Sun News - October 6 - Literary

OCTOBER 6, 2012

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LiteraryReview Myth, poetry and social vision in Maik Nwosu’s Suns of Kush

FEATURE PAGE 32

Reading People PAGE 42

Why Nigeria remains home of literature in Africa – JOJ NwachukwuAgbada

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rofessor J.O.J. Nwachukwu-Agbada teaches at Abia State University, Uturu. An alumnus of both Universities of Jos and Ibadan, where he took two degrees from each of them, he has been H.O.D of English, Coordinator of School of Humanities, Director of the Division of General Studies and twice Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences of Absu. Currently the Dean, School of Postgraduate Studies of his university, he has just left Abuja after partici-

Countdown to 2012 Garden City literary festival

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pating in the Presidential(Special) Visitation Panel which recently finished looking into the activities of the University of Abuja in the last twenty-four years. A creative writer and a core academic in the field of African Literature and English, he is a member of this year’s Nigerian Liquified Natural Gas (NLNG) Literature Prize Jury. He spoke to HENRY AKUBUIRO on his novels, poetry, short stories and sundry literary developments in Nigeria.

Lure of the physical book

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our writing began as an undergraduate at the University of Jos. Can you reflect on pragmatic steps towards becoming a published and acceptable writer taught in the universities?

Writing is a puny feeling, somewhat egoistic of individuals who think they can impact on their immediate world by what they write or hold as view. One thinks that one has something to add to the chaos of what one’s fellows are equally saying. It is the desire to be read or heard and so probably derive the self-satisfaction that one has said one’s own. In the university, we wanted to be read by fellow students. And they did read us. Many of my contemporaries were conversant with the name ‘J.O.J’ without knowing who I was in person; they had known the name, and not the bearer. In our time, education was everything. To show or exhibit knowledge, no matter the extent was evidence of good standing.

It is unlike now when some students write, they write just anything and paste it for others to read, often filled with all manner of infelicities of language. Then one needed to be sure of oneself to want to be read. If you were not in control of your language, you had better not show up because fellow students would make remarks on what you wrote, pointing out grammatical mistakes, spelling

To be a published and acceptable writer is a product of hard work.

You wrote, cancelled, revised and occasionally tore up your scripts. errors and so on. At the time in question, being truly educated was treasured. You were respected by the information and enlightenment you radiated, the scores you made in your courses, what your lecturers talked about you and the like. Compare that with the basis for hailing students on today’s Nigerian campuses. All negative portrayals in the past are now the hallmark of today’s campus toughie and macho. Our tough boys then had the best results, were in students’ unionism, led students’ agitations and had girls running after them because they were intelligent and bold. So much for that.

Talking about practical steps I took, I would consider the steps chancy in nature, not necessarily that one sat down to think about them before hand. Having been read on the Notice Boards and in some Nigerian newspapers, I wanted to be read in a book medium. I chose poetry and fiction and tried to imitate the masters. I was an active member of the English Literary Circle of the

Department of English, an association really meant for Honours students. If it were now, perhaps I wouldn’t have been allowed a kilometre near their meeting ground. The fact was that I was in Education. Because of the quality of my class contributions in the English courses I took, what my English teachers said about me etc, the then HOD, Mr M. A. Adekunle, later Professor Adekunle, insisted that I become a member of the English Literary Circle.

When there was a leadership vacuum in the Circle, a Caretaker Committee was set up and I was elected a member! It was our committee that published the first number of The Weaverbird, the official journal of the association. Secondly, what I’d consider as the only ‘premeditated’act towards becoming a writer is that I registered for Creative Writing, then taught by a young Canadian lady called Barbara Turner. She had just finished her master’s degree and had come to Nigeria to teach equally young people. She used to read my short stories in the Nigerian Standard newspaper, and got interested in me. She persuaded me to join the class. I had been reluctant to do so because the course was not officially put out for my class by the Faculty of Education. However, I joined. The first year prong of the Creative Writing course was not recorded for me because as I’ve just said it was not recommended for Education/English students. When Barbara knew about it she fought for my score of A- to be credited to me but she did not succeed; she was only promised that my scores in subsequent levels of the course would be recognized since she had assured the Faculty that I was impressive in class and class assignments. That promise was kept up to my final year.

To be a published and acceptable writer is a product of hard work. You wrote, cancelled, revised and occasionally tore up your scripts. Wrote and kept away, polishing after a while, re-reading, re-writing, reading the masters and domesticating what you like about their writings. Practically imitating how this writer or that author wrote. I use the word ‘imitating’ advisedly. You desired your writing to sound like theirs, not on a permanent basis but as a stepping stone towards formulating your own style.

fledgling writer then, I was poised to polish my muse when academicism overtook me. I was encouraged by my late friend, Ezenwa-Ohaeto, to give more time to academic writing if I was to become a professor. Elsewhere, in another clime it wouldn’t have mattered whether or not I gave more time to creative writing, but in Nigeria Ezenwa was right, and I knew he was. Thus, when I embraced academicism, it was not easy for me to look elsewhere: it was quite consuming.

Operating on the intellectual planes of an academic and a creative writer is exacting. How do you achieve symmetry, or which of these two has suffered most for the other?

There is no conflict. It’s like being a child of someone, at the same time being somebody’s husband and probably being the father of another person. All belong to a family. My academic realm is literature, and the writing you are referring to is the creation of literature. It’s one arena but two mutually inclusive roles.

You teach literature for a while or teach Creative Writing as I do, and you turn round and create so that your students can emulate you. It assures them that writing is not for those in the outer space.

If your teacher can do it, you too can. Yes, we can, as Obama would say. That’s the idea. Which of them –creative writing or pure academicism –has ‘suffered’? I would say my creative writing because I actually started out as a creative writer. By the time I joined the academia, I had published two novels which I wrote as an undergraduate at the University of Jos. Although I was a

What did you have at the back of your mind when you were working on the meta-mythical source of God’s Big Toe? A few years before I started writing the novella, I read a newspaper article in which the writer was berating present-day parents for training their made maids but pampering their children. I was moved by that piece because the man was making a lot sense to me. Parents were strict with their servants and got them humanized whereas their children were turning into animals because of lack of correct attention. I had to fictionalize the scenario by creating Onwubiko, an only son in the midst of many girls. Ironically, while Azu Anuka, the father was consumed by the ‘importance’ of this boy as heir, it is the mother who really cares, for which the young boy loathes her and his female siblings. Of course, like all false gods, Onwubiko falls when his rich father dies shamefully in the hands of a teenage love rival. The perception of the newspaper writer which motivated God’s Big Toe is more apt today that we have lots of mandarin millionaires than in the nineteen eighties when the essay in question was written. There are more gods and godlings today whose devilish impact can easily be felt by the sinister activities of cults in Nigeria’s higher institutions.

Years ago, you expressed your disenchantment with publishing in Nigeria. How has your views changed over the years?

My view hasn’t changed radically. Local publishers are more into school publishing, leaving the re-creation of our culture unattended to. They think of mass buying, of profit and loss. I am not saying that to expect profit is bad. But to want to make profit even in the first year of setting up a business venture is commercial myopia. Publishing is better seen as an idea which needs to grow over time it is sufficiently tended. It is as a cultural investment that publishing realizes itself best. This is why government at all levels must assist publishers by reducing tariff on the materials that their outfits use on a constant basis. My disenchantment is not with those who are still publishing, even if in trickles, but with those who invest little there or are no longer keen to publish because of its slow yield. If I do not add this caveat, I would be sounding like the priest who only reprimands and admonishes those who come to church, his visible congregation, whereas it is those who are not there that really need to be tongue-lashed. Now that we are talking of publishing, a few new entrants are making an impact, particularly in the area of creative writing. I want to single out for praise Farafina, Kraft, Bookcraft, African Heritage Press (based in New York, which has lately done quite a few Nigerian works) and a few others. Of course, the old redoubtable like University Press Plc (formerly Oxford) is still doing very well in all spheres of publishing, including creative writing.

In deploying songs in your fiction, are you pandering to African orature?

I don’t need to ‘pander’, if I understand the word well. This is because songs are part of the African. And so if you insist, yes. But you must know that I was only reflecting the African existential reality. Songs are not just found in our cultural fossils, Africans think in songs. Hence, our languages taken to the language labs for analysis tend to resonate. Writing is more real and therefore more effective if reality visits the imagination or even gets domiciled in it. By creating songs in fiction, we are giving off a part of us which outsiders may not know much about. Songs are also some shorthand of experience. You need to know as well that songs are used to spur work, to channel innuendoes or serve abusive medium. Depending on the impression the author wants to create, songs could serve a few more purposes.

You have written copiously on proverbs in African literature and your fiction also bears witness to proverbs. Why have you kept fidelity to this aspect of language in your fiction and what have you found engaging about proverb scholarship?

My notion of writing is that one’s literary acts should be as close to reality as possible without sacrificing the boundary between reality and verisimilitude. I like to position my creative gestures in such a way that my reader agrees with me that what I am conveying to him/her is both possible and plausible. Note that I am not prescribing that all writers write in this way; I am simply saying that it is the style that appeals to me as a writer. If that is my outlook, it shouldn’t then be surprising that proverbs are found in my fiction. Proverbs are so used in Igbo social communication that some of the recent sayings are probably a few years old. In other words, we are still churning out proverbs in the Igbo world.

My essay on ‘Engligbo’ proverbs which will be published in October this year in Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship, by the University of Vermont, USA is an examination of this proverb corpus. If we are this close to the proverb, I don’t see why we cannot emphasize it as a habit of speech among our people. We should not allow the Whiteman’s

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LiteraryReview given in the preceding response to the question as to why I seem to be in love with a tragic representation of life in my published works.

Humans hardly bargain for tragedy even when they know that it is lying in wait all the time for them preferences all the time and on all occasions to determine our own local literary taste in the name of internationalism or globalization.

With respect to my interest in proverb scholarship, the proverb as a literary genre is quite rich. It is from how a people turn aspects of their lives into saws and sayings that one can appreciate them.

Don’t forget that some of our apothegms have equivalents in other cultures. That way it becomes clearer that we share certain feelings or attitudes just as other people do.

A poem in Prayer Beads entitled “A Letter to Heaven” is modeled after Okigbo’s “Heaven’s Gate”. What’s your take on the anxiety of influence in Nigerian literature?

‘Anxiety of influence’ is a complex discourse in literature.

Those who spearheaded the theory did not leave us with sufficient conditions for insisting that one is under another writer’s influence. If I tell you that I wasn’t thinking of Okigbo’s influence when I wrote the poem, you may say that I don’t want to claim anybody’s influence, which is an act of ingratitude. Okigbo has influenced many of us, and it is a thing of pride to claim such a link. I am so enamoured by his writing that I had to go to Boston in 2007 to celebrate the 75th year of his birth. At the time I wrote “A Letter”, it was apartheid in South Africa that I was more concerned about, and how the world had been so racialized that we needed to go to animals and insects to re-learn how to live in harmony with our fellows. If the poem sounds ‘Okigboish’, so be it.

I’ve everything to gain by that association. Remember, as I said earlier, AOI is a complex theoretical formulation, like a two-edged sword or a two-faced Janus. I say this because you could still be accused of suffering from ‘anxiety of influence’ if you purposely

In Azu Anuka, in God’s Big Toe, you create a semi-literate wealthy businessman who is sold to the patriarchal notion of traditional society. Do you write with an eye for verisimilitude?

I have just used the term, ‘verisimilitude’ earlier, which is to show how important it is in creative literature. The idea in imaginative writing is to stay as close as possible to what is observable, what is plausible, what can happen. The Azu Anukas are all over the place. Usually, they are not too educated, though somehow they manage to come in contact with money. They are so conceited about the power of their resources that they respect very few people. Although they love to tryst with women outside, they have no respect for the female in their vicinity. Thus his wife is nothing to him, and his daughters are mere marginal figures. His love affair with his maid is not evidence of love for the female folk. The only pastime of the Azu Anukas is sex, and yet more sex; they are hardly creative with their wealth.

In your novels such as No Need to Cry, The Taste of Honey, God’s Big Toe, The Forbidden Fruit and Dance of the River Song there is a permeating sense of tragedy.

Why do you give urgency to the tragic in your fiction?

Life itself is essentially tragic. Look at this straight scenario of our existence. We cried the day we were born. And if you didn’t cry your mother would not be confident to take you home. This is a metaphor of the future. We grow, initially beautiful or handsome, and struggle to make it in life as we say it in Nigeria. Perhaps we succeed. At the point we consider ourselves successful, we are banned from eating certain foods. Soon after, we visit hospitals because our health is failing. The children have all left the house; your wife or husband may have died earlier. Eventually, the day you die you die alone, perhaps in a little corner with or without anybody’s love. By now you must have lost all your beauty, you are now an ugly old man or woman for whom nobody has genuine time. Perhaps you had struggled to make wealth; it is probably left in the hands of those who’ll squander it or quarrel over it as soon as you depart etc. This is the scenario of a typical life, at least in today’s Africa. On the other hand, the simple life is comic. Perhaps the life of a child (who, don’t forget, is yet to fully grow up), that of a fool or a mad person. This cannot make a great story. A complex, multi-dimensional life is laced with the tragic sway. If I create works of comedy, I make people laugh or happy but life is not a laughing matter. If I create unrealistic scenarios in my fiction, I would not be staying close to ‘verisimilitude’. The word keeps popping up again and again!

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Your poetry collection, Prayer Beads of the Silent Supplicant, is dominated by such broad themes as politics, exploitation, spirituality, love and death. What have they got to do with your artistic vision?

My vision of life is that nothing is simple in that simplistic manner we occasionally say things. That’s one. Two, there are layers of actions in the world which affect us. The poet is the most sensitive person to take note of these occurrences even when less perceptive people are not aware of what is happening around them.

These themes, some of them ugly, including others not raised here have affected my life. However, note that I am not succumbing to them, they do not weigh me down as it were. I treat them largely with derision, with airiness and occasional smirks. As if to say ‘And so what?’That’s what a typical writer does with themes and subjects. He/She insinuates his/her persona in the fray as it were and questions the world with audacity. And yet without leaving any simple answers nor ‘solve’ any problem. But s/he has struck your ire with her/his simple descriptions, arguments, observations, direct narratives or analogies. As for my artistic vision, it is already

Our muse is as fecund as ever. I advise our governments to buy into the country’s writing potentials. Tourism should not end with building hotels avoid the style of a well-known writer who is making waves around you!

Your latest fiction, Dance of the River Song (2012), echoes the melding of art and social commitment. In a country like ours that has since passed through some literary tutelage, isn’t it possible to draw a line between art and commitment?

That’s a good question. If you do an assessment of African existential realities today, you’ll discover that our social conditions have registered little or no improvement. We are in fact retrogressing. Take the political sphere, for example. Can you equate the quality of leadership offered by Zik or Awo or Ahmadu Bello or Aminu Kano with what you meet today? Perhaps one or two can pass the test. Many of those in leadership today in Nigeria look like outsiders who have merely come to reap what has not even been sown. They enter the arena without anything to offer because they had come with nothing in fact. Let’s say it: we are a society in ferment, in decline. So your question has deconstructed itself, which is that we even need more works of commitment now than ever before. We may have gone through some ‘literary tutelage’– to use your expression – but the conditions which gave rise to this tutelage are still there, even in a worse state. While our literary vision is galloping in front, it doesn’t let go, it still looks back because one of its pet subjects has refused to update or upgrade

itself.

With the tragedies of the randy corps members –Makuo, Garba and Purkis - in their primary assignment at Oduduwa in Dance of the River Son, the relevance of NYSC is once again being brought to question. What are we to take away from this fiction?

There is no cause for panic, as it is said in popular parlance.

What they did is what emerging youths can do if they are not sensitized enough to know that life is more than satisfying the urge of the flesh or battling with transient issues. That’s why the work was written in the first place. I would want the youths of this country to realize that Nigeria is in their hands to build or to destroy. There is a statistics I came across recently which claimed that 75% of Africa is of the youthful age unlike in other continents. What the three youths did in the novel does not question the concept of ‘youth service’. Many of us had good memories of the NYSC. Even this novel benefited from such good memories which is why it sounds the way it does. There is nowhere in the novel in which the relevance of youth service is brought to question. It was all a memorable experience, which was what youth service is meant to foster in young Nigerians. Don’t doubt the relevance of NYSC because of Boko Haram, as obnoxious as their campaign is.

Humour is a recurring technique in your novels and in the short story collection, Love Strokes and Other Stories.

What intrigues you in creating comic personalities like Nelson Jumbo, Bola, Mallam Sariki etc.?

Humour is an important part of life. We cannot be serious all the time. We must occasionally recreate ourselves by letting things go, as it were. You were a while ago accusing me of immersing my novels in tragic experiences. Humour is what a writer could use to force down the morsels of harsh experiences into our memories so that they can be palatably absorbed. That is why a tragic playwright who has no place for a lighthearted moment in his sorrowful drama risks one of his spectators doing it for him. Humans hardly bargain for tragedy even when they know that it is lying in wait all the time for them. In Igbo mourning, there must be music, there must be dramatic moments in one form or the other, there must be some spectacle or some form of tension-breaker; it’s not one long shot of furrowed faces. This is because the Igbo know that it must happen again. And if it does happen again, they mourn for a while and life goes on. So if one comes from this influence, the narrative could be tragic but the vehicle doesn’t have to be tragic too. There must be moments of mirth, even in melancholy. We achieve humour not just in what is said, but also in the twists and turns in the actions, in the opposite of events happening, far and beyond what had been thought about or imagined. We then laugh, but we laugh at ourselves too because – to quote Aristotle – “there but for the grace of God go I.” You have been involved in judging this year’s NLNG Prize for Literature. How has new Nigerian literature advanced over the years, against the backdrop of repeated pillories by older critics?

This is going to be my shortest answer because the NLNG Prize project is on-going. The courts talk of a matter being ‘sub judice’, that is when a case has not been decided. All I can confidently say is that Nigeria is still the powerhouse of creative literature in Africa. Our muse is as fecund as ever. I advise our governments to buy into the country’s writing potentials. Tourism should not end with building hotels; the book in Nigeria could be promoted to tourist propensities such that they can become forex earners. As for ‘the pillories of the older critics’ we are still to land on the moon as some of them have advised us to do! It is likely that there is much here still to tackle that it won’t allow our literary spaceship to take off.

The short story teller and poet in you seem to have been overshadowed by your predilection for the novel, going by the tilt of your oeuvre. Do you see yourself more as a novelist?

That does not demand a straight answer. I started out as a short story writer, poet and then novelist, in that order. As a Creative Writing student, I did many assignments with the short story, published quite a number of them in newspapers. I mentioned the Nigerian Standard newspaper in Jos. There was the outlet offered

by Rock Magazine, also of Jos. I published in students’periodicals in the English departments of some other universities. The same could be said for my poems. I would consider my foray into the longer fiction as epochal in my career as a creative writer. So each time I am able to ply the more extended route on creativity –that is the novel –I am usually happier because it enables me to say in full what I have in mind. But I have not missed the opportunity of writing a poem or a short story if such an opportunity presents itself. It should not be surprising that publishers are keener about one’s longer fiction. Remember what I said earlier about their commercial interest in certain types of manuscripts. The novel has more potentials as a commercial success than any of the other literary genres. And so they go for it more than the others. That’s bound to affect the output of one over the others.

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LiteraryReview ESSAY

Myth, poetry and social vision in Maik Nwosu’s Suns of Kush

SULE E. EGYA

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more useful, rewarding way to approach Nwosu’s poetry is to apprehend his affinity for, and his attitude to, or his engagement with, myths, legends and (the Christian) religion. One of the first things that strike one when reading his poetry, especially the poems collected in Suns of Kush and the yet-to-be-published Stanzas from the Underground, is the numerous footnotes that explain the legendary, mythical and religious figures that so easily permeate his imagination, popping up almost in each of the poems. Nwosu dedicates a poem, “River Legend” to his mother with this footnote: “For my mother, whose stories, especially about the River Niger and its myths, forever bind us” (Stanzas, 38).

This underscores his contact with myths early in life. The contact from childhood with myths, legends and other mystical figures, such as the masquerades in his immediate society, is not only a vital impetus to the realization of his poetic aspiration, it continues to register itself, rather pervasively, in every of his poetic production. A more interesting dimension to Nwosu’s self-immersion in mythology is the boundlessness of his mind-scope, that is, the unrestricted capacity of his sensibility to engage in, and with, myths, legends, fables, tales, and the likes, from anywhere in the world. Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, and J. P. ClarkBedekeremo have earlier on deployed myths, African and nonAfrican, in their imaginative works. Mythology also attracts the attention of Nigerian writers, those of the Alter-Native tradition, who engage post-independence disillusionment, but they approach it from a different perspective. Poets and playwrights such as Niyi Osundare and Femi Osofisan, conscious of countering the appropriation and valorisation of mythology by their precursors, question, even ridicule, a myth-centred national narrative.

Victor Ukaegbu, for instance, writes of Osofisan’s use of myths to privilege “revolutionary option over impotent silence” (2006: 179).

Like Okigbo and Soyinka, Nwosu deploys myths, alludes to legendary and religious figures to interpret, or construe, contemporary happenings in his society. This is the phenomenon one encounters in Suns of Kush, a collection that, beneath its toughened tropes, dramatises the predicament of the ordinary people, especially of the black race, in a society plundered by a select few most of whom are military generals.

Nwosu uses myths in Suns of Kush to contextualise the baffling

Nwosu

condition of life in Africa, and of other less privileged peoples of the world, which has perpetually remained unchanged. But, as with Okigbo and Soyinka, mythology for Nwosu is also a medium for negotiating individualism, for discovering and inscribing self in a social, national spirit. While Okigbo’s epiphany is negotiated towards his roots, the gravitation towards the goddess Mother Idoto (the very manner in which Soyinka aligns himself with Ogun), Nwosu’s epiphany is towards all the myths and gods and legends of the world that attract him although there is a uniquely Afrocentric inquest to his expansive imagination. In his poetry and fiction, Nwosu demonstrates that writing is a product of boundless influences cutting across the entire world, and here there is something of a restless imagination, as in Dambudzo Marechera, about Nwosu’s entire range of creative works. It is in Stanzas from the Underground that Nwosu’s idiom grows increasingly towards the personal, deploying memory and mystical contemplation as a mode of re-knowing, re-examining, self in relation to other selves that are fated to one destiny. The first part of this volume, captured “for dust and dreams”, realises this self-immersion in memory and, through dialogue with his precursors namely Okigbo and Soyinka, Nwosu the poet-persona speaks of ambitions and wastes, dreams and counter-dreams, and the vanities in a socially imbalanced society that tend to overwhelm intellectualism. In “Children of the Crossroads”, the dialogue is with his contemporaries such as Uche Nduka, Izzia Ahmed, E. C. Osondu with whom the poet-persona seeks light but are, because of the crisis of leadership in their society, condemned to the dark side of life.

But the important thing running through these poems and others, throughout the entire collection, is the mythopoeic projection of self articulated in “i malaika”.

‘Malaika’is a Swahili (also Hausa) word for an angel, and it is a recurring persona/motif in Nwosu’s poetry. As an idiom, “malaika” pulls Nwosu’s verse towards the metaphysical, the mystical; the sublime longing to rise atop the wasted dreams and the sociopolitical inanities that characterise his physical world. The phenomenalisation of ‘malaika’ in Nwosu’s poetic imagination has sought to be the centre, the connection, the interconnection, of personal epiphanies, spiritual inquests, and heightened individuations. For sure, Nwosu’s poetry does not have faith in, nor advocates, social or mass action, as his fiction notably Invisible Chapters does. His poetry, itself originating from the liminal depth of individualism, only seems to have faith in spiritualised individuals such as malaika, or ashikodi (in other poems and narratives) who choose to challenge the status quo, and transgress

limitations. Mostly they are (self-)purified, socially and intellectually conscious figures who stand to speak on behalf of the downtrodden. In a sense, then, the poet Nwosu who writes about the people’s plight in his personalised, mythologised idiom is a malaika or an ashikodi.

For anyone eager to locate Nwosu’s poetry in the domain (in terms of textuality, contextuality, and the tension between them) of contemporary Nigerian poetry, that is, a poetry that shares historical grounds with Nwosu’s poetry, the task is not only to deconstruct Nwosu’s highly mythologised verse but to trace its link to events in Nigeria in the past few decades. To do this is to perspectivise Nwosu’s poetry and establish its cultural, political valency, like the poetry (such as Remi Raji’s, Usman Emman Shehu’s, and Toyin Adewale’s, among others’) contemporaneous to it, and recognise its discursive capacity as a medium for narrativising nationhood. This is not merely to hypostatise Nwosu’s rather incorporeal poetry, but to pursue the obvious which is that socio-political events in Nigeria, in Like Okigbo and the last few decades, have inflected Nwosu’s Soyinka, Nwosu poetry in a way that deploys myths, social realities cast some alludes to legendary concreteness on the and religious figures poetry. Nwosu does not, Raji or Chiedu to interpret, or con- like Ezeanah, explicitly thestrue, contemporary matise military oppreshappenings in his sion in Nigeria; he is not, like them, obsessed with society the idea of imagined nation, now ruptured, requiring the lore of protest and action from the poet to mend it (see Egya 2007: 111-126); in his poetry there is a certain human universalism that brackets him with Uche Nduka. But the metaphorical signatures Okigbo are there in Nwosu’s

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LiteraryReview poetry for erecting a reading of his poetry, along with Raji’s and Chiedu’s, as a critical discourse constructed during, and about, an important juncture in the history of Nigeria. Side by side with mythical and religious figures such as “olokun”, “ogbanje”, “kush”, and “izaga”, there are explicit words, even in their densely mythological context, such as “[military] generals”, “soldiers”, “maroko”, “bull-dozers” (words not used as metaphors) that betray the inevitable connection of Nwosu’s poetry to his nation.

While this may sound like a proviso for any reading of Nwosu’s poetry, despite its continuous swings from the liminal to the subliminal, as a socially conditioned discourse, it is indeed something of a settled claim for Nigerian literature in English which emerged, first, as a response to a bigoted, self-hierarchising epistemology (Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart), and, second, as a response to endemic, unending manifestations of oppressive regimes (Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest). At the same time that this literature assumes this role of intervention, interrogation and deflection, there has been of course the alternative domain occupied by a thematic inquest fusing personal liminality, inward probing, individualistic epiphany, with a human-centred, communal aspiration (Christopher Okigbo’s Labyrinths).

Writers today, especially the poets, have tended to embrace personal lyricisms which mingle their personal aspirations with their society’s, but often in such a manner that their personal aspirations are deeply submerged in the society’s. It does seem that in spite of the exophoric concern that Nigerian, African, writings are vulnerable to the so-called danger of the single story, that is, that every literary work from Africa is inevitably concerned about the socio-political situation of the continent, emerging writers have not felt the need to shy away from the socio-political situations in their immediate society. This is true of new Nigerian poets such as Nwosu.

But idioms and tropes, even among poets bound by the same socio-political worries, differ as the case ought to be. In this context, we can talk of the differentiation in the capacity of each poet to trope events that attract his/her poetic imagination and those of others. Nwosu’s poetry has that distinctive feature of bringing together concerns that are personal, social, and universal, in often lengthy poems that tend to ramble from one issue to the other and so on. His poetry, as it were, distance itself, more than the poetry of his contemporaries, from the singularity of referentiality; it embraces, often in complex fusion, epistemological, ontological, cosmic, and mythological figurations. Nwosu’s readings of histories, mythologies, and literatures exert a propelling force on his poetry, (deliberately) thwarting any formation of a linear background to his poetry. This is a deliberate act from the poet, and it often mortgages the lyrical strengths of the poems. It is however pertinent to point out that Nwosu avoids what one may call the-poemas-song obsession common with his contemporaries. Nwosu’s poetry has the inclination to narrativise, but with a language, i.e. diction, that defies the pellucidity of narration; so the implicit claim of balladry for some poems such as “Ballad of the Peace-Keeper” and “Ballad of the Rainmaker” is one ironic twist that runs through Nwosu’s entire range of imagination. Beneath his turgid language, or stylised poetics, though, is a kaleidoscopic poetic mind sensitive to even minor social issues or objects; Nwosu’s poems may contain details that other poems may consider inconsequential, that perhaps only novels in their amplitude or heteroglossia can contain.

In “Ballad of the Rainmaker”, for example, Nwosu seems to deploy the myth surrounding the rainmaking in almost all cultures of the peoples of Nigeria. The rainmaker is said to be a person who has magical power to cause rain to fall, especially in time of drought, or to cause rain to stop, especially when that is needed for an occasion or event to take place. The poem assumes the voice of a rainmaker, the voice of an oracle in a society, to philosophise on the drought-like situation that strikes a society metaphorised as “the bleeding heart of the desert” (53). The metaphor of the rainmaker comes through as the facilitator of growth and development; he is thus imbued with the skill of invoking the power of fertility a society needs for germination and pro-

duction. Though the rainmaker has the knowledge and power of prediction, and understands as well as interprets the inscrutable language of the rain to his society, he is “taunted by covenants of misery” (7). At the same time he is “haunted by beauties/ beyond common explanation” (9-10), a paradoxical position that a thinker-activist finds himself/herself in the years of exploitation in Nigeria. The problem with the society is that the rich engage in “lavish ceremonies in holiday resorts / speckling gestations in roadside motels” (16-17) and the society is senselessly geared toward materialism. The rainmaker in his wisdom foresees this extravagance on the part of the leader as “laughters poisoned by the anticipation of pain” (25). This becomes a way of life for the destroyers of the nation because “the histories go on / steaming their ferocious chapters” (28-29) and their insatiability is shown in: “and all rivers flow into the sea /

Soyinka

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Writers today, especially the poets, have tended to embrace personal lyricisms which mingle their personal aspirations with their society’s

yet the sea is never full” (italics his, 30-31).

If the rainmaker therefore succeeds in inviting rain, it will be of benefit only for the insatiable “sea” of the land. In his pessimistic stance, the poet, in addressing rain, sees no end to the dryness in the land caused by the insufficiency of water to a land that is doomed to dryness: you are the deluge that balms the bleeding heart of the desert still, the desert is the waste land - nectars scalped by breathless rosaries tears dried by funerals upon funerals and we stopped in the middle of the melody. (52-58) The land thus continues to be dry; indeed a land, like Nigeria, wasted by its leaders whose incessant wicked acts create funerals among the people. Nwosu’s imagery and many allusions drawn from Christianity – he refers to the nation as “a lost ark” (51) – and the air of religiosity surrounding the rainmaker aim to question the potency of religion in evolving a nationhood.

But religion has a dual rendition in Nwosu’s

poetry, even in his fiction. There is in this poem the orchestration of religion as that part of the social life of a people, bound together by a common demiurgic concept, clearly a result of Nwosu’s fascination with the Christian religion, especially Catholicism. On this level Nwosu writes of a communal shortcoming on the part of the people, a social and societal failure hinged on the excesses of the corrupt leadership. As a people, the society has failed to take the advantage of the energies of religion in entrenching morality and modesty. There is also an orchestration of religion at the personal level, a spiritual idiom that runs through Nwosu’s creative works. The persona in this poem, the rainmaker, at some point refers to himself as “I malaika / the sand whistles are my benediction / to laughters poisoned by anticipation of pain / to welcome searching out the journey’s end” (23-26).

In “Ballad of the Peace-Keeper” Nwosu also centres his concern on a social problem, one that emanates from the phenomenon of peace keeping, that is, the military occupation of a nation deemed to be in the crisis of disintegration. It is clear from this poem that the soldier/peace-keeper is a Nigerian, sent along with others to other African nations to keep peace. A footnote explains that the poem is written for Umoru Shantali, a Nigerian soldier (a private) on a UN peace-keeping mission in Somalia, who, according to the poet, “saves time” in a Mogdishu dungeon. The four-part poem begins with the poetpersona addressing the soldier/peace-keeper, Shantali. In what sounds like a philosophical contemplation on the renewed interest on peacekeeping by the governments of the world and their machinery called the UN, the poet-persona addresses the private soldier, and in doing so launches a criticism of the inhumanity of it all.

One of the rhetorical questions in the poem points up the question of power in the abstraction of peace-keeping: “when they trussed you up in Mogadishu / and the dungeons clenched your silences / how did it feel?” (9-12). This question anticipates the next part of the poem which may stand as an adequate answer to it. Here Shantali speaks, and his words evoke a sense of pity in us.

As with most decisions in the army, the decision for peace-keeping is one that the private soldiers, who will eventually be sent to the peace-keeping field, do not have any say in what will surely be the fate to befall them.

Although the authorities make it sound as if the decision for peace-keeping is humanitarian, it is in fact political, one that is to strengthen individual positions in alliance with the strongest nation(s), those in control of the UN. The military regime in Nigeria that commands Private Shantali to wear the UN’s blue helmet (the regime that “pronounced the sentence of the blue helmets” (35)) is not, for instance, morally better than the despotism that causes a crisis situation in Somalia, and in any case the self-intrusive military regime in Nigeria also brings about a crisis situation in Nigeria. The disturbing question then is how can a nation that needs peace send soldiers to another nation to keep peace?

This question and others underline the travesty of peace keeping dramatised in Nwosu’s poem.

Private Shantali himself relates the alarming irony that is the peace keeping situation in Mogadishu. Through his words, the urgent tone of his voice, and the constructed immediacy of an eye-witness, the very horrible situations that form what the authorities call peace keeping are laid out clearly: where is the peace we have come to keep? to enumerate the limbs and shrapnels of twilight massacres to ponder the ghosts and skeletons of mid-noon carnage to beat the bush for red-cross syrups are these then the agenda of peace?

(48-54) Of course these are not, but they are the situations that Private Shantali and other UN peace keeping soldiers have to contend with. For soldiers of conscience like Shantali, the peace keeping becomes an avenue for constructing personal narratives, for negotiating the place of humanity in the wicked acts of man, for interrogating the powers of the authorities under which they operate. But a personal narrative goes beyond that; it also contains the soldier’s life left behind

in his society, and this in turn defines the humanitarian situation at home. Mairo, Shantali’s beloved wife or lover whom he left behind in his society, dies while he is keeping peace in Mogadishu. To be a peace keeper then is to be condemned to the grim realities of death: in Mogadishu it is death, and at home too it is death.

Although the poem is silent on the cause of death, it is loud on indicting the society for the death of Mairo. Private Shantali wails, “malufamshi, where is mairo?” (his italics, 87).

Malufamshi is a town in Katsina State of Nigeria, presumably the place Private Shantali hails from.

While Shantali is familiar with seeing deaths, especially the unending deaths in Mogadishu, it is the death of Mairo that strikes him most with pain: “but you are the great death / greater to me than all the grim litanies / of sarajevo and mogadishu” (81-83). Mairo’s death also awakens his sensibility – and this is crucial to the thematic horizon of this poem – to the reality of insecurity, hardship, neglect, and systemic dehumanisation in his immediate society, and in the entire world. In search of his lost Mairo, in his desire to everlastingly connect to her, he seeks her voice all over the place, all over the nation, indeed all over the world. Her voice is the voice of other vulnerable, suffering, dying people: now I hear your voice also in the shudders of the corn-woman see your dimples in the bosom of the milkmaid hear your injunctions in the desideratum of the mullah and at last it has come home to me - the lesson of mogadishu the brotherhood of man the affinities of anguish for these we must keep the peace o mogadishu, my love. (94-105) The realisation now is that human anguish is the same, irrespective of place and period; Shantali’s anguish for losing Mairo is the same as the anguish of the ordinary Somali for losing his/her loved ones. Such anguish is one that authorities such as national governments and the UN do not feel, do not have because their politics neutralises their sense of human compassion. The peace keeping eventually advocated

by Shantali is one that involves eternal vigilance and alertness to human suffering, which should be part of each individual, not part of any forced command to realise peace in a crisis situation.

Really, with every soul being vigilant for the sake of humanity, there may be no crisis situation to necessitate any peace keeping structured along the line of economic and political interests.

If everyone is his/her brother’s keeper, as it were, the human anguish is shared and communally tackled. While this poem reads like a satire on the UN peace keeping mission, which has been widely criticised across the world, it is also a poem that instructs human beings to look

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Nwosu writes of a communal shortcoming on the part of the people, a social and societal failure hinged on the excesses of the corrupt leadership

Osundare

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LiteraryReview inward and to will their souls to seek and maintain peace and to create a situation that will not require the authorities to display their highly politicised compassion. Here too the idiom of individualism, though in a subtle way, underscores Nwosu’s philosophisation on the socially disturbing issue. Needless to say, ashikodi, metaphor of self and selflessness, pops up here: “like ashikodi the head-walker / tending his caravan of fowls” (22-23).

But principally “Ballad of the Peace-Keeper” demonstrates Nwosu’s sensitivity to social issues beyond his society. Beyond the death of Mairo and travails of Shantali, Nwosu draws attention to the inhumanity in Mogadishu, a city simmering under the violence of “brother against brother / clan against clan” (40-41); those who cause this violence, those the poet refers to as “the patriarch of the apocalypse” (43), flee the land, leaving only the underprivileged in this game of blood. Through allusions Nwosu draws attention to the same kind of violence against humanity in Sarajevo, in Johannesburg (apartheid), in Gaza, in Monrovia, and in Kigali.

These were places of irrational and arbitrary killings and massacres in the 1990s, with the world either watching unconcerned or playing the politics of peace keeping.

The title poem The Suns of Kush explores the plight of underprivileged black people as a race.

Characteristic of Nwosu’s poems, the poem is subtitled “for the stilted urchins of forgotten villages”, and there is a considerably lengthy footnote explaining “Kush”. Kush is the first son of Ham, in the bible, who is said to be cursed because he looks at his father’s nakedness; this cursed man is said to be the progenitor of the black race. Kush was also the name of the ancient Nubian kingdom in north-eastern Africa comprising large areas within the present-day Egypt and Sudan. Its capital Meroe was destroyed by King Aeizanes of Aksum in A. D. 350. Nwosu’s formation, Suns of Kush, in his words, is in the context in which “suns of Kush are both those who, atop the myth of an Original Black Sin and Curse, illumine new depths of self or collective decimation and also those whose dreams and realities of self or collective extension illume the crests of a Penultimate Black Ascension, of an Ultimate (Universal) Brotherhood of Man” (Suns of Kush, 23). The use of “Suns of Kush” not only as a title of a poem that speaks of the senseless rot in a society but also as a title of a book, the entire collection, attests to Nwosu’s crave for using myths to interpret, interrogate the presence, such as the existing, disturbing misery of human beings in his immediate society. With images and symbols drawn from different places, and with allusions far and near, Nwosu, in “The Suns of Kush”, engages issues of despair common to the human beings everywhere in the world, but especially in Nigeria, in Africa. The poem begins by asking a vital question: which master smith can recast now the phosphorescence of genesis or which finisher the permeating mireacle of the offspring of ham? (1-4) The importance of this question first lays on its eloquence as a rhetorical question, its arresting unanswerability, and then on its position as a preface to perhaps one of the most engaging selfflagellating discourse in Nigerian poetry in English. The clue to this self-flagellation is the coinage “mireacle”, the combination of ‘mire’ (misery) and ‘miracle’, to encapsulate the startling, nagging, oppressive state in which the black race, “the offspring of ham” (4), have found themselves. And it seems no “master smith” or “finisher” can change this situation, or rewrite the story of this unfortunate race. The situation the poet writes of here is an alarming master-paradox, homing all those poverties in the midst of plenty, those insanities on a sane, virgin land; all those failures amidst bucolic wisdom, what the poet refers to as “hydra-headed paradoxes” (14). Keeping to biblical stories and myths, Nwosu raises provocative issues about the fate of the black people in a world that seems to naturally give them all they need in abundance.

The poem in its post-colonial postulations

does not in anyway sound the note of a counterracist discourse, or anti-racist racism, as in some of Ayi Kwei Armah’s fiction. In order words it raises questions, not for the colonial masters or those who colonially and imperially decimate Africa, but for Africans who have in their own inadequacies and inefficiencies constructed the “hydra-headed paradoxes”. The poem thus provokes intellectual thoughts, social action, towards the total overhauling of the systems in Africa. But first it asks another vital question: now the time is no longer for weighted postulations on the geography of atlantis or the charged seminars on the philosophy of oceania for when the blood dries on the altar and the horns of the beast recede no more what is to stop little tots

Remi Raji

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Children without food, on “distended tummies”, are a nation without a future, without a vision, a nation that is surely doomed to fail demented by the compulsion of distended tummies from desperate acts of desecration? (5060)

The concern of the poet here is that when children (turned urchins by the social realities in their societies) are forced to desecrate the land, then all politics of talks, all luxurious theories of empty rhetoric, or all lip services to the cause of humanity must be reconsidered. The use of children here is, of course, metaphorical, a way of getting at and pricking the conscience of the society that does not care for its own, as most of the societies in Africa have become. Children without food, on “distended tummies”, are a nation without a future, without a vision, a nation that is surely doomed to fail; hence Nwosu’s revisionary exhumation of the question of original sin through the myth of Kush. But Nwosu’s thesis, it is clear in the poem, goes beyond locating the persistent, disturbing retrogression in Africa in the domain of the original sin. The

other side of his thesis is the awakening of the people to what he calls “the multiplying unctions of ujaame” (33), possibly a reference to the socialism of eastern Africa theorised and practised by the activist-leader Julius Nyerere in Tanzania.

If the reference is to the African socialism based on bucolic cooperatives, or give and take, then Nwosu in this poem speaks of its funeral; that it once was but now does not exist, and the children of those who were bound by ujaame have become cannibals, literally and literarily, only feeding on one another violently. The quintessential voice of the poet-persona emerges with a litany of woes, with disconcerting songs of sorrow. Here him: I have seen citizen-refugees crawl under eko bridge to lie in state until tomorrow’s dawn beheld the tragi-comedy of a prostitute towering above a recalcitrant customer with a fist of stone in the mist of dawn at moshalashi but not the sack clothes of the navel of darkness where the royalty of ageless trunks sometimes tramples leisurely on the sovereignty of a dying tribe and the plaintive dreams of the suns of kush are the very apogees of deferred lives.

(100-114) This is a depiction of life in the slums of Lagos, a place that is also called Eko, and hence “under eko bridge”. The bridges in Lagos are homes to the homeless, and in the night there are bizarre scenes around the bridges. Nwosu harps on this, throughout this lengthy poem, to dramatise the open sore on the conscience of Nigeria, and other similar African countries that have failed to cater for their citizenries. Nwosu’s categorical statement in this poem is that the African nation-states, the entire black race, seems to have failed.

And if things are to get back to normal, if the people are to reclaim their ujaame, then the struggle has to come from each individual. The poem seems to end pessimistically: for the suns of kush their path branches out to all pores of the world and both in the enchanted castles of arabia and in the chicken farms of virginia are their signs to be read farewell ujaame farewell acorns and seed-yams. (247-253) The fate of dispersal compulsion is still with Africans. In the past Africans were forced, through slavery and colonialism, to abandon their land and build other nations: “castles of arabia” and “farms of virginia” are symbolic of the two forms of colonial violence the black people of Africa suffered in the past, the invasion from the East and from the West. But today, as demonstrated in the poem (“where the suns of kush chant down / the obstinate fable of London bridge” (170-171)), it is the children of Kush that offer themselves willingly to the outer world, what the poet calls “all pores of the world” (248), ready to suffer all kinds of anguish, for often the anguish outside their societies is presumably far better than the anguish in their societies. “The Suns of Kush” is a powerful, provocative indictment of the entire race of the black people who, in the estimation of the poet, have been unable to break free of that myth of original sin, a reality that seems to confound the poet.

If “The Suns of Kush” is an expression of tension within the self, as its self-satirising, selfreproaching mythologisation suggests, then the ironically titled “Rendezvous” is an extension of it in the sense that it merely provides an intersubjective dimension to that personal-cum-social tension. “Rendezvous” too moves back into memory, into myth, to engage the contradiction, personal and social, that characterises an affair between, possibly, a male and a female. It is a poem that recollects love, but more than that, like most of Nwosu’s poems, engages quite a number of issues that have to do with the social condition of the society. The poem swings from the spiritual to the physical: the male lover seems to, like Nwosu’s mystical persona, bestrides both

the known and the unknown worlds, and in the known world he seems to know much about life in the slums of Lagos. In other words, this lengthy poem too is set in Lagos, in a slum, or in different slums, with that daringly kaleidoscopic view of the condition of the poor. The figure of the oppressor, usually absent in Nwosu’s poems, is visible here, in fact from the first part of the poem. Although elsewhere in the poem Nwosu figures the military oppressor as “gutter generals” (225), his preferred mode of representation, i.e. the mythic mode is deployed at the beginning of the poem.

In Julius Ceasar, Judas Iscariot, and Pontius Pilate, Nwosu represents the present rulers, concentrating in their high-handedness, rapacity, corruption and materialism. But Nwosu soon moves to a terrain that is familiar to us, as he increasingly shifts beyond histories and myths to the realities in the Lagos that he knows, that we all know; a place where “transient passions truncate rooted dreams / [and] stolen pleasures truncate rooted dreams” (80-81). A much explicit depiction of Lagos slum emerges later on in the poem after a lengthy recall of a tortured imagination of life that defies personal triumphs. The persona hits on the alarming rate of violence against the poor in Lagos, first asking: “can we laugh when the marks / on the maternity door are all blood-smears?”

(211-212).

This is not the blood of joy that comes with the baby but that of sadness that implies death because with such blood the persona is “haunted by the song and dance / smithereened in mid trajectory” (217-218). The persona is more direct when he says: the people remember the howling laments of the past season when the uniformed bull-dozers castrated the grey hairs of maroko the kaiser’s apologia was the martial music of gutter generals: “why should sympathies be spent on ‘roaches and bed-bugs ‘roaches have no title-deeds bed-bugs no alarm clocks …. farewell maroko, your hearts will beat again still froths the epauletted beast of the apocalypse in gutturals: “who is this nonentity the spout of phantasmagoria?” should we bandy the worth of a litany of deaths awaiting a single resurrection, general?

(220-242) Maroko, around which Nwosu constructs the passage above, was a popular slum in Lagos demolished in July 1990 with the order of the military governor Colonel Raji Rasaki. The

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The Suns of Kush” is a powerful, provocative indictment of the entire race of the black people who, in the estimation of the poet, have been unable to break free of that myth of original sin

Nwosu

OCTOBER 6, 2012

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LiteraryReview

It is possible to see Nigeria or its history clearly in the poetry of Chiedu Ezeanah or Idris Amali, for instance, it is not possible to see it so clearly in Nwosu’s poetry

WORKS CITED Egya, Sule E. 2007. “The Nationalist Imagination in Remi Raji’s Lovesong for My Wasteland”.

In: Research in African Literatures 38, 4, 111-126.

Irele, Abiola. 1990. The African Experience in Literature and Ideology. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP. Johnson, Dul. 2001. “Art for National Unity: A Reading of Emman Usman Shehu’s Questions of Big Brothers”. In : Studies in Language and Literature. ed. by Macpherson Nkem Azuike. Jos: Mazlink, 188-197.

inhumanity of this cruel act by the military, widely condemned at the time, is what Nwosu depicts here, as he does in Invisible Chapters (see Ofeimun135141). The emphasis, indeed the thematic thrust of this poem, is that the people are not treated as human beings.

Nwosu deploys the metaphors “roaches” and “bedbugs” to show how the military regime regarded the ordinary people at that time.

They are roaches and bed-bugs because the regime considers Maroko a sore sight in Lagos where only decent houses should be built and only decent people should live in them. As the poems shows, the method of demolition is alarmingly brutal with “uniformed bull-dozers” crushing the shanties and their inhabitants bringing about what the poet calls “a litany of deaths”.

Nwosu weaves this into the disturbing tapestry of violence in the world in such a way that the Maroko tragedy appears small as placed side by side with “the fires of sarajevo” (255), “the zion trains of auschwitz” (263), and “the chars of Biafra” (264) – very engaging allusions to the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis in Auschwitz in the 1940s, and the Nigerian civil war in the late 1960s.

The poems in Suns of Kush, as we have seen, were written in the 1990s, a decade of defeat and frustration, of anguish and angst, at least in Nigeria (with worse conditions occurring in other parts of the world such as Somalia, Monrovia and Sarajevo) where Nwosu lived and wrote. Nwosu was a journalist. It is reflected in his poetry that he read quite a lot and knew much about human predicaments in the world.

The marriage of this knowledge, and of his experiences, to his fascination with, and his recontextualisation of, myths, fables and the Christian religion give a force, an unprecedented one, to his poetry. The effects are both positive and negative: if Nwosu is a learned poet, with the tendency to mythologise, intellectualise and footnote his poems, as he proves to be in Suns of Kush, his poetry, ambitious in speaking about the plight of the ordinary people, is (as it ought not to be) reflexively arcane. Nwosu’s poetry or, rather, imagination is, as it were, footloose, even reckless, and perhaps there is some strength in its transculturality and universality. It arguably buoys its thematics that it can easily allude to other realities at such a diachronic level that startles our sense of history. Nwosu’s poetry reminds us that histories and/or myths exist, and out of them it constructs its discourse of humanism. But there is a sense in which his poetry is

not historical, or enslaved to any historicism (like the poetry of most of his contemporaries), avoiding that linearity that parallels poetry and history.

While it is possible to see Nigeria or its history clearly troped in the poetry of Chiedu Ezeanah or Idris Amali, for instance, it is not possible to see it so clearly in Nwosu’s poetry. In other words, Nwosu’s poetry, as expected (given its romance with myths and histories), shies away from being overtly political, although it is a poetry that still desires to engage social contradictions in the poet’s country and in the entire world. But Nwosu’s notion of poetry, if we can infer from his poetry, seems to exemplify what Macherey means when he says “[l]iterature is the mythology of its own myths: it has no need of a soothsayer to uncover its Odia secrets” (69). This underscores the distinctiveness of Nwosu’s poetry.

EE Sule is with the Department of English, IBB University, Lapai

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The poems in Suns of Kush, as we have seen, were written in the 1990s, a decade of defeat and frustration, of anguish and angst

Macherey, Pierre. 2006. A Theory of Literary Production. Trans.

Geoffrey Wall. New York: Routledge.

Nwosu, Maik. 2007. “Interview with Sule E. Egya”. In: In Their Voices and Visions: Conversations with New Nigerian Writers. ed. by Sule E. Egya. Lagos: Apex Books, 24-47.

Nwosu, Maik. Stanzas from the Underground. Unpublished Manuscript.

Nwosu, Maik. 2001. Invisible Chapters. Lagos: House of Malaika and Hybun. _________. 1998. Suns of Kush. Lagos: Malthouse Press.

Obafemi, Olu. 1996. Contemporary Nigerian Theatre: Cultural Heritage and Social Vision.

Bayreuth: Bayreuth Studies Series.

Quayson, Aton. 1997. Strategic Transformation in Nigerian Writing: Orality & History in the Work of Rev. Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka & Ben Okri.

Oxford: James Currey.

Ukaegbu, Victor. 2006. “Mythological and Patriarchal Constraints: the Tale of Osofisan’s Revolutionary Women”. In: Portraits for an Eagle: Essays in Honour of Femi Osofisan. ed. by Sola Adeyemi. Bayreuth: Bayreuth Studies Series, 179-192.

Viet-Wild, Flora. 2004. Dambudzo Marechera: a Source Book on His Life and Work. Trenton, NJ & Asmara: Africa World Press

LITERARY NEWS

Kaduna varsity hosts Wale 10 writers make NLNG list Okediran he Literature Advisory Board for The Nigeria Prize for Literature, led by

T

he Kaduna State University, in collaboration with the Kaduna Chapter of the Association of Nigerian Authors, will host former National President of the Association of Nigerian Authors, Dr Wale Okediran, at a special Reading Session today at 10 am.

Okediran, who will be speaking on the topic, “Literature and the Developing Nigerian Political Culture,” will also read from his award-winning book, Tenants of the House.

The event takes place at the University’s Science Auditorium, will be chaired by Col (Rtd) JIP Ubah, with the wife of the Kaduna State Governor, Mrs Amina Yakowa, as the Guest Of Honour, to be assisted by the Deputy Speaker of the Kaduna State House of Assembly.

Other activities scheduled for the day include Poetry Readings, Speeches, a dance drama of Tenant of the House, as well as a Book Signing Session. The Vice Chancellor of the Kaduna State University, Professor William Bernabas Okediran Quirix, will be the Chief Host.

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Emeritus Professor Ayo Banjo, has announced an initial shortlist of 10 books in the running for the 2012 literature prize.

A total of 214 entries from Nigerians were received this year, the highest number received since inception of the prize in 2004. The longlist includes the following writers: Ngozi Achebe Onaedo, The Blacksmith’s Daughter Ifeanyi Ajaegbo, Sarah House Jude Dibia, Blackbird Vincent Egbuson, Zhero Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, I did not come to you by Chance Onuora Nzekwu, Troubled Dust Olusola Olugbesan, Only a Canvas Lola Shoneyin, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives E E Sule, Sterile Sky Chika Unigwe, On Black Sister’s Street The Nigeria Prize for Literature rotates yearly among four literary genres: prose fiction, poetry, drama and children’s literature. The 2012 prize is for prose fiction and comes with a cash prize of $100, 000. The final shortlist will be announced soon.

Other members of the Advisory Board include Prof. Ben Elugbe and Dr. Jerry Agada while the other members of the panel of judges headed by Professor Abiola Irele include Prof. Angela Miri, Prof. Sophia Ogwude, Prof J O J Nwachukwu-Agbada and Dr. Oyeniyi Shoneyin Unigwe Okunoye.

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OCTOBER 6, 2012

LiteraryReview LITERARY NEWS

CORA’s book party for writers on the Island

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he Committee for Relevant Art (CORA) holds its fourth yearly BOOK PARTY tomorrow Sunday, October 7 at the Conference/Exhibition Room of the Kongi’s Harvest Gallery, Freedom Park , 1 Hospital Road, opposite General Hospital, Broad Street, Lagos. The event.

The session of readings, reviews, conversations and fraternization shall run from 1pm to 5pm, featuring the shortlisted writers in the yearly Nigeria Prize for Literature who will be reading from their works. The writers would also be engaged in conversation with their colleagues and members of the public.

On the list of authors to be honoured are Onuora Nzekwu, (Troubled Dust); Vincent Egbuson ( Zhero); Lola Soneyin (The Secret Lives Of Baba Segi’s Wives), Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani (I Do Not Come To You By Chance); Jude Dibia (Blackbird), Chika Unigwe (On Black Sister’s Street), Olusola Olugbesan’s (Only A Canvas), Ifeanyi Ajaegbo’s (Sarah House ) E. E. Sule’s (Sterile Sky) and Ngozi Achebe’s (Onaedo, The Blacksmith’s Daughter).

CORA started the readings/jam session/review four years ago as a mark of honour writers who make the Shortlist of the $100,000 Nigeria Prize for Literature, NPL. The objective is to make the shortlisted work and its author known to members of the public by creating conversations around the work and the author.

Literaryfest ends in Lagos with tale of two cities

Profs Amali, Angya and SONTA executives

SONTA in Calabar: Seeks transformation for the stage

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fter a two-day feast at both Federal Palace Hotel and the Freedom Park in Lagos, the cultural exchange programme featuring literature and poetry of two leading African cities - Lagos and Johannesburg – rounds off today.

The South African Writers Siphiwo Mahala and Kgebetli Moele and two Nigerian writers Toni Kan and Jumoke Verissimo featured at the literaryfest of a fusion showcase platform known as ‘A Tale of Two African Cities’- which held in Lagos between Wednesday October 3 and today, October 6.

This initiative organised by Inspiro Productions and the South African High Commission in Nigeria aimed at connecting both countries in the culture, tourism, lifestyle, business and music realms. It also explored music, art, jazz, fashion, literature, food and wine by creating platforms for exchange, which opened up insights into both cultures, their heart beats and dynamism. The first day featured author’s conversation while the second day featured Poetry Reading/Performance sessions.

OAU hosts conference on arts and leadership

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eginning from tomorrow through Wednesday October 10 at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State, an international conference tagged Reenacting Leadership in Nigeria: The Place and Role of the Humanities shall be hosted by the Faculty of Arts. Organizers of the conference had earlier called for papers, following realisation that Leadership, viewed from the local, national, and global perspectives is crucial to the level and rate of development of any community.

While the understanding or misunderstanding of practitioners in leadership has been noted to affect the Nigerian nation in diverse ways, leadership in Nigeria is equally endemic and continues to stagnate the nation in several and diverse ways and at different levels of local, national and international engagement. There is therefore a growing need for scholars in diverse fields of the humanities to assess and re-assess the state and practice of leadership in Nigeria, from the traditional to the modern. The conference will therefore provide a forum for scholars, administrators, politicians, and religious practitioners to engage in critical appraisal of leadership from knowledge-based orientations.

Celebrating Sunday Ododo @ 50

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n recognition of his great contributions to theatre scholarship and training in and outside Nigeria, friends and admirers in a golden birthday feast will celebrate Professor Sunday Ododo, a cultural icon and intellectual giant this month.

Already, an evening of Creative Entertainment holdsat the Gamji Hotels and Suits, Nagazi-Okene, along Lokoja Road, on October19, 2012, between 5pm – 7pm.

Also, there would be public presentation of a festschrift in his honour entitled: A Gazelle of the Savannah: Sunday Ododo and the Framing of Techno-Cultural Performance in Nigeria, edited by Osakue Omoera, Sola Adeyemi and Benedict Binebai.

Three of Ododo’s latest creative works shall also be presented to the public. This event shall hold at the College Auditorium of the Federal College of Education, Okene, along Lokoja Road, Kogi State, on Saturday October 20, 2012 by 10.30am. This will be followed by a reception and cultural entertainment for guests; all under the distinguished anchorage of Alhaji Sanusi Abubakar, Gamji Limited, Abuja.

On Sunday October 21, a thanks giving service shall hold to commemorate his 50th birthday and the kindness of God to him and his family at the ECWA Church, Idare Street, Okene by 10.30am.

Ododo

Dandaura

SOLA BALOGUN

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fter about three decades, the yearly Sammy Ododo, Professor Mabel Evwenrihoma, conference of the Society of Nigeria Professor Emma Emesealu, Mr Mohammed Theatre Artists (SONTA) returned Egye, Prof Tracie Utoh-Ezeajugh, Dr recently to the tourist city of Calabar Abdulrasheed Adeoye, Dr Ameh Dennis Akoh, amid glamour and style. It was a Mr Greg Mbajiorgu and Mallam Denja memorable event for the local organizing committee Abdullahi.

Shortly after presenting the awards, SONTA (Department of Theatre and Media Studies, Universty of Calabar) and visitors who took time to savour the president, Prof Dandaura described the 25th ediacademic, cultural and social aspects of the interna- tion of the conference as a memorable one. He urged participants to warm up for SONTA activtional conference.

The conference, which had the theme, Emerging ities one of which is the proposed hosting of the Trends in Theatre, Media Practice and National International Theatre Institute (ITI) by Nigeria in Security, featured paper presentations, lectures as well 2016.

While giving her acceptance speech on behalf as musical/drama /dance productions. It rounded off on a colourful note with awards of recognition present- of all the awardees, Professor Angya recalled ed to deserving members in eight categories. Among how she started her theatre career in Calabar other issues, participants at the conference resolved under Professor Kalu Ukah, shortly after comthat the 2013 edition be moved to Makurdi, as hosting pleting her studies at the University of Ibadan.

She noted the coincidence of the award given to right was conceded to Benue State University.

Incidentally, the next host of the conference has a her in Calabar as a symbol of her heroic ‘home member of SONTA, Professor Charity Angya, as coming’ to her academic cradle. She later urged Vice-Chancellor. The latter, who bagged the distin- fellow awardees to see the honour given to them guished leadership award last year from the society as a privilege and an impetus to do greater also received the highest SONTA award during the exploits in their chosen profession.

At the forum organized for young academics 2012 conference. She was inducted into the guild of Fellows of the society in Calabar, in recognition of her and newly promoted members, Professor great achievements and contributions to theatre schol- Hagher stressed the need for leadership and proper mentorship in the theatre profession. He arship in the country.

And so, in what looked like the high point of the urged the theatre and drama departments in the country to incubate leadership studies conference, a number of theatre scholars and with the hope of restoring values practitioners received awards from the of integrity and performance.

President of the society, Professor According to Hagher, Emmanuel Dandaura. They is in dire need of include Ambassador Iyorwuese At the forum organ- Nigeria good leaders and the theHagher, Senator Florence Itaized for young acaatre departments can Giwa, Ashiwaju Jerry produce such leaders Alagboso (Honour in Cultural demics and newly probecause of their releArts), Dr Barclays moted members, vance to virtually all Ayakoroma; Executive Professor Hagher areas of human endeavSecretary of the National stressed the need for our.

Institute for Cultural In his own address, Orientation, Mr Chris leadership and proper Professor Chris Nwamuo, Mammah, Prince Emeka Obasi mentorship in the the- Head of Department of (Artistic Excellence), Hon Alex atre profession.

Theatre and Media Studies, Egbonna, Mr Onwuka Meregini University of Calabar commend(Pacesetters), Mr Anold Udoka, Hon ed the theme of the conference, saying Etetim Anwatim (Great Achievers), Chief Edem Duke and Dr Chris Iyimoga (Distinguished that there is need to discuss national security as Leadership). Meanwhile, some of the dignitaries in incessant violence and bloodshed in the country attendance were Professor James Epoke; Vice- have affected theatre patronage as well as estabChancellor, University of Calabar, Chief George Ufot lishment of local theatre groups and sponsorship of the Federal Ministry of Tourism, Culture and of artistic programmes.

National Orientation, Professor Kalu Ukah, Professor Continued on page 37 Ayo Akinwale, Professor Sam Kafewo, Professor

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OCTOBER 6, 2012

37

LiteraryReview Femi Oke, former CNN reporter, in a workshop

Garden City Literary Festival:

Countdown begins Port Harcourt has promised to make The workshops, which run for three the annual celebration of literature and days, are facilitated by seasoned writthe arts, which also serves as a plat- ers. The workshops take participants form for networking between players through the rudiments of writing, in the book chain industry, a big suc- offering them an opportunity to revise cess. their work and finally present their finThis year’s keynote speaker is the ished work to their peers, who critique

BY HENRY AKUBUIRO Ivorian writer, Veronique Tadjo. Other it and offer valuable feedback. On writers are Lizzy Attree, Doreen completion of the workshops, particiBaingana (Ugandan writer), Lola pants are given a certificate of attenonceived by the Rivers Shoneyin, Noo Saro-Wiwa, and dance.

State Governor, Chibuike Chibundu Onuzo.

The Ugandan writer, Doreen Rotimi Amaechi, and In the past, the festival has attracted Baingana, will facilitate the Fiction organised by the Rainbow literary greats such as Chinua Achebe, class, while Dr. Obari Gomba will Book Club, in collabora- Wole Soyinka, JP Clark, Gabriel take the Poetry class; just as Cpt tion with the state government and the Okara and Elechi Amadi, Kenya’s Elechi Amadi and Veronique Tadjo University of Port Harcourt, pre-event Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ghana’s will handle the Master’s classes. for this year’s festival will begin on Kofi Awoonor and Ama The workshops are free but Wednesday, October 10, with the Ata Aidoo. participants are those Writers’ workshop, which is expected Other writers –Sefi who took part in preto produce an anthology from works Atta, Igoni Barrett, registration.

In the past, the festival has produced during sessions.

Akachi Ezeigbo, The Garden City attracted literary greats such This year’s festival components Karen King, Book Fair, another as Chinua Achebe, Wole include a book fair, which begins American Petrina key feature of the Soyinka, JP Clark, Gabriel Monday October 15, a symposium, Crockford, Turkish festival, is open Okara and Elechi Amadi, writers’ workshops, library launch, Ilyas Tunc, South Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o, from 8 am to 6 pm book launch, Master Class, special African Lisa Ghana’s Kofi Awoonor and daily for the duration Ama Ata Aidoo. events and arts/writing workshop for Combrinck, Helon of the event. The book children, interactive sessions, and Habila, Kaine Agary, fair is open to booksellers, drama performances.

Adaobi Nwuabani, Okey publishers, gift shops, educaRecently nominated as the Ndibe and Zainab Jallo –have also tion establishments, banks and others.

UNESCO World Book Capital 2014, participated as guest writers.

Patrons to the exhibition in the past

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have included Longman Nigeria PLC, Heinemann, Book Craft, Bible Wonderland, Literamed Publications, among others.

Children’s events are an integral part of the festival activities. In addition to the usual children workshops, there will be an essay competition for senior primary school pupils on a national level. This will be assessed by ELTAN (English Language Teachers Association of Nigeria). Also, there will be children workshops in writing, drama and arts facilitated by CATE (Children and The Environment) and Polly Alakija, a Children Author based in the UK. Port Harcourt is fast developing as a book hub, and having clinched the much coveted title of UNESCO World Book Capital 2014, the book

industry in the city is expected to thrive even more. Schools, universities and the general public have, therefore, been urged to participate and maximise this opportunity to shop for a variety of books and learning resources all under one roof and at competitive prices. The Hotel Presidential, Port Harcourt, and the University of Port Harcourt will serve as venues for the festival holding from October 15-20.

Festival partners have included the Association of Nigerian Authors, The Reading Association of Nigeria, the British Council, Alliance Francaise, and PEN International. More information is available on www.gardencityfestival.com and www.portharcourtworldbookcapital.org.

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Rev. Jesse Jackson and Koko Kalango at last year’s festival

Emmanuel Dandaura: We’re set to host the world in 2016 Continued from page 36 We have started taking major decisions that would transform the landscape of our culture and art sector. We are looking towards having the Academy of Performing Arts, and we are also looking at the area of design. For the first time too, we are trying to have a policy direction and vision for the society. So we are going to have a plan, a strategic plan that would run for five years.

We have also accepted to mobilise and network with our sister organisations, especially the Arts and Culture Writers Association in order to give Nigeria the pride of place in the

hosting of the World congress on theatre and by hosting the international association of world critics, which has never come to Africa before. At the last congress, which held at Warsaw, Poland Nigeria was granted the hosting right of the World Congress in 2016. This is a major breakthrough for Nigeria, because in most cases, such decisions are taken with consideration for the security condition in the country, the level of stability of the government, the welfare, the facilities that will be available for these international participants who would come from at least 52 countries. And for the world to settle for Nigeria means that they have endorsed the country in spite of her huge security challenges. Major decisions have been taken and we

can only hope that this would impact positively on the sector.

The proposed Academy of Performing Arts for example, has been adopted and we now hope to reach out to NANTAP that is in partnership with us. We shall also reach out to other sister organisations to ensure that we put in place a proper academy that can cater for the development of the various segments of the performing arts. At the moment, we have only the Academy of Letters but within the arts sector, we have so many genres, and it’s difficult for an academy of that nature to satisfy the aspirations of everyone in the sector, particularly the performing arts which is the most vibrant in the arts and culture sector in terms of its contributions to the economy

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OCTOBER 6, 2012

LiteraryReview

Magic of the physical book:

As Matthew Umukoro offers four at a go

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he ceremony came as a novelty but its essence was to give premium to physical books ahead of e-books or other reading outlets. Recently at the Pope John Paul hall of the University of Ibadan, Dr Matthew Umukoro of the Theatre Arts Department presented a total of four books to the public all at once. He achieved this feat in an age where a singular book or a maximum of two books are usually launched, thus making a significant difference in scholarly and creative writing.

In this era of social media when books can be obtained through many outlets, the author’s gesture expectedly lends credence to the superiority of real books over the electronic ones. He presented a bumper harvest of the written word through the four titles-The State of the Nation, The Performing Artist in the Academia, The art of Scholarship and the Scholarship of Art and Obi and Clara (a play).

Perhaps the hallmark of the event was the high quality of the attendance, which recorded two former vice-chancellors of the university, a respected traditional ruler, a former minister of the Federal Republic, many academics and scholars as well as journalists, friends, relations and students of the author. On the long list are Emeritus Professors Ayo Banjo (chairman) and Tekena Tamuno, Oba Segun Akinbola, Chief

BY SOLA BALOGUN

Umukoro

Rasheed Gbadamosi, Professor Idowu Olayinka who represented the Vice-Chancellor, the Dean of Arts; Professor Kola Olu-Owolabi (now late), Professor Dan Izebaye, Professor Canon Lucas, Professor Femi Osofisan, Professor Mabel Evwenrihoma, Dr Julie Umukoro (author’s wife), Dr Sola Olorunyomi who reviewed one of the books on behalf of Prof Dele Layiwola, Dr Tunde Awosanmi, Dr Alphonsus Orisaremi, Dr Taiwo Oladokun; Special Assistant (Media) to Minister of Tourism, Culture and National Orientation, Mr Yinka Babalola, Mr Solomon Iguanre and Dr Chukwuma Okoye, who gave vote of thanks as Head of Theatre Arts Department.

Compered by Elvon Jarret, the event was equally spiced by a thrilling performance of a short excerpt from Obi and Clara, by students of Theatre Arts Department, as directed by Soji

Umukoro, Gbadamosi, Julie Umukoro, Olayinka, Banjo, Tamuno and Izebaye

sectors. The chief launcher was buttressed by Cole. The play was originally the chairman who praised the author for adapted by Umukoro from the quality of his scholarship and the Chinua Achebe’s classic relevance of the subjects he chose novel, No longer at Ease. to write on.

Meanwhile, Chief By its very nature, Asked why he decided to Rasheed Gbadamosi who the physical book is present the four books at a go, was chief launcher like the foundation of Umukoro said his mission was unveiled the books publishing. Anything to further elevate the physical amidst felicitation as the less than that tends book. His words ‘By its very author; chairman of the nature, the physical book is like the to be glamorous occasion and other dignifoundation of publishing. Anything taries joined him. Gbadamosi less than that tends to be glamorous, it’s who is also a playwright the physical book that really matters….the expressed his pleasure at the volume physical book is indestructible just as the glamand quality of work from the author. He comour of social media can’t displace the aesthetics mended scholars like Umukoro for keeping of the book which one can hold and read with pace with developments in the arts and literary great satisfaction’.

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Julie Umukoro, Matthew Umukoro, Gbadamosi, Olayinka and Banjo

Author’s recipe for success

BY THERESA ONWUGHALU

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s a way of helping Nigerians to realise their dreams, young and talented Kelechi Anyalechi, a consultant recently launched a book, entitled, A More Excellent Way To Achieve Your Goals Smarter & Faster. The motivational book was presented at the Evangel Pentecostal Church, Carnal Avenue, Okota, Lagos. In attendance were Pastor Dimgba Igwe, the former Deputy Managing Director of The Sun Publishing Limited; the General Overseer of the church, Pastor Paul Toun, Major- General (rtd) and Miss Alusi Amaka, the book reviewer, who is On Air Personality (OAP), 96.9 cool FM. Anyalechi, who is a speaker, life and executive coach, was trained and certified in the United States. He is a regular TV host on a satellite television station, where he speaks on developing human capacity and productivity. He is also the Managing Consultant at Life IMPRINTS; a firm that assists its clients to create positive change, see new possibilities and help them define the steps to be taken to achieve both their short term and long term goals.

On why he wrote the book, Anyalechi said, the inspiration was stirred up when he attended a coaching certification course in the United States last year. “During the course, my facilitator asked us one major goal we would want to achieve in 2012. I told her I want to write a book. I had always desired to write a book because I know I may not be able to

physically go everywhere, but my book can be everywhere and make impact,” he explained, adding that his major inspiration came from God, who directed him on how to write the book.

He said two major people were his mentor in the course of writing his book. According to him, they were his dad, Pastor Osondu Anyalechi, an author of six books and also his coach in the United States, Sherry Prindle, who both guided him.

The author said there is no special or specific format one must take in writing a book. “Writing requires a lot of discipline and creativity. It takes a lot to write because you must be making a strong demand on your brain. Sometimes, you may want to write, but there is no flow at the time. This is where discipline also comes in. It also requires a lot of boldness because you cannot tell where the book will go. It is one thing to write a book, but a bigger challenge to publish it.”

On why he chose to write on that particular topic, Anyalechi said: “I did a research and found out that many Nigerians set goals, but do not achieve up to 30 per cent of their set goals. I had opportunities to coach both senior and junior managers, business professionals and I found out that the same challenge also existed at that level. This book shows practical principles on ways one can achieve one’s goals. There is a way to achieve goals, but this book shows a more excellent way to achieve them smarter and faster.

“That is why this book is actually for everyone who is passionate and desirous to achieve his or her goals. Major

Continued on page 41

OCTOBER 6, 2012

39

LiteraryReview

FACE TO FACE WITH JANE ODOE, AUTHOR OF EDGE OF THE BRINK SOLA BALOGUN

I’ll use drama to fight social decadence

By WOLE BALOGUN

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t all started like a childhood dream in her early years in the secondary school.

Writing and reading became a twin passion of sorts for Ifechi Jane Odoe who had her eyes on anything that would let her get noticed and appreciated by people. She recalled how she was not quite sure of was she was doing then, even after publishing her first work- a novella entitled The Cat Stone- as a school pupil.

But many years after her university education (Mass Communication) and her brief journalism practice, Odoe came out with Edge of the Brink, a melodramatic piece, which mirrors social realities in Nigeria and seeks to correct certain anomalies in the polity.

The new play is expected to hit bookshelves soon, according to the ebullient writer, who confessed recently that ‘every part of me and none can be found in the play’’. She hinted that the play is about Nigeria and Nigerians, and essentially about what Nigerians go through on a daily basis.

Edge of the Brink chronicles how Chidi, one of those persons from the lowest social ladder survives all the odds a rotten society throws at him to find himself in the corridors of power.

Joined by his friends - Kod, Ayo, Edu, Abudul – Chidi foists himself onto power at all costs, but fails to do the right thing. Instead of turning things around, Chidi and his friends join the group of selfish leaders, who continue to impoverish the people, and inflict more wounds of bad leadership on them.

This crop of leaders ignores the people’s incessant cry for reprieve in the midst of unemployment, crime, broken infrastructure, daily loss of lives and property as well as increasing poverty. However, this vicious cycle of suffering is broken by one-man, ‘Better Land’ though not without fatal consequences. In the seven-act play, the characters talk in the same stilted, arch phrases, just as any natural human drama is sacrificed to underscore the author’s point: Greed and corruption lurk everywhere in the rotten government system. The play thus portrays an earnest but ultimately uninvolving look at the underbelly of a very corrupt nation.

Explaining her mission with the new play, Odoe stressed the need for Nigerians to review our value systems, and get rid of the ‘get rich quick’ syndrome as soon as possible. She called on families to rise to the challenge of giving their wards proper training, without which the society can never change.

Odoe also recalled how, as a teenager, she wanted to get published, mainly to express herself, and as much as she had done in her church as a chorister. Her words ‘I wanted to be prominent and I looked up to the time I would publish a book. While undergoing my service year (NYSC) in Abuja, I contributed my articles to the Aso Corps Magazine but I was constrained by time. I later worked at The Guardian as a reporter and I must say the training I received gave me the impetus to realize my dream of becoming a writer.’

Asked how her dream was realised so soon, since writing in this part of the world is essentially a labour of love, Odoe explained how her husband discovered her creative talents and later played a major role in seeing her works in print. She is married to an astute

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There is need for us to dialogue. We cannot solve our problems with violence. This is why we need attitudinal change.

businessman and art lover who believes in her and always ready to support her literary career.

She envisioned a revolution through her work ‘Most times, we pretend that these problems don’t exist but nature has a way of forcing them on us. There is need for us to dialogue. We cannot solve our problems with violence. This is why we need attitudinal change. I expect people to learn lessons from the play.

It’s like a call to duty-a call to all Nigerians to be

Author lists gains of amnesty programme

ODOE

patriotic and loving. A call to all and sundry to exhibit confidence and achieve our goals in life.

I couldn’t have achieved this easily without my husband. I am married to a man who wants me to do anything positive and who wants me to express myself.’

Odoe attended Urban Girls Secondary School, Nsukka. She obtained her first degree in Journalism from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, after which she bagged a Masters Degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos. She once worked with The Guardian, where she was exposed to practical journalism and garnered a wealth of experience.

Edge of the Brink is a product of Odoe’s journalistic experience combined with her everyday observation of reality. She is married and lives in Lagos with her family.

resident Goodluck Jonathan and past leaders of the militant groups have listed the gains of the presidential amnesty programme on the lives of the people of the Niger Delta. These remarks were made at the launch of a book; Remaking the Niger Delta: Challenges and Opportunities, by Hon. Kingsley Kuku, held recently at the Eko Hotel and suites, Victoria Island, Lagos..

In an address delivered through Vice President Namadi Sambo, President Jonathan said that Kuku has through book, highlighted that the Niger Delta now wears a new look, especially in terms of the safety and security that now prevail in the area.

He added that the achievements are direct results of the pr<None>ovision of the presidential amnesty programme, which ‘has been able to ensure an irreversible development in the region.’

Kuku who is special adviser to the president on Niger Delta and chairman of the Presidential Amnesty Programme took the audience on a historical voyage. He reminded the people about the agitation of people of the oil-producing Niger-Delta region of Nigeria for improved livelihood and sustainable development, which led to violent armed struggle and insurgency due to government’s neglect.

Kuku in his address explained that writing the book is one of the ways he is making his own contribution to ensuring that the dreams for reasonable socio-economic development and improvement on the environmental challenges of the region are realized.

Appreciating the efforts of the Niger Delta freedom fighters and those who assisted in disarming the militants thereby paving the way for a smooth realization of the amnesty programme, Kuku said: “It takes a great passion and courage for peace and development for the duo of former President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and the incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan to continue to support the amnesty programme which has brought peace and development to the Niger Delta. We enjoin the president to continue with the support so as to prevent a reverse to the former militancy activities and incidents of oil bunkering.’

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OCTOBER 6, 2012

LiteraryReview SHORT STORY

Letter from the grave calls again…

RSheita sounds desperate to rouse me from my sleep. I am struggling to wake but I can’t. I open my eyes and they shut of their own accord.

I am powerless to keep them from shutting.

And I find as soon as I stop struggling, my sleep becomes sweet repose. Suddenly I don’t want to wake from it just yet. It is peaceful.

I see mum again, and I see Rita. Rita keeps calling. She won’t stop calling. She is crying too, just like mum.

Can someone bring John and Cecelia to me?

Can someone bring my babies to me? I need to hug them, John, especially. Is he crying too and calling out for me? Does he understand that I am gone? John will miss me.

He is a special child, you know; Johnson - my son and my first child.

I prayed and longed for his birth. He was the blessing from above that would seal Ifeanyi’s love for me and give me some footing in his home and some acceptance from his family.

Before John, I was a nobody in Ifeanyi’s home. I was born the last of nine children, the baby of the family. I was used to love and affection. I was everyone’s baby. I grew up knowing that everyone had my back, I grew up knowing the safety and security of being the baby of the home. You may then understand my shock when I stepped out of my home and into new territory with the man of my dreams only to find that I was really not as special as I had been made to believe. I look back to that day when Ifeanyi took me home to introduce me to my new family. The cold and rude shock of the welcome his brother’s wife gave me set off an alarm in my head.

These people didn’t think I was special. In fact, her first words were, ”Ifeanyi, ebe kwa ka isi dute nka?” (Ifeanyi, “Where on earth did you bring this one from?) That would be the first time I would be addressed as “this one” and from then on, I grappled with the realization that I was not welcome in my new home.

I remember my first Christmas at Ihiala as a new bride. My brother-in-law’s wife would sneer and clap and refer to me as “Ndi ji ukwu azo akwu” (the people who process palm fruits with their bare feet). I knew she meant my impoverished home town of Nsukka. She would sing to me all day long telling me the only reason why their brother married me was because of my beauty and complexion.

Now, I lie here and I wonder if I was in my right mind to ignore the several other alarms over my 12- year union with Ifeanyi.

I had to ignore them, I told myself. I had already taken my vows to be with Ifeanyi until death did us part.

They never really wanted me, I can now see. But I was too blinded by love to realize that. I needed to do something to cement Ifeanyi’s heart with mine. I needed to remain Ifeanyi’s wife and to prove to the world that indeed Love would conquer all.

When after one year of marriage there were still no children, the painful journey that sent me to my grave started. I went from specialist to specialist, ingested every kind of pill that promised to boost my fertility. As my desperation

BY MIKE UDOFIA

grew, so did pressure from Kevin’s family. My horror-movie life story started playing out; the horror-movie life that has sent me to an early and cold grave from where I write this letter to my husband.

My sweet Ifeanyi, We started to fight over little things. The fights were worse after you visited home or attended any of your numerous family meetings. You came home one evening and asked me to move out of the bedroom we both shared and into the guestroom downstairs. The next time you returned from the meeting, you tied me up with a rope and used your belt on me. No one heard my screams.

I remember when you told me that your family had asked you to remarry. You showed me documents of all your numerous landed property including the house we lived in. Your brother was listed as next of kin. When I asked you about it, your answer rocked the ground I was standing on. You said, “What have you to show that entitles you to any stake in this household?” You were referring to my barreness.

It is funny how to my family and friends, I was the beautiful and loving Julie, whilst to you and your family I was a worthless piece of rag. You called me barren. I could have fled but your love and acceptance was of more worth to me than the love and admiration of the world outside our home. I desperately sought to be loved by you, Ifeanyi.

In your family’s presence I felt unworthy, unloved and unwanted. Yet, I stayed on. I would make you love me one way or the other and I knew that one sure way would be to produce a child, an heir for you. That was the most important thing to you.

I began the numerous procedures, painful procedures, including surgery. I gave myself daily shots. At some point the needles could no longer pierce my skin. My skin had toughened to the piercing pain of needles.

After seven years of marriage, our prayers were answered. God blessed us with our son, John. God had intervened and miracles were about to start happening because for the first time in seven years, my mother-in-law called me.

Finally I was home. I had been accepted. I was now a woman, a wife and a mother.

Finally there was peace. John will be four in November.

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The miracles stayed with me because 18 months later through another procedure, Cecelia was born.

Her birth was bitter sweet for me.

Sweet because you Ifeanyi, my husband, and my in-laws would love me more for bearing a second child, but bitter because this particular birth almost cost me my life. The doctors had become very concerned. You see, I had

You said that our daughter, my Cecelia, was a girl and that you had no need for a girl child because she would someday be married off.

developed too many complications from all the different procedures I had undergone in the journey to have children and these were beginning to get in the way of normal everyday living. I developed conditions that had almost become life threatening. So the doctors sent me off with my new bundle of joy and with a stern warning not to try for another child as I may not be so lucky.

I chuckled, almost gleefully. Why would I want to try for a third child? God had given me a boy and a girl, what more could I ask for. I was only ever so thankful to God. Ifeanyi, you and I gave numerous and very generous donations to different churches in thanksgiving to God. All was well. I was happy and fulfilled. Ifeanyi, you loved me again. Your family accepted me. Life was good. And all was quiet again. …………………… For a while.

Then fate struck me a blow. As if to remind me that my stay in your house was temporary and was never really going to be peaceful, John – our son, our first fruit, my pride and joy and the child that gave me a place in my husband’s home, began to show signs of slowed development; the visits to the doctors resumed, this time on account of John.

We started seeing therapists. After we’d been from one doctor to another I decided I had to resort to prayer. I was frightened. I was terrified.

I was threatened. I started to feel unwell. I had difficulty breathing. I needed to see my doctors, John too. He wasn’t doing too well either. He had difficulty with his speech. He was slow to comprehend things. I did not know for sure what was wrong with him but I knew all was not well.

Not with him and not with me. We were denied visas to the USAbecause we had overstayed on our last trip on account of John’s treatments. So whilst we waited for a lawyer to help us clear up the immigration issues with America, I applied for a UK visa and sought help in London. But by then, trouble had reared its head at home, again.

Ifeanyi, you had again become very impatient with me. My fears were fully alive again. The battles it seemed I had won were again in full rage. My husband, in your irritable impatience and anger, you told me to my face that our son, my John, was worthless to you. You said he was abnormal. You said that our daughter, my Cecelia, was a girl and that you had no need for a girl child because she would someday be married off. I remember, in pain, that you didn’t attend Cecelia’s christening because you were upset with me. You told me your mother was more important to you than “THESE THINGS” I brought to your house. You were referring to our children, were you not?

“THESE THINGS”.

My heart bled. I wept bitterly.

Then I quickly calmed my fears by telling myself that you were under a lot of stress at work and that you were also probably reacting to all the money that you had spent on my

treatments. Surely, all that was getting to you?

Even when you threatened me with a knife, twice you did that, I still felt unworthy of you and very deserving of your hatred. Even when you would say: “I will kill you and nothing will happen because you have no one to fight for you”, I kept on struggling to get you to love me because, Ifeanyi, your validation was important to me You had refused to give me money for my medical trip to London. I knew then it was because you had your hands full with caring and catering for everybody who was dear to you.

Your finances were stretched. I thought then that in time you would come around.

My health continued to get worse. Eventually, I made it to London. After extensive consultations and tests, I was given a definitive diagnosis.

My condition was life threatening. It was from this time, when it was clear that I required surgery to save me life that I came face to face with a different kind of war from our home.

Ifeanyi, you stopped speaking with me. I was in pain, in anguish and in tears. I didn’t understand what was happening. I had stayed three weeks in London and Kevin, you never called, sent a text or inquired how I was faring. You stopped taking my calls. Instead I got a call from my cousin in whose care I had left my children.

She was frantic with worry because there was no food in the house for the children to eat; ifeanyi you had refused to provide food for our children.

Kevin, you had also refused to pay for John’s home schooling.

Then Ifeanyi, I received that e-mail from you.

The only communication from you for the entire period I was in London.

Do you remember? It was an angry email.

You berated me for putting your integrity at stake at your work place. Apparently your employers

IN NEXT EDITION...

November 3, 2012

ELECHI AMADI

My dramatic venture into the literary world

OCTOBER 6, 2012

41

LiteraryReview

Camillus Ukah: Celebrating the scientist-turned writer Ukah receiving a plague from Jerry Agada

BY HENRY AKUBUIRO

I

t had all the trappings of big writers’ event, what with the magnitude of scholars, writers and the turnout for the second Writer-in-focus programme of the Association of Nigerian Authors, Imo State branch, which held at the Alvan Ikoku Federal College of Education, Owerri, Friday, September 21, so much so that one of the participants from Delta State University, Professor Sam Ukala, told Literary Review, at the opening ceremony, “This is a like a mini-ANA convention.”

The Vice-president of the Association of Nigerian Authors, Denja Abdulahi, and the General Secretary, Baba Dzukogi, led the entourage of the national body that included member from Niger, Kano, Oyo and Enugu states. There were also scholars from Anambra, Ebonyi and other parts of the country, who converged to honour the latest writer-in-focus, Camillus Ukah, who was being celebrated by the Imo State branch of the Association of Nigerian Authors, following on the heels of Professor Tony Duruaku, who was earlier celebrated in March. The immediate past ANA President, Hon. Jerry Agada, was also present.

The writer-in-focus is a new initiative of Imo writers to celebrate writers bred in the state as a means creating more awareness on their works and giving the due honour to the unsung scribblers. It is a programme that has continued to enjoy all the hype in the Eastern Heartland.

The imperative of this innovation was summed by Gbenga Ajileye, who chairs the state chapter of the association, in his address on the occasion: “We discovered that none of the literary giants quietly bred in Imo state’s ample bosom has been song in the proper tunes. This is a nation where if your song is not loud, you are simply not heard! We have resolved to begin to sing the songs of those who have relentlessly devoted life and enormous energy to providing rhythm and beat to the literary

When the Wind Blow”, which songs of our clime and generation; true was on the NLNG longlist of men and women of literature who 2008. The revered literary have consistently provided the critic noted that the new necessary aesthetics that adorn context in which Ukah is the pillars of literary creativiCamillus Ukah’s engaged in When the ty.” swim in the ocean Wind Blows is not just In choosing Ukah, as the to look at the corrupSeptember writer-in-focus, tide of womanism tion in which Nigeria Ajileye said it was an inspirborders on the same wallows, but to coning one: “We chose an enthupedestal as the demn it in the strongest siastic writer who, has over human rights stipula- terms. the years, developed an Situating the setting of immense passion for creative tions on the discrimithe novel as “thoroughly literature; a man who has extennation against depressing” due to the sively written stories on themes as women. shambolic hospital ward diverse as the human society.” seething with despondent He reiterated the commitment of the patients and sympathizer, as well as writers’ guild in Imo state in publishing anthologies of creative writing, which has seen overstretched work staff, Nnolim notes that the it producing two editions of Ogele journals, “atmosphere of dirt, chaos, confusion, incomeven as he enjoined lovers of literature present petence and squalor pervading at the opening to help re-establish Imo as the literary capital of of the novel was just an appropriate prologue to the corruption and moral lapses embodied in Nigeria.

In his goodwill message, Professor Sam the character of the protagonist, Chilaka Adaku.

His eulogies for the work continued: “…

Ukala lauded the writer-in-focus innovation of the Imo writers, enjoining visitors to take it When the Wind Blows belongs to the genre of back to their various branches and begin to cel- the novel termed felix culpa or the happy fall: ebrate writers in their localities. He also Chilaka falls in order to learn her lessons and stressed the need to focus on the humanities become a better person. Hawthorne’s The and writers in a bid to affect the mind and pre- Scarlet Letter and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment belong to this genre.” vent society from bestiality.

As Africa and Nigeria continue to wallow Speaking extempore, the keynote speaker, Professor Charles Nnolim hinted that Ukah irredeemably in the cesspool and sewage dump “May be the greatest writer from Imo after of corruption, Nnolim added that “what John Munonye and Flora Nwapa, charging redeems When the Wind Blows and gives it writers from the state to wake up in order to hope for redemption is the Jerry Rawlings’ catch up with his state of origin, Anambra, treatment meted out to the culprits in the novel. famed for producing literary greats in Nigeria In this, there is hope for Nigeria.”

An author of eleven works of fiction pubsuch as Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi and lished in eleven years, Ukah’s writings also Chukwuemeka Ike. The first of the three scholars to deconstruct exploit feminist undertones. Exploring this theUkah’s writing, Nnolim spoke on “A New matic preoccupation in her essay entitled Writer in a New Context: Camillus Uka’s “Nigerian Literature and Womanism: Camillus

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Ukah’s Worth More than Dollars Blazing the Trail of Women Emancipation”, Ngozi Chuma-Udeh, HOD, English Department, Anambra State University, was elated that Ukah “is one of the few Nigerian male authors who conscientiously try to break through the agelong-iron like cultural discrimination against women.”

She asserted that “Camillus Ukah’s swim in the ocean tide of womanism borders on the same pedestal as the human rights stipulations on the discrimination against women. He takes as a swipe on the forces against the rights of the Nigerian women as located within Nigeria’s particular historical experience from the precolonial era to contemporary times.” Thus, Ukah’s Worth More than Dollars represents a firebrand womanist activism by drawing attention to the flaws of the indigenous philosophies and traditions on the rights of women.

Professor GNT Emezue also spoke on “Camillus Ukah’s Vision and the Dilemma of the Human Condition”, where she treated the writer’s social concerns in his writings. Ukah studied Chemistry in the university, but has since veered into writing and publishing.

In response to the claims of Ajileye and Nnolim on which state is the literary capital of Nigeria, ANA Secretary, BM Dzukogi, to the laughter of the audience, announced his state capital, Minna, as the real literary capital of Nigeria due to Niger State’s teen authorship scheme, which has been investing in The Child.

Speaking to Literary Review at the end of the event, former ANAPresident, Jerry Agada said: “The Imo chapter of ANA has done Ukah proud, not just him, but the entire national body of the association. It is good to celebrate one in one’s vicinity. As Nnolim said in his speech, he [Ukah] is an unsung writer. This programme will encourage other writers to aspire higher like him.”

...Ways and manners of achieving set goals Continued from page 38 General Paul Toun Rtd. (Former Director Army Finance and Accounts), who wrote the foreword of this book recommended it for all and sundry. In his words: “This book is of much relevance to anyone or organization in today’s world, especially in our country Nigeria. The topics discussed are very vital to success. This book is good for students, workers and organizations, and anybody who wants to further develop himself or herself. I therefore recommend it to all and sundry. It depends on the category one falls into: tired of setting goals and not achieving them, passionate about achieving your goals or desirous of practical knowledge to enable you accomplish all your goals? This book is for you. I had a goal of publishing this book by December 2012, but it was published in August 2012. I achieved my goals faster. I used these

same principles I shared in this book. If it worked for me, it will sure work for anyone who reads and applies the principles accordingly.”

The book is presented in a unique manner. It was written with special consideration for the Nigerian environment. For example, there are many fantastic foreign books that talk on time management but this book was written within the environment of the author, who might have experienced the traffic snarls experience here. It shows one how to achieve one’s goals irrespective of the peculiar challenges faced. The author disclosed that he did not have to gather so much information because most of the things written were based on experience although with some added information from the internet for reference purposes.

On the best time to write, Anyalechi said, “There is no best time to write but it usually depends on when one has inspiration. I write

during the day and also at night. One major thing is to ensure you are not distracted. Your work could be very distracting, because you come back and you are too tired to write. Also, the environment must be calm and quiet. Once I pray and get inspiration, I start writing. Sometimes, I listen to music while writing.

“Sometimes, I may start writing a certain chapter and feel like I have ended it. After a while, I get some added information and I add to that chapter. Some paragraphs may be ambiguous, and you get to reduce it after reading through. There were occasions where a thought popped in while driving. What I did then was to quickly park, jot the thoughts into my i-pad and continue driving. When I got to my destination, I developed on those thoughts. I do a lot of thinking and brainstorming even while having a shower. I always move around with writing materials, so I can write anytime.”

42

OCTOBER 6, 2012

LiteraryReview In those final hours, as I prepared for my surgery, I was alone, my spirit was broken. I had lost all the fight in me. had called a hospital in London to inquire about me and were told that no one by my name was ever their patient. I later found out that you had given the wrong hospital name to your employers. Do you remember, Ifeanyi?

For the first time in my 12 year marriage, the alarm bells in my head began to sound real. For the first time in 12 years, I felt real anger stir up in my heart. Ifeanyi, I was angry because you paid no heed to the hospital where your wife was at in London. You had no clue and cared little about what I was going through. Yet you would berate me for putting your INTEGRITY at work at stake.

Your integrity was your primary concern, not my health.

Then it hit me! All these years I was trying to be all I could be for you, Ifeanyi, to make you happy, to please you, Ifeanyi, ……… you actually hated me. You didn’t want me in your life. The signs were all there.

Your family had showed me from day one that they didn’t want me. I was the object of a hatred that I could not explain. I couldn’t understand why.

Then I saw the hand writing on the wall, all those many things that went on. You even sold my car whilst I was still lying on a hospital bed in London, with no word to me. I was not to learn of what you had done until I returned to Nigeria. The doctors had allowed me to return to prepare for surgery.

Ifeanyi, do you remember that on my return I gave you a pair of shoes I had bought for you?Ifeanyi, my husband, do you remember hurling those shoes at me?

Ifeanyi, do you remember me breaking down in tears?

Ifeanyi, do you remember me asking you that night, many times over, why you hated me so much, what I had done to make you hate me as much as you did?

“You are disturbing me, and if you continue, I`ll move out and inform the company that I no longer live in the house. Then they will come and drive you away”.

Ifeanyi, my husband, that was your response to me. Did

you know then I only had days to live? Is that why you told me that would be the last time I would see you physically? Did you know it would only be a few more hours?

I still had a surgery to go through. Ifeanyi, since you wanted no part in it, I had contacted the medical officer in your company directly for referrals. I left Eket for Lagos on Saturday. That same day I consulted with the specialist surgeon and surgery was scheduled for Monday morning.

In those final hours, as I prepared for my surgery, I was alone, my spirit was broken. I had lost all the fight in me. Ifeanyi, I knew that nothing I did or said would turn you heart toward me, and I had nobody for whom you had any regards who would speak up for me.

In those final hours, Ifeanyi, I called you. This was Sunday morning, less than 24 hours to my death. Do you remember, Ifeanyi? I called you to share what the specialist surgeon had said. I was still shaking from your screams on the phone when I got in here. You did not want me to bother you, you screamed. I should go to my brothers and sisters, you screamed. I should pay you back all the money you gave me for my treatment in London, you screamed. Ifeanyi, did you know that would be my last conversation with you?

My last conversation with you, my husband, my love, my life, ended with you banging the phone on me.

Recalling the abusive words, the spitting, the beating, the bruising, the knifing, and the promise that I would not live long for daring to forget to buy garden eggs for your mother, an insult you vowed I would pay for with my life ……., I knew then it was over for me. There was no rationalizing needed any longer. Even the blind could see ………. You did not want me in your life.

I went in for surgery on Tuesday morning, February 28 , 2012, and after battling for several hours, I yielded my spirit.

Ifeanyi, my husband, I lived my promise to God. The promise I made on the day I wedded you.

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I went in for surgery on Tuesday morning, February 28 , 2012, and after battling for several hours, I yielded my spirit.

For better ………………………… For worse For richer …………………………. For poorer In Sickness ………………………. And in health To love ………………………….. And to cherish Till DEATH US DO PART! And it has.

R

eading people

“The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read” –Abraham Lincoln

CHINYERE VIVIAN OBI-OBASI Chinyere Obi-Obasi

holds a B.A.(Hons.) in English Language/Literature and LL.B (Hons.) from University of Uyo, Uyo and B.L from Nigerian Law School. She has law for seven years and is currently working in the banking sector with Unity Bank Plc. She has published three children’s books, The Brave Driver, The Faithful Dog and The Great Fall, as well as short stories and poems featured in many anthologies. Her book, Chijike won the ANA/LATERNA Prize for Literature 2011, while The Great Fall was on the final short list of Nigerian LNG Literature award for 2011 Who are favourite writers?

Of recent, I have enjoyed Chimamanda Adichie, Lola Shoneyin, Chuma Nwokolo and Abubakar Adam.

Who are your favourite heroes of fiction?

I remember Prophet Jero of Jeros Play written by Prof. Wole Soyinka.

Okonkwo of Things Fall Apart also come to my mind.

What book are you reading now?

I am reading One day I will write about this Place by Binyavanga Wainaina and Fine boys by Eghosa Imaesun.

What attracts you to writing?

Writing is a gift, and when I don’t write, I am not happy. The fact that people enjoy my stories/books is enough motivation for me.

What words or phrases do you cherish most?

I don’t like clichés in books. I enjoy words that are carefully crafted for the readers’ pleasure.

Briefly describe the room where you write Right now, I write in my well-lit sitting room while sitting on a single sofa. I place my portable HP laptop on my lap and type away.

What do your readers tell you when you meet them?

A lot of the parents tell me how much they and their children loved my books. The children themselves directly tell me how much they enjoyed my books and always follow up with, ‘When are you writing another book?’

What distracts you from writing?

My family. I have 5 children, and all the time, most especially during holidays, I have to give them attention. What qualities do you admire most in women?

Their ability to juggle their different jobs (roles) and still come out alive, smiling and ready to embrace more responsibilities. I love their resilience and the fact that they consider other members of the family before themselves.

What are your greatest dislikes?

I hate lies and haughtiness.

What do you consider your greatest achievements?

Being able to prove to all women that one can strike a successful balance between one’s job, family, social activities and talent.

What is your current state of mind?

I am happy because God loves me and glad too that He has blessed me with good health.

Who are your real heroes in life?

My parents and those founders of Nigerians whose only thoughts were on how to turn Nigeria into a great country.

What was your happiest moment in life?

I have had many happy moments; marriage, birth of each child, every time it is my birthday, the day I was nominated for NLNG Award.

Where would you like to live?

I love living in Nigeria even with all the problems. I have travelled to many countries, but, like the cliché goes, ‘There is no place like home.’

What qualities do you admire most in your friends?

Their loyalty, listening ears and openness.

What do you fear most?

I would have said death but the assurance from the Lord that He has gone to prepare a better place for us has taken away that fear from me.

How do you like to die?

Old and right after a get together party with my children, grandchildren and perhaps great-grand children. I want to die with a smile on my face.

How do you read and what time?

I read any minute I can, because time is not exactly my friend. I like to be chauffeur-driven so I can use the opportunity to read.

Between hard copies and e-books, which do you prefer?

I was skeptical about e-books until I got my IPAD and discovered that reading e-books were not so bad after all. I love the two though I still prefer the hard copy as it can passed down and can also be preserved.

Is there any book or books you have read severally?

I am never tired of reading The God Father by Mario Puzo. I am also looking forward to reading the Diaries of the Dead African by Chuma Nwokolo a second time. I hope I can write a very humorous book like that.

What are your favourite childen’s books?

I enjoyed reading Enid Blyton books, all those series of Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, etc. I enjoyed Pacesetters series, too.

What attracts you most to a book?

The hype around the book, the author, the blurb and the layout of the favourite childhood books? I read a book.

OCTOBER 6, 2012

43

LiteraryReview

Many crimes of the warlords

BOOK REVIEW Title: Eaters of Dust Author: Iheanyichukwu Duruoha Publishers: Learn Africa Plc Pages: 215 Reviewer: Ugochi Ezennadi

E

aters of Dust by Iheanyichukwu Duruoha is an engaging book that is reminiscent of the postindependence Nigeria. The author’s style of narration through the protagonist, Nduweze, is quite detailed with exact locations and happenings. His writing skills and structure of language would immerse the reader into the very life of Nduweze and his experiences, telling the war story from the perspective of the Biafrans.

The story is set in the Eastern part of Nigeria during the Biafra war. Thirteen year - old restless and stubborn Nduweze was a MESS boy in the Biafran 10th Battalion Training Depot 3 in Usi, formerly Usi Grammar School. His childhood friend Chima, who was just a few months older, is the errand boy to the formidable and reckless Captain Ebenezer Odogwu, alias “Bazooka” who was the leader of the 10th Battalion.

Nduweze, who spent the war in his hometown acting as the cook for the officers in the army, was constantly at loggerheads with his mother whom he felt treated him like a weakling rather than a man. In the true sense, his mother was just being protective of him and wanted The war finally him to surcomes to an end. The vive the Federal troops occupy war.

Usi and take over the As the camp for themselves. novel opens, The people of Usi Nduweze scramble to find w a t c h e s jobs refugees on the highway who are

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fleeing from the advancing Federal troops.

Orders had come in for an evacuation from the refugee camp, but it turns out to be too late for the unfortunate refugees. During the escape, while one of the refugees tries to escape from his car, Captain Bazooka kills the car owner in cold blood and drives away. Nduweze, who had separated from his friend Chima, has a series of adventures and misadventures in the confusion that follows. He abandons his army uniform so he won’t be spotted out as a rebel, and spends a lot of time running around either naked or trying to keep a small cloth wrapped around his private parts. He later reunites with Chima and both of them continue the run.

The war finally comes to an end. The Federal troops occupy Usi and take over the camp for themselves. The people of Usi scramble to find jobs with them, first selling them water, and then building tents for them around the grammar school. The young boys are made to bury the dead scattered around the grounds. A number of Nduweze’s friends survived the war and the story then tilts towards their relations with each one gossiping about girls and school.

Before long, though, the father of the murdered car owner by Captain Bazooka comes looking for his missing son. One of Nduweze’s friends, Cosmo, is found wearing a shirt taken from the dead man’s body, and is accused of the killing. Tortured and beaten, he is billed to be executed if the real murderer isn’t found. In the end, Nduweze and Chima come forward as eyewitnesses, and justice is served. During the story, the whereabouts of Nduweze’s father is not known. But at the end of the novel, Nduweze reunites with his father in Lagos.

Iheanyichukwu narrates the many things that go on during wars – loss of innocent lives,

Re-tracking a nation’s journey

T

he metaphor of a moving train is a strong one in literary history as it evokes charting through a determined path; questing for a different reality and journeying to discover new frontiers. In the filmic medium, the train and the train station has been a much favoured setting to enact and re-enact solemn or happy arrivals and departures. The picture of a lone passenger with a luggage waiting for a train to arrive or coming too late to catch a departing train and wistfully looking at its rear is one that never fails to connect with the human spirit.

It is, therefore, dramatically refreshing to encounter the new play, Cantankerous Passengers, from Patrick Adaofuoyi Ogbe, which is largely set inside a train coach on a journey to one of the furthermost parts of the nation, Maiduguri, which in our recent history has become a hotbed of strife and insurgency. The title of the play itself gives an inkling of the medley of people, voices and dispositions that make up the dramatic world of the play. The confine of the coaches of the train is a metaphor for the geographical Nigeria while the characters cut across the different shades of ethnic groupings, classes and socio-religious persuasions that can be found in the country. The journey itself can be interpreted as that being made to discover our nationhood. The playwright’s intent appears to be to highlight the expected cacophonous outcome when such divergent persons are confined within the same space, the train coach, albeit the nation-space Nigeria.

Dialogues and repartees in the play between and among the various characters mirror the reality of the nation that has since the start of her journey in 1960, been unable to “speak with one voice” as they say. Some of the characters in the play who carry direct ethnic reference by means of identification such as “The Tiv Man,” “The Fulani Man,” “The Old Yoruba Man,”

and “The Igbo Man” all behave as stereotypical new man…at the helm of affairs in the train driof similarly perceived roles in the referential ver’s compartment,” steering the train away from world of the play. By this it may seem the play- listlessness and derailment. Does that say somewright is merely interested in regurgitating the thing about Nigeria? fault lines in our journey towards nationhood but Since a play as a text is always considered as a close reading of the play reveals a nobler objec- unfinished until performed, it will be necessary to tive. That objective is dramatically sustained by briefly dwell on the production possibilities of the character of the “The Professor” and “The Cantankerous Passengers. The major setting, Corps Member” who beyond acting out their inside a moving train, may appear unachievable, peculiar idiosyncrasies, throw up critical ques- but from the playwright’s directorial notes intertions and mediate in the resultant conflicts of the spersed within relevant sections of the play’s six divergent occupants of the train coaches. scenes, the reader’s and a potential director’s Through these two characters, who are consis- appetite is wetted for a possible production. With tent in intervening in the actions around them, the the accomplishment in the area of technical thereader gets to understand that rationality and pos- atre today, it will be very possible and quite interitive actions devoid of primordial sentiments are esting to recreate the mood and setting of a life requisite tools for successfully charting the jourchanging train journey on live stage. ney towards true nationhood.

The language of the play is The metaphor of the train assured, simple, apt for the journey(railway transportation) itself characters and not descendemployed in the play and its actual ing into verbosity as comThe play Cantankerous national history of a glorious Passengers is unabashedly mon with some plays of beginning and gradual descent into similar nationalistic conabout Nigeria, its history of decrepitude parallels the Nigerian cern. The theatrical picture strife, underdevelopment story of hope at independence and presented by the text of the and perpetual inability to the eventual unraveling of such harness her diversities for play is one that will be hope in the difficult march towards amenable to radical re-intersignificant national nationhood. Railway transportation, pretation in the hands of an progress. though a colonial creation used in funnelimaginative director, considering ing resources from the hinterland to the coast the scope, twists and turns of the to service colonial industry, also played intricate Nigerian story being told. roles in uniting the various constituent ethnic The play Cantankerous Passengers is groups in Nigeria via trading. The cantankerous unabashedly about Nigeria, its history of strife, passengers in the train at a point in the play actu- underdevelopment and perpetual inability to harally abandon their divisive discourse when it ness her diversities for significant national became known that the train is heading towards progress. The play seeks to highlight in a dramatdisaster with the loss of the driver who mistaken- ic mode the oft-repeated call for Nigeria to work ly took an overdose of sleeping pills. This aware- towards unified goals and objectives in spite of ness of the imminent collective destruction as a her diversity. It is a play with a potential for usage result of lack of leadership or any kind of steer- in nationwide re-orientation campaigns and may ing in a way unites the groups towards a search serve that purpose well for the playwright, who, for solution. The solution came in the form of “ a added to the fact that he has a first and second

immense suffering of people, loss of childhood, and unjust actions on the part of the soldiers who have no checks on their actions because nobody curbs their excesses. With Eaters of Dust, Iheanyichukwu shows us the extent of selfishness of leaders in a war as innocent people usually pay for what they know nothing about. This can be seen in the lives of Chima and Nduweze, who are robbed of the joy of childhood after being forced into a war they know nothing about.

Iheanyichukwu’s systematic way of storytelling conveyed the true message of the book.

Iheanyichukwu Duruoha, who dedicates the novel to his mother, Lucy Akuagwu Duruoha, is a Lecturer at the Rivers State University of Science and Technology. Easters of Dust is a title under the Echo series published by Learn Africa Plc (formerly Longman).

The Echo series are published to improve the Nigerian reading culture and create an avenue for the promotion of the Nigerian core values of hard work, selflessness, devotion, dedication, etc. The series are stories of African origin that are of international standards and promote creativity and local authorship.

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Iheanyichukwu narrates the many things that go on during wars – loss of innocent lives, immense suffering of people, loss of childhood, and unjust actions on the part of the soldiers who have no checks on their actions because nobody curbs their excesses.

Title: Cantankerous Passengers Author: Ogbe Patrick Adaofuoyi Pages: 118 Reviewer: Denja Abdullahi Date of Publication: 2012

“

degree in Theatre Arts, also works at the National Orientation Agency in Abuja. Cantankerous Passengers is thus a worthy addition to the pantheon of plays written by patriotic Nigerian playwrights that are devoted to exploring the multicultural implications in negotiating for national development.

Denja Abdullahi is Deputy Director, Performing Arts, National Council for Arts and Culture Abuja, Nigeria.

44

OCTOBER 6, 2012

LiteraryReview POETRY

ISMAILA BALA Sunday Morning Then the doorframe shook violently, like a knock, on Sunday morning.

“Who’s that?” I blurted out.

“The new maid”.

ANTHONY AGBO NATH Beautiful Africa Africa Beautiful Africa Black beauty Beauty devoured by men Men of the past and present White and black The slave master And the ruler.

I needed a hand, it’s obvious, but I never anticipated her to come so soon, without notice.

I never anticipated her to be so dashing.

Love lyrics I

I hear your story And tears rain storm Stories of shuken slave ships And of untold hardship Of neo-colonialism And of imposed rulers.

Your future blotted Even by your own

I was like the fragments of ancient terra cottas hidden in a cave at Nok, and you were the archaeologist I had been longing for all these years, the one scholar who unravelled the hieroglyphics and interpreted the word and decrypted its secrets.

They still tell you they care And treat you like a new bride, But they only crave your fruitfulness And so they queue And take turns to rape you

‘THE SLANDERER’ The slanderer, His word is like scorpion sting Painful to the bone marrow.

In nothing she sees good, Her name she attempts to build Upon the ruin of others.

With his injurious words, She inflicts pain Upon the worthiest of character.

Her tongueAs dangerous as a dagger In the hands of a murderer And chaotic, Like the sound of an assassin riffle.

II

Anthony Agbo Nath, the author is a graduate of civil engineering from the University of Agriculture, Makurdi, Benue State, Nigeria. He hails form Odega- onyagede in Ohimini Local government Area of Benue State. He was born in Makurdi on the 12th od December, 1985 and raised in Lagos. His writing span the three genre of literature which is prose, poetry and drama. He currently resides in the suburb in Rivers State Nigeria.

She spreads her gossip through town Relentlessly, Canvassing support.

Until her victim is down below Like a man led to the gallows, She knows no rest.

LiteraryReview E D I TO R I A L T E A M

Arts Editor: Sola Balogun Assistant Arts Editor: Henry Akubuiro Senior Correspondent: Theresa Onwughalu Contributors: Folu Agoi, Austine Amanze Akpuda, Obu Udeozo Layout & Design: Titilayo Balogun THE SUN Literary Review is a monthly publication of THE SUN Publishing Ltd. 2 Coscharis Street, Kirikiri Industrial Layout, Apapa. PMB 21776, Ikeja, Lagos. 01-8980932, 6211239 Email: literaryreview01@gmail.com Website: www.sunnewsonline.com

Stroking your body I was like a priest toiling over a psalm on passion, the double entendre hidden in the parchments.

I remember our euphoria as my eyes darted forward across the scroll, word for word, line by line, letter by letter.

Ismail Bala writes in English and

Hausa and teaches English at Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he specialises in modern and contemporary poetry, and literary theory. His poetry and translations have appeared in the UK, the USA, Canada, India and South Africa, in journals such as Poetry Review, Ambit, New Coin, Okike, A Review of International English Literature and Aura Literary Arts Review.

Born and educated to university level in Kano, he did his post-graduate studies at Oxford. He is a Fellow of the International Writing Programme of the University of Iowa; currently working on his first collection of poems.

I was an affectionate reader fondly following the sensuous paragraphs of an enigmatic book. our tryst became a sacred place

certed— that have carried me to ecstasy.

as my palms sweat and my faith trembled when I recited the prayers from the book that reeked of ecstasy.

I watch you lying next to me in a dapple of light, or sauntering into the bath in the late evening, your looks as soft as the soul and your braids that are pitch black.

I wish I could draw you.

I Wish I Could Draw You I wish I could draw you— your gangly body, supple, bouncy, precise.

I need a pencil for your soft curves and fierce browns and blues.

I need to broaden a new canvas to capture you broadened across the sofa.

I wish I could draw you from hips up—your elegant eyes and flush chest, your dreamy face (it would take Picasso to paint it) that has gotten you so much praise showing off your proud smile.

I wish I could draw you from hips down—your naughty bum, your honey-pot like the sturdy eye of a Sapphic empress, your lanky hot-blooded hands—impulsive, con-

Going up to Lagos The ward head’s wife had a small behind, it looked like a small box, it looked like a small box.

The ward head’s wife was big-chested, too, the back of her tattered corset looked like a gapping-mouth, looked like a gapping-mouth.

How I longed to laze like a portulaca beside her as she slept.

How I longed to fly into her ebbing breathing.

How I longed to be reformed as her god son, lethe-looking, go up to Lagos and set up with some willing widow.