The Earth, My Brother...

Kofi Awoonor

1972.  1st U.S. Edition.  FINE in like dust jacket.  

'Kofi Awoonor, a Ghanaian, has already acquired a reputation as a poet.  With This Earth, My Brother he makes his debut as a novelist . . . The story describes the pain of Awoonor's voluntary exile and his spiritual return to his native land.  Like his hero, the young lawyer Amamu, Awoonor tries to come to terms in this novel with the conflicting realities of independence . . .

'Gnawed by the futility of his life, torn between the tedium of a bourgeois marriage and the unreality of an affair, constantly faced with the contrast between the arrogant Western section of Accra and the African inner city of the Nima district, Amamu breaks down.  But for all its social commentary, This Earth, My Brother is not a political novel.  Politics have been minimized to point up the moral plight of the hero, and changed into a metaphysical confrontation . . .

'At the end, Amamu's frantic race to the seashore is an attempt to recover a unity with his soul.  The sea woman who lures him, her lover, to her cavern, is Africa, but Africa is also the conflicting landscape of a butterfly field and the dunghill . . .

'This Earth, My Brother, fusing the language of history and poetry, represents one of the most significant attempts in any literature today to reconcile man with himself.' Saturday Review