Cloth For A Return, As Much As For A Beginning

Willis records Odo Nnyew Fie Kwan used on cloth associated with courtship, marriage, and reunion specifically, its message of confidence in a relationship's durability suited to occasions marking either a relationship's formal beginning or its resumption after separation, migration or estrangement. He groups it with Akoma and Osram Ne Nsoromma as a small cluster of Adinkra symbols devoted specifically to romantic loyalty, each addressing a different angle of the same general concern, and notes Odo Nnyew Fie Kwan's is the angle of persistence across distance and time specifically, distinct from Akoma's emphasis on an individual's patient character and Osram Ne Nsoromma's emphasis on companionship maintained in steady proximity. Willis records Odo Nnyew Fie Kwan used with some frequency on cloth given to or by someone returning from an extended absence, migration for work being the most commonly cited modern occasion, a use he treats as a natural contemporary extension of the proverb's older meaning into circumstances, long-distance labour migration, that the design's original context could not have anticipated but that its underlying claim about love enduring distance maps onto readily.