Month: July 2013

According to RomeReports, Pope Francis kept his promise to speak to the Vatican Press Corps on his journey back to Rome. And for over an hour Francis held a no holds bare press conference “where nothing was off limits. For the first time he talked about controversial issues like the role of women in the Church, the Vatican Bank and he even talked about the so called ‘gay lobby.'”

On the Gay Lobby, Francis said:

“Quite a lot has been published about the gay lobby. I have yet to find someone who introduces himself at the Vatican, with a ‘gay ID card.’ In these situations, it’s important to distinguish between a gay person and a gay lobby, because having a lobby is never good. If a gay person, is a person of good will who seeks God, who am I to judge? The catechism of the Church…

Sermon:  Encounters with Jesus on the Way to the Cross:  Martha and Mary of Bethany

Text:  John 12:1-10; Luke 10: 38-42; John 11

 

A different cross appears on the cover of the worship bulletin each Sunday during the season of Lent.  The cross this week is a Trinitarian cross.  You can clearly see the three-in-one theme in the depiction of the cross of Christ.  If you draw a cross in each quadrant of the Trinitarian cross, you create a Jerusalem Cross.  Those of you who have been to the Holy Land are familiar with this depiction of the cross, but perhaps you do not remember the meaning behind this five-cross configuration.  The large cross in the center stands for the city of Jerusalem.  Each of the smaller crosses represents a city, village, or town.  One cross represents Bethlehem, the place where Jesus was born.  A second represents…

I sat crouched at a corner of the room… With my arms circled around my folded knees.

Another stream of tears rolled effortlessly down my cheeks as I relived the experience.

I could still feel his fingers like the gentle slithery movements of a snake as he caressed my body.

I closed my eyes….If only I could shut out the images…

But No…. They were there… Refusing to leave…They came with such vivid clarity!

Images of flailing arms … Fighting to keep away the evil that loomed above me.

I remembered trying to scream… But I couldn’t hear the sound of my own voice.

Randomly the images came, in no defined order. I recalled a struggle to retain my underwear as groping hands determined to take them off…

The sound of a dress being torn…

Then I remembered the slap! Like a thunderbolt, the impact had gone through my whole…

He said her ‘cocoyams’ were ripe. That was all the reason he needed to approach Halima’s father to ask for her hand in marriage. The smile on Adamu’s face was disgusting and not because it was hard deciphering how much of his teeth his lips covered for they were of like shade and colour. Worse still was watching Hassan, Halima’s father, nodding, giggling demonically and embracing his new ‘son-in-law’ after hearing his proposal.

The entire marriage process was quicker than it took for him to spot her and ‘like’ her in the first place. Pervert! With two wives and six children, half of which were older than Halima, waiting for him at home, I wondered what he needed her for.

Girl as she was, Halima looked on like some young untried knight as her mother broke the news of her marriage to her. And then all she could do was…

The Consequences Of Loving Joan

When she followed you on Twitter, you were ecstatic. It wasn’t everyday that a Coke writing shortlistee-to-be followed an anonymous account from the back waters of the Niger Delta. Modesty was key, one didn’t want to seem crude or ill-mannered. At your desk, you shrieked and danced; online you tweeted : Thanks for following back.

At first you worried that it wouldn’t last. What on earth had made such a popular, pretty lady follow a nonentity like you? It did last though, longer than you thought it would. You were hard to love and sometimes your strong minded views on christian affairs made your tweets sting the eyes of some would be followers. From time to time you checked to see if she was still there; still following you. It was never a small consolation to discover that indeed she was.

You had met her…

[To be read in your best ‘T.D. Jakes voice.]

Now these begin the chronicles of the My Boy Saga. A story of great moral value to those who desire fame or are at risk of falling prey to it.

1. It came to pass that a certain Ngozi wrote a book called Amerikana which was widely talked about around the whole world. Many regarded it with awe and some with exasperation. As a service to the Bostonrearview, a great teacher of African literature, AB did interview Ngozi about the book. Their interview went most amicably until it happened upon the subject of new African writing and the Caine Prize.

To which, in part, Ngozi replied

“Eli was one of my boys in my workshop.”

“What’s this over-privileging of the Caine Prize anyway… it is not the arbiter of the best fiction in Africa. It’s never been. I know that Chinelo…

You know the type, they send guys manhood shrinking emails and receive manhood shrinking replies from men whose p*nises shrink and they started to shout ‘ She stole my p*nis’ in the market square! El Nathan used the phrase manhood shrinking more than six times in this brilliant piece about loving Ngozi.

Its brilliant satire; sarcastic, tongue in cheek, ironic, cocky. I’m also pretty sure its sexist but then I guess so was Ngozi for calling him ‘boy’ in the first place.  Now that sounds like its manhood shrinking.  And sexist. Yet the entire piece was infused with the eroticism of that second paragraph about cocoyam.  It was smoking with sexual innuendo. That’s sexist.

El Nathan has always professed his love and respect for women, he defends them on twitter and Facebook more than the women them self even. His tweets for criminalizing marital rape started a robust…

By Professor Pius Adesanmi

Winner, the Penguin Prize for African Writing

Author of  You’re Not a Country, Africa!

 Keynote lecture delivered at the National Convention of the Association of Nigerian Authors

Uyo, Akwa Ibom State

November 9, 2012

Protocols!

When I first received the theme of this conference in a somber email from the soon-to-be-Dean, Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan, I wondered what writerly demons took possession of my great friend, Professor Remi Raji, Richard Ali, Denja Abdulahi, D.M. Dzukogi, and other members of the National Executive of the Association of Nigerian Authors, and made them settle on a theme advertising such apparently incompatible terms as literature and security in the same sentence. Being a very active member of literary Cyberia (my neologistic contraction of Cyber and Nigeria), I could understand and relate to the social media part of the theme but security? National security? Was it the demons…

By Professor Pius Adesanmi

Winner, the Penguin Prize for African Writing

Author of  You’re Not a Country, Africa!

(Remarks at the Anglophone-Francophone Cultural Conversations Panel Convened by the African Studies Program and the Department of Comparative Literature, Penn State University, February 27, 2013)

First things first. I want to thank the usual suspects for inviting me back home to give a talk. For those of you who are new members of the Penn State community in this audience, I use the word home because this is where it all began – I mean my career – amidst wonderful colleagues and under the exceptional mentorship of Professor Carey Eckhardt, my Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature, and Professor Thomas Hale who, at the time, was Chair of the French Department. Since I left to join other wonderful colleagues in another wonderful Department at Carleton University in Canada, every return to…