The Weaver Bird is perhaps Kofi Awoonor’s most famous poem. An early work, it initially appeared in Awoonor’s first volume of verse, Rediscovery (1964). What seems on the surface to be a simple complaint about a nest-building bird resonates with bitter colonial and postcolonial themes. Weaverbirds, a flocking species of finch (Ploceidae) widespread in Africa and Asia, are well known for their communally woven nests. In fact, the weaverbird is an infamous invader who destroys its host trees. To be fully understood, Awoonor’s poem must be read in this ecological light as a conceit on the destructive history and legacy of Western colonialism and imperialism in Africa.

Only 16 lines long, the poem is unrhymed—its line-end discords in due course reflective of the poem’s final, unsettling tone. The speaker begins conversationally, casually telling how the weaverbird is watched with curiosity as it appropriates a family’s “only tree.” The speaker reports, “We did not want to send it away. / We watched the building of the nest / And supervised the egg-laying.”

Then disaster occurs. The following season the speaker reports: “The weaver returned in the guise of the owner / Preaching salvation to us that owned the house.” The word preaching refers onomatopoetically to the sounds these birds make. Finches are garrulous, chatty birds; however, their flocks—like the conquerors they correspond to in this poem—are often followed in the natural world by symbiotic armies of stinging ants that build their own societies in the ground at the base of the trees that the weaverbirds occupy, thus effectively protecting the bird colonies from predators.

The poem’s speaker describes the dislocation caused by the assault: “We look for new homes every day”; and because the bird’s droppings defile the sacred spaces and villages, the speaker grumbles: “we strive to re-build / The old shrines defiled from the weaver’s excrement.” In retrospect, a reader recognizes that the poet is also censuring the indigenous Africans for passively indulging the invaders, those obnoxious and destructive creatures, in the first place.

Categories: Literature, World Literature

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