“Where the worm eats, a grain grows”: Kofi Awoonor and terror in Benisheik, Baghdad, Nairobi, and Peshawar

In 1971, the great Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor published a poem on death “The Journey Beyond,” using the imagery from Ewe myth of the boatman Kutsiami who ferries the dead to the other world: Kutsiami the benevolent boatman;/ When I come to the river shore / please ferry me across […]This weekend Kutsiami arrived.I am […]

In 1971, the great Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor published a poem on death “The Journey Beyond,” using the imagery from Ewe myth of the boatman Kutsiami who ferries the dead to the other world: Kutsiami the benevolent boatman;/ When I come to the river shore / please ferry me across […]
This weekend Kutsiami arrived.
I am out of words. This week terrorists have shown us the depths of human evil. As Awoonor writes in “Songs of Sorrow,” “The affairs of this world are like the chameleon faeces / Into which I have stepped / When I clean it cannot go.”
There was the massacre in Benisheik, Borno, which according to Daily Trust, killed over 161 people; the Al-Shabab attacks on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi Kenya, which killed at least 67;  two suicide bombs at funerals in Baghdad, Iraq, that killed at least 96; and the suicide bomb at All Saints Church in Peshawar, Pakistan, that killed at least 81.
And here is the shameful thing. I had stopped paying attention to most of it, until I heard Sunday morning that Awoonor had been killed in the Kenya attacks. Kofi Awoonor, author of The Earth, My Brother. One of Africa’s greatest poets, a contemporary of Achebe. Shot dead in a Kenyan mall by terrorists. I still can’t quite wrap my head around it.
As I began to obsessively follow what was happening in Nairobi, I remembered, with a shock of guilt, Benisheik where terrorists on Tuesday alone had killed over double those killed in Kenya, as they have killed thousands over the past few years. We have grown so used to the killing that it no longer makes headlines. We have become like Iraq, like Afghanistan, like Syria, accustomed to death. Brief acute tragedies involving the wealthy overshadow long steady wars, where the poor are slaughtered almost weekly. Their names are not spoken, and their stories are not told. By Sunday evening, my Twitter feed was moving from discussions of tragedy to the Emmy Awards in the U.S. and football—what CNN’s Piers Morgan was calling #TheGreatManchesterMassacre.
It is in times of mourning that I turn to poetry. Awoonor’s corpus of dirges and eulogies speak powerfully to the moment. Kenyan writer Julie Muriuki tweeted that the seventy-eight year old poet told his last class at the Storymoja Hay literary festival on Friday that “writers are like prophets[…].”  “He talked a lot about death that day,” she wrote. “He even sang dirges.” He read his poem “Parting,” and “After that he said, ‘Sadness is mine to explore. It is part of the human condition.”  In his poem “Across a New Dawn,” that will be published in 2014 in his final collection Promises of Hope: New and Selected Poems, he wrote “We are the celebrants/whose fields were/overrun by rogues/ and other bad men who/interrupted our dance.” In his poetry, he meditates on evil and death, but he fiercely refuses to let it destroy the love and joy of life. The world is evil, he acknowledges, but the earth gives us hope: “where the worm eats, a grain grows.”
In honour of those lost this week and for those who mourn, I devote the rest of my column to his poems:
A Death Foretold
Sometimes the pain and the sorrow return
particularly at night.
I will grieve again tomorrow
for the memory of death foretold.
I grieve again tomorrow
cull a flower across the yard
listen to the bird in the tree.
I grieve again tomorrow
for a pain that grows on
a pain a friend of my solitude
in a bed long emptied by choice;
I grieve again this grievance
immemorial for
this pain
this load under which i wreath and grieve
Yesterday i could not go
for my obligatory walk,
instead i used the hour
to recall the lanes, the tree
the birds, the occasional snarling dog
the brown sheep in a penned field
the dwarf mango tree heavy with fruit
the martian palms tall and erect
the sentry-pines swaying
in the distant field.
I believe in the possibility of freedom
in the mild winters and furious hurricanes;
I believe in the arrival of the American tornadoes
before i go to hunt
on that island of youth
where i smelt the heady smell
of the wild guinea fowl
and heard her chuckle for her child
in the opening light of an April day.
I believe in hope and the future
of hope, in victory before death
collective, inexorable, obligatory;
in the enduring prospect of love
though the bed is empty,
in the child’s happiness
though the meal is meagre.
I believe in light and day
beyond the tomb far from solitude
of the word, and mystical night,
in the coming of fruits
the striped salmon and the crooked crab;
I believe in men and gods
in the spirit and the substance,
in death and the reawakening
in the promised festival and denial
in our heroes and the nation
in the wisdom of the people
the certainty of victory
the validity of struggle.
beyond the fields and the shout
of youth, beyond the pine trees
and the gnarled mangoes
redolent of childhood and pre-nativity,
I am affronted by a vision
apparitional, scaly
lumbering over a wall
raising a colossal bellow.
And, from his recent poem “Across a New Dawn,” 

But who says our time is up
that the box maker and the digger
are in conference
or that the preachers have aired their robes
and the choir and the drummers
are in rehearsal?
 
No; where the worm eats
a grain grows.
the consultant deities
have measured the time
with long winded
arguments of eternity
 
And death, when he comes
to the door with his own
inimitable calling card
shall find 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

At the end of the poem he invokes again that boatman, to carry him to the other shore

Master, if you can be the oarsman
for our boat
please do it, do it.
I asked you before
once upon a shore
at home, where the
seafront has narrowed
to the brief space of childhood
 
We welcome the travelers
come home on the new boat
fresh from the upright tree

Terrorists thought they killed him. They didn’t know they were just bringing the boatman to ferry him home.