'Search Sweet Country' and the language of authentic being.

In an earlier paper, the language of the poetry of B. Kojo Laing was presented as a synthesis of the techniques and traditions associated with the Concrete Poetry movement (especially as practiced in Scotland during the 1960s) and with the techniques of figurative speech characteristic of formal language use in Akan. Focusing upon existential concerns that were strongly influenced by the writings of Kierkegaard, Sartre, and most especially R. D. Laing, I showed that this language is directly related to what the poems have to say, and that it was deliberately created for the direct expression of unified, existentially authentic experience. In the present paper, I argue that the same synthesis and the same concerns are further developed in the language of B. Kojo Laing's first novel, Search Sweet Country. The language and the linguistic imagery of the novel arise directly from the poems and build upon them. At the same time, I consider the ways in which the novel introduces new dimensions into Kojo Laing's work. I do not aim to present an analysis of the novel as a whole, but to supply a key to one of its most important aspects.

The first paragraph of the novel introduces many of the most frequent images that inform the poetry: sea, food, fruit and smoke, trees (implied in "bush"), and especially language and the Town--the multipticity of inner and outer presences that threaten the ontologically insecure individual in Kojo Laing's long poems but now become externalized in a real city, Accra. The images of language and the Town are at least as intimately related in the novel as they are in the poetry. In the second paragraph we learn that "Beni Baidoo was Accra...," and that he represented not just language, but the failure of language, which is one of the novel's major themes: in the past he had been a clerk (but never of the first division) and an unsuccessful letter-writer; now he is a desperate, indiscriminate talker, obsessed with founding a village, a Town of his own, but unable to find a more solid building material than words. This clown chorus and commentator embodies in ridiculous microcosm the problem of Accra, and thus of the whole country.

Perhaps the most accessible way in which "Concreteness" (both as a linguistic device and as an image of social and personal reality) informs the novel is through names. Although its title refers to the whole of Ghana, the novel is centered on Accra, its suburbs, and its rural hinterland. In many ways, it is a celebration of the manifold, exciting modern city, the place where the consciousness of the country reaches its highest pitch, where all the threads in the national cloth come together and are revealed to each other--strong and weak, clean and dirty, old and new. The "Town" of the poems, with its multiplicity of inner and outer presences, has been externalized into a kaleidoscopic, messy city where the new society must decide upon whether or not to be born. This situation has implications for the language of the novel, and of its city, on a matter-of-fact sociolinguistic level.

Accra and its immediate hintertand, the Accra Plain, have traditionally been the home of the Ga-speaking people, and the Paramount Chief of the area is Ga. Until recently, the heavily populated down-town areas of Accra, where many of the fishermen and traders live, were ethnically and linguistically mainly Ga. This traditional Ga fishing and fish-trading Accra hardly appears in Search Sweet Country, but there is another aspect of Ga traditional life--the farming communities on Ga-owned lands of the Accra Plain--which does. Some of the villages are Ga-speaking, but most include Ewe--speaking people and other migrants, and the Ga themselves often have family connections with the Akan- (or Twi-) speaking people, whose lands adjoin theirs on the hilly fringes of the plain. For example, the character 1/2-Allotey is a farmer and herbalist; his name is Ga, but his natal village, Kuse, seems to be Akan, for it has an okyeame and an odikro (both Akan terms for town officials). His Wofa Anim (wofa is Akan for "maternal uncle") lives there, as do his wives, Mayo (an Adangme name) and Fofo) (a Ga name). Neither 1/2-Allotey nor the village represents a "pure" ethnic tradition. Any supposed purity of traditional ways cannot, therefore, be the true object of the search for wholeness and authenticity with which the book is concerned. It follows that the language of that search is not likely to find the source of its authenticity in strict adherence to traditional forms.

Most of the words listed in the glossary at the back of the book are names: of foods, birds, animals, clothing, institutions, and various attributes of people. The largest single group of these words (more than a third of them) is derived from either the Asante Twi or the Fante dialect of the Akan language. Examples include adinkra (a traditional cloth), abenkwan (palm soup), and abrantsi (young man). Akan has far more speakers than any other Ghanaian language, and it has been used alongside Ga in Accra almost since the founding of the city. That Akan-derived vocabulary should predominate is therefore entirely appropriate. However, the Akan words are closely rivalled by words from local and West Coast varieties of English, including Pidgin English. Ga words come a distant third. There are about twenty, including alasa (a fruit), chale-wate (beach sandals), and kpakpo shitoh (a small round pepper). There are about eight words of Hausa origin: gari (in Ghana, cassava grits), waakyi (beans; in Ghana, rice and beans). A few words derive ultimately from Arabic (Alhaji), Ewe (zomi palm oil), Yoruba (joromi shirt), or Wolof (jolof, referring to a rice dish). Whatever their original source might be, many of these words have become common currency in the languages (including popular forms of English) of southern Ghana. Several Hausa (and ultimately Arabic) words occur as place names (for example, Adabraka).

In a general way, the proportions in which Ghanaian words from various sources are represented in the book reflect what is known about the relative frequency of the source languages as second languages in Accra, at least among people of southern origin (See Dakubu One Voice, esp. Chapter 2). Although Laing's purpose is not to make a sociolinguistic statement, he in effect does just that: his Accra is polyglot and multi-ethnic almost to the point of being nonethnic. Its language is the mixed language of a nation-in-the-making, not the language of any single group, traditional or otherwise.

The names of the characters are even more revealing. A few, mainly peripheral characters have Muslim or Frafra names. Several have English nicknames (e.g., Ebo the Food, Baby Yaa, Manager Agyeman). The majority of names are Akan, especially although not exclusively from the Fante dialect, but few of the major characters have names that are entirely Akan, especially if titles and nicknames are taken into account. It might be significant that most of those who do are women: Adwoa Adde, Yaaba Boadi, and all the members of a household that is a major element in the structure of the novel: Araba Fynn, Ewurofua, and Nana Esi. Ahomka, the name of Kofi Loww's child, is an Akan word meaning "gladness"--a word that is used as a personal name in the Fante dialect. Loww's father's name, Erzuah, is Nzema, a language closely related to Akan but quite distinct.

Sackey is a Ga name, derived from the Akan equivalent Sakyi but preserving an older pronunciation. Since his first name, a common day name, is spelled Kwesi, instead of Kwashi (as it would be in Ga), Professor Sackey's "tribal" identity is uncertain, as is appropriate for this …