Reflections

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…

I am no princess waiting for rescue.
Any tower I am inside I own the keys to
and the dragon coiled at the base
is of my own making.  You might bleed
the price the thorns I planted as seeds require,
surrounding stone walls and hope to find me
sleeping, waiting for a kiss to animate me,
and end up disappointed
when you break down the door

and find me awake and scowling,
flatfooted and ankle deep in weeding,
asking you why, knighthood aside
you lacked the grace to knock,
and what you have done to my roses.

I live in New York, and I see them everywhere – on subways, in coffee shops, on park benches, lying on their sides on picnic quilts, in restaurants while others are eating around them, in buses, in supermarkets, in department stores, on the streets. Women, pulling out their breasts from under their shirts, clipping open their bras, sometimes exposing a nipple, to feed a hungry child in the middle of a public place. I see them, and I think to myself:

How in the world could anyone, ever, have an issue with this?

I am a native of Finland, and I realize that our relationship with nudity in general is very different than in many other countries, largely due to our sauna culture which is as essential to being a Finn as 4th of July barbecues are for Americans. We grow up understanding that a naked body, or bare breasts…

By Nwachukwu Egbunike

 

The waves from the Niger sing

Flowing from deeps

To chants of dirges

For the fading of a prince

 

Hopping from Oke Ado

To the plains of Potiskun

Nkisi roars with pain

Ado N’Idu is inconsolable

 

The crimson cap

Carried on a royal cape

With beads of bronze

And twigs of valor

 

Peering into the future

Carrying the past

Curetting the present

Is the diviner’s feat

 

Though the garden

Bloomed once with promise

Blighted now with pestilence

The plough never paused

 

For in those veins

Pumped via valves

Flowed the sovereign blue

Polished with silvery hues

 

While others spoke

Words were made wise

Fitting of a sage

Flanging off aberrant fallacy

 

 

The flame tree

That illuminated

Without consuming

But cauterizing flippant fools

 

The imperious imposters

Impersonating jesters

Drumming thé dansant

Dregs of a desolate desert

 

Their…