Summary
The poem's final stanza describes a woman named Aku, who is standing outside beside her cooking-pot and her two children. She places her hands on her breasts and cries, feeling that her ancestors and her gods have failed to protect her. Expanding the poem's scope, the speaker explains that it's a cold, stormy Sunday morning. Farm animals are drowning in the seawater that floods the town, and both the sound of the waves and the sound of people's cries and moans are audible. The sea sweeps into town and destroys possessions, including the dowry of a woman named Adena. It eats up the whole town, destroying the people's home.
Analysis
The first three stanzas of this poem took an abstract approach, sticking to archetypal-sounding descriptions, avoiding proper nouns, and borrowing from the styles of oral folklore. This approach allows for a variety of symbolic readings, but it also has a distancing effect, making the reader feel less emotionally entangled. While those first three stanzas certainly describe intense emotions, they do so without specifics, making those feelings seem larger-than-life and disembodied. Their subtle mimicry of oral folklore hints that the events being described happened a very long time ago—long enough to be distilled into a highly stylized and abstract retelling.
That all changes from the very start of the second stanza, which is, in contrast, specific and immediate. Though this stanza is poetry rather than prose, it in many ways takes inspiration from the novel form—with its focus on the plights of individual characters over time—rather than the folksong or folktale. The stanza starts with the mention of a specific name, Aku. Thus, we're no longer in the world of broad generalizations. We have a specific character to follow. We don't learn a lot about her, only that she's a mother of two, that she's standing next to her cooking-pot, and that she is devastated by the flood—not just because it causes her physical harm but because it disrupts her worldview and makes her feel abandoned and alone. The poem's earlier stanzas mention the way the sea eats up cooking-pots and makes women call on their gods. These details are repeated here, but now they're directly connected to Aku herself, giving them an entirely different, rawer emotional impact. Similarly, while the poem's second stanza mentions that the sea "carried away the fowls," the animals' fear becomes much more real and immediate in this final stanza, when they are described as "struggling in the water." Here, the focus on the physicality and desperation of the animals' experience, and the visceral imagery of the verb "struggling," creates an altogether different effect from the earlier use of the more metaphorical verb "carried."
Another character is introduced near the very end of the entire poem: Adena, who is just as upset as Aku but for different reasons. While Aku is evidently older, with children of her own, Adena seems to be unmarried and therefore must come to terms with the fact that the flood has destroyed her dowry. With the introduction of a second character, Awoonor once again takes a more detailed, realist path, abandoning the broad strokes that characterized the first three stanzas. By placing two women of different ages and with different responses to the flood beside one another in the poem, Awoonor gives readers a glimpse at the highly personal and diverse ways in which a single event impacts the community: one tragedy here splinters into many. At the same time, his focus on women suggests that women face particular hardship in this moment—or, possibly, that something even worse has happened to the men. When the poem is read as an extended metaphor for invasion or colonialism, this appears to be a comment on the gendered nature of colonial violence.
In any case, the contrast between the broad, songlike descriptions of the first three stanzas and the more specific details of the fourth serves as a comment on historical memory itself, offering a reminder that the most personal and immediate tragedies can be made distant and abstract by time or repeated retelling—and, at the same time, hinting that distant and abstract narratives may stem from painful, personal, and concretely distressing events.
