Discovery

Digging for tubers
Of barren cassavas
The root of our fingers
Uprooted
Skulls…
            And then…
Femurs…tibias…
Carpals…tarsals…
Ribs…metacarpals…
Hips…metatarsals…
Of seething ghosts
Whose spirits
Trail our homes
Traverse the forests
And have no rest
Buried in pieces
In wide dugouts
And trenches
Remembered by none
Save the termites
Which file pass
Their dry bones
In one long scribble
Spelling their life’s
Achievements in
Twisted epitaphs
Their assassins
Being our
Armageddon shall
Taste no death on earth
But shall live into
The eternity of hell
Well deserved
When man exacts
Judgement unto man
His measure is the
Firmament’s expanse
Which his eyes
Cannot size or behold
His expectations are
The seas whose borders
Our brains cannot
Point out or stake
Pinoche unto Chileans
Milosovic’s Serbs unto
Yugoslavs’ Albanians
Majority Hutus unto Tutsis
Hitler’s heinous Holocaust
Juiced just for Jews
Foday Sanko and his
Hand-cutting RUFfians
Unto silent Sierra Leoneans
Man has buried man
For unknown sins
These mass graves
Lost in time’s memory
Call forth man’s earliest debasement
Of deceit and murder
by Nana Fredua-Agyeman (July 2006)

Comments

Post a Comment

Help Improve the Blog with a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

10. Unexpected Joy at Dawn: My Reading

Image
Title: Unexpected Joy At Dawn Author: Alex Agyei-Agyiri Genre: Novel Publisher: Sub-Saharan Publishers Pages: 331 Year: 2004 Country: Ghana Unexpected Joy at Dawn is a story of two siblings, Nii and Mama Orojo, during the 1983 deportation of Ghanaians from Nigeria under the Shehu Shagari government. Nii, who is a Nigerian by blood but a Ghanaian by birth, was left in Ghana by his parents as they made the tortuous journey to Nigeria when Ghana enacted the Aliens Compliance Order of 1969, which made every person living in Ghana without the required papers an alien. His name was changed to reflect the name of his adopted parents. After fourteen years of living in hardship in Ghana, which involves living in slums even though he was an Assistant Manager at a bank, taking on multiple jobs, not being able to bury a wife and being chased around by market women for purported 'fraud', he decided to go to Nigeria in search of his roots. Besides, he entertained the fears of being...
Read more

69. The Clothes of Nakedness by Benjamin Kwakye, A Review

Image
Title: The Clothes of Nakedness Author: Benjamin Kwakye Publishers: Heinemann African Writers Series Genre: Fiction/Novel/Class Pages: 212 Year of First Publication: 1998 Country: Ghana For the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa Region Winners Reading Challenge Benjamin Kwakye 's novel The Clothes of Nakedness  is a compelling narrative directed at a Ghanaian audience, in particular. It reveals the economic hardships existing in our society; it also reveals the intricately woven relationships between the rich and the poor and how the 'seemingly' rich manipulate the poor to further that wealth-dom in this dual economic society where absolute riches exist side by side with abject poverty. The latter scenario is even more stark and pathetic if one knows that Nima and Kanda Estates, two neighbourhoods presented in the story, are real and not just fictional representation made concrete by Kwakye's brilliant mind. The story revolves around thr...
Read more

42. The Blinkards by Kobina Sekyi

Image
Title: The Blinkards, A Comedy and The Anglo-Fanti - A Short Story Author: Kobina Sekyi Genre: Play/Short Story Pages: 256 Publishers: Heinemann/Readwide ISBN: 978-0-435-92784-4 Year of Publication: 1974 (this edition, 1997) Country: Gold Coast (Now Ghana) Setting:  This book contains two stories: The Blinkards - a play and The Anglo-Fanti - a short story . Though the stories are from two different genres, one theme threads through them: the effect of absolute cultural osmosis or better still the consequences of swallowing an alien culture without much scrutiny, as happened in occupied countries popularly referred to by the occupiers as colonies (colonies of what? Ants? Bees?) Both stories took place in Cape Coast and the setting is very significant to the story. Apart from the author being a Fanti from Cape Coast, Cape Coast was the first point of introduction to colonial rule. As a seaport city, it was the first town that was brought under colonial rule; hence ...
Read more