Ghana home in a feast of highlife cultural things”. It is a telling comment upon the
highpoints of multiculturalism achieved through the agency of cosmopolitanism.
Immediate diasporic formations in this poem align with the long-standing diasporic
cultural structures necessitated by racial slavery. So the Ghanaian “highlife”, a unique
genre of West African pop music, blends with the African-American “Selom and Pearl
and Selim” (38), whose “home [is] so full of ancestral presences”. The evidence of
hybridity is clear in “music’s cross-rhythms” of dance in Avorgbedor’s home (38). The
excitement is rapturous and the poet concludes on the memories of the vagrant
“waywardness”, although occasioned by studies. The prevailing feeling, in short, is in
sync with the book jacket commentary on Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic :
There is a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all
of these at once; a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend
ethnicity and nationality to produce something new.The title poem advances this discussion of cosmopolitanism by looking critically at its
flipside from a historical angle. It gallops back to the archives of memory to consider the
antithesis of African/ Ghanaian migrancy: curiously this moment was initially that of the
“Locust Clan” from a distant location into the spatial and temporal enclave of the
“Earth”. What follows is a consistently destructive assault by “Moonchildren” on our
“Earth”, where “Termites came and ate away our voice/ ate away our rainbow’s wild
banquets of blood”. Nevertheless, the renaissance and survival will of the “Earth”, is
strikingly epic. That is, despite the continual assault on the “Earth”, which is a metaphor
for the continent, it is able to stem and survive every tide, even if that means at a high
cost as in the days of slavery and colonialism. The refrain celebrates this unique
resilience and survival:
And still we stand so tall among the cannonades
We smell of mists and of powered memories... (39)It is significant to note that the refrain couplet comes in different shades and hues in an
alternation and antinomy of treacherous marauding on the part of “moonchildren” and the
curious, almost magical survival of the “Earthchildren” imbued with fragrant “smells”.
The triumph and survival are illuminated via the transformation of the seeming stasis and