REHEARSING MOURNING AT THE HOTEL SANKARA For Kofi Awoonor Do not dress me yet lift me not onto that mound before the mourners. I have still to meet the morning dew a poem to write a field to hoe a lover to touch and some consoling to do before you lay me out. Kofi Awoonor There is a deep grotto on the second floor of the Hotel Sankara. It is a Thai restaurant, set beside the brightly lit continental restaurant. I choose the grotto. It occurs to me that the foreign people in the hotel have chosen the grotto. It is dark, hard to be seen, I suppose. We are all thinking of terrorists. I wonder what I will say if they question me like they say they questioned a woman about the Prophet. She had an answer. Would I? On my knees. Then down. Those are movies. This is not. I am eating alone. Someone fired bullets into the abdomen of my uncle. His name is Awoonor, Kofi Awoonor. He is famous. He is seventy-eight years old. He should die in his sleep. But he was shot. It would have hurt. There would have been blood. I keep thinking of movies. He did not think of movies. He has seen shots fired. He has seen bloodshed. Once he spent a year waiting to be shot. He imagined the bullet every night in the house by the sea. I think of the sweet humming stench of a morgue. They knew him by his clothes. He was wearing a heavy batakari when I last saw him. He looked like a prince. They knew him by his cloth. A few miles away—five minutes away now that the streets are so bare—the Westgate Mall is being stormed. I am eating steamed tilapia, and wondering if there is shellfish in my soup even though I asked. With each bite I think of the comedy of my dying of shellfish allergies while bombs explode outside. The waiter smiled and said, how was your day? Jambo, she said, how was your day? I wanted to say fine. I wanted to lie. But my uncle was murdered in the mall. I said, it has been a hard day. And it has. At least 67 people are confirmed dead, that is sixty-seven families in mourning, sixty-seven sets of friends and acquaintances broken. And there will be more. We can see the thick smoke rising to the sky less than a mile away. We can hear the explosions, the quarrel of rifles. Helicopters batter the air, sirens complain, the bite of tear gas sends us inside from the balcony. Inside the air is calm. I have to relearn the language of mourning like someone who has forgotten what he has lost, like a widow who has misplaced her husband’s corpse. Should I not be covered in sackcloth and ash and fasting? A friend sends me an email: Ugly times. May you have the strength to muscle though them. I need food for the strength to muscle through. Maybe I will need to run, spend a night without food, waiting to be rescued. For two nights I have a knapsack packed for quick flight. The waitress brings the fried snapper and brown rice. It is aromatic, tender, affirming the pleasures of the living. Soyinka’s hero Elesin in Death and the King’s Horseman, stuttered before death, not because he feared it, but because he hated the thought of missing life, of life going on without him, of missing the warmth of giving bodies, the humanity of our failings, the sweat, the taste of food, seasoned well, delicately aromatic dancing on the tongue. Elesin was not afraid of dying, he just hated to think there was a party going on that he could not attend. He is that guy. Kofi Awoonor was not that guy. Kofi Awoonor wrote his last songs about dying, and he wrote of villages, of children singing, of rivers, of the dumb ineffectual glare of death. Kofi Awoonor wrote his first songs about dying, about the village, about the gods waiting. He was younger then—then he was writing songs about dying. Now he has written his will in verse to comfort the left behind. Once he predicted the journey he would talk, and he named my father as his companion—Neville, he said, after the man had gone before. Now he follows. A man died. He wrote poems. His poems are here. Read them. I sip ginger tea. I am waiting to be told it is all a lie. The dark grotto is empty now. Only the waitress brings the check. She smiles. Then I smelt the rum shops and the cooking heard a hymn feminine and ardent “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord” and the doors of Babylon closed again, this time behind me with Neville and I on the freedom train, going home, yes, going home. Kofi Awoonor September 23rd, 2013, Nairobi, Kenya Kwame Dawes is Chancellors Professor of English at the University of Nebraska and Editor of Prairie Schooner. He is the author of “Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems” (Copper Canyon, 2013). Dawes is series editor of the African Poetry Book Fund which is set to publish Awoonor’s latest collection, “Promises of Hope: New and Selected Poems” in 2014.
Posted on: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 21:43:43 +0000
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