom, translates to ‘The Town of Litigations’. Aunt Araba does not want Kakraba to marry from that town because of its notoriety for having abrasive women.

Note that the speaker does not use the gender-appropriate word lioness for the women of Manso-Krom. They are portrayed as lions, as having masculine attributes such as control, aggression and violence. The depiction is of an obaa barima (a woman who behaves like a man). It is known that female scorpions kill their males after mating with them, an action similar to that of a black widow spider. Female scorpions are also known to eat their young when they are hungry. This image of self-centeredness troubles Aunt Araba. Bottom line, she has a problem with women who 1) do not act like women and 2) who misuse and discard men.

However, the question that rises immediately is about the accuracy in Aunt Araba’s perceptions. Certainly not all the women ‘are lions and scorpions’ as she alleges, but she prefaces her concerns with an established fact – the name of the town. Manso-Krom, the Town of Litigations. This adds credence to her harsh description of the women from that town. Or so it seems. It is interesting how the name of a place can color perceptions about people from that place. Africans living in other parts of the world have countless stories about this issue. People view Africa through the prism of films such as Shaka the Zulu or The Lion King and documentaries about hunger-stricken communities. These images give people a certain level of “expert” knowledge (sarcasm intended) about all things African. Of course, perception is reality, albeit a distorted one.

In this stanza, Aunt Araba, once again, demonstrates her human limitations. She is guilty of generalization, based on name and reputation. However, she is not alone in that guilt. Our world is still wading through the swamp of intense schism, ranging from tribalism to racism. All schism emanates from misguided interpretations of names and reputation. Nonetheless, this stanza raises a lot of questions. Is Manso-Krom a nickname because of its women or does the name predict the conduct of those women? Why is Kakraba interested in marrying from a town whose ‘women are lions and scorpions’? Is Kakraba a foolhardy Lothario or is it a secret about the town that Aunt Abena dishes out to him? Why is Aunt Araba, the post-modern feminist in stanza two, undermining the worth of women from Manso-Krom by describing them as ‘lions and scorpions’? Is it because she is preventing a reverse situation where the husband will not find ‘a pillow’ in his wife?

Aunt Araba is clear in employing the proverb – what is good for the goose is good for the gander. To a typical African woman, liberation does not mean role reversal – it only means that each person gets the maximum benefit and respect from their relationship. To Aunt Araba, the situation in Manso-Krom represents an anomaly that does not have to be encouraged. As a matriarch, she is unequivocal in her stance. She will not recommend women who ‘are lions and scorpions’ to her male kith and kin for marriage.


Stanza 6:

I am going...
when I am gone,
invite Kuntu and offer him some drink
tell him: he has my pardon over the land dispute

The sixth stanza is about reconciliation. However, it quickly raises the question as to why Aunt Araba is vindictive against Esi in stanza three over ‘five okra and an onion’ but is conciliatory to Kuntu ‘over the land dispute’? At first glance, it is not fair as we compare ‘five okra and an onion’ to land. Yet, this is a glimpse into the inexplicable, and sometimes hypocritical, nature of the human being. It is not about fairness; it is about favor.

We see more of that inconsistency when Aunt Araba tells her listeners to ‘invite Kuntu and offer him some drink’. Isn’t she the same Aunt Araba who raked Kojo through the coals for being in love with the bottle? Why is the standard different when it comes to Kuntu? Reading between the lines, Kojo is a younger man (perhaps, her son or nephew) and Kuntu might be a co-equal in age (a brother or cousin). The land dispute is a dead giveaway because it connotes a blood relationship, which is usually a basis for shared land in most African communities.

In this stanza, Aunt Araba is magnanimous, extending a ‘pardon over the land dispute’. She is smart in doing so because she intends to restore familial unity after her death. There is a reason for that. It is because her kith and kin of her age group become her children’s parents by default. As a good mother, she will be doing her progeny a favor by not letting them inherit her personal litigations.


Stanza 7:

I am going...
when I am gone,
tell Aba: I don't need her shadow at my funeral
for the arrows of her falsehood have crushed my soul

The seventh stanza is about vengeance. Aunt Araba has a bone to pick with a second woman, Aba. Like Esi in the third stanza, Aba has to pay a price for offending Aunt Araba. In Aba’s case, it is for lying and gossiping. The price is a ban from attending Aunt Araba’s funeral.

Funerals are important events in African communities. They are part family/friend reunions and part board meetings. Attendance or absence has huge implications. Whenever one is unable to attend the funeral of a close relative or friend, one is considered a ‘sansanni’, a useless person whose funeral does not merit attendance. For Aunt Araba to tell Aba that she does not want ‘her shadow at my funeral’ is an effort to isolate Aba and make her subject to the ire of the community. By asking Aba to stay away her funeral, Aunt Araba is severing all ties. It will be a safe guess to deduce that Aba is Aunt Araba’s daughter. There are three reasons that support my guess. Araba is a derivative name from Aba, suggesting a mother who named her daughter after herself. The second reason is that the act of banning people from funerals is usually done by parents to punish children who did not treat them right. The third reason is the level of pain. Note that Aba’s punishment is the harshest of them all. Esi, perhaps, after huffing and puffing over ‘five okra and an onion’ might still attend Aunt Araba’s funeral. But Aba does not have a choice.

It seems Aunt Araba is still in pain from ‘the arrows of her [Aba’s] falsehood’. Pain, any kinds of pain, caused by close relatives, sting more than those caused by strangers. To have a daughter, or anyone for that matter, rain ‘arrows of her falsehood’ is certainly a crushing experience. Aunt Araba is going to the other world with a peeve against Aba. In West African culture, this implies a curse, an irrevocable stain on Aba’s life. To Aunt Araba, Aba has become a persona non grata, something of semblance to the description in Christopher Okigbo’s "Love Apart" –

And we are now shadows
That cling to each other
But kiss the air only.

Stanza 8:

I am going...
when I am gone,
be faithful with your vows to Nananom
that you may have their blessing and avoid their wrath

This stanza concentrates on reverence for the divine. Aunt Araba states the necessity of being ‘faithful with your vows to Nananom’. Nananom, which translates to ‘The Kings’, is a euphemism for gods and departed spirits. Here Aunt Araba becomes a medium between the living and the departed, a role defined with excellence in Senghor’s "Night of Sine" –

Let me inhale the smell of our Dead, let me collect and repeat their living voice, let me learn
To live before I sink, deeper than the diver, into the lofty depth of sleep.

This is the final piece to the mosaic that is Aunt Araba’s life. She wants those who remain in this life after her to do the right things so that ‘you may have their blessing and avoid their wrath’. Among several tribes in Ghana (and Africa, for that matter), one’s success or failures are believed to be intrinsically linked to either the blessings or wrath of Nananom.

Aunt Araba uses Biblical allusion in this stanza as it echoes the sentiments in Ecclesiastes 5: 4 – 7 -

When you make a vow to God, do not delay to fulfill it. He has no pleasure in fools; fulfill your vow. It is better not to make a vow than to make one and not fulfill it. Do not let your mouth lead you into sin. And do not protest to the temple messenger, “My vow was a mistake.” Why should God be angry at what you say and destroy the work of your hands? Much dreaming and many words are meaningless. Therefore fear God.

The warning that Aunt Araba extends to her listeners is to walk their talk. As she has proven throughout the poem, she is a woman of few words, moving from subject to subject with clarity even as her time on earth comes to a close.

In this stanza, we experience the frailty of the human experience and the dependence on external things to validate that experience. We also see the divine as the unseen unifier of human divergence. What sets stanza eight apart from the rest is that its message is universal. It lacks the specificity that is rife in previous stanzas. Aunt Araba’s advice, like the rain-water in Wole Soyinka’s "Dedication" is -

                                  the gift
Of gods ---- drink of its purity, bear fruits in season.

Fruits then to your lips: haste to repay
The debt of birth. Yield man-tides like the sea
And ebbing, leave a meaning of the fossilled sands.

Darko Antwi uses this stanza as a sleight-of-hand to restore Aunt Araba’s image as a devout individual. It is effective because suddenly we see a woman who is fixated on cultural continuity and the maintenance of divine relations. No one (in her community) will have a problem with her directives in stanza eight. Aunt Araba’s image is salvaged by her appeal to the senses of the majority. This raises several questions such as these: Is the individual vindicated by towing the line of the majority? Doesn’t this sudden change in tone undermine Aunt Araba’s contrarian image built in stanzas one through seven? Is Aunt Araba trying to curry the favor of Nananom before she even joins them? Is there a specific way to exercise faith in order to get results?

Through the first seven stanzas, we have seen Aunt Araba through many prisms (some flattering, others not-so-flattering). This eighth stanza depicts her as a devotee to the ways and customs of her people. She is revolutionary in asking Birago to find independence from her husband but reserved by asking Kakraba not marry women from Manso-Krom. She is hard rock and soft wind. She does not forgive Esi’s debt of food items but she pardons Kuntu over a land dispute. However, in the end, she is a woman who wants a good life – for herself and her family. She wants to be remembered for something. As the sands in her hourglass drip, Aunt Araba finds it her final duty to connect the people she is leaving to those she is about to meet. In this stanza, her personal issues become secondary to the issue of respect for tradition. She becomes like the speaker in Senghor’s "The Message", a messenger to the tribe from Nananom –

I left my warm meal and the handling of many disputes.
Wearing nothing more than a pagne for the dewy mornings,
I had only words of peace as protection and to open every
road.
And I too traversed rivers and forests full of dangers
Where vines hung more treacherous than snakes.
I went among people who would easily let fly a poisoned
greeting.
But I held on the sign of recognition
And the spirits watched over my breath.

Stanza 9:

I am going...
ah... oh... oh...

In this stanza we witness death. We hear Aunt Araba as she drifts into the icy hands of death. There is a tone of painful regret in her ‘ah... oh... oh...’. From the previous stanzas, there was a sense of unfinished business. Perhaps that was the source of regret for this woman. Yet, death comes to us all. It is the most certain appointment on the calendar of our lives. Aunt Araba lived a life of contradictions, as most of us do. Her last words summarize those contradictions but through it all, we discover a person. We discover a beautiful soul, we experience the transition between life and death. Okigbo’s "The Stars Have Departed" depicts this scene -

the sky in monocle
surveys the world under
The stars have departed
and I – where am I?
Stretch, stretch, O antennae,
to clutch at this hour,
fulfilling each moment in a
broken monody

Even though Aunt Araba is passionate about issues that come with being alive, Aunt Araba is alone in her descent into the hands of Death. She must bear that burden alone. That is why in the ninth stanza there is no directive to 'tell' anyone what to do. There are no more words, no more bones to pick or stones to share, only silence to capture the finality of death. At this point of the poem, David Diop’s "The Renegade" resonates well –

Let these words of anguish keep time with your restless
Step –
Oh I am lonely so lonely here

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"The last words of Aunt Araba" is a poem about seeing an individual vis-a-vis the community in which they live. From the first to ninth stanza there is an ongoing conversation centered on what the speaker has to offer her community and what that community has to do in order to make her happy, as captured in these ten statements:

• Kojo has to quit alcoholism
• Birago has to quit being dependent on her husband
• Birago’s husband has no capacity to provide comfort
• Asantewaa has to collect on a debt
• Esi has to pay that debt
• Ebo has to dig for hidden treasures
• Kakraba has to rescind from his decision to marry from a particular town
• Kuntu has received pardon over a land dispute
• Aba has to stay away from Aunt Araba’s imminent funeral
• Everyone has to be faithful to tradition

Note that everything has to be done when the speaker, Aunt Araba, is dead and gone. The most active verb in this poem is to tell. To tell with the sense of resignation that Awoonor’s "Songs of Sorrow" espouses –

Tell them their house is falling
And the trees are in the fence
Have been eaten by termites:
That the martels curse them.
Ask them why they idle there
While we suffer, and eat sand,
And the crow and the vulture
Hover always above our broken fences

The first time I read this poem, I was quickly reminded of its similarity to the hit list that King David, on his deathbed, gave to Solomon in 1 Kings 2:1-9. On that list, people had to be disposed of, while others were to be promoted. Likewise, in this poem, some people are warned, some are shamed, some are pardoned, and the rest are given either a pardon or a gift. Why is this the case? Why won’t Aunt Araba allow her issues to go to the grave with her? Why is she using her imminent demise as a trump card to drag the nine people on a guilt trip to do her wishes?

Some of Aunt Araba’s wishes are petty and vindictive, while others are subversive to the happiness of their recipients. Throughout the poem, there is a bequeathment of treasure to only one person. Even though the poem does not elaborate on why Ebo was the only person to receive the ‘hidden dozens of stones’, it is baffling as to why Birago with a husband with no ‘pillow’ in him is not given anything? Or why Esi’s debt of ‘five okra and an onion’ is not forgiven? Or why Kuntu is forgiven over the land dispute? Through the tapestry of her warnings and wishes, we see Aunt Araba as a complicated character. A woman who means well in one stanza but is mean in the next one. A woman who advises one woman to be self-reliant but warns her male kin not to marry self-reliant women. A woman who will not forgive a debt of ‘five okra and an onion’ but will give another person a gift of ‘hidden dozens of stones’. A woman who forgives someone she has a land dispute with but will not forgive someone who lied about her. One of the many ironies in this poem is Aunt Araba calling out Manso-Krom for its lion-and-scorpion women whereas she is clearly a lioness and a scorpion herself. However, Aunt Araba, through catharsis, offloads the residual speed, power and weight on her heart. By doing this, she becomes 'weightless' like the butterfly, ready to enter the next phase. She reckons that each phase of existence requires us to experience tabula rasa, a clean slate, in order to come into synchronicity with requirements for that new phase. As Achebe mentions in "The Butterfly" -

Speed is violence
Power is violence
Weight is violence

The butterfly seeks safety in lightness
In weightless, undulating flight

Death has no porters for human baggage. We leave our qualms, quarrels and questions at the border of life and death. We come into life empty, we go into death empty. Aunt Araba’s last words are her own frantic efforts to become as empty as possible, to be ready for the journey beyond.

The contradictions paint a painfully human portrait of Aunt Araba. This is a contrast from the portrait of the deceased individual in the poet’s other seminal poem, "The Burial of St. Domeabra", which I had the opportunity to analyze in a previous “How Poems Work”. In that poem, no ill was spoken of the dead man because it was considered unacceptable. However, Aunt Araba, en route to her demise, incriminates her flawed humanity by having her warnings and wishes recorded. Is the poet subtly alluding to the proverb – silence is golden, speech is silver? Is Aunt Araba doing her community any good by leaving with ‘a bang’, or would she have done better service to her own memory by not saying a word? The more we get to know Aunt Araba, the more we understand the wisdom encapsulated in Achebe’s "Knowing Robs Us" –

Knowing robs us of wonder.
Had it not ripped apart
the fearful robes of primordial Night
to steal the force that crafted horns
on doghead and sowed insurrection
overnight

"The last words of Aunt Araba" is a glimpse into metadecisions of a tradition-minded, family-oriented African woman. This poem’s strength lies in its unapologetic realism. There is no effort to sanitize Aunt Araba’s legacy – it is presented as is – you take it or leave it. Darko Antwi has given us a snapshot of a life that could be like ours or our mothers’ or our aunts’. This poem is a dance between mystery and meaning. Its central theme is about becoming better, even though some of the speaker’s wishes are bitter. This is certainly a smorgasbord of love and hate, generosity and vindictiveness, worry and warnings and all things in between. It reminds us of us – the double standards, the favoritism, the overtly intrusive concerns and any kind of disposition that positions us to play God in other people’s lives. Like the speaker in Kwesi Brew’s "The Mesh", Aunt Araba is resolute that -

in the darkness of my doubts
You lifted the lamp of love
And I saw in your face
The road that I should take.

In the end, she is a human being. Human in her criticisms and concerns. Human in her foibles and failures. Humanized by death.

How Poems Work #5 - L.S. Mensah on Prince Mensah's "Fresh Memories of an Old Village"

The following is the fifth installment in our "How Poems Work" series. This series aims to give OGOV readers and poets an opportunity to talk about some of their favourite poems previously featured on the site. We have a special treat this time, as L.S. Mensah brings us a new poem never before published on the site - Prince Mensah's "Fresh Memories of an Old Village".

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Fresh Memories of an Old Village - Prince Mensah

Bare trees and barren earth
Trapped in afternoon silence
Haunted by songs of forlorn
Children left behind by dead
Parents and fleeing relatives.
They watch the dance of dead leaves,
Choreographed by the whirlwind,
Moving to unheard music.
They wait and wait and wait
To awaken with faith,
Expecting this ghost village
To become what it once was.

(Reprinted by author's permission.)

There are many things one could do with a poem. Sometimes like water, a poem can exist in different states: a liquid, a solid, a vapour in the air. Sometimes it is like light, both wave and particle. In the same way, when one reads a poem like Prince Mensah's, “Fresh Memories of an Old Village,” one could take a number of things from it, such as the paradoxical title which sets up the abstract noun fresh against the concrete noun village. One might even see the phrase fresh memories as an oxymoron. By the time we speak of memory/memories, we are already in the past, and so the two words begin to peel away from one another. One could pick up the poem's resemblance to Kwesi Brew's “The Dry Season” and point out that the difference between the two is that while the stripping in Brew’s poem is inevitable, the harrowing in Mensah's is caused by humans. We can also break the poem into, say, three parts, where the poet places his full stops, and from there analyse them. I’ll try to do that, but my main task here is to pick a word/image, and see where that leads.

If you want to know about whirlwinds, the place to go is The Hebrew Bible, also called the Old Testament. But first a detour – the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “whirlwind” as “a column of air moving rapidly round and round in a cylindrical or funnel shape.” The dictionary then concentrates on its cyclical/spherical/curved shape; and passages like Isaiah 5:28 seem to bear that out:

“Whose arrows [are] sharp, and all their bows bent, their horses’ hoofs shall be counted like flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind:”

It seems that every time the whirlwind appears, it is accompanied by an action word, though not always that of a rolling motion. Sometimes there is a scattering, a carrying off, etc. The OED traces the word's etymology to sometime in the High Middle Ages, around 1340; and since the Bible predates it, it is not difficult to see how the definition then is not designed to express the more complex meanings the word connotes in the bible. Biblical scholars remind us that the whirlwind “is not restricted to a rotary movement of air”; it can also be translated as “storm”, “tempest” or “storm-wind” as in Job 21:18 “They are as stubble before the wind, and as chaff that the storm carrieth away,” or Deutero-Isaiah 54:11 “O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, [and] not comforted ...”

I took it upon myself to ask the poet Prince Mensah about whether he had any biblical images in mind while writing the poem He told me in an email exchange that the whirlwind was his channelling of Hosea 8:7, which states: “For they shall sow wind and reap a whirlwind”. Hosea ben Beeri was an 8th century prophet who prophesied in the Northern Kingdom of Israel in the reign of Jeroboam II, when Assyria's hegemonic ambitions in the Ancient Near East were clear for all to see. Hosea prophesied under the Sinai tradition; which emphasises the centrality of the Mosaic covenant. Ancient Israel brings God's judgement upon itself if it strays from the demands and conditions set by Yahweh at Sinai. Their punishment therefore is as a result of their own sins.

If we follow this reasoning then the barren landscape in the poem is as a result of the adults abrogating their responsibilities. Let's take a look at the first part of the poem:

Bare trees and barren earth
Trapped in afternoon silence
Haunted by songs of forlorn
Children left behind by dead
Parents and fleeing relatives.

The first five lines, a single sentence really, run on the heels of each other, and to see where the poet's thoughts lead, one needs to read the next line, and then the next line – it's like peeling an onion, with each succeeding image revealing another. Look at the opening line again: in both bare and barren, you have the verb bar; in this case, to prevent; and there, trapped in the silence, are the children who have been abandoned, both by the dead and the living. We are in an upside down world with no adults, and the humans alive are children, not usually the normal order of things. When we move to lines 6-8 the children

… watch the dance of dead leaves,
Choreographed by the whirlwind,
Moving to unheard music.

Though the leaves share the same condition of death as the parents, the former have been animated by the whirlwind. It is possible that the children, being children, have no idea that when the whirlwind passes things do not get back to what they once were. But if things were not normal to begin with, what would the whirlwind bring? Even in the Hebrew Bible, the whirlwind is not always the eschaton portrayed by the prophets. Its appearance does indicate the overturning of the old order of some sort, as seen by Ezekiel as he stood by the Chabar in Ez. 1:4:

“And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness [was] about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire.”

It is clear from what follows in Ezekiel’s vision that the Israelites had never before encountered a situation like that. However in Job 38:1: “the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said...” This theophany is really the beginning of the end of Job's suffering, and in time he regains all he had lost and more. In 2 Kings 2:11: Elijah “went up by a whirlwind into heaven.” There is a possibility then, for a future restoration; even for the world that the poem depicts. As Mensah says again, in an email:

“The whirlwind can also be seen as a comforting element to the children because it 'choreographs' a display for the forlorn children, giving them a semblance of hope in a time of hopelessness.”

They wait and wait and wait
To awaken with faith,
Expecting this ghost village
To become what it once was.

Conclusion

A poem can mean different things at different times, depending on how one looks at it. So can words and images within a poem. The history that a word or an image carries can lead one to a particular reading. In the poet's response, he mentions the words “forlorn” and “hope”; put them together as “forlorn hope”, and you go back to the phrase's origins in the 16th century, all the way through to the Napoleonic Wars, and to the stalemate in the trenches during the First World War. The forlorn hope is usually a group of soldiers selected to lead an attack, and often not expected to return alive. Sometimes a few do return, and these become instant heroes. Their survival is a testament to man's ability to defy the odds, like the children in Mensah’s poem holding out for a hope that just might come.



References

Egblewogbe, M. and Hill, L. (2011). Look Where You Have Gone To Sit. Woeli Publishers.

Douglas, J.D. (1980). The Illustrated Bible Dictionary: Part 3. Intervarsity Press.


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L.S. Mensah is a frequent OGOV contributor. Read more of her work here.

How Poems Work #4 - Rob Taylor on Nana Agyemang Ofosu's "18 Miles to Yeero"

The following is the fourth installment in our "How Poems Work" series. This series aims to give OGOV readers and poets an opportunity to talk about some of their favourite poems previously featured on the site. Nana Agyemang Ofosu's "18 Miles to Yeero" initially appeared on our site on November 27th, 2010, and that original posting can be read here.


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18 Miles to Yeero - Nana Agyemang Ofosu


The car ran like a hare’s sprint
In a blink we left them to squint
To see us through the vaporizing sand
The whole mass of brown land
Danced in the atmosphere

The journey was not smooth
So rough like an aching cough
Soon I was at Kadoli
And I anticipated Gudayiri

Along the route I numbered the houses
About thirty at Kadoli
And the rest I considered abandoned
The place was a corpse

But at Kadoli we met two women
Each with a child wrapped at the back
Their destination, Gudayiri
But they were nowhere near

They had walked miles with dust
On their feet that could turn a pond brown
I was lost in the sweat from their faces
As they jumped in the wagon

Scattered houses along the route
Dilapidated and rotten thatch roofs
Hung loosely on waste-away bricks
Life in the interior, an eye saw

I wished there was space to accommodate
The many more women along the route
Who paddle their hearts, early morning, to Wa
And back with hope of a better life

I am at Yeero
Don’t think it Yaro, a man’s name
In a flash I went round the town

My journey was only an eighteen mile trek
But I saw the countryside
And witnessed the pain of women
And the neglect of remote towns

If you get time tell others
Of these many villages
Where the politicians visit once in four years
Say that we need them to act
And it is now and no other time.

First off, full disclosure: I am the head editor of One Ghana, One Voice. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I am a fan of "18 Miles to Yeero" by Nana Agyemang Ofosu – it is a poem I chose to publish, after all. That said, every poem published on OGOV isn’t automatically a favourite of mine. If OGOV was a traditional literary magazine with a general publishing mandate and four (or less) issues a year, perhaps every poem published would be deeply loved by me. But OGOV isn’t standard by any stretch. We publish weekly and function as much as a community-building forum as a venue to highlight literary gems. So, regularly I will publish poems which aren’t my favourite, but which do something interesting or unexpected, or which show potential (especially in the case of first-time contributors).

Initially, "18 Miles to Yeero" was one such poem. I was intrigued by its content (rarely do we have poems submitted to us that are set in the Upper West region), but little else. Moreover, I was bothered by the sudden dropping of the rhyme scheme after the first stanza (although a full-length poem with an AABBC rhyme scheme would probably have been worse!). Still, the inconsistency concerned me. Nonetheless, I thought the poem was interesting enough to merit publication, so I posted it on OGOV in late November 2010.

In the year that’s passed since then, "18 Miles" has grown to be one of my favourites on the site. I love its rich images, like the “feet that could turn a pond brown” and the roof hanging from “waste-away bricks”. I love the women “Who paddle their hearts, early morning, to Wa / And back with hope of a better life” - the joyous, sweeping nature of the line; how oddly natural the verb “paddling” feels within the dusty scene, “Wa” echoing as “Water” in my mind and on my tongue.

I love, also, the poem’s regionalism. Having only ever travelled through Upper West Region once myself, and briefly at that, all of the place names (beyond Wa) are foreign to me, as I suspect they would be to many readers. But this in no way diminishes the poem. We have all been to towns like Yeero, where you can count all the houses in town as you drive by and “where the politicians visit once in four years”. But by including these rather obscure names, Ofosu is allowing us to feel alienated along with his narrator, as if we, like him, are journeying into an unknown. By tapping universal themes without abandoning an honest description of these real (and remote) places, Ofosu leaves the reader in flux between the known and the mysterious. This, to me, is the optimal space to inhabit as a reader. It is a space rife with possibility for engagement and the discovery of new meaning. And, in part, it is Ofosu’s devotion to regional accuracy that makes entering that space possible in "18 Miles".

I love the end of the poem too, where it takes a turn towards the unabashedly political. This is the kind of turn that many in North America (where I am writing from) would find off-putting, expecting a more “artistic” ending, instead of a direct call for political action. This poem, instead, fits into the rich vein of African literature that faces vital political issues head on. Reading "18 Miles" reminded me very much of Ama Ata Aidoo’s response to a question about the “practicality” of the American “hippie” art of the Sixties:

It comes with freedom - a certain type of freedom which I think no black person in this world has right now. It's almost like doing something which is beautiful and nice because you want to do it - like writing a story about lovers in Paris - it is beautiful, it is nice.... [but] I cannot see myself as a writer, writing about lovers in Accra because you see, there are so many other problems... You know, I feel a responsibility and I feel that it’s the same type of responsibility I think black people all over feel. (African Writers Talking, Heinemann, 1972)

Obviously, much has changed in Ghana since Aidoo spoke these words in 1967. But much has stayed the same, as well, especially in remote Northern towns like the poem's Yeero. So here we have Nana Agyemang Ofosu refusing to talk about lovers in Paris. In a 2010 twist on Aidoo’s 1967 analysis, however, Aidoo waits until the end, like the volta in a sonnet, to spring the political angle on the reader. Ofosu’s is a hybrid poem, then - a descriptive narrative and a political poem fused together by that deep sense of responsibility that has fuelled so much of the best of African writing. Indeed much has changed and much has stayed the same: in poems like Ofosu's the plane may now take off for Paris, but it still lands in Accra, at the gates of Osu Castle.

This brings me to the subject of form (which was the source of much of my original displeasure with "18 Miles"), more specifically that oh-too-smooth AABBC rhyme scheme that opens the poem. What can I say? Here, too, I was won over. At first glance, the poem can seem hastily constructed, as though Ofosu began with a rigorous rhyme scheme and grew tired of its demands after one stanza. Perhaps this is the case, though I doubt it. I doubt it chiefly because of the first unrhymed line, which opens the second stanza: “The journey was not smooth”. With that line, the rhyme scheme falls off, and never recovers. It is as if, in that moment, we have taken a turn off the main highway and on to the potholed dirt road that we will be travelling for the eighteen bumpy miles of the poem.

I’m reminded here of a poem called “Sampling from a Dialogue” by the Canadian poet Don Coles. A poem about an argument between a husband and wife, its form starts off as a traditional sonnet, but slowly unravels as the poem (and argument) proceeds. On the (lucky) thirteenth line, the wife interjects “Well / maybe there is just such a thing as / having enough of somebody”, and the poem’s form falters. The poem ends up being twenty lines (not the sonnet’s traditional fourteen), and both the form and the relationship are left in ruins.*

In both Coles' and Ofosu’s poems, then, a traditional form is played with in order to heighten the felt effect of the poem, with the form itself enacting the content of the poem. It’s a risky thing to do – perhaps the reader will never notice the formal play, or will come to negative conclusions about the abandonment of the form (assuming, incorrectly, that there is only one “right” way to compose a formal poem) – but the payoff can be great.

I was originally one of those readers who missed the payoff when it came to "18 Miles to Yeero". I’m very glad, though, that I gave it a second chance. I still see imperfections in the poem, to be sure, but these are easily overshadowed by its rich language, form, and content. Poems like "18 Miles" humble me as an editor – there isn’t enough time on earth to carefully give multiple readings to every poem submitted to OGOV, but when I rediscover a poem like "18 Miles", I wish there was. I fear what I might have missed publishing over the years. But at the very least I can be happy that this poem made it out there.

I encourage our long-time readers to go back through our archives and find some poems that you may have overlooked, and encourage our new readers to discover those same poems for the first time.






* I owe a debt here to Zachariah Wells, whose anthology Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets (Biblioasis, 2008) introduced me to both the poem itself and to the sonnet hidden away within its twenty lines.
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Rob Taylor is a Co-Founder and Editor at OGOV. You can read more of his writing here.

How Poems Work #3 - Prince Mensah on Darko Antwi's "The Burial of Saint Domeabra"

The following is the third installment in our "How Poems Work" series. This series aims to give OGOV readers and poets an opportunity to talk about some of their favourite poems previously featured on the site. Darko Antwi's "The Burial of Saint Domeabra" initially appeared on our site on September 11th, 2010, and can be read in full here.


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O Saint Domeabra… that Friday dawn
that dawn when you died at AbrepƆ,
your kinsmen dragged your body –
through the long woody quiet path
that goes to your primal village.

One could barely hear the singing birds.

Darko Antwi opens “The Burial of Saint Domeabra” by calling Domeabra a “Saint”. He does this without letting us know what Domeabra had done in life to merit being so called. It is interesting, then, that even though Domeabra is said to be a Saint, his "kinsmen dragged" his body, instead of carrying it, as is customarily done, "through the long woody quiet path/that goes to your primal village." From the words in the first stanza, it can be deduced that St. Domeabra’s death occurred before morning. This makes the news of his death the first thing that people heard about that day. His body is hurriedly "dragged" from AbrepƆ to his "primal village". I wonder why there is a rush to bury him. If he was of importance to his kinsmen, they neither would have dragged his body nor would they have rushed to bury him. However, the tragedy sinks deep in the heart of nature, so that "one could barely hear the singing birds". It is believed in Ghana (and other parts of Africa) that the skies turn dark when great men die. Even though the kinsmen do not accord St. Domeabra’s body any respect, nature becomes silent because of him.

It was so quiet – a whisper could explode.
No maid had been out to the wells
and the boys who run helter skelter at noon
were still on their bamboo mats,
dreaming snail-hunt and rattraps.

In the second stanza, the silence has become infectious. There is no activity; no work by the maid, no play by the boys. Everyone is "still on their bamboo mats/dreaming snail-hunt and rattraps." Once again, the question rises: why are they not meditating on the life and times of St. Domeabra? Was it only a routine courtesy to be paid or a sincere pause to mourn a friend?

Domeabra, that day of your death,
your people cried – but not unto your soul.
For they delight in bodies more than life.
Yet, no sooner had they worn red and black
than their pestles and mortar put aside.

The third stanza answers the why in the preceding stanzas. People cried upon hearing about Domeabra’s death but it was not to mourn his soul's passing. It was just another funeral; another life wasted by death. This is where Antwi begins his subtle dig against cultural addictions to the performances of rites superseding the importance of the people in them – For they delight in bodies more than in life. Domeabra was more worthy to his people dead than alive. At least, they could raise money through nsuwa (monetary contributions by friends to the family of the deceased). They could wear red and black (colours of mourning) in the same breath as "their pestles and mortars" were put aside.

At the graveyard, I eavesdropped,
they were telling a thousand tales about your life:
the lemons, the salt, the god and the demons in you.
Yehowah! each person knows what or who killed you,
all too compelling – but none trustworthy.

In the fourth stanza, the poet listens to testimonies about the deceased; he hears "a thousand tales" about Domeabra. He hears bizarre stories that border on the absurd and the mystical. The stories about Domeabra are "all too compelling – but none trustworthy." The area gossips "know what or who killed" Domeabra but it seem no one was able to pre-empt his death. Antwi mocks the myths and legends that tend to be told after people die. All of a sudden, everybody seems to know some powerful secret about the deceased; everyone wants to be seen as an expert on the deceased's life (and death).

If I should say: you were without fault,
I will be defying Romans and Corinthians.
None of your accusers is righteous though
– amongst them are many two-leftfooters
who can guess the skeletons in their cupboards?

In the fifth stanza, the poet does something that Domeabra’s people should have done all along: he mourns the dead man. The poem becomes a dirge. He sees the Saint as a flawed man, a man no less than his self-righteous accusers. This stanza reminds me of Mark Anthony’s words in Act III, Scene II of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;

In the poet’s eyes, it is not Domeabra who is on trial. It is his people and their attitudes about his passing. It is not about Domeabra’s character; it is about his people’s callousness. Antwi uses biblical allusion in the line "If I should say: you were without fault,/I will be defying Romans and Corinthians." In the Bible, the Book of Romans talks about the fact that all have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God. The Book of Corinthians covers the subject of life after death.

The use of Biblical allusion in this stanza betrays the subtle dance between tradition and Christian beliefs promoted by the society Antwi is writing about: St. Domeabra’s soul is consoled with scriptural themes. This is key to understanding the context of Domeabra’s "sainthood". At this point in the poem, the dead man’s memory, though dishonoured by his own people, is immortalized through the use of Christian concepts. It is important to note that Domeabra was not given a native appellation at death, he was given a Christian designation. This raises a few questions about his society: Do they give credit to their own as much as strangers praise them? Is this a validation of Christ’s saying in John 4:44 that “a prophet has no honour in his own country”? What has the practice of culture done to the way we treat ourselves?

Domeabra, when you were buried,
that day, that very day, I bathed with palmwine
And ripped my heart into shreds of reed
(I ripped it bleeding with hands of gorilla)
But, sorry, I couldn’t have joined you in the grave.

In the sixth stanza, we do not hear about Domeabra’s kinsfolk at all. This is because the poet has taken over the role of chief mourner as he "bathed with palmwine/And ripped [his] heart into shreds of reed." The poet does everything that is humanly possible to mourn the dead but sets a limit to what he can do – he cannot "join [him] in the grave." At this point the poet stops mourning and begins searching for meaning. He scans through images at the funeral and finds none that satisfy his search. Because of this, the poet starts seeking beyond the physical depiction of things.

The sixth stanza is poignant in its description of alcoholic binges at funerals. The usual Ghanaian village funeral scene is a mixture of cold palm wine and hot tears. Antwi refutes the half-hearted me ne wo be ko'ooo (I shall go with you) funeral chant in the last line of the sixth stanza - "But, sorry, I couldn’t have joined you in the grave."

Domeabra, look, when you die again,
let them bury you where you would die
because no piece of land repels a corpse.
Humans may fail or pretend therefore
but earth is a kind keeper of us all.

The seventh stanza carries hints of rejuvenation and/or reincarnation where the poet speaks to Domeabra’s soul: "Domeabra, look, when you die again,/let them bury you where you would die"

The poet chooses not to speak to others about St. Domeabra; he speaks directly to the “Saint” himself. He sets a defiant tone against every ingredient of this tragedy: it is directed at death, the community and its customs. The poet subtly digs at the cultural insistence that a man be buried where he was born, "because no piece of land repels a corpse." The poet finds it in his heart to be forgiving of how Domeabra’s kinsfolk handled his final rites. The final words of the poem reassure the restless spirits of the disrespected dead to understand that "Humans may fail or pretend therefore/but earth is a kind keeper of us all", for nature does not fail where humans falter.

The seventh stanza resonates with people who live in a land faraway from the land of their birth. There is this tendency by culturally obsessed Ghanaians, who live in Diaspora, to insist on being taken back to Ghana after they die. Instead of being buried in the "foreign land", their corpses are flown back to Ghana as special cargo. This incurs a heap of expenses for their family members, forcing them to use funds that could go into enhancing the education and/or sustenance of a living person. It is a belief held among Ghanaian tribes that if a person is not buried in their land of birth, their soul will be restless.



"The Burial of Saint Domeabra" is a poem about wandering, about the nomadic in life, who seek closure by being brought home to rest. Darko Antwi questions why wanderers seek closure, why Domeabra chose his primal village to be his final resting place and not AbrepƆ. Or perhaps everything was decided for him once he was dead. He was not there to choose how his funeral was organized; he was not there to monitor how he was buried. He was not present to judge the fake tears that were shared for him. He was dead and gone; no disrespect of his body and memory could faze him any longer. At that instance, the poet becomes his voice, his means of expression in a world wherein he is silenced on all levels.

The title of the poem is splendid, from a linguistic point of view. Domeabra is a derivative word of the Akan phrase, Se wo do me a, bra which means "If you love me, come to me". Anyone who has attended a Ghanaian funeral would remember seeing multitudes of people. The fact remains that a huge part of the multitude never knew the deceased in personal terms. Some of them are distant relatives, others are old acquaintances (or friends of friends) and the rest are curious folk who want to be part of the funeral. They all attend the funeral because there is a thin line of love, a human solidarity with the dead person. It is assumed that people normally do not attend the funerals of people they dislike. Peter Tosh’s famously declined to attend Bob Marley's funeral, for instance. Hence, the crowd at a funeral is assumed to be present because they "love" the deceased. Everyone becomes a Saint when they die, because it is considered dishonourable to speak ill of the dead. Domeabra was a simple man, who made mistakes in life but, in death, he is canonized by villagers bound by customary practices.

"The Burial of Saint Domeabra" tackles our cultural obsession with funerals and, by extension, places of burial. With brutally honest humour, Antwi lays into deep seated cultural practices that adore corpses but do not attend to the needs of the living.

There is symbolism in Antwi's use of seven stanzas to convey the themes in this poem. In Akan funeral rites, seven horns called the Menson are blown to remember the dead. It is the same idea as the twenty-one gun salute for fallen soldiers. In many cultures and religions, seven means completion and for the poet, a practicing Seventh-Day Adventist, the seventh day is a day of rest (according to the order of creation). In the Akan language, God is known as Kwame, the name given to a male born on the seventh day. Antwi’s use of seven stanzas to commemorate the passing of Saint Domeabra satisfies a native ritual. The intertwining of cultural symbolism gives this poem refreshing distinctiveness. Antwi hopes that, after all the brouhaha in the village concerning his burial, Saint Domeabra will finally find rest in death. Antwi does exactly what poetry is meant to be: commenting on very deep issues in very few words.

His use of Twinglish (a linguistic mix of Twi and English) in the phrase, "Saint Domeabra," is one of the many powers that this poem uses to convey its themes. It is about time for us, writers of African descent, to be creative on multiple levels when it comes to language. Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o were unapologetic with the use of native words in their prose. Poetry in Ghana, as a microcosm of African poetry, has been reluctant to give the rest of the world a taste of our beautiful languages. It is about time African poets and writers put their words where their hearts are. The use of a local word or phrase as the pivot of a poem urges the English speaker/reader to understand a word that is not native to his/her tongue. African writers can inject this instrument of linguistic reciprocity to achieve seven main objectives:

1. To forge new words made out of their own languages
2. To maintain the use of their native language in a world where other languages are dying or acquiescing themselves to English
3. To give their work authenticity and identity
4. To broaden the lexicon of the English language, which still lacks words that properly describe certain actions, activities and people
5. To keep the contextual integrity of their works
6. To open their world to the rest of the world, and
7. To make their poetry more accessible to the less-educated in their societies.

From the first to the seventh stanza, Darko Antwi creates a sad portrait about forms and intentions. The funeral is the form but is it to honour the dead or enrich the living? The world is the form but are we called "Saints" in zest or in jest? We cannot answer these questions thoroughly. Each person sees a different side of the prisms of life and death. We are thankful that poets like Darko Antwi never cease to remind us of the deep things in life.


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Prince Mensah is an Associate Editor at OGOV. You can read more of his writing here.

How Poems Work #2 - Dela Bobobee on Mariska Taylor-Darko's "The Deer Hunt"

The following is the second installment in our "How Poems Work" series. This series aims to give OGOV readers and poets an opportunity to talk about some of their favourite poems previously featured on the site.  Mariska Taylor-Darko's "The Deer Hunt" initially appeared on our site on September 25th, 2010, and can be read in full here.


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History of the Aboatyer Festival

The poem “The Deer Hunt” showcases the Aboatyer Festival of the people of Winneba. Like most every other festival in Ghana in particular, and Africa in general, the tenacity of the people of Winneba to their indigenous mores is highly commendable.

It is arguable that all African festivals based on rituals are underlain by an attempt to appease or conciliate somebody or something supreme (a deity). This is also known as propitiation, and it is the historical motivation for the Aboatyer Festival. In this case, the Otuano royal house, which is the custodian of the paramount stool of the Effutu state, observed this ritual once in a year. It is believed that in the past during periods of difficulty; the sons and daughters of Gyarteh Gyan Penyin and their descendants were greatly supported by a deity called Otu. History has it that in their quest for a suitable place of abode, they were guided by the deity on a long, tortuous and windy trail through forests and across rivers, down to their present location. In appreciation, a ritual sacrifice was made, which was meant not only as an act of gratitude but also as a consecration of the deity to renew its powers. At a particular time of the year, the people offered propitiation and sanctify the deity and its sons (the lesser gods) with human sacrifices. But as time went by the human sacrifices were replaced by the “wansan” (deer).


Parading Prior to the Hunt

Nowadays, active preparation towards the festival starts soon after the Easter holidays. Since 1965 the date has been permanently fixed for the first Saturday in the month of May. The Asafo companies consult their shrines for clearance, protection and early catch during the week preceding the festival day. The Tuafo invoke their gods on Wednesday and Thursday whiles the Dentsefo invoke theirs during the week apart from these two days. The gods are invoked indoors between noon and sunset. On Friday, the day proceeding the hunting day, both Asafo companies parade through the town on some selected streets.

The capture of a live deer needs many hands and hence the involvement of the militia or “Asafo” hunters’ groups. It was from this point on that the annual sanctification and appeasement became a public affair. The “Asafo” in Winneba was developed from the local militia initially established by King Bondze Abe. This later became the Tuafo “Asafo” No.1 company. Later his successor and son created the Dense “Safe” No.2 company. It is recognized that the creation of the second Asafo company began the competition and rivalry between the Asafo companies. The competitive spirit made each group eager to bring home the first catch which the needed for the annual sacrifice. This was what gave birth to the Deer Hunt or “Aboatyer” festival.


Themes

Based on the general festive depiction of this poem, there can be several levels of interpretations in terms of the contemporary significance of holding fast to one’s cultural heritage. But in my opinion there are some other equally important themes surrounding the uniqueness of Aboatyer Festival in itself.
 

At first glance, the thematic preoccupation of the poet would appear to be a simple showcase of one of the most popular festivals in Ghana, by using the point of view of a child narrator. This would perhaps easily mislead the reader to regard it as only an occasion of great fun and childish fascination recollected from the nostalgic memoirs of a Ghanaian poet who has left the shores of her native country at a tender age. But in terms of the real cultural significance of the Aboatyer Festival of the people of Winneba, the cogent themes derived are the adaptation of ancient rituals based on compassionate grounds as ethical tenets of humanity, freedom and justice. There are also the themes of reunion and royalty (the significance of the particular family house of the narrator being chosen as the ceremonial converging point for preparation, for the hunters to wear their gears and get ready for the task ahead, and the women to cook for the feast; perhaps means that the narrator comes from a regal lineage of some sort). The poem’s third stanza also showcases to the world and the uninitiated some mouth-watering typical Ghanaian delicacies which bring some thrilling gustatory images to the reader’s mind.



Hunter's Regalia Adorned with Ammunition Cartridge Casings

As we can all rightly affirm from the backdrop of its antecedence, facts reveal that the previous ritual of human sacrifice associated with this festival has been completely erased and successfully replaced with the symbolic sacred deer that must be caught live without the use of weapons. Yes, this goes a long way to say that society is dynamic and so from time to time it reviews and adjusts its cultural practices to reflect its evolving humane ideals. In other words, the poem has entrenched within it the universal theme of human compassion. This also demonstrates that not all of our indigenous African mores or traditions are fetish and heathen as others unfamiliar with our socio-cultural inclinations would make us to believe. The deer represents a redeeming status in terms of a human life, just like the ram replaced Isaac as an object of sacrifice in the biblical account of Abraham’s obedience to God’s directives. Other significant themes of the poem include hunting prowess, heroism, unity, peaceful coexistence, harmony, the adherence and preservation of the rich cultural heritage of the traditional African people.



Point of View

One of the most magical elements of this poem is the fact that the ceremony being showcased is narrated through the point of view of a child. For this, I give Mariska a plus for exceptional artistry and an apt choice of point of view. Her choice of a child narrator gives the poem a peculiar tone of good cheer, simplicity and festivity. The imagery created by the words of the child narrator evoke an atmosphere that is a mixture of tension, relief and celebration.


The Clever Use of Imagery

Perhaps what makes the poem “The Deer Hunt” exceptional is the clever use imagery, the pictures the poet paints in the mind of the reader.  Imagery in poetry is what the words of the poem make the reader 'see' in their imagination. It is the colours, sounds, and sometimes feelings evoked by the poem. Mariska’s smart use of imagery intensifies the impact of the words of her poem as she “shows” us with her words, rather than just “telling” us what she feels. To put the matter concisely: imagery is the content of thought, where attention is directed to sensory qualities: mental images, figures of speech and embodiments of non-discursive truth.

Psychologists identify seven kinds of mental images — those of sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, bodily awareness and muscular tension.  All these imageries are available to poets, and are used by poets, though rarely to the same extent as Mariska uses them. The effects Mariska achieves are various. She uses imagery to externalize thought, create mood and atmosphere, develop plot, and increase dramatic effects by abrupt changes in imagery. She achieves all this in a very clever way. Let me use an example to explain this. When I mention the effect achieved to develop plot or increase dramatic effect by abrupt changes in imagery, I mean that the poet gives a surprise attack on our emotions: all along she makes us think something different but at the last minute she quickly switches imagery to show us a different scenario. Well, that is what I call clever, isn’t it?

In stanza two, the poet created the imagery of warfare and gore in the reader’s mind:

Dawn was creeping in when the hunters assembled.
They gathered around in their hunting clothes
With sticks, guns, cutlasses, bows and arrows
Looking fierce and frightening
To a young child like me.

What are the images of combat, gore, violence, bloodshed, death, etc? They are sticks, guns, cutlasses, bows and arrows. But the surprise comes at the end –  “Did our men catch the elusive deer!”  Yes, they did. The men “caught” the elusive deer – live (without recourse to any of the kind of weapons listed).

The men came jogging with branches so green
The deer held high looked frightened with big eyes so brown

Perhaps we can rightly compare this clever use of imagery to this short poem, written by Robert Herrick in the 17th century, as it provides us with a very good example:

Here a pretty baby lies

Sung asleep with lullabies:

Pray be silent and not stir

Th' easy earth that covers her.

In the first three lines, the reader is made to believe that the speaker is describing a sleeping baby. But at the fourth line, this understanding is shaken. The baby is covered, not by a blanket, but by earth. That is, the baby is dead.  This realization can produce a sharp emotional reaction, an almost physical pang. And this effect on the reader is the "work" that this "machine of words" is designed to do. Although this poem is not humorous, its "mechanism" is akin to that of most jokes: a sudden alteration of perspective produces an immediate and visceral response.

Other literary techniques, such as metaphor, simile, allegory, personification, metonymy (attribute for whole) and synecdoche (part for whole), all involve imagery. Often the things compared are both images, but one of them may also be a feeling or concept. For example, in stanza nine, apart from gustatory imagery in the first sentence below, which other type of imagery is used in both quotes?

“Lick our lips and act like scattered chicks” 

“With their sticks shaped like little whips,”

Simile: a figure of speech in which one thing is compared to another, typically using the word “like” or “as”.  The playful children portrayed in a party mood are being likened to chicks, and their busy mothers lashed out with sticks when the children went near the food.

It should be noted that while Mariska makes frequent use of the various types of imagery mentioned above, she also made sure she does not overuse them. How does she achieve that? She avoids employing any unnecessary clichés that might weaken the overall effect. The imagery comes naturally, and aptly achieves the intended effects.


Conclusions



The Hero of the Day

In the poem “The Deer Hunt”, Mariska paints pictures in the reader’s mind through the use of literary techniques, simple descriptions and a vivid narrative. As shown above we can see that in her use of imagery in the poem, the poet has been very careful not to mix metaphors too wantonly. Shakespeare did that, but we all know that fashions change because society is not static but dynamic. The overall intended effect is brilliantly achieved. How? She uses images that are new-struck and rich. 

Today, the Aboatyer Festival of Winneba can truly be regarded as one of the most popular and spectacular festivals in Ghana in terms of the ever increasing number of tourists that throng yearly to witness it. It is my hope that Mariska Taylor-Darko’s poem “The Deer Hunt” will go a long way in helping to also give the deserved publicity and exposure of the festival beyond the shores of Ghana. On the symbolic level it represents other themes which can be regarded as more complex. The circumstances surrounding the symbol of “wansan” (the Deer) is socio-cultural in nature, an ancient ritual of propitiation as deep as the mystery of earth itself.


References:

1.       Del Tufo, J. P. (1965) What is Poetry? Publication Office: Ateneo de Manila University. 

2.       Drew, E. H. (1933) Discovering Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc. 

3.       Louise Bogan, The Pleasures of Formal Poetry, in Reginald Gibbons (ed.), The Poet’s Work: 29 Poets On The Origins And Practice Of Their Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979

4.       http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/prettyboi/

The photographs used in this essay are by Kofi Nyan Amoako of Winneba, and are used by permission of the photographer. 

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Dela Bobobee is a frequent contributor to OGOV. You can read more of his work here.