Preface Of a Great Book; A wreath To Awoonor

To sing a dirge in memory and honour of a master dirge-singer is like, as the old cliché goes, “sending co-alto Newcastle.” This is the arduous task young, energetic and enthusiastic poet Oswald Okaitei has set for himself. Oswald is from the stable of the new generation of budding Ghanaian poets still cutting their teeth at the feet of the old word-masters, but who have already outgrown their infancy as poets. With a string of national and international awards under his belt, Oswald has certainly cultivated a voice,strong enough to mourn the great Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor. Had Awoonor died peacefully in his sleep, with a calm octogenarian’s smile on his face, knowing that he was only transiting to the other side of Eternity to join those he had always referred to as the “gone before”, perhaps Oswald’s poems in remembrance of this great poet would have taken on a different complexion and timbre. But,alas, the great bard’s tragic death in Nairobi at the hands of terrorists on September 21 (Nkrumah’s birthday), 2013, in the infamous West Gate Mall holocaust, calls for a different kind of song. One that expresses the depth of grief, sorrow and loss, but at the same time one that declaims, celebrates and firmly establishes this cultural icon, literary genius and Pan-Africanist in time and place. That Awoonor has already immortalized himself through half a century of poetry—from Rediscovery (1964) to The Promise of Hope(2013)—and his service to the world in a diversity of capacities, is an understatement. However, as our people say, “when a singer dies, they bury him with song.” So let it be with Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor as it was with the pantheon of singers before him. This is exactly what Oswald has done in A Wreath to Awoonor,in a voice whose cadences and modulations artistically combine the elegiac and the honorific.The collection, like a traditional dirge, also digresses intermittently and makes strong statements about international terrorism and human destiny; about a precarious world where Death constantly lies in ambush,anytime, anywhere. It is an anthology that will certainly find its place in the corpus of similar works across the world in memory of Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor.