HCSHR 6:04 - Adjei Agyei-Baah, Scaring Crow

Agyei-Baah, Adjei. Scaring Crow. Great Falls, Montana, USA; Buttonhook Press, 2022. 42 pages.  https://ojalart.com/buttonhook-press2022-chapbook-seriespoetry-all-forms-styleshaikuadjei-agyei-baahscaring-crow/

Review by Brian Bartlett

 

Art using scarecrows as raw material has been with us for a long time. Basho, Buson and Issa all wrote scarecrow haiku. Hawthorne’s satirical story “Feathertop” (published in 1852) tells of a witch making a scarecrow so life-like he’s mistaken for a flesh-and-blood man. In L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and its subsequent, extremely popular film adaptation, the straw-figure fears he has no brain, but proves to be smarter than most of those around him. Silent-screen comedian Buster Keaton blurs the boundaries between scarecrows and their emulators in his 1920 two-reeler The Scarecrow. In the early 1940s, DC Comics introduced Scarecrow as a supervillain in Batman’s world. More recently, Leroy Kanterman edited called The Scare Crow, a gathering of scarecrow-related haiku and senryu by twentieth-century American poets and earlier Japanese practitioners of the form.

            Now we have Scaring Crow, composed of 102 haiku by Adjei Agyei-Baah. He echoes, plays with and broadens the conventions of poetic responses to straw-stuffed figures in fields. In the six preceding years, Agyei-Baah published five chapbooks and books of haiku. A teacher of English and Literature at the University of Ghana’s School of Continuing and Distance Education, he co-founded the Africa Haiku Network and the continent’s primary haiku journal, The Mamba. His scarecrow-populated tour de force is his finest publication so far, a gathering ripe with inventiveness and surprise, mischief and subtle emotional undercurrents.

            Recently after saying that I’ve reveled in the book, I’ve heard skeptical reactions like, “102 haiku about scarecrows?” or “A whole book of scarecrow haiku? Are you kidding?” Yes, as seems inevitable with such a book, the experiment might’ve produced even stronger results if it had included fewer three-line moments—90, say, or 75, or even 50—yet a surplus of haiku indicates the creator’s excitement and versatility, and different readers will choose different favorites among the bounty. Hawthorne describes his Feathertop elaborately—hoe-handle and stick for legs, pumpkin for head, three-corner hat, plum-coloured coat, velvet waistcoat—but Agyei-Baah’s scarecrows are, in keeping with haiku, quickly sketched, their construction and dress not a concern. A major factor that keeps the book lively and enlivening is its many variations on the theme, its fruitful variety.

            The poet offers both haiku that depict scarecrows essentially alone, unto themselves, and haiku dramatically related to human figures. Yet the former sort of poem usually employs or implies personification, often giving scarecrows sight: “full moon / the scarecrow watches / its own shadow”; “empty field— / scarecrow watches / scarecrow.” The first poem suggests self-absorption brought on by lunar brightness; the second, our turning attention to our own kind—out of kinship? loneliness? curiosity? suspicion? Mulling over the lines “after the storm / the tilted scarecrow / watches the stars,” a reader might imagine a human—bruised by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—regaining strength by contemplating cosmic things transcending the familiar. Likewise, “abandoned after harvest / a lone scarecrow / against the hurricane” brings to mind a person spurned yet resilient and not fleeing out of fear.                                                        

            Haiku bringing farmers into the foreground include the good humour of “midnight banter / the drunken farmer / and a scarecrow” and the doctoring tenderness of “departed storm / an old farmer straightness / the scarecrow’s spine.” One of the haiku that haunts me most, “lying / at the door of the farmer — / storm-tossed scarecrow,” made me think instantly of Frost’s “The Death of a Hired Man”—a long stretch of association, to be sure, yet the poem does hint at scarecrow as victim, overcome by agricultural demands and stresses. In other examples of haiku that show human-scarecrow interactions, Agyei-Baah spaces several interrelated haiku throughout his collection. First, we find, “grandpa’s will / all his clothes go / to the scarecrow,” ambiguous lines that could hint at the old man’s generosity, or death freeing him from possessions, or his poverty (he hadn’t many clothes? the family is glad to get his shirts and pants out of the house?). Three pages later, “country walk… / passing of an old hat / to a scarecrow” catches a whimsical moment of spontaneous freeing and giving. Ten pages later: “daddy’s clothes / passed on to me / passed on to the scarecrow,” a wry, open-ended report. Does the son dislike his father’s clothes? Is he striving for independence?

            Despite the title of his book, Agyei-Baah demonstrates how scarecrows are put to many uses besides scaring crows (the collection’s introduction by Hiroaki Sato states that early records of scarecrows date from Egypt 3000 years ago, and that the Japanese translation of “scarecrow,” kagashi, makes no reference to crows, but means “something that makes animals smell”—a reference to traditions of using burnt meal or fish to keep birds and animals away from crops). Scaring Crow depicts scarecrows providing shelter: “taking rest / the farmer sits in the shadow / of the scarecrow”; indicating winds’ directions: “wind ways— / a scarecrow’s / various poses”: giving privacy: “yet another pee / the comfort / of a scarecrow’s shadow”; welcoming rather than freaking out birds: “ripened field — / an old scarecrow invites / birds to party”; and protecting future meals: “working peasants— / leaving their food / at [in?] the care of a scarecrow.” (Scarecrows as protectors were also acknowledged centuries earlier by Issa, in lines translated by Sato: “standing as a windbreak / for the suckling / the scarecrow.”)

            Agyei-Baah’s chapbook Ghana 21 Haiku ended every haiku with the phrase “in Ghana,” but in his scarecrow collection he offers fewer local or regional details than he’s done in much of his previous poetry. A couple of the haiku refer to Western Africa’s famous dust-laden wind, the harmattan, and one of them cites draining poverty: “African drought — / the peasant farmer, not different / from his scarecrow.”  But variety remains prevalent in the collection. One haiku mentions a Zen Garden; another suggests Zen in its use of paradox: “arms wide open / the scarecrow / catching nothing” (is “nothing” something? does the opened-armed scarecrow catch “nothing” as a presence?). Other haiku include Christian references, such as All Saint’s Day, Palm Sunday, a scarecrow as “preacher / to a dozen crows,” and “Ascension— / a scarecrow rising / in the wind.”

            A more painstaking edit of the collection might’ve given increased concentration by replacing a few “of” phrases with simple possessives—e.g., revising “the arms of the scarecrow” into the scarecrow’s arms, and “the armpit of the crow” into the scarecrow’s armpit. More broadly, Agyei-Baah causes confusion in the inconsistency of his decisions about whether to supply line-ending dashes to vary the duration of pauses and clarify the separation of a haiku’s stages. In one case, I stumbled over “sorghum harvest / swallows’ manoeuvre between / reapers and scarecrows.” At first, I read “swallows” as a verb and “manoeuvre” as a noun, and scratched my head over how a harvest swallows a manoeuvre; a dash at the end of first line would’ve prevented that misreading. In most cases, the absence of dashes shouldn’t result in baulking, but it remains a mystery why the punctuation (sometimes ellipses rather than dashes) is inserted in some haiku and not in others.

            Further, deeper readings of Scaring Crow could investigate its ordering of its haiku, the shifts found among the four-haiku-a page groupings, and the ways in which the 102 moments speak to each other. For now, I’d like to finish with the surprise and rightness of the closing haiku: “the skeleton / I’ll become — / feeding the scarecrows to fire.” Though an occasional “my” and “me” appeared earlier, Agyei-Baah waits until the book’s penultimate line to use the pronoun “I” for the first and only time. The effect is of a sudden remarkable uncovering of the poet’s self, simultaneous with his imagining himself in the future as a skeleton destined for a fire. After spending pages with many scarecrows and their human creators and neighbours, this reader for one experienced the book’s last line as a thought-enflaming shock.

*****

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