Dr. Jumoke Ajuwon: Tribute and a New Definition of Mourning

Abstract

Jacques Derrida posits; “There is no culture without a culture of death” (p. 361). Here, Derrida is sensitive to the ubiquitous manifestations of death. Death is a poignant phenomenon that is widely debated in literatures. In Ghana’s Efua Sutherland’s Edufa, Edufa never dies but his wife, Ampoma, becomes a victim of death. The centrality of death is evident too in the American Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in which Willy Loman creates a definition of tragedy that creates an anti-thesis of the Aristotelian doctrine of the same subject. Agamemnon never escapes death in the Greek Aeschylus’s Agamemnon.