Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Stop Press/ Tribute To Nadine Gordimer 1923–2014
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Editorial Article: Fiction & Socio-Political Realities in Africa: What Else Can Literature Do?
- The Novel as an Oral Narrative Performance: The Delegitimization of the Postcolonial Nation in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari Ma Njirũũngi
- Abiku in Ben Okri’s Imagination of Nationhood: A Metaphorical Interpretation of Colonial-Postcolonial Politics
- Refracting the Political: Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place
- Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Resolutionaries: 47 Exoteric Fiction, the Common People & Social Change in Post-Colonial Africa – A Critical Review
- In Quest of Social Justice: 58 Politics & Women’s Participation in Irene Isoken Salami’s More Than Dancing
- Breaking the Laws in J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus – Philosophy & the Notion of Justice
- The Rhetoric & Caricature of Social Justice in Post-1960 Africa: A Logical Positivist Reading of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari
- ‘Manhood’ in Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty: Authenticity or Accountability?
- Remembering Kofi Awoonor (13 March 1935–21 September 2013)
- Reviews
Kofi Awoonor: In Retrospect
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Stop Press/ Tribute To Nadine Gordimer 1923–2014
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Editorial Article: Fiction & Socio-Political Realities in Africa: What Else Can Literature Do?
- The Novel as an Oral Narrative Performance: The Delegitimization of the Postcolonial Nation in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari Ma Njirũũngi
- Abiku in Ben Okri’s Imagination of Nationhood: A Metaphorical Interpretation of Colonial-Postcolonial Politics
- Refracting the Political: Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place
- Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Resolutionaries: 47 Exoteric Fiction, the Common People & Social Change in Post-Colonial Africa – A Critical Review
- In Quest of Social Justice: 58 Politics & Women’s Participation in Irene Isoken Salami’s More Than Dancing
- Breaking the Laws in J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus – Philosophy & the Notion of Justice
- The Rhetoric & Caricature of Social Justice in Post-1960 Africa: A Logical Positivist Reading of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari
- ‘Manhood’ in Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty: Authenticity or Accountability?
- Remembering Kofi Awoonor (13 March 1935–21 September 2013)
- Reviews
Summary
Rediscovery and Other Poems, Kofi Awoonor’s first collection of poems, was published in 1964 by Mbari Press in Ibadan, Nigeria. By a significant coincidence, The Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems, 1964–2013, is being released in 2014 by University of Nebraska Press, the first publication in the African Poetry Book Series. In many ways, the new collection offers a unique opportunity for critical retrospection, a backward glance over a half century of Awoonor’s distinguished career as a Guardian of the Sacred Word.
The collection opens with poems that point us in two directions, to a reconciled past and to a future of new challenges and new possibilities. First, to a past where we meet poet and country, young as the new moon and filled with hope and the promise of hope. We see in that past many memorials of struggle, inviting a stroll across a landscape of birds and flowers strewn with graveyards. But we walk arm in arm with the poet, with little fear of mortality. We hold our breath as the poet looks across a new dawn and introduces us to Death holding out his own ‘inimitable calling card’ only to be ushered into
a homestead
resurrected with laughter and dance
and the festival of the meat
of the young lamb and the red porridge
of the new corn.
Here is a constant return to old familiar themes and subjects and the need to postpone dying ‘until the morning after freedom.’ So we find in ‘To Feed Our People’ a gentle plea with the pallbearers and mourners to hold back, just a little bit, while the poet persona attends to a few outstanding concerns:
I still have to meet the morning dew
a poem to write
a field to hoe
a lover to touch
and some consoling to do
I have to go [to India] and meet the sunset.
Above all, we must join the poet in ‘herding the lost lambs home.’ Only then can we pass on to a deserved ancestorhood.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Politics and Social JusticeAfrican Literature Today 32, pp. 121 - 134Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014