Ama Sefa: Unrequited Love

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe Jr.

Ama Sefa: Unrequited Love celebrates attempted love and the challenging emotional complexities involved in the art of loving and being loved. It is at once passionate, exciting and harrowing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 2, 2004
• ISBN: 9780595769629

Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe Jr.

The first recipient of the 1988 John J. Reyne Artistic Achievement Award for English Poetry at New York City College, where he earned his bachelor?s degree (summa cum laude) in English, Communications and African-American Studies, Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., was born and raised in Ghana. He teaches English and Journalism at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. A graduate with Master?s and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from Temple University, Philadelphia, Okoampa-Ahoofe regularly writes political and cultural columns for the Accra Daily Mail, Ghanaweb.com, Africa-Forum.Net, AfricaNewsAnalysis.com, as well as occasional book reviews and commentary for the New York Beacon and the Ghanaian Chronicle. He is married and has a daughter.

Book preview

All Rights Reserved © 2004 by Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr.

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Library of Congress Control Number:

2004094218

ISBN: 0-595-32155-0

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Ama Sefa

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

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XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLI

XLII

XLIII

XLIV

XLV

XLVI

XLVII

XLVIII

XLIX

L

Akan-Ghanaian Glossary

About the Author

Critical Praise for Okoampa-Ahoofe’s Poetry

For Ama Sefa; Ama Korang (aka Connie and Mother); and Daphne Hall

Acknowledgments

I should like to express my utmost gratitude to all those relatives and friends

who have, in diverse ways, demonstrated great affection and concern for the

betterment of the private and emotional aspects of my life.

Introduction

A recent conversation with a respected colleague and fellow poet, and here I should add that Stuart J. Kaufman is also a novelist of remarkable sensibilities, brought my attention to what my friend termed as your terse and laconic pros- ody. By the latter, Stu, as he is affectionately called, meant the supposed rhythmic brevity of my verse. I had not hitherto been conscious of this phenomenon, since for me poetic measure, or meter, comes purely autogeneratively. In other words, it is the proverbial poetic afflatus, or inspiration, at any particular moment of esthetic orchestration that suggests and literally executes both the logic and shape, or structure, of the poem. Of course, there is also the near- instinctively cultivated aspect of the art—the ineluctable element of context or the cultural milieu in which the poet is nurtured and which has a great influence on his or her artistry at a multiplicity of levels, including linguistic and syntactic, epistemic and thematic. In my case, prosody or meter is determined in no small way by esthetic affinity with the traditional Akan-Ghanaian Talking-Drums, whose script is primarily, needless to say, aural, sonic and acoustic than spatial—in terms of chirography—though space, by way of tempo, is integral to all musical scripts, of which the Akan-Ghanaian coordinate is no exception. But, perhaps, the main and sole reason for having paid little or no attention to meter, in the manner in which my friend Stu envisages, is due to the fact that the very concept of meter as a mechanical device is almost extraneous to the esthetic practice of a neo-oral poet, one who essentially and primarily employs or appropri- ates the literary art in the service of oral tradition or orature.

Recently, however, it occurred to me that the purported laconism or terseness of my prosody might have been subconsciously imbibed from the late African- American Blues poet and my teacher Raymond R. Patterson (1929-2001). The latter is best known for his award-winning collection titled Twenty-Six Ways of Looking at a Blackman. He is also the founder of the annual Langston Hughes Festival hosted by the City College of New York (CCNY of CUNY). While an

undergraduate at CCNY in the mid-1980s, I had the privilege of taking two