So I must reject the honeyed call of distant dreams
I come back home to ragged hopes of Earth
The wealthy child’s wardrobe may not outmatch
The earthy elder’s termite-eaten wooden box of ragsOur Earth survives recurring furies
of her stomach pains and quakes
From the bleeding anger of her wounds
volcanic ash becomes the hope
that gives rebirth to abundance of seedtimes (44)The necessity of return as iterated in the concluding part of the volume raises once again
the question of the primacy of home in the present age. This part of the world may have
suffered many setbacks which in metaphoric terms are designated ‘stomach pains and
quakes’, ‘our Earth’ nevertheless radiates hopes of survival, hence the question of return.
The understanding becomes clearer for the African postcolony when the discourse verges
on the realm of development. This is what Anyidoho himself has dwelt so perceptively
upon in the “Back without which there is no Front”. Read against this backdrop, the
argument of the second volume in the collection, “Brain Surgery” could as well be said to
be a peroration of the concern of “EarthChild” as the vagrant metaphor of Agbenoxevi
reverberates in “The Lost Wanderer” where the travel-weary poet-persona “in a world I
can’t belong” declares the certainty of his return and invokes the “Spirits of our Land” to
“Guide me safely home” (108). A similar concern is expressed in “To Ralph Crowder”
where the overwhelming crunch of economic hardship leads to a hopeless migrant
existence. In an apostrophic clarion call, therefore, his brother cries out to him to return
home even if “all is not well at home” (112). And with the title poem “Brain Surgery”
taking one through the path of mythical history and the shattering of an ideal ontology by
“Moonchildren”, and self-proclaimed “Master Architects”, the pervasive traumatic mood
realigns with other dirges in the volume to show the degree of depredation and loss