OVERVIEW
Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor often worked abroad as a professor and ambassador. From afar, like the persona in this poem, he wrote about the loss of his native land and Ewe culture. In this poem, the persona mourns the loss of his ancestral home while he lives elsewhere.
At a literal level, the poem depicts a tropical cyclone flooding the coast of a town, taking away the residents’ property and valuables, making them destitute. The waters tear down the cement walls of houses, before moving deeper into domestic spaces such as kitchens and making family life impossible. Livestock, a means of livelihood for the villagers, is also dragged out into the sea. The losses of two women residents, Aku and Adena, and their grief at the upturning of their lives, receive special mention.
Read the poem here: https://home.koranteng.com/writings/sea-eats-the-land-at-home.html
BUT IT’S NOT ONLY A NATURAL DISASTER STORY
However, the poem is not only about the devastation caused by a cyclone to a community. It can be read at another level as a poem about the IMPACT OF COLONIZATION on Ghana. Europeans arrived in the Gold Coast area in the 16th century, drawn to the gold deposits, but soon the trade included the buying of abducted Africans and selling them to European plantation owners in the Caribbean area. From the 19th century to 1957, Ghana was a British colony.
This Ghanian history is hinted at in the poem. The personification of the sea as being “angry” and consciously destroying residents’ lives and livelihood, its coming “one day at the dead of night” to destroy homes and carry away fowls, tends to suggest an invasion. Further in the poem, when Aku moans that her ancestors and her gods have abandoned her, we get a stronger picture emerging that the sea could allude to the European colonisers who came by sea and invaded African countries with their naval forces and trading ships. They mercilessly destroyed diverse African cultures and turned them away from their religions towards Christianity. The poem’s ending line is also significant: like the sea, the European coloniser ate the “whole land”, conquering almost the entire African continent.
STYLE MATTERS
ALLEGORY--When a poem has two or more distinct levels of meaning, it can be said to be an allegory. In an allegory like this poem, many words and images will have multiple meanings that refer to at least two different sets of events.
For example, the sea and the references to “eat[ing]” the land could refer to the flooding of the land or to its conquest by European naval forces. Adena’s loss of her jewellery can be interpreted as highlighting the power of tropical cyclones to decimate people’s wealth but it could also refer to European colonisers’ habit in those days to raid the wealth of the countries they conquered as well as to the gold trade.
The image of Aku standing outside her collapsed home, without her cooking pot, accompanied by her two “shivering” children, may refer to the way the Europeans destroyed the peaceful family life of Africans.
Notice the ABSENCE OF MEN in this town? Where are all the husbands, brothers, fathers and sons? That could refer to the actual history of Europeans killing African men in order to take over their land and to the abduction of men for the slave trade.
PERSONIFICATION—The personification of the sea is crucial in conveying the secondary meaning of the sea as the colonizer. The personality ascribed to the sea/coloniser is interesting—it is seen as determined to destroy people’s lives, malignant and secretive in entering the intimate spaces of the home (its “cooking places”). It is certainly greedy, obsessed with “eating”, with carrying away livestock and stealing “trinkets”, and is “cruel”, being able to remain indifferent to the misery it creates.
DIRGE ELEMENTS—In many traditions, a dirge is a SONG OR POEM OF MOURNING. It is often recited or SUNG AT FUNERALS. In Africa, dirges are often sung at funerals, USUALLY BY WOMEN. They express grief at the death of a loved one. Dirges are often accompanied by the wailing and sobbing of women. Awoonor draws on the oral tradition of his Ewe culture and here translates the African dirge form into English poetry.
As in this poem, the African dirge has a STRONG NARRATIVE COMPONENT and tells a story. The DICTION IS SIMPLE, everyday speech. It also contains many IMAGES OF LOSS, GRIEF AND SADNESS, such as of women wailing and beating their breasts, walls crumbling, loss of life of goats and fowls, and one’s belongings being “taken away”. Since the dirge was a musical form in African culture, this poem is full of the SOUND IMAGES OF GRIEF, of “wails”, “mourning shouts,” “sobs” and “low moans”, and of repeated sounds that seem like chants. The repeated reference to the sea eating the land gives that CHANT-LIKE EFFECT. The MELANCHOLIC TONE of the poem is conveyed by the use of long vowel sounds and soft consonants that give the effect of slowly moving lines.