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BIOGRAPHY
Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor was born on March 13, 1935, in the small farming village of Wheta in the Volta region of Ghana. His maternal grandfather, Chief Nyidevu Besa, was a noted elder of the Asiyo division of the Ewe and a suc- cessful farmer. His father was a tailor by trade. Kofi Awoonor’s primary-school education was at the Catholic Mission at Dzodze, which he attended from 1939 to 1943, and then at Bremen School at Keta, a school founded by Presbyterians on land given to them by Awoonor’s great-grandfather in 1847. This early mis- sionary education proved to be a significant factor in his work, which reflects, on many levels, the struggle to free himself from the values and attitudes ac- quired during his colonialist education. In his first volume of poetry, he was to make explicit reference to the necessity of abandoning the Christianity taught to him at the mission schools to embrace his traditional religion.
After attending the Achimota School in Accra, Kofi Awoonor received ad- vanced degrees from the University of Ghana at Legon, the University of Lon- don, and the State University of New York, Stony Brook, where he earned the Ph.D. in comparative literature. From 1960 to 1965, Awoonor served as a faculty member at the University of Ghana at Legon, first in the Department of English and subsequently at the Institute for African Studies. While at the university, Awoonor was a participant in the International Socialist Solidarity of Kwame Nkrumah and helped to found the party study group at Legon. As part of the solidarity, he traveled to Russia in 1961, China in 1963, and Cuba in 1965. From 1965 to 1967, he served as director of the Ghana Film Institute and was closely associated with the Ghanaian literary magazine Okyeame, which pub- lished his poetry along with works by his compatriots Efua Sutherland, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Ama Ata Aidoo. After the fall of the Nkrumah regime in February 1966, Awoonor left Ghana and on October 8, 1968, while at the Uni- versity of London, changed his name from George Awoonor Williams to Kofi Awoonor. Awoonor spent eight years in exile, and more than half of those years were spent in the United States, in New York, California, and Texas. At the University of Texas, he held a visiting professorship, and at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he chaired the Department of Comparative Lit- erature. Upon his return to Ghana in 1975, Awoonor taught for a while at the Cape Coast campus of the university but was arrested in November of the same year and accused of collusion to subvert the Acheampong regime. The specific charge was harboring a fugitive from justice. He spent one year at the Ussher Fort Prison and, like South Africa’s Dennis Brutus, Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and several other African intellectuals and artists, joined the ranks of ‘‘prison graduates.’’ The year at Ussher Fort, however, yielded a collection of prison verse, The House by the Sea (1978). After a brief court appearance in October 1976, Kofi Awoonor was sentenced to another year in prison but was released mysteriously a few days later. During the 1980s, Kofi Awoonor rendered diplomatic service to Ghana, first as ambassador to Brazil and subsequently as permanent representative of Ghana to the United Nations, a position he held until 1994, when he returned to Ghana. He is currently re- siding in Ghana at Legon.
MAJOR WORKS AND THEMES
Kofi Awoonor’s work, which includes poetry, fiction, and social and political history, is informed by his experience of colonialist cultural dominance, by his participation in the early success of independent Ghana, and by his experience of migration, exile, and return. In his poetry Awoonor re-presents and interro- gates the African past as well as affirms new, developing African identities and sensibilities. In his fiction, however, he subjects to critique the African national bourgeoisie and its role in creating what he perceives to be a bankrupt postin- dependent Ghanaian society. In all his work, Awoonor renders consistently a forceful critique of and resistance to the colonizing and neocolonizing strategies of domination over Africa’s economic and cultural production.
The publication of Rediscovery and Other Poems (1964) brought international attention to Awoonor’s poetic talent and craft. The poems in this collection, referencing the rediscovery of cultural identity, speak specifically to the recovery of spiritual traditions and to the abandoning of Christianity, the ‘‘senseless ca- thedral of doom,’’ to return to the energy, vitality, and power of the ancestral gods. The themes in this and in Awoonor’s other early verse collections are also related to his conception of the role of the artist in society and to his close connection to Anlo-Ewe oral tradition.
As a young child, Awoonor attended funerary ceremonies and was exposed to the Ewe dirge, a traditional verse form of loss and lament. Later, as the more mature, self-conscious poet, he worked closely with the well-known dirge singer Akpulu. From his collaboration with Akpulu, Awoonor published Guardians of the Sacred Word (1974), a prolonged meditation on the role of the traditional poet, his skills, and his position in traditional society. From the dirge,Awoonor’s poetry frequently incorporates themes of death, grief, and loss. At the sametime, there are themes of regeneration, continuity, and survival, all of which are an- chored, according to Awoonor, in the ‘‘faith, belief, and certainty that life is a cyclical process’’ (‘‘Afterword,’’ Until the Morning After, 216). Just as there are the grief and lament for the loss of traditional culture, seen as the wellspring of creative and spiritual power, there is hope for regeneration and continuity in the cultural work of the poet, the scholar, and ordinary people. The valorization of the traditional, first symbolized by the abandoning of his Christian name, George Awoonor Williams, speaks to the centrality of identity and the reclaim- ing of a knowledge of self. For Kofi Awoonor, cultural rediscovery is a gradual and ritualistic process. It is also that which marks him as a ‘‘traditionalist,’’ that is, one who incorporates the materials and conventions from oral literature in his works. Unlike the first wave of ‘‘modern’’ African poets, primarily the Francophone poets of Negritude, whose verse demonstrated elaborate gestures of cultural affirmation, or the second-wave ‘‘Euromodernists’’ who debunked the attitudes of their predecessors, the traditionalists used verse forms to rep- resent and explore the personal and political dimensions of their history and cultural legacy.
Sometimes labeled ‘‘nativist,’’ traditionalist poets and writers promote the idea of an authentic ethnic identity that resides in traditional cultural forms and that, once ‘‘rediscovered,’’ functions to heal the wounds inflicted by colonial subjugation and cultural displacement. The conscious reclamation of indigenous traditions and forms is also a means to reconnect with the masses and to chal- lenge the political and social hegemony of the African national bourgeoisie. For Awoonor, this traditionalist aesthetic is manifested not only in the re- presentation of oral forms, but in the clear, precise poetic diction and the use of verse as public utterance, as ‘‘message’’ to a communal audience.
Themes of disillusionment and decay and of loss and yearning inform Awoonor’s fiction. In his first novel, This Earth, My Brother (1971), published the same year as his second verse collection, Night of My Blood, Awoonor gives metaphoric representation to the condition of modern Ghanaian society by means of thematic definitions of corruption and defilement. Experimental in form, impressionistic and expressionistic in technique, This Earth, My Brother is a complex rendering of the moral and spiritual degradation of the postcolonial African bourgeoisie. The text alternates between prose and poetic forms, using the first to describe the daily experiences and external reality of the protagonist and the other to represent his mythopoetic, spiritual consciousness. The move- ment between internal and external realities is paralleled by movements in time and space. Spatially the text moves back and forth between urban and village locales, between neighborhoods in the capital city and outlying districts in the eastern region of the country. Haunted by the memory of his dead female cousin, who is linked to images of a mythic water deity and who symbolizes the modern nation-state of Ghana (Innes, ‘‘Mothers or Sisters?’’ 132), the protagonist also moves back and forth in time, between recollections of a childhood past and the experiences of a vapid present. Amamu, a European-educated, ‘‘Been-to’’ lawyer, is so spiritually bankrupt and so alienated by the corrupt society he inhabits that he attempts to connect himself to the mythic, mammy water deity and suffers mental breakdown and death. Amamu’s loss of identity and self is a metaphoric representation for the greater national malaise, disillusionment, and loss.
In Comes the Voyager at Last (1992), Awoonor moves from earlier themes of alienation and corruption to themes of betrayal, longing, and return within a transnational and transcultural context. The novel defines themes of forced mi- gration and enslavement, displacement and confinement, reconciliation and re- turn. Traversing geographical space and crossing national and cultural boundaries, the protagonist, Marcus Garvey MacAndrews, recoups an unsullied traditional past and is reconciled to an originary, indigenous homeland. From his birthplace in Virginia, he moves to New York, where he is betrayed and unjustly imprisoned. Disillusioned and bitter, he journeys to Africa and is able, through violence and murder, to move beyond the experience of racism and oppression to reconciliation.
As in This Earth, My Brother, Awoonor juxtaposes prose with poetic forms and moves back and forth in space and time. In this novel, however, the move- ment from rural and village locales to the city, from the diaspora back to the continent, imitates and parallels the various dimensions of identity. On one hand, identity, as racial or ethnic subjectivity produced through individual and collec- tive experience, is constructed as a multiple and shifting phenomenon. On the other, identity is delineated as a unitary, ‘‘true’’ cultural self that, once redis- covered and reclaimed, restores what has been lost, stolen, and denied through economic, and cultural dominance. What distinguishes this novel from This Earth, My Brother, however, is that thematic definitions of loss and recuperation and of longing and return are situated within a transnational and transcultural context. In doing so, Comes the Voyager at Last makes possible a new kind of engagement and exchange between African people on the continent and those in the diaspora.
The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Culture, and Literatures of Africa South of the Sahara (1975), Ghana: A Political History (1991), and Africa: The Marginalized Continent (1994) are works in political and social history in which Kofi Awoonor addresses the effects of imperialism and colo- nialism on African politics, economy, and cultural production. In Ghana: A Political History, Awoonor first explains that he proceeds from the assumption that ‘‘no national effort to forge ahead can succeed without close reference to the national culture and history’’ (xii), and that the purpose of the book is to revise those external versions of history that have sought to ‘‘straight-jacket the African predicament into well-wrought and neat ideological frames’’ (x–xi). He then goes on to denounce the importation of Western democratic institutions to Africa, arguing that pre-European societies on the Gold Coast had viable po- litical and social institutions that integrated all facets of life. Delineating the systematic destruction of these institutions under the British colonial order from 1844 to 1957, Awoonor recounts Ghanaian political history since independence, discloses the complicity of the African national bourgeoisie with the neocolonial strategies of Europe, and finally calls for an ‘‘Alternative African Society,’’ constructed on a new political, economic, and moral base (271).
In Africa: The Marginalized Continent (1994), the collection of essays and speeches made while Awoonor was Ghana’s permanent representative to the United Nations, the focus is Africa’s position in the post-Communist, post–Cold War era. Recognizing the far-ranging implications of the collapse of the Soviet Union for the developing nations of the South, Awoonor focuses on the issues of humanitarian relief and intervention, on the emergence of a unipolar world, and on global security and global apartheid. All of these, he contends, are crucial to the argument of whether democracy is a ‘‘feasible proposition within any nation that is plagued by deprivation and grinding poverty’’ (xiii). Asserting that ‘‘Africa’s crisis is the world’s crisis,’’ Awoonor sees this very crisis as a ‘‘fundamental challenge to the moral basis of our common humanity’’ (xv).
CRITICAL RECEPTION
The critical writing on Kofi Awoonor’s work focuses primarily on his verse. He is regarded as preeminent among Anglophone African poets and is recog- nized for his skillful and imaginative use of language. At the sametime, because his work links the ethical, the political, and the aesthetic, Robert Fraser in his study of West African poetry asserts that Awoonor is ‘‘poet and propagandist,’’ characterizing his poetry as verse in which ‘‘personal self-expression and social criticism proceed hand-in-hand’’ (161). Ken Goodwin in his study often African poets labels Awoonor a ‘‘syncretist’’ and delineates three stages in Awoonor’s movement toward cultural synthesis. The first is the stage of rediscovery of tradition, with a heavy reliance on Ewe oral poetry; the second is the stage in which Awoonor juxtaposes, in a single poem, African and European traditions; the third is the stage of synthesis in which material from each culture reinforces rather than opposes the other (94–95). John Haynes devotes part of his study to Awoonor’s poetry and its relationship to Ewe oral poems and songs, the dirge in particular. According to Haynes, while Kofi Awoonor, Okot p’Bitek, and Gabriel Okara situate traditional oral poetry as the basis for their art, these poets are also concerned with English as a translation language and with the question of ‘‘Africanness’’ in relation to it (40).
As one of the few studies to offer critical analyses of Awoonor’s poetry and fiction, Richard Priebe’s Myth, Realism, and the West African Writer deserves special mention. With a full chapter devoted to This Earth, My Brother, Priebe looks at the novel in terms of its structural and thematic similarities to the dirge. More important, he interprets the death of the protagonist, Amamu, as suicide and sacrifice, as a negation of the current social order, and as ‘‘symbolic of the recurrent transformations necessary to the health of any society’’ (70). In his analysis of Awoonor’s poetry, Priebe offers a reading that links Awoonor, de- spite ideological and formal differences, to Wole Soyinka. The basis for the similarity, he argues, is liminality and the priestlike role of the personae in both Soyinka’s and Awoonor’s verse. Priebe likewise contends that there is a similar conception of the role of the poet as prophet, of the poet being the ‘‘priestlike’’ man who leaves his society only to return with the power to revitalize it (99). In much the same manner, Robert Fraser suggests that Awoonor claims the role and authority of the heno, the traditional custodian or guardian of the Ewe covenant with the ancestor. In reclaiming the tradition of the heno and asserting his prerogatives, Kofi Awoonor, Fraser maintains, becomes the medium by which ‘‘poetry becomes a means of continuity . . . and a channel of grace’’ (166).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Kofi Awoonor
Rediscovery and Other Poems. Ibadan, Nigeria: Mbari, 1964.
Night of My Blood. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971.
This Earth, My Brother. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971; London: Heinemann, 1972.
Ride Me, Memory. New York: Greenfield Center, 1973.
Guardians of the Sacred Word: Ewe Poetry. New York: Nok, 1974.
The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Culture, and Literatures of Africa South of the Sahara. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Doubleday, 1975.
The House by the Sea. New York: Greenfield Center, 1978.
Until the Morning After. Saline, Mich.: McNaughton and Gunn, 1987.
Ghana: A Political History from Pre-European to Modern Times. Accra: Woeli, 1990. Comes the Voyager at Last. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1992.
The Latin American and Caribbean Notebook. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1992. Africa: The Marginalized Continent. Accra: Woeli, 1994.
Selected Studies of Kofi Awoonor
Elimimian, Isaac. ‘‘Kofi Awoonor.’’ Theme and Style in African Poetry. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991.
Fraser, Robert. West African Poetry: A Critical History. London: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Goodwin, Ken. ‘‘Kofi Awoonor.’’ Understanding African Poetry: A Study of Ten Poets. London: Heinemann, 1982.
Haynes, John. ‘‘Song and Copy: The Relation between Oral and Printed in Kofi Awoonor’s
‘Dirge. ’ ’’ African Poetry and the English Language. London: Macmillan, 1987.
Innes, C. L. ‘‘Mothers or Sisters? Identity, Discourse, and Audience in the Writing of Ama Ata Aidoo and Mariama Ba换.’’ Motherlands: Black Women’s Writing from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia. Ed. Susheila Nasta. New Brunswick: Rut- gers University Press, 1992, 129–151.
Kolawole, Mary. ‘‘Kofi Awoonor as a Prophet of Conscience.’’ African Languages and Cultures 5.2 (1992): 125–132.
Priebe, Richard. Myth,Realism, and the West African Writer. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World
Press, 1988.
©ALMA JEAN BILLINGSLEA-BROWN
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