Kofi Awoonor’s Poems to be first publication of African Poetry Book Series posthumously

Kofi Awoonor

Prof Kofi Awoonor,78, died on the first day of the terrorist siege of Westgate shopping mall (21 September 2013) in Nairobi, Kenya.Ghanian-born poet, Kofi Awoonor, had agreed to be the first major African poet to be part of the African Poetry Book Series. His New and Selected poems with an introduction by fellow poet and scholar, Kofi Anyidoho, will be published in 2014 with assistance from the African Poetry Book Fund, established by Glenna-Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner,Kwame Dawes, also from Ghana. Kofi, who was in town with his son Afetfi, who sustained shoulder injuries, was attending the StoryMoja Hay Festival at the same venue where over 150 people gathered to bid him farewell. The farewell evening opened with singing of the Kenyan and Ghanaian national anthems. Dr Auma Obama, Presidnet Obama’s half sister sent a tribute as did Nigerian children’s author Atinuke. Some of those who read his works include celebrated authors Peter Godwin(Zimbabwe), Kwame Dawes(Ghana), Nii Parkes (Ghana), Warsan Shire(Somalia), Teju Cole(Nigerian-American), Billy Kahora and Binyavanga Wainaina.

Peter Godwin

Professional storyteller Aghan Odero Agan said : “We, the arts community will celebrate him as a giant on whose shoulders we will stand to see far”.

“We are devastated by the loss of Professor Awoonor, but hope must prevail,” said StoryMoja founder, Muthoni Garland, in announcing the tribute. The festival had to be cancelled after news of the attack. “[Awoonor] is as a poet of witness, of great lyric grace and a remarkable capacity to combine his command of traditional Ewe poetics with a modernist lyric sensibility,” says Dawes. “That makes him one of the great African poets to have appeared in the twentieth century.  His agreement to be a part of this series is a tremendous coup.  We are extremely pleased.”

Awoonor, a political activist and national Ghanian hero, has been a champion of African poetry throughout his life. In addition to lecturing in English and African literature at the University of Ghana, he directed the Ghana Film Corporation, founded and directed the Ghana Playhouse, and served as an editor of the literary journal Okyeame and as an associate editor of Transition. Awoonor sought to incorporate African vernacular traditions—notably the dirge song tradition of the Ewe people—into modern poetic form,” notes the Encyclopedia Britannica. “His major themes—Christianity, exile, and death are important among them—are enlarged from poem to poem by repetition of key lines and phrases and by use of extended rhythms. Each poem in Rediscovery and Other Poems (1964), for example, records a single moment in a larger pattern of recognition and rediscovery.”

Also an internationally published author, Kofi Anyidoho, the editor of the New and Selected poems, is an achieved scholar. He serves on editorial board for several journals in Ghana and has been guest editor of Matatu, a journal of African culture and society that is published in Amsterdam. Awoonor’s other volumes of poetry include Night of My Blood (1971), Ride Me, Memory (1973), The House by the Sea(1978), and The Latin American and Caribbean Notebook (1992). His collected poems (through 1985) were published inUntil the Morning After (1987).