Atukwei Okai: A Tender Homage to Noisy Poetry

Atukwei Okai

Part One

The cry of the fontomfrom wakes me from a studied slumber as I steady myself to pay homage  to our own version of what Walt Whitman and Allen  Ginsberg  could well have been if only they had worked a bit harder.

Fontomfrom. I throway salute. Fontomfrom. Fontomfrom.

Atukwei Okai is certainly not meat for milk teeth. Even though meat will certainly destroy milk teeth easily. I will take my time because the man who specializes on killing people for a living, executioner style,  may not take kindly to being flayed without appropriate preambles.

Okai's rumbunctious swagger alone would compel rumblings in the tell-tale heart. His verbose braggadocio would never spare the silent witness. And when his fontomfrom begins to wail begins to wag begins to call arms to war, one knows that it is time to re-member the most colourful Ghanaian and African poet of the 20th century.

So I will re-member him tonight. And tomorrow. And the day after. But I will take my time. After all, when we stage our traditional epics, we take our time. When we play out our Ozidi sagas, we don't rush out things  to shatter the miracles embedded in the tortoise crawl in the snail walk. We take our time we take our days we prate we stay our speed in slow paced imitation of the royal laze because we know when a chief stops a procession to do his thing, it is not for mere mortals to start asking infantile questions about schedules/timelines/deadlines. So I will take my time with this one.

This is just the beginning. Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!
Somebody's newspaper salesboy. Fontomfrom!
Somebody's  rapper before hip-hop came along. Fontomfrom!
Somebody's love-lorn Rosimaya cuckold. Fontomfrom!
Somebody's bula-matari on ayekoo terms with too many gifts so many gifts. Fontomfrom!
Somebody's pseudo-Soyinka as good as the Nobel Laureate himself, Fontomfrom!

Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!


Part Two

Was it the drum that called you or it was you who called the drum? One attempts to answer that and finds the inevitable gap that clouds all searches for antecedents of genius. Maybe in this case as well as that other well known one, there were no calls. Not from either side. No calls. No voices. No supernatural portents.

But find each other you did. The drum and you. You and the drum. The ancestrallogic of the ancestraldrum in the high tide of Romanticism in Blackface.

For you came to us at a time when all poetry, for us neo-Euro-bourgeoisie of the Anglophone West  African species, had to go through the clearing houses of Chaucer-Shakespeare-Marlowe-Pope-Wordsworth-Keats-Browning-Hardy ad infinitum to weave comedic strains of inane parrot-vogues that not even we ourselves would give a second listening to.

And while we jested our offbeat iambic pentameters and imbecilic hexameters in the marketplace of others looking for sympathetic ears to buy our songs-dead-at-birth, it was you the iconoclast from Ga Mashie who  burst on our stage with the shocking reminder that our ancestors did not talk in the esoteric accent of foreign coinages to rouse the Asante bush to the full stature of its erotic cheer. No, you said, even in the midnight of high betrayal, when our sons and daughters were sardined off to unnameable places to serve unnameable gods of unnameable morals, even those sons and daughters lost in alien soils trying to come to terms with life without home moorings, even those sons and daughters did not forget the primal ancestral birthcordial watu wazuri drums...

The wail of the guitar might be fine for Andalusian soils soaked with Lorcaian blood, but over here in Africa, we start with the drums.

We start with the drums in order to give voice to authentic Afro-discourse in this world that we live in it where the quantum physics of existential inequality blows up the dorkordiki bowl of human sanity...we start with the drums we start with drums we start with the drums.

For drums make noise and in this world that we live in it where the quantum physics of existential inequality blows up the dorkordiki bowl of human sanity, one needs to make noise in order to let it be known that we are just taking our time to make sure that it is you who is standing on our testicles that it is you who is squeezing our existential testicles that it is you who is trying to bracket our life-brockos...

Those are words you spoke and then you started with the drums you started with the noise of the drums even when it was clear the special branch our knowledgeable dons thought your visions were coming from a country with which our masters in the West were not on ayeekoo terms...

But did you care?

You returned you returned from the doldrums you returned with conundrums you returned with soles burnt upon coals you returned
You returned manuring your memories into a fertile remembrance of things recent and past
You returned and succeeded in re-entering the realm of the Old Odomankoma Okyerema against all the 666 barricades they set up against you all the 999 fake smiles before the stones they flung at you...

You started with the drums and swore your oath against all those who throw stones at us. We emaciated besieged ravaged uncertain returnees heard your first wail as though it were cool water to the parched palate of the droughted desert:

My brothers
                  My people
                                  My brothers
I am sought,
                  I am sought because
When you want to starve
                                  the ocean
You paralyze
                  its source
                                  the river

And who were you? Okai, who were you in the incarnation that called us back to the life of the noisy living drums?

You were the fontomfrom!
Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!
You are the fontomfrom.
Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!

Fontomfrom! The noise of the drums! Fontomfrom! The sense of nonsense! Fontomfrom! The sword of Nat Turner! Fontomfrom! The wireless phone of our ancestors! Fontomfrom! The mobile networks of our forests! Fontomfrom!

You began with the drums and the drums began with Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!!