THE DIALECTICS OF GRIEVING AND COPING WITH DEATH IN SHADRACH A. AMBANASOM’S HOMAGE AND COURTSHIP: ROMANTIC STIRRINGS OF A YOUNG MAN

Abstract

Death and the process of grieving remain universal human experiences that have continuously inspired literary reflection and creative expression. In African literature, these themes are often explored through a communal lens, where death transcends the individual to encompass family, culture, and identity. Shadrach A. Ambanasom’s Homage and Courtship: Romantic Stirrings of a Young Man provides a compelling exploration of how individuals and societies confront loss while navigating the tensions between tradition and modernity. Through its depiction of emotional struggle, remembrance, and renewal, the text captures the dialectics of grief how mourning coexists with the impulse to heal and to rediscover meaning in life. This paper explores the inevitability of death and its attendant indelible psychological marks as well as the coping strategies adopted by the bereaved in Shadrach A. Ambanasom’s Homage and Courtship. Though death as a universal theme is much discussed in literature, African, Cameroonian and especially Cameroonian writers of English Expression have largely focused on the “big” issues of the day like marginalization and corruption, relegating this all-time phenomenon to the background. Thus, a poet like Ambansom stands out in bringing to light death and grieving as some of the major concerns in his poetry; death not as an outcome of bad socio-political systems as the case is in most of the literature but as a psycho-social issue that we live with and must come to terms with it. Considering the psychological responses of the affected, the use of the psycho-social theory with particular attention to anxiety, fear and dreams is used for analysis. It is realized that although thoughts of death may cause anxiety, despair and sadness, its inevitability warrants that one prepares for death: minding the legacies which not only compel one to live purposefully, but also help to lighten the grieving for the bereaved, who may also be consoled through healing dreams and seeking solace in God