sorrow. The only reason for this malady, Anyidoho reflects, is nothing but a derailment
from a nation’s cause and course, all because the revolution, pretending to salvage a
nation from the edge of the precipice, is “gone astray into/ arms of dream merchants”
(71). The unrealism of the interruption and the attendant failure to deliver on promises
are as glaring as they are discouraging. But if A Harvest of our Dreams is a vindication of
the prophetic reputation of Elegy for the Revolution (Okunoye 100), EarthChild , which is
made up of two separate volumes (“Earthchild” and “Brain Surgery”), navigates the
temporal dialectic between the two previous collections to demonstrate the unity of vision
as a telling trope that runs through all the collections of the poet. The said unity between
these collections is attested in the preface to EarthChild where he admits that the two
volumes constitute an interface between the “memories” of the seasons that “have... been
gathered away in Elegy for the Revolution ”.
One thing that remains remarkable, furthermore, in the artistic adoption of the dirge
tradition is how it is acclaimed to offer explanation on a people’s survival strategy. The
metaphor or narrative of survival has come to occupy a privileged place in the assessment
of EarthChild (Ezenwa-Ohaeto 1999: 121). This has been limned to be an abiding index
of the collection and Anyidoho himself in one of his critical writings has given voice to
this stance (Anyidoho 1992). This section of this chapter however stands to argue beyond
the survivalist paradigm in order to explore the exilic import and dimensions to the
reception of the collection.
First, it is to Ewe cosmology that one must turn for the understanding of the exilic angle
to the text. The centrality of the dirge tradition to the Ewe is as old as the people
themselves. But beyond the commonplace identification of this tradition as lamentation
over the dead, Kofi Awoonor (1974:1) argues that it stands more appropriately to speak
to the living in a manner that makes a statement on the collective ontology of the people.
He illustrates this through an appreciation of the performance of a renowned Ewe oral
dirge-poet, Akpalu:
After all, funeral dirges are not for the ears of the dead. They are for the living. So
Akpalu made them vehicles of self-lamentation, philosophy, ideas on morality and ethics,