Kofi Awoonor, a Ghanian poet, was killed last weekend alongside sixty-one other people in the deadly standoff at Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya. He was seventy-eight. His son, Afetfi, was wounded in the same shooting, but has been discharged from the hospital.

According to his nephew, Kwame Dawes, “Awoonor’s verse is distinguished by its almost seamless combination of the syntax, cadence, and posture of the traditional Ewe poetic tradition, and the lyric concerns of modernist poetry.  His confidence in his Ewe voice and culture made him more likely to reshape English prosody than for English prosody to alter him.”

Born in Ghana 1935, Awoonor is best known for his novel, This Earth My Brother. He published several books of poetry including The House by the Sea, which chronicled his time in detention in Ghana on death row in the 1970s. He traveled to Kenya to attend the Storymoja Hay literary festival. (It puts our weekend at the Brooklyn Book Festival in perspective.)

“Professor Awoonor was a great African, a leading light whose footsteps leave big footprints,” the Storymoja Hay organisers said in The Guardian.

From Awoonor’s “Had Death Not Had Me in Tears“:

By the road I wait
‘death is better, death is better’
came the song
I am by the roadside
looking for the road
death is better, death is much better
Had death not had me in tears
I would have seen the barges
I would have found the road
and heard the sorrow songs.
The land wreathes in rhythm
with your soul, caressed by history
and cruel geography
landscape ineffable yet screaming
eloquent resonance like the drums
of after harvests.

His poem “Across the New Dawn” is available through the Wall Street Journal.