So Many Questions Yet A Few Answers: Ohikhuare Isuku

Barrack Obama’s Dreams for my Father mirrors not only the issues of race and inheritance, but a deeper search for the essence of one’s life: one’s aspirations – no matter how large and unattainable they may seem – and the honest strides one lifts just to see these aspirations materialize. In reading this book, so many questions which had put my heart adrift were answered. But yet again, so many questions were opened up – so many whys, whats, whens, wheres and hows.

Dreams for my Father is my book; it is my own personal fears, my own aspirations which now appear unattainable in a vast lawless land where to dream well is to be labelled as abnormal. Mr Obama’s story somehow answers the puzzle eating up my heart – a disturbing puzzle regarding why I always feel I have failed a generation even before I was born.

There is this similarity between Mr Obama’s experiences and mine. For instance, when he described Djakarta, I thought it was Lagos or the unkempt streets of Ibadan where beggars stick out their hands to importune for alms. Djakarta held all the disorderliness like Lagos: the chaos, the traffic gams, a congested municipality where peasants from rural settlements travelled to, burdened by dreams which very often die off. These dreamers caught in the web between dreams and confusion, between aspiration and perspiration, are lost in tougher lives where they seldom find rescue. They pick up menial jobs as gatemen, gardeners, cooks, salesman, while they hope for better lives which are never within reach. Barrack Obama’s Dreams for me Father documented these clearly of Djakarta and I thought I saw Lagos on the pages full of aimless people walking to nowhere, sleeping under bridges, pickpocketing, hawking different wares in still traffics. And when he mentioned power failure and the lacklustre of public facilities like the hospitals, I drew a strong connection between Djakarta of the 70s and my climes in recent times.

But I can pardon Indonesia for the poverty, for the abandonment of public facilities, for the power failure. They had fought against the Dutch for their own freedom about three decades before then which had left them politically and economically unstable. As for Nigeria, we had no war with the British. Their exit was a peaceful one, and power transition was smooth enough to have ushered us into a better future. But the greed chained us, tribalism polarized us and the corruption hid under this polarization, and then there was a free fall to unemployment, to crimes, to deception and cyber criminality among our youths which have put a dent on our national pride as viewed by the international community.

It is not only the description of Djakarta or of Nairobi or of Altgeld, which had a striking familiarity with my own corner of the world; actions and dialogues well detailed in Mr Obama’s book also bred inside my heart so many questions and thoughts. For instance, when the author’s mother worried about the lack of values in a falling society like Djakarta and how it might affect the young Obama. Then the next few lines that followed relaxed my pounding heart. In a frustrated society, there are no values, no honesty. Between values and survival, a people would most likely choose survival and throw values away to be swallowed in the dark. 

Then there was the time Lolo – Obama’s stepfather in Indonesia – had told Obama not give out money to every beggar on the street. They were too many to be helped and if he should continue in his generosity, a time would come when he too would have to join the beggars on the streets. Again, this brought me back to the dirty streets of Ibadan, lined with thousands of beggars, palms outstretched. But it wasn’t just the similarity between the streets of Djakarta and Ibadan that had struck me, the dialogue between step father and son had reminded me of a similar talk I had with my mother in our little beautiful village a few years back.

I was home for the sessional break from the University. The primary and secondary schools were still on session then, but I noticed a neighbour’s grandchild didn’t go to school. A gentle girl in her first year in Secondary School, she was. I had once heard of her refined dream of becoming a medical doctor. Why wasn’t she attending school? I wondered. One morning, I called her, this girl of about thirteen.

“Why are you not in school?” I asked her.

“I was sent away because I couldn’t pay my school fees.” She replied, her head bowed and her right toes making a rainbow curve to and fro on the dry sand.

She told me the amount eventually, an amount I could afford, and I gave it to her. But a big hole opened up in my heart. I knew I couldn’t help her always, and that one day, she would come to be a school dropout and her sweet dream of becoming a medical practitioner would have burnt out, leaving a scar in her that would torment her entire life. That evening, while my mother and I sat in our verandah and our faces lifted above our fence, I told my mother about the girl and the pain which encrusted in the deep wall of my heart. I wasn’t able to help her enough.

“I’ll set up a scholarship for many poor children someday when I have money.” I said.

And then my mother, expressionless in her gaze, said, “There are a lot of poor people everywhere. You can’t help all of them in a lifetime. If you dare it, you become poor yourself. Think of a boatman who happens to paddle his boat to a wide space where thousands of people are drowning, waving their hands for help. If he tries to help all of them all at once, they’ll pull him into the river and his boat will capsize. So also is poverty in the world we now live in. You have to help a few, and if they have good hearts like yours, they’ll help other. That is how help spreads.”

Those words of my mother were true, but I was heartbroken that I could not help every person on the street singlehandedly. Thus, I began to see being in government as a solution. Putting few laws in place and enforcing them can heal so many wounds poverty has created, I said. I dreamt of politics and being in the helm of affairs. But politics, as I soon noticed, has the capability of forging great men who really want to help into failures who later become embezzlers. The system moulds them in some ways, I thought. I ponder over Oshiomhole, how he came into power with an obvious clean conscious, but had to rig the local government elections under his watch because he wanted to cede power from the opposition party who could impeach him at no cost. His action was undemocratic but he was only guiding his government against the bullying of the pre-existing system. I didn’t want to be him. I didn’t want to change like him, from being a good man to being a failure because politics was dirty. Thus I began to resent politics. It even became worse when I heard young people talk about entering politics, not for causing a change, but for embezzling to become wealthier or for just making their biography attractive. And they weren’t even ashamed to say it in public that it was normal to steal public funds when you had the opportunity to.  One day I and a young man of about my age were talking, and then we swerved into politics.

“The country is dead already.” He said. “The thing is this, once you have the opportunity to get into government, embezzle as much as you can for you and your generations.” He said laughing wildly, as though it were a normal thing to say out, or as though I had no choice but to support his view,

“Embezzling the money of future generation, right?” I said, suffocated with anger. I felt my heart being pulled out of my chest. “Our fathers embezzled our money that is why there is no headway in this country right now. Do you want to make such a mistake too?”

“See, if the next generation comes, they should embezzle the funds of their next generation.” He said and laughed wildly, for he was a fun-loving fellow.

I was starting to say something, to convince him how wrong his ideology was, but I gave up. He would never understand, I sensed. Rather he would take me as a hypocrite.

With these little revelations unearthing themselves about Nigerian politics, I decided to stay away from it. I didn’t want to be dented. I didn’t want to be like Oshiomhole. I would just be a writer, I said, and criticize. I thought of what my mother had said, about a wide river and people drowning, but instead of picturing poor faces in that water, I imagined powerful men swimming in the river which had become dirty. I was the only one in a boat. When I made an attempt to help them out, I was dragged into the river. The river was no longer poverty; it was corruption, and the men in it were those who had taken pride in being corrupt, those who had foiled any attempt to be salvaged – who would pull you into the filthiness of corruption when you try to lift them up to salvation.

But I was sad. Even with so many criticisms, changes will be non-existent, suffering will persist and life will become nastier. I knew that a direct participation in government would create drastic changes, but I was scared that entering politics would change the peaceful nature buried deep inside me.

Reading Barrack Obama’s Dreams for my Father, indicted me as a coward, for shying away from a future, from a responsibility because of fear of falling. The book charged me to stand up to challenges to salvage the remains of an already dead country. The book told me to embrace destiny even though this appears dark and uncertain. But still my hands are tied. Many questions have been answered, yet so many have been opened up; so many whys, whens, whats and hows.

Read More »

The Prince and the World's Hypocritical Reviews

When I read Machiavelli’s The Prince, I discovered how hypocritical the world was. Long before I the epic work came to my reading table, there had been controversial comments about the book and how to a large extent its teachings deviated from normal ethical standard. But, later, after the interesting read, I realized that the world may have frowned at The Prince because of its blunt sincerity in documenting how human beings behave and how best is it to win them to your side as a leader either by conventional ways or dubious means.

Niccolo Machiavelli was a Florentine genius, a political theorist and philosopher of the sixteenth century, whose best known work – The Prince – shocked papal Europe upon publication. This was because The Prince veered off from abstract ideas of consolidating power, and thus said things the way it was. Machiavelli’s ideas and writing have been labelled as devious because of the blunt truth embedded in them. Yet, their practical applications have yielded success upon careful practice.

The Prince discusses various ways power is gotten in a Principality either by hereditary, or by force, or by criminal act, etc, and the various reactions the subjects show to these different forms. For instance, a Principality acquired by hereditary is not so difficult to govern. The subjects easily give their loyalty to the new prince.

The Prince goes further to bare to us that human beings are fickle and liars; they easily forget a good done unto them, but remember for a long time a wrong done unto them. So it might be advisable for those rulers who might not be able to please their subjects till the end of their tenures, to deal with their subjects from the beginning of their tenures and then begin to do good unto them towards the end. Because human beings have short memory, they will forget all the evil done unto them and speak well of the ruler.

The Prince says that human beings can be perfectly loyal to their leaders if only the later can abstain from their properties. Properties don’t only relate to furniture, cars, house, etc. Properties in broad prospective could also include wives or husbands; in managerial setting, salary could also be included. Thus, as a manager or ruler, to be successful in your career, it is better to recognize your subordinate’s properties and abstain from them no matter how tempting they may appear.

The Prince has taught me beyond the letters in which it was writ. Although, I had heard about it before my University days (then, often painted with darkness), it was in my First Year I got to hear about Niccolo Machiavelli formally and I read The Prince few years after. In the Philosophy text I read, Machiavelli represented the philosopher of the modern age, because his work – The Prince – disregarded the world’s hypocritical and abstract ideas and thus spoke the truth the way it appears.  But this stand caused him so many foes especially among the Catholics of the medieval period, and as a result of this, he was labelled as an enemy of moral doctrine and as an ill influence to politicians of his time.

Ever since the first version of The Prince was published in 1513, its doctrines have been shocking just as Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. While to some, it has been a compilation of crazy ideas which have brought deceit and lies to modern political corridors, rather than a consolidation of  the abstract truth our hypocritical world has glued together so it could appear vindicated in the sight of the God it claim to worship. But the truth stands that Machiavelli’s work - The Prince – has since had resounding effects on effective management and even wider prospect in preventing anarchy in a Free State. His take on whether it was better to be more feared than loved has in no small measure affected my thoughts politically and otherwise.

Read More »

A Review of Pius Oleghe's Sudden Storm

I read Pius Oleghe’s Sudden Storm (click here to read the poem) in my first year in Junior Secondary School. It was in my New Oxford Secondary English Course Book One. It became the first African poem I was exposed to. Our English Teacher – a glamorous lady then – had (because she was strict) directed us to learn the poem by heart if we got home. It was an assignment, so I treated it as such. Thus, at night, in the four-ceiling room of the boys quarter I shared with my elder brother (in JSS3) and my elder sister (in SS3), I memorized the poem entirely from ‘The wind howls, the trees sway’ to the last line: ‘Steadily pours the rain.’  My mother was not there to remind me to read, as she had done many years before when she was teaching me two letter words. She lived far away from where I and my siblings schooled; in our countryside several miles away. So I read that poem, because I feared if I did not memorize it, there would be punishment and embarrassment in class the next day.

And as I predicted, there was embarrassment for defaulters. Our Teacher had come into the class the next day and asked everybody to stand up. One could only sit down on the long bench – shared with a partner of opposite sex – if only the poem was recited correctly. Only three of us sat down – two girls and I – not because the teacher loved us more, but because we surpassed her expectations. I had never been so proud of myself. Well, that was many years ago; over a decade now. Yet, this poem – Sudden Storm – continues to live in my heart, watered by time.

I remember in my second year, while in a friend’s apartment, I forged a tune for the poem and sang it. Perhaps, this has given it strength to live beyond its lifetime in my memory, or maybe it was the simplicity of words which the poet merged to create an everlasting image in my memory. I can see the wind howling in a clean village setting; I can see the trees swaying as the wind rages, bending the Coconut trees, palm trees, pear, orange etc.

Mr Oleghe in this poem also talks about lowlife and poverty and what people who experience such face when the rain is approaching. The poem talks about houses with loosed top sheets, and how they clatter and clang, to herald the rain’s coming.  The open windows close with a bang, because of the mad wind. The sky changes into dark, as if it was night: the thick dark clouds stuff the sky like cotton wool, and shield the sun completely.

Mr Oleghe, in the next stanza, explains how the Rain’s coming affects the housekeeper; how she parks the household wares, be it clothes dried in the level field, buckets, brooms, plates, foodstuffs dried outside, etc. Although she does this with a thousand minor cares, she worries about the where about of her son who is so happy because the rain will soon come.

The streets clear of people who throng it because they do not want to be drenched. The houses are filled: even strangers seek refuge under your roof until the rain comes and goes. The noise gathers because happy children shout. This noise rivals the ranging wind. And all that can move (human beings and Animals) are still. There are heavy clouds; then from above, thunder strikes (which deafens) and then the rain falls at last.

Pius Oleghe was a Nigerian poet (from Owan tribe, in Edo state). He attended University of Ibadan, and together with Wole Soyinka and five others, they founded the Pirate Confraternity while studying at Ibadan. He died in early 2000, and was laid to rest in his home town – Uokha – in Owan East Local Government Area of Edo state, Nigeria. His well-known work is the Sudden Storm

Read More »

Let Us Talk About W.H. Auden's Poem - The More Loving One

W. H. Auden

Years ago, I read W.H. Auden's memorable poem - The More Loving One. It so much stuck to my memory that, it immediately became one of my favourites from the West. And for so many years after I was chanced to read this wonderful piece, it began to shape my general philosophy of love. It is a sad poem, and the poet must have written it to console himself of the pain of a love which he showed someone but was never given back.

Now, when I reread this poem, I think deeply of my two favourite lines:

   

                                         If equal affection cannot be,
                                         Let the more loving one be me.

Of course, there cannot be equal affection when two or more persons are in a relationship. No matter how perfect it may seem to viewers outside, there must be the one who loves more; who tends to show more affection. It is natural for mothers to love their children more than their children do to them. Fathers love their children more than their children love them due to obligations. Boys show affection more before courtship, and then during courtship (often times), the girls tend to carry this load on their head.

There is always sadness to loving more, because sometimes you desire affection of equal measure, which you may never get. Yet you cannot relax your love, because, it has become part of you, and you fear if you do let it wane, your partner would experience the bitter pain which you feel. Yet, it is safer to love more, because it brings joy to guard against other people's pain, even while you suffer depression.

In this poem of his, Auden has symbolized his friends as stars, and he begins with a sad note in the first two lines, when he writes: 'Looking up at the stars, I know quite well/ That, for all they care, I can go to hell'. Yet in the next two lines, the poet has revealed that he cares less about human's indifference towards those they should love. In the second stanza, Auden asks a question about unequal affection - if it were good to be on the gaining or losing side. Disregarding the consequences of loving more, Auden chooses to be on the negative side, when he writes that: 'If equal affection cannot be? Let the more loving one be more.'

The third stanza speaks again of the sadness of not noticing someone who spends much time to give you attention and love, yet you fail to give a damn. Auden makes us understand here that, if you push those who spend time to love you away, there will be a time when their passion for you will completely die off. Thus, in the last stanza, the poet draws the curtain by saying that if all stars (friends) should disappear, he should learn how to look at an empty sky, although it may take sometime. 

Read the poem below

THE MORE LOVING ONE

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well

That, for all they care, I can go to hell,

But on earth indifference is the least

We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn

With a passion for us, we could not return?

If equal affection cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am

Of stars that do not give a damn,

I cannot, now I see them, say

I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky

And feel its total dark sublime,

Though this might take me a little time.

Read More »

Do not stand at my grave and weep: Poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye

Do not stand at my grave and weep 
I am not there. I do not sleep. 
I am a thousand winds that blow. 
I am the diamond glints on snow. 
I am the sunlight on ripened grain. 
I am the gentle autumn rain. 
When you awaken in the morning's hush 
I am the swift uplifting rush 
Of quiet birds in circled flight. 
I am the soft stars that shine at night. 
Do not stand at my grave and cry; 

Read More »

If You Forget Me: Poem by Pablo Neruda

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine. 

Read More »

To His Coy Mistress: Poem by Andrew Marvell

-

Had we but world enough and time, 

This coyness, lady, were no crime. 

We would sit down, and think which way 

To walk, and pass our long love’s day. 

Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side 

Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide 

Of Humber would complain. I would 

Love you ten years before the flood, 

And you should, if you please, refuse 

Till the conversion of the Jews. 

My vegetable love should grow 

Vaster than empires and more slow; 

An hundred years should go to praise 

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; 

Two hundred to adore each breast, 

But thirty thousand to the rest; 

An age at least to every part, 

And the last age should show your heart. 

For, lady, you deserve this state, 

Nor would I love at lower rate. 

       But at my back I always hear 

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; 

And yonder all before us lie 

Deserts of vast eternity. 

Thy beauty shall no more be found; 

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound 

My echoing song; then worms shall try 

That long-preserved virginity, 

And your quaint honour turn to dust, 

And into ashes all my lust; 

The grave’s a fine and private place, 

But none, I think, do there embrace. 

       Now therefore, while the youthful hue 

Sits on thy skin like morning dew, 

And while thy willing soul transpires 

At every pore with instant fires, 

Now let us sport us while we may, 

And now, like amorous birds of prey, 

Rather at once our time devour 

Than languish in his slow-chapped power. 

Let us roll all our strength and all 

Our sweetness up into one ball, 

And tear our pleasures with rough strife 

Through the iron gates of life: 

Thus, though we cannot make our sun 

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Read More »

Detailed Review of the poem: Elegy for a Nation by Wole Soyinka (part 1)

Review © Ohikhuare Isuku (author of Grandpa’s Clothes)
First published in October 2016 by English Writing House.
All rights reserved.
For use of this work, contact English Writing House (englishwritinghouse@gmail.com)

Wole Soyinka

     Elegy for a Nation is a long elaborative poem written by one of Africa’s finest poets – Wole Soyinka – who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, becoming the first African to be so honoured. Addressed to another literary icon – Chinua Achebe – to mark the 70^th birthday of the later, the poem (just as the title implies) mourns the fall of his home country – Nigeria – to his fellow compatriot, Chinua Achebe.
     The poem is in two parts and it is one of the darkest and saddest poems of the Nobel Laureate. As often characterized by his satirical works, there is no humour in this one. Bitterness surges through every line as he reports the failure of the nation to Achebe in distant land.
     In the first part of the poem, Soyinka concentrates on the moribund structures in our system as well as the visionless leaders who have foiled the struggles of the nation’s founding fathers. He also criticizes scantily in this first part, the invasion of traditional religious practices by their foreign brethren.
    But Soyinka expresses faint hope as he writes in the opening stanza:

                         Ah, Chinua, are you gravepine wired?
                         It sings: our nation is not dead, not clinically
                         Yet. Now this may come as a surprise to you,
                         It was to me, I thought the form I spied
                         Beneath the frosted glass of a fifty-carat catafalque
                         Was the face of our own dear land – ‘own’,’dear’

    In this first stanza, Soyinka inquires from his addressee – Achebe – if he is still concerned about the nation of his own, which has undergone a lot of turbulent political histories in the recent past. He expresses hope (but it shocks him) that the nation is not entirely dead, although he shows fear that the country has already been put in casket by gruesome circumstances emanating from disgusting leadership. Well, the nation would have been dead long ago if not aids from international organizations and foreign countries which have kept the countries from meandering off like vapour into eternity. Soyinka is quick to note that these organizations and countries rendering aids, don’t do these because they love Nigeria; rather, they do what they do to keep the country balance, pending on when she will be able to pay her debts to them. Here, Soyinka writes:

                        Doctors IMF, World Bank and UNO refuses, it seems,
                        To issue a certificate of death – if debtors die,
                        May creditor’s collect? We shall turn Parsees yet,
                        Lay this hulk in state upon the Tower of Silence,
                        Let vultures prove what we have seen but fear to say.
                        For if Leviathan is dead, we are the maggots
                        Probing still her monstrous womb.

    The above stanza further stylishly bares the fact of Nigeria’s heavy indebtedness to foreign monetary organizations. Soyinka then warns Achebe that it is right to be mute about the poor situation of the country, until poverty and social vices finally betrays the hidden truth of Nigeria’s hideousness – what they have seen but fear to say.
    Soyinka, like his other works, makes fluent use of literary devices to embellish this work; for instance, while using symbolism, he calls Nigeria Leviathan, and then uses strong metaphor when he writes: We are the maggots (i.e we are the people).

     In the remaining stanzas left in this first part of this poem, Soyinka refreshes our mind on histories which have spanned over a century (even before the amalgamation of the southern and northern protectorates in 1914): he writes about Overamwen’s resistance of the British empire which led to the Benin invasion of 1897; the Aba women riot, where, in 1929, Aba women ( from Eastern Nigeria) protested against colonial tax billed on women. Soyinka also speaks about the civil war with dark emotional tonality: how compatriots laid their lives down for the oneness of the country – a country whose sap is being sucked now by scarecrows in government.
    He speaks also of traditional deities and their prowess: Sango’s axe, Orisa-Oko, Ogun, of his Yoruba race. He shows deep veneration for their genuineness, although, foreign gods have trampled upon then more or less.
    Yet Soyinka (in his autumn years or old age) notes the stagnation the country witnesses, when he writes:

                       In our now autumn days, behold our leaden feet,
                       Fast welded to the starting block.

       Soyinka goes on and on to document the agricultural boom of our recent past: Heads of Millet, Flakes of Cotton, Green of the Cornfields of Oyo and Ochre of Groundnut Pyramids of Kano. He also talks about the beauty of the nation’s art and craft, long abandoned: Indigo in the ancient dye-pot of Abeokuta, Bronze in Benin-city, etc.
     In the next stanza, the poet becomes bitterer as he notes that these agricultural and art achievements have been expunged completely and nothing is left to invest in.
     In Soyinka’s bitter voice:
    
                       Alas for lost idylls. Like Levi jeans on youth and age,
                       The dreams are folded, potholed at joints and even
                       Milder points of stress. Ghosts are sole inheritors.
                       Silos fake rotundity – these are kwashiorkor blights
                       Upon the landscape, depleted at source.
                       Even,
                       The harvest seeds were long devoured.
                       Empty hands scrape the millennia soil of planting.

     It must be noted that throughout this elaborate work, Soyinka – armed with the power of rhetorical questions – unmasks the struggles of yester years especially the Nigerian-Biafran civil war, which silenced Okigbo and other griots in infancy. Then weighing the struggles of the time past and the current denizens of zoo which pride themselves as leaders, desecrating public offices, Soyinka cries out to Achebe:

                        Whose feet are these upon the storehouse loft?
                        Shod in studded boots or jewelled sandals,
                        Khaki crisp or silk embroidered – who are these?

    In the above lines, Soyinka, with sad spasm, demands from his addressee, who the people are that loot the country’s treasury dry. He symbolizes Military regime as ‘studded boots’ and ‘khaki crisp’, while civilian regime, he calls: ‘jewelled sandals’ and ‘silk embroidered’.
    In the stanza which follows, Soyinka explains that the coming to power of these regimes have brought nothing but famine to the land. The dark lines read:
                
                         Their advent is the hour of locusts – behold
                         Cheeks in cornucopia from the silos’ depletion
                         While the eyes of youth sink deeper in despair.
                         Death bestrides the street, rage rides the sun
                         And hope is a sometime word that generations
                         Never learnt to spell.

       Soyinka, in this long work, proves himself again to be a master of the English language. He flaunts his dexterity to intimidate those who have not mastered the language. In these lines noted below, instead of wishing Chinua that long life was theirs, he writes instead:
                                    
                          Chinua, I think with you I dare
                          Be indelicate – we scrape our feet upon
                          The threshold of mortal proof, denying
                          The ancestors yet a while our companionship –
                          May that day learn patience from afar!

     

Read More »

A review of Chinua Achebe's Image of Africa: Racism in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Posted by Ohikhuare Isuku (author of Granpa's Clothes)

                             
                                                                Heart of Darkness
Chinua Achebe

Years ago, I read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I remember it was a semester break and I was in my third year at the University of Benin. A roommate had installed a book app in my android phone, and in the bookshelf, Heart of Darkness was one of the free books. So I set to read it.

Read More »