The sea eats the land at home
Kofi Awoonoor (13 March 1935 - 21 September 2013)
A map of Ghana: https://www.lonelyplanet.com/maps/africa/ghana/
A Ghanaian poet who wrote
extensively about African identity and the loss of cultural identity in the
face of Western colonization and influence. He studied in Ghana, London in the
UK and in the United States, and became a university professor of comparative
literature, teaching in several countries. He was involved in a political
scandal in Ghana, but later became Ghana's ambassador to Brazil, Cuba and
finally the United Nations (1990-1994). He was killed in a terrorist attack of
a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya in 2013. He wrote many books of poetry and
novels.
'The Sea Eats the Land at Home'
The headline
In newspaper articles, titles often
give news of disasters far away: 'Earthquake in South America",
"Tsunami in Indonesia", "Floods in Eastern Europe". The
title of our poem points out something serious in a surprising way: 'The Sea
Eats the Land at Home'. A personification of water, flooding the land, is seen
as a person having a meal at home, and the land is the food. We all have a
personal experience of being at home, of feeling that a place belongs to us, a
place of security and comfort. This gives the title a special urgency, but also
some black humor or irony. What happened? Well, the sea eats the
land at home... It has a primitive
simplicity, as if the author was explaining something very serious so that a
child could understand it.
A flood in a busy place
The extended metaphor of the sea as
a hungry person, eating everything, runs through the poem in present tense. The verbs in present
tense give the feeling that this is a fact, this is what happens, and this is
what always happens. The first five lines use the present tense to announce the
news. Participles with -ing show a
dynamic, moving water that is flooding everything,
"running","collecting", "sending",
"destroying". It is a very active, busy water. At the same time, the
people living on the land are also shown as busy and active,
"cooking", but we can imagine that they also were "running in
and out", "collecting the firewood" to keep their families warm
and take care of them, and trying to keep the water from destroying the
"cement walls" that they had built. We get a visual image of what the house was like, with "fowls",
chickens to provide eggs, "cooking-pots" and "ladles",
"hearths" in the "home". These material objects, tools,
make up the people's possessions and allow them to survive. We can imagine if
the flood takes everything away, the people will be left with no material
possessions and no food or shelter.
The loss
Line 11, we have an auditory image, the sound of voices.
"It is a sad thing to hear the wails/ And the mourning shouts of the women/ Calling
on all the gods they worship, / To protect them from the angry sea."
"Wailing" and "shouts" and "calling" are
described as "sad". "All
the gods" seem to be unable or unwilling to help and protect the women,
which seems even more pathetic, as
if they asked many different deities to
help them and no one could. This also sounds exotic and foreign, in a place where the people are polytheistic, in a traditional
place in Africa. It also shows that these women practice a religious faith and
that it was making them feel hopeless to experience such helplessness.
It is on line 14 that we learn that the sea was not only hungry but
ANGRY, which suggests a kind of punishment has fallen on these people in their
homes, and they are powerless to protect themselves from it.
The persona of Aku is described in
the third person with objectivity and detachment. "Her ancestors have
neglected her, / Her gods have deserted her, / It was a cold Sunday
morning," sounds like a news announcement, but it expresses the
disappointment of Aku's faith in her family ancestors and her religion, and
ironically it is on a "cold Sunday morning", which is traditionally a
day off in Western societies, that "the storm was raging." We could
see the humor in this representation
of the Western news on television or online, how this primitive African
dwelling and its occupants are represented in dramatic and pathetic terms,
and "the cold Sunday morning" sounds like an anti-climax, but we still do feel sorry for "her two children
shivering from the cold" l. 16, and Aku "Weeping mournfully" l.
18.
The persona of Adena, on line 29 is
another individual, a person we could relate to and feel sorry for. "She
has lost the trinkets which/ Were her dowry and her joy"(l.29-30). We
could imagine skeptically, "It has taken away their belongings"(l.28),
only their material
possessions, "trinkets", which means "any small item of jewelry
or a trivial thing". But a dowry is what a young girl needs in order to
make a good marriage in a traditional society. If Adena loses her dowry, she
loses the chance to marry and have a family of her own and will have to depend
on other family members and work for them for the rest of her life. She might
not have any children, which is not such a trivial thing. This is an example of
understatement, using a detail to
imply a lot more than is said explicitly. The poet uses irony to show the extensive damage caused by the flood, and to make
the reader understand the suffering of these people without being too dramatic.
Style and form
The
everyday, simple language of the poem is one of spoken language. The narrator
tells us what happened in free verse.
Almost every line ends with some form of punctuation, a few full stops, but
mostly commas and semi-colons, to show the accumulation of endless water in the
flood, a flow of water that does not stop. The conclusion is a repetition to close the endless cycle,
"In the sea that eats the land at home, / Eats the whole land at
home." It could be the refrain in a folk song that repeats, and the
conclusion, "the whole
land" ends the poem with an image of total destruction. In this way, the
poem could be considered an allusion to
a traditional African song of lament
or dirge song.
sources :
Jane
Chumbley, Poetry Study Notes, UK : Amazon, 2017.
"Kofi
Awoonor", https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kofi-Awoonor, published 17
Sept. 2018, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., consulted 31 October 2018.
THE SEA EATS THE LAND AT HOME by Kofi AWOONOR
A series of
questions for you to consider and answer:
1.
How many stanzas? Why is this
important?
2.
How many complete sentences? How many complete thoughts are expressed? Why
is this important?
3.
What is the effect of the enjambment?
Does it create order or confusion?
4.
How does the form of the stanza
echo/mimic the action of the water “lap-lapping”?
5.
What is the effect of the last two
lines? In the sea that eats the land at home/ Eats the whole land at home.
6.
What is the effect of the definite
article ‘the’ and of the absence of a pronoun before ‘home’ (eg: not ‘my home’
or ‘your home’ but ‘home’?
How is the sea personified? Complete table below. Note:
Running in and out = a Gerund (a verb form that acts as a noun – creates
a sense of permanence – an action becomes a fact) yet “mourning shouts”
(adjective in -ing). The repetition if the ‘–ing’ sound creates an insistent, (lapping?)
almost claustrophobic effect.
1.
Compare the sounds of the women and
the sound of the sea. In contrast, what is the effect of imagining the ‘eternal
hum of the living sea’?
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THE
SEA
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Verb/Gerund
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Obects
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Extra
Information
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Who
would do this
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Running
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In
and out of the cooking place
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A
busy woman / a naughty child?
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Collecting
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The
firewood
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From
the hearths (fireplaces)
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A (wo)man
would install the firewood
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2.
How are the women portrayed?
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THE
WOMEN
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Verb
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Objects
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Extra
Information
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Who
would do this
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The
wails
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After
a death or a shock
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The
mourning shouts
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After
a death – but a shout?
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Calling
on
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All
the gods
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They
worship
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A
Christian? Not only = god(s)
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People wade through
flood waters in Ghana's Upper East Region in September 2007. (ghanaweb.com)
Article of flooding in Ghana:
Interview:
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3. A Challenge: Can
you draw Aku, her two children, her gods, the goats and fowl, the shore, the
‘cruel sea’, Adena, her lost trinkets, and all the other objects eaten by the
sea?
“It
was a cold Sunday morning” yet “It came one day at the dead of night”
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