Mmaa: I Miss You: Please Assign Me to Mike Altman

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe Jr.

In this threnodic and filial homage to his late mother, Okoampa-Ahoofe wistfully depicts the matriarch as an all-pervading spirit of boundless generosity and warmth. It is a solemn and loving conversation between the poet and his creator-mother and esthetic muse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 22, 2004
• ISBN: 9780595765423

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.

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

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic,

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Library of Congress Control Number:

2004105142

ISBN: 0-595-31734-0

ISBN: 978-0-5957-6542-3 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

For my mother, Dorothy Tomina Adwoa Attaa Aninwaa Sintim Okoampa- Ahoofe (1934—1998), whose life, as I have experienced and witnessed it, is affectionately represented in the following pages;

and,

to my father (Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Sr.), who alone, in our clan, knows howit feels to wake up one day without a spouse.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREFACE

MMAA I

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ABOUT THEAUTHOR

CRITICAL PRAISE FOR

OKOAMPA-AHOOFE’S POETRY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

I should like to express the profound gratitude of the Okoampa-Ahoofe and Sin-tim families to all those who helped, in diverse ways, to make my mother’s home-going ceremonies, both here in New York City and Ghana, the ringing tributethat it was to my mother’s memory and honor.

PREFACE 

(From the Eulogy)

It is a veritably prophetic or vatical closure, of sorts, that my mother, whom I affectionately called Mmaa, should depart this life or ontic reality here in the United States of America. For, my mother often recalled her father and my grandfather, The Reverend T. H. Sintim (1896?-1982), importing her baptismal dress from the United States in 1934, the year in which she was born. Part of the reason, though it now appears to have been the sole reason, inhered in my mother’s special birth—she had been born the elder of a set of twin sisters. Her younger sister, Obiriwaa, died accidentally at two or three years old.

I have often lamented the fact that Adwoa Attaa Obiriwaa Sintim, I cannot recall her Euro-Christian nominal prefixes—for almost all of my grandfather’s children had at least two Euro-Christian names—died at such a tender age, just as the twain or couple were beginning to assume a rhetorical stance among the teeming ranks of their six older siblings. If she had not so prematurely departed this life, Obiriwaa would have served as a second, xerox-copy, mother and my siblings and I would have grown up relishing the rare maternal warmth and protection of two mothers. Interestingly, among the Akan and, one may aptly presume, several other continental African nationalities, twins are never identified as two discrete personalities or souls; they are simply recognized as a single personality with two souls, a Siamese personality of sorts. Thus my grandmother, Grace Ateaa Agyemang-Sintim (1903?—1987) was fond of saying, whenever the subject came up, while I was growing up, that: Were it possible to split twins in the counting, she would have birthed thirteen children during the course of her sixty-year marriage to her husband, my grandfather. Two other aunts also died very young; one of them was barely a year old, and the other was stillborn. So our kinship with death is one that is quite primal, although the death of very young children among the Akan occasions no formal celebration or commemoration; infact, tradition sternly forbids mourning the barely post-fetal, since the Akan believe in the cyclical law of idefinite return, particularly in the case of those who departed this life in a quite untimely fashion, often by accident or sheer youthfulness.

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