"Imagine This" by Sade Adeniran

Oyebanji Ayodele has done one strange thing in this review; he has upturned the literary apostrophe in this book. He has given life to Jupiter, an imaginary addressee of Lola's diary, and made it respond to the many letters addressed to it by Lola, the book's main character. If you were the Jupiter, how will your response be? Will it be like Ayodele's? In this review, Oyebanji Ayodele has acted the Jupiter and has spoken back to Lola out of her diary. Strange? There are many strange issues raised in this review. Read and let's discuss in the comment box how strange you've found some of the matters written about.

CLR features Oyebanji Ayodele once more. Read.

****

Jupiter Speaks

Dear Lola,

That you have made me a part of your story, perhaps as an addressee has made the strings that tie me to the ebb and flow of your life become more noticeable. What a mangled twists your life is on this existential plane. Anyway, I shed some tears; I perspired and smiled too.

Listen Lola; what I think you need now is my response to your epistolary journey even as you wait for another kick-off shot now that your life picks a novel baton…and that, I've just done.


Your friend, 
Jupiter

***

Lost?

Sorry, that was my response to Lola, a friend who keeps me posted on the happenings that have led her back to the warm-up tracks as she prepares to begin a new life.

Read on…

Imagine this…

Here is a novel that delves into the world of Lola Ogunwole, a fastidious, precocious, funny and eagle-eyed girl who cannot but apprise Jupiter, an imaginary inhabitant of her diary, of everything life offers her.

Lola alongside her brother, Adebola, is cached under the roof of a foster home after their mother abandons them. In a bid to prevent the duo of Lola and Adebola from being lost like a thread-less bodkin in a desert, their father opts for reunion. Their exodus to Nigeria, their dad's homeland, with everything that surrounds it, most especially as they are related to the life of the solitary narrator (Lola), culminates in Sade Adeniran's Imagine This.

Presented in the prolixity-prone epistolary mode, Imagine This terminates with an end that is a beginning. Confusing? Being a Jupiter will shed more light.

Imagine Lola … Imagine Sade.

Lola is an astounding and outstanding character. Even when her voice is saturated with the throes of childhood, the reader cannot but marvel at her curiosity and precocity. I like her literal interpretation of "leg-opening" (immoral consenting-sex). You will like it too;

"It was mean of him to expel her just because she didn't keep her legs closed. Maybe if I kept my legs open I'd also get expelled and Daddy would have to find me another school for me to go in Lagos" (pg. 54)

Her being enigmatic and tenacious leads me into examining her maker, Sade Adeniran, who probably shares some characteristics with Lola. Sade's struggle with the character of Lola is overt only in the sight of an observant reader. Despite the fact that Sade drains her voice of everything mature in the incipient portrait of Lola, she still fails to cover up completely. Lola's love for Arts, Literature, especially buttresses this. Sade writes and Lola does too.  Imagine that! Lola also speaks Sade's tokunbo Yoruba patois.

However, she identifies with every sliver of Lola's life. Her allusive power fortifies her creativity as she fleshes out Lola as a character. What a powerful voice she breeds in Lola!

She also tries to portray the believability of an increase in responsibility and understanding at Lola's attainment of adulthood. Lola's initial derision for amour suddenly disappears; as "Dear Jupiter" at some point becomes "D J". Whatever it is; both creator and creature are inseparable.

Imagine these…

The book is fraught with issues an African reader would easily identify with, considering the fact that the blood that paces the veins and arteries of the narrative are akin to that which flows in his.  My attentive sight didn't fail to recognize the uncomplimentary air that lingers around child-upbringing when the parties saddled with the responsibility are divided. If guilt were a plaque, I'll present it to the horrible circumstance that breaks up the Ogunwole's family. That brings up another issue: the African family system.

The extended family system in Africa doesn't restrain itself from putting its old, ugly dentition on exhibition. It isn't smiling! It weeps inconsolably considering the way its once-adored reputation keeps dwindling. The series of trivialities in Ogunwole's extended family in Idogun, which always morphs into sheer wickedness, affirms this.

Once was the communal norm of the Africans an enviable thing that it was considered reasonable to hand every child over to the society for moral nurturing. It takes a village to raise a child is what we say. Idogun almost ruins Lola psychologically and academically. Spirituality is another picture that faces the reader. Like a bat, the book portrays Africans as neither rodents nor aves – neither orthodox nor traditional religion is strictly adhered to. Both are what the Idogun based characters follow. Sheer religious infidelity!

In addition, everything that surrounds the entity christened Nigeria, the coups and counter-coups especially, engages the reader's head. It dangles every now and then like a scare-crow in the middle of a raging whirlwind. Imagine this: in a book that spans almost ten years, there is no singular reference to the celebration of anything Nigerian.  That's awful and an indirect appease to the Western thirst for black-Africa.

Spread across the pages of the novel is a story told in a simple and eclectic diction which embraces both African and Yoruba proverbs; a characterization borne and named out of the personal views of the narrator. The use of mental images is also effective. Here is my favourite:

"I went into the bushes to do a number two… I thought I had finished, but I could still feel something there so I used some leaves to wipe my bottom and there it was – a giant worm sticking out of my bottom! I screamed and started running with the worm dangling behind me… I stood there crying with my pants down, dress up and worm sticking out." (pg. 50)

As mono-sided (and maybe selfish) as the narration is, the reader cannot but marvel at the way Sade manages her plot and characters. Thematically, the picture of Nigeria and Africa are seen in the "horriblest" (using Lola's word) condition. The author splatters derision on the pages of the novel owing to the stench the African culture ignorantly produces. However; that is not to say everything African or relating to the African culture is repulsive.

Imagine the vivid image of Africans as complacent folks who value social functions more than any other thing. What a pathetic situation for Africans! I wish Lola (or Sade) had toned this cultural criticism down. Read this and you will shake your head (at least):

"If someone dies every week or so for the next five years then I'll never go hungry again…" (pg. 39)

Even if hunger rages with gusto, the demise of some person tackles it. That's what the above means to me!

The Beginning

"The time has come for me to start my life" (pg. 266)

I opine that Sade has more to narrate but has decided to play within the forte of a character's proverb:

"If hunger forces a farmer to eat both his yam tubers and his seed yams, the years to come will have no yams to eat and none to plant" (pg. 47)

As Sade plans on writing a sequel, I see her leaving the reader with more to imagine. But I consider the sequel a test on Sade's ability to manage the conflict she has already built up in this prequel. To that; will she really measure up? Well, she's written Imagine This, we should await Imagine That for an answer to such question.

Shadows Of A Bleak Edifice?

As the first post in this month of love, February, CLR features DAVID ISHAYA OSU's review of To See the Mountain and other stories, the 2011 anthology of Caine Prize for African Writing. Read, agree, disagree and comment to further more discussions on the book – that is what a critical analysis is meant to do and our guest reviewer balances objectivity with powerful reasoning in a fruitful manner; this is really worth reading.

Read on>>>

[A review of the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing Anthology -To See the Mountain and other stories]

With the incessant upsurge of young talented writers thriving in fiction writing, and the unbroken dedication to African Literature; the 2011 Caine Prize anthology paints a flamboyant and stunning picture of a non-wilting and non-withering garden of literature in Africa. Capturing several countries such as Uganda, Nigeria, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Zambia, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Botswana; To See The Mountain And otherstories presents a visual rendering of the diverse cultures, occurrences,and assorted fractions of the uniqueness of the Africa continent. The fictional embroidery upon which continental issues are encircled, in this anthology, though peculiar not only to Africa, largely underlie the patois of a quarter of the African literature. The naked constructions of the short stories (2011 shortlisted, and the writers' workshop stories) featured in To See the Mountain, optically attempts to illustrate the overtly antecedents that assemble an Africaness; though some stories juxtapose universal situations and eccentric episodes.

To See the Mountain and Other Stories is the Caine Prize for African Writing 2011 anthology of short stories, with 17 stories authored by 16 African writers; relating to readers the varied realities surrounding African multifaceted characteristics. Blending talent, imagination and precision of themes, the anthology electrifies the reader with different tactics involved in the building of fiction as a genre of literature; albeit, some of the stories in the anthology pollute the atmosphere that label literature, which certainly can be attributed to idiosyncratic grasps of the literary medium and perhaps degrees of artistry. Nevertheless, in this collection a reader is dazzled by the submissions made by the authors in portraying invigorating and stimulating outlooks; apropos of the narrow-minded and bigoted perspectives about phenomena. Grippingly, the infinitesimal traces of catchphrases rooted in the fluidity and gracefulness of the anthology lures a reader, just as it lured me, in believing that Literature is indeed full of life; although a 'dark' presentation is staged by the thematic portraitures, garbed in undertones, in quite a number of the stories.

SOME STORIES

From the 2011 winning story, Hitting Budapest, the Zimbabwean NoViolet Bulawayo employs the autobiographic style of narration to put in pictures chapters of a squad of ambitious juveniles who stubbornly escape through Mzilikazi Road from Paradise, to reach Budapest just to steal guavas. What magnitudes of gratification will the juiciness of guavas assemble? Yet, this singular adventure encapsulates the centrality of varying themes.This conceptual influence admittedly forms the solidness and intrigues of Hitting Budapest. NoViolet busies her readers with vistas of fiction by producing scenes that manufacture a sense of veracity in the story, letting the characterization do the intact story-telling. And suspense, created by the mixture of talent and fine syntaxes and splendid imagination, leaves the reader stimulated to meet the end of the story just to know what might happen as the juveniles reach Budapest. Will they find the guavas as they thought? Upon disobeying their parents, what will be the consequence of their act? Yet, what they behold while returning diverts their desires from guava to weirdness. Hitting Budapest moulds a saddening graphic sculpture of the wide gulf between the typical poverty-stricken child and a moneyed character.

Botswana Lauri Kubuitsile, with her shortlisted In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata, develops a comical upshot of the death of Mcphineas Lata in the Nokanyana village. Here, startlingly, death becomes not just an agonizing subject but a thing some people [frustrated and infuriated husbands] revel in. Effervescent as this story appears, though incongruous through the eyes of Puritanism, promiscuity eventually gives birth to matrimonial revolutions as to the theory of bedding in a home and the entire village. Could this narration be true about the 'matrimonial beds' of Africans? Well, the reader is left to form his opinion on that.

''Who is this child of a Hyena!'' was the exact scream that poured out from my mouth when I saw Child of a Hyena by the Malawian Shadreck Chikoti. Adopting the fisi or hyena custom to infuse misery and melancholy into the ritualistic fragments of an African ethnicity; Child of a Hyena beautifully invents a caustic account of an Immigrant who discovers that Saide the village drunkard and polygamist, is actually his father and not Bwande. This admixture of sterility and paternal intimacy, spawning a radical trauma; momentously gushes out the fictional stunt, which irresistibly welds the inquisitiveness of the reader to the enthralling pulsation that is intrinsic to the storyline. What delight will his marriage to a foreigner-Danish-be, considering the sullenness of being born of a scornful custom? Could it be the reason why he inadvertently has not given birth?

Cameroonian Monique Kwachou's Afritude, displays a tale of a baffled mother (living in America with her daughter) whose daughter, she thinks, has wandered away from the African attitude. She, Elizabeth, the daughter to 'Ms Frida, Tambe or Ma Fri as she is commonly called is 'tired of hearing her' mother 'complain about' her 'so-called' attitude. She 'had left Cameroon at the age of five' and 'hated it when' her 'mom spoke of the place as though it was heaven, when' she 'distinctly remember(s) it as a step up from hell.' Elizabeth is sent back to Cameroon to attend a boarding school; a strategy by her mother to refresh her African ideas and flush out that of America. In Christian Remedial High School, Elizabeth gets the bitterest tastes of her life, as against the pleasures she enjoys in America and the freedom she thinks she'll get by leaving her mother. 

From the title it is suggestive of what one will set eyes on, in Ayodele Morocco-Clarke's The Menagerie of the Accused. Mama Edem gossipingly informs Ekanem that Ekanem's child, Kufre, is a witch:

''I overheard Kufre telling Edem that she always eats in her dreams.'' (p. 152)

 Udo, Mama Kufre's son suffers epilepsy, and dies some nights later. And new agonies blow the family.  Mama Edem warns Mama Kufre that there is more to all the ugly situations tormenting her family unit:

 ''I just came to warn you as a friend. People who eat in their sleep are witches. I am sure Kufre has a hand in all the misfortunes that keep befalling your family. You have to find a way to counter her before she finishes you off.'' (p. 153)

Mama Edem whispers to Mama Kufre. In hustling for a solution to her inconceivable but ostensible reality, Mama Kufre is escorted to a 'solution centre' where Pastor Inyang confirms that Kufre is indeed a witch. But will Mama Kufre afford to let her only child's, after Udo's demise, admission into the dull, grimy and disgust-painted 'bizarre building' [owned by the church Pastor Inyang heads], which harbours supposedly horrible juveniles indicted for witchcraft, where the goal is to eject the evil-clad spirit out of them? From the tone of narration and fair manipulation of sway; much a keen reader digs out, in my estimation, is Morocco-Clarke's submersion of her impression about the mystical imprint of witch-craft. Or, an invitation to get people into re-considering the postures that are manufactured, upon uproars of legend.

SPLODGES OF CREATIVE GLORY, AND LITERARY DEBRIS

One leading trait in most stories of the 215-page anthology, in my opinion, is the masterly attempt by the authors to forge an ambience of believability by inventing blatant cogency with hues and haze of witty intrigues. It is on this-intrigues-the triumph of the anthology largely reclines; as the heat of spells emit and spear readers, thus readers' curiosities are tantalized.

In spite of this success, much a keen reader sees in the anthology is a journalese-splattered writings shrinking the modicum patches of literariness knitted in some of the stories. Monotonous and unadorned lexis is what the anthology is bodily dressed with. What freshness of ripened literary expressions would one pluck from a work should be a major item in any literary labour.

Check out these expressions from some stories: From What Molly Knew -''some body shot her'' (p. 21). Of what essence are figures of speech and imageries, when expressions as this betray the seductive glows of literary language? ''What do you do when your only child is dead?''(p. 21). And I ask why euphemism is an ingredient of literature. From Child of a Hyena- ''I go downstairs and wait for her on the living room couch. She does not show up.''(p. 95). What differentiates this expression from the common and everyday expressions? Isn't literature supposed to be ad infinitum novel, and in addition be a senior advocate of jargon exploration? ''somebody calls from behind me.'' (p. 95).This is disgusting to the intellectualism of literature. From No Blood, No Slaves- ''The sultan is old.'' (p. 106). Where was metaphor, or even simile, when this sentence was penned? ''It was well past midnight.'' (p. 111). Okay; so there's no single element from the 'evening' that can represent or better sound with, allegiance to literature, that the time was midnight? From Bottled Memory- ''Fresh sweat from her neck drips on her pillow.''(p. 138). Why not hyperbolically tell us that the body of her pillow was rather wetted with the downpour of sweat overflowing from her neck? ''I cannot forget my son, she says…'' (p. 139). Who on earth, especially Africans who go crazy for want of a child, will forget his child? From The Lost Friend- ''I was lonely and withdrew from them, but…'' (p. 161). What is the role of 'lonely' in the sentence? If one is lonely, isn't it because there is no person to talk with? Perhaps, what the author intended are the feelings of 'loneliness' as the prevailing ambience of the narrator. Still, from The Man with the Hole in his Face and Dark Triad, are more over-diluted and flavourless expressions oozing uncontrollably. 

It's not all about unearthing flaws. There are as well fine expressions that stimulate the genitals of one's literary inclination. From The Menagerie of the Accused- ''The sun played peek-a-boo all afternoon; darting behind clouds, then re-appearing when it got tired of its silly game.''(p. 149). How can it be said that the sun played a game meant to amuse children? You may want to ask. But this is an unmitigated staunchness to the personification trend. From In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata- ''the fragility of my bones.''(p. 44). Also from Butterfly Dreams- ''You were skinny as a cassava stem'' (p. 50). ''Your feet were cracked and swollen.'' Beside the exterior picture, there is a cryptic connotation of abattered life nay splitting or crumbling fragments of life.

EAVESDROPPING ON THE UNDERTONES

The similitude of undertones, reverberating from the plot of themes inherent in the panache of writings in this anthology, blatantly bares the African cadaver. More drab and pathetic images of the African continent are what the anthology has succeeded in excavating. A vigilant voyage through the deftness in the stack, one discovers the delineation of Africa as an old hand at dark and awful ventures. Carnivorous cultures, incest, fanatical penury, milieus hostile to pursuance of bliss, etc; all of these, form the frame on which the African picture is moulded. It is left to the reader to decipher which depiction is unblemished or mendacious.

In deciphering Hitting Budapest, one sees a picture of moral decadence plastering the visage of African children whipped by poverty. Thieving is what I mean. Fictionalizing IMF, AU, and SADC as streets; and narrating that, that is where the children have got to steal guavas from; I am tempted to pronounce that there, the mannerism of Africans who seek to migrate in pursuance of greener pastures is captured. Yet, it becomes worse as these children choose to hit these streets to steal and slake their unkillable thirst for guavas. Guavas as used in the story, suggests greenery or satisfaction. While, IMF [International Monetary Fund], AU [African Union], and SADC [Southern African Development Commission] unambiguously imply the seductive establishments Africans especially the pseudo-leaders flee to, to do the thieving and embezzlements. This fictional depiction, in a way, is a sheer mockery of the covetous and materialistic temperaments displayed by some people not only in African but the entire world.

Also in Child of a Hyena; No Blood, No Slaves; Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Pastor; Afritude; The Menagerie of the Accused; are buried multiple undercurrents of pique towards anomalous trends. And this core spirit inbuilt in the collection has succeeded in fortifying the anthology.

As noisy as the undertones sound, over-crowding the intrigues in the spellbinding stories, one is tempted to interrogate or prosecute the perceptions affixed to Africa as a continent as well as the position of the literary enterprise. Shouldn't a segment of literature be given to the task of mirroring the ills of a society and as such mending the hostile and common perception about that society? Then; why the merciless crucification of Africa, as flaunted in To See the Mountain and not any single attempt to inject optimism or hope for a healthier Africa? While devotion to utopian writing would not defile literature, I think African writers can detach a large flesh of dystopian writing so as to set in motion a process of painting other friendly and lovely sections of the African continent, without blinding their eyes to a dysfunctional society.

Aside from the denominating of Africa as a deadly shore where the brightest of suns rain darkness, a reader is entertained with the breezy and glittery sharpness surrounding the collection. As a victory, To See the Mountain and other stories has unarguably demonstrated the diversification of literary skills, cultures, artistic acuities, etc; though the conformation, by the un-premeditated submissions of the writers to stereotypingis demeaning to the continent's sanguinity. Nonetheless, we await the flames and dishes from the Caine Prize 2012 shortlist plus the 2012 anthology, to heat up more polemics and sate the diverse bubbling thirsts of the literati respectively.

***

DAVID ISHAYA OSU was born on 27th October 1991; and he hails from Nasarawa State, Nigeria. He writes poetry regularly, some of which have appeared in several National Dailies, and e-journals. He won an Honourable Mention for a National Poetry competition in honour of Prof Remi Raji at 50. Aside poetry, he dabbles into short story writing; and he is as well, a Broadcast and Journalism Enthusiast. David is currently a student of Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Federal University of Technology Minna, Niger State.  

"Say You’re One of Them" by Uwem Akpan

© Joseph Omotayo

As I went through the pages of Uwem's offerings, I could feel that Uwem has more experiences to share than what he has written on in those five stories that make up Say You're One of Them. My premise is rooted in the manner Uwem drags on in some of the stories, which individually spans almost a hundred pages, sating the reader with the superfluous details he wants the reader to know. He tends to be so compassionately biased with the way he tells some issues with brevity aided with creativity and others in a narrative that nearly makes them novellas within a collection of five short stories. What however lures the reader into Uwem's stories is in the narrative spells that can only be identified with a narrator who is not only telling his stories in vivid descriptive words, but in the smoothness of one who knows his stories well before telling them. You might be wondering what collection of five short stories really chronicles the events in Africa in picturesque sequences. You only will need to be told that each of the stories, set in five different countries of the continent and relayed in children's perspective, does not foist what should be on you but rather makes you piece meanings together for yourself from the accounts of disoriented children of nefarious abuses and violence. 

Uwem must have been aware that his piece of literature could easily be thrown off as one of the lots that appeal to the West with fixed African themes of child soldering, religious calamity, child trafficking, etc, hence he adopts the point of view that speaks with tones of innocence rather than narratives that relay events with adult confident accuracy.  Sympathy can always save flaws when stories are told by a child and one might not quickly overreact against pictures that are just too blackly painted to seek pity when it is a minor blathering about them. Say You're One of Them seems to make a reader confess and expiate on behalf of the villain in sheer empathy that grieves one so dearly after each story.  

Say You're One of Them is an afro geo-collection of short stories which unfolds in different settings of five African countries.

Five Countries; Five Short Stories

An Ex-mas Feast (kenya):  Maisha is never her family's favourite when it comes to moral standards, but she does command the greatest dignity when the family needs depend on the income she gets from prostituting as a minor. She is the sacrificial lamb that holds the family together in seeming unity until the Ex-mas Feast when she explores full time in her trade to cater for the more demanding wants of her family.

Fattening for Gabon (Benin): For Yewa and Kotchikpa, the coming of a Nanfang motorbike into their uncle's, Fofo Kpee, home is the beginning of the abysmal era that will soon ravage them apart. When the source of the Nanfang is known, it has already become too late for Fofo Kpee to remedy events and protect his cousins against the suffering he has sold them into. The story delves into the hypocrisy of religion while it still maintains its objectivity on the child-trafficking issue that majorly characterizes the story.

What Language Is That? (Ethiopia): Before the war that tears the narrator apart from her best friend, Salem, all what they know is the world they have mutually created in their own infantile simplicity. In severe suddenness, they become as guilty as the circumstance that creates a gorge between them. With the falseness of emotions that those caught in the middle of religious crisis exude, the two children go aboard to learn another language that can communicate their friendliness to each other even though the plumes of thick smoke that billows from the charred part of their houses robs the atmosphere of all harmony.

Luxurious Hearses (Nigeria):  The quietness of the hearse might not be luxurious to the dead. Maimed and mangled cadavers are never a pleasant sight even when ferried in luxurious buses. The situation that plagues the characters in this story is antithetical to the lives they must have lived at one time or the other. After Tijani’s co-Muslim faithful betray his trust during a religious war in the northern part of the country, he returns to reposing his confidence in the God of the south he knows little about. A fanatic of some sort, Tijani who calmly watches the martyring of his blood brother, who is of the Christian faith, can’t brave it to reveal his Muslim identity in the refugee bus where he seeks protection. Amidst staccato bursts of gunfire, jarred dismembered bodies and reprisal attacks from the two religions (Muslim and Christian) and ethnic groups (North and South), Tijiani almost does make it, but his chopped off hand becomes his main enemy.

My Parents' Bedroom (Rwanda): As succinct as this story is, it well re-enacts the inter-tribal carnage between the Hutu and the Tutsi brilliantly. A child can eavesdrop on the creaking bed of his parents, but when the matrimonial room of the home becomes an abattoir where the mother's head is slashed, the memory of the bedroom may become a hunting ghost. This story uses the setting of a simple Rwandan family to show how inhuman the war between the two tribes is and how the actors of the savage wear bestiality as fitting garbs.

Take this…

I am afraid this collection might turn out to be Uwem's best work; I can hardly hope he will write anything as entrancing as this. That some of the stories are almost on the whole pages of the book shows he was under pressure as to what medium to pass his messages through; a collection of short stories or a full novel. Writing about religion is one fragile issue writers seldom dwell on. Being a Jesuit priest, I thought Uwem Akpan will let prejudice guide him towards giving an imbalanced narration while stifling the views of the opposite religion in Luxurious Hearses. The diplomacy he employed in equally giving voices to the two religious sides takes Luxurious Hearses out of the packs that use literature as their controlled mock courts where cases are adjudged on emotions and microscopic reasoning.

"Voice of America" by E.C. Osondu

©Joseph Omotayo
@omotayome

In Voice of America, almost everybody has an international passport, while those without it only nurture escapes from different miseries. Give some of them visas and they are bound to become Americans or at least illegal immigrants. When their African affinity and culture pressurize their new American lives, they instantly are people battling with the same immigrant pains. As a bunch of the stories fail in similitude of themes and characterizations, others excitingly add refreshing twits to common telling. In this packing contrast, there is perhaps one thing Osondu is artistically deft at; he beamingly shows the unusualness of strange realities and the hypocrisy of individual frailties in the face of societal and household evils.

I won't give a stock opinion on this collection and be quick to pass it off as one stack that is raspingly filled with Immigrant issues. My view will be broad enough and I will first say this collection is a sterling art of storytelling before any other opinion is formed. There are glaring examples of Osondu's writing confidence in the book. The simplicity of diction and plots' flexibility in Voice of America are the authentication of Osondu's storytelling prowess. However, Osondu leaves many trails in the collection which point to only one angle – Western gentrification. Only a few of the stories survive on their own without tilting to a Western outlook and ingratiating themselves with the easy comprehension of an outsider. I will forgive an author that explains in reams what Agege Bread is, but when a place as historic and cyberly found as Badagry is relatively over-tutored, I will call that lazy writing for unexcited audiences. In 'Welcome to America' for instance, the addendum on Badagry only adds more drabness to the enormous burdens the collection struggles with. Osondu is helpless in his attempt to upsell the familiar to the foreign. The proofs are in the repetition of structures that cuts across most pieces in this collection; lacing potentially creative renderings with inexcusable lethargy that stretches on. In the unreasonable lengthiness the collection is muddled in, it can still be remedied if pruned from a collection of eighteen to seven short stories. What nauseates one most isn't in the futile attempt of high numbers that unfittingly characterize this collection, but that the stories that will have been better merged or alternatively left out are exercised in the same exhausted themes explored by other pieces in the collection. The spoiling issues that confront this collection are indeed avoidable.

You will have questions after the reading. Some might likely be; after "Waiting", is there any refreshing nectar offered in "Janjaweed Wife"? "Nigerians in America", "I Will Lend You My Wife", "Stars In My Mother's Eyes Stripes On My Back" and "Miracle Baby"; aren't they all substitutive and in need of reduction to get around unthinking repetition? Until questions as these are noted and solutions provided in subsequent republications, Voice of America might remain in the lower rack of readers' choices struggling to stand out.

Some Undesirable Parallelisms

'Waiting' <> 'Janjaweed Wife': In Waiting, only the word Tsofo tells you where the geographical setting of the book may likely be. In the refugee camp where this story plays out, nothing maintains its real name. Everybody is labeled and classified according to the type of solace s/he has been given. Orlando is called by the name written on the T-Shirt given to her. Paris is only known as Paris for her T-shirt reads See Paris and Die. Chars of some war they all are at the refugee camp, only the help extended to them through Western adoption will put them back into a sane society. But how long shall they all wait for?

Concerning Janjaweed Wife, when Nur and Fur are taken out from the imagined reality of what a Janjaweed solider is really capable of, they will become refugees seeking safety in protected camps. They will suffer and scramble for supplies, kill domestic dogs for meat when Red Cross delays provisions and be subjected to barbaric abuse from the one who later comes offering shelter. In the volatile situation that surrounds Nur, Fur and their mother, escaping the molestation that lies within their ultimate rescue will be a demanding choice to make.

When reading these two pieces, note the subject matter they both hungrily share and the story they both tell without so much difference. Everything in these stories is too closely similar.

'Nigerians In America' <> 'Stars In My Mother's Eyes, Stripes On My Back': Through the perspective of Adesua, the collective sufferings of Nigerians in America are bared in her family's house. Adesua's home provides the communal platform Nigerians alike come on to discuss their woes. Uncle John complains bitterly of the problem that awaits him from the report his contracted American wife's lays against him. Uncle Siloko, her father's childhood friend, is also mired in sticky immigrant trouble. In the night Uncle Siloko begins his temporary stay with Adesua's family; Adesua is invited for the wisdom she will gather from their small talk.

'Stars In My Mother's Eyes, Stripes On My Back' is a tiff gone bitter between the narrator's parents. It must have been more than stars the narrator's mother sees when his father physically assaults his mother. They must settle their marital differences before religion is given attention to – and who cares if it is Sunday? Uncle Boateng's visit has more to do than settling a trivial squabble, the narrator must sit with Uncle Boateng and his father after the family's reunion to gain sageness from their elderly chatter.

Harvesting Some Good Ones Out

My choice of these selections is not so much based on the stereotypical setting the stories sit in as it is on their freehandedness in turning fictional mendacities into relatable instances. They are exact to the situations in the society without being forced. The power that boils from their literary functionality moves you so close to deep appreciation of their messages.  

'Voice of America': There is a good trick to this title and Osondu pulls it off to the success of the story. It is the anchor title of the collection. By the title, it is the least story you will expect anything spellbinding from. You are taken by surprise. It is the last piece in the book. The aftertaste this piece leaves you with easily makes up for the near daftness others reek of. A summary on it will upset the cart of the story. I wouldn't do that. The story is worthy to be left to the personal savor of the reader. It is that worth it.

'The Men They Married': This is a good example of how stories of the same theme can be dealt in a single combined narrative. It is the story of Ego, Uzo, Ebone and Malobi; women anguished and pained by marital un-blissfulness. Their emotions are unhinged and their stories pour out into the same trough to the reader.

'An Incident At Pat's Bar': There is this unusual excellence in every story that differently touches a matter so beaten to banality. When you read one, you wouldn't need to be told; you just know it. This is what separate essay writing from creative writing.

In Port Harcourt, Pat's Bar is more than where expatriate oil workers while away their time with sex, meat, alcohol and weeds. Charities that support different organization are constantly raised in dollars; even hypocritical preachers lick Pat's feet for dollars' support offerings for their churches. There is a show of class and Pat's Bar outshines others. But all these are before the changing time which sweeps through Pat's Bar.

'Teeth': A baby is born and nothing more is precious like the teeth he grows from the womb.

***

Keep trawling through; Voice of America is not totally blundered. I like collection of short stories, Voice of America has just increased my volume of them.

‘Open City’ is…Julius

©Joseph Omotayo
@omotayome

·         Reviewing Teju Cole's Open City

Open City is more than a book of one purpose streamlined plot and a contrived theme setting; it is further broader than that. With its loosed plot, there is really no story in the mainstream sense. The book is deep with intelligences meeting at different mental ports of the main character's emotional reflexes, intellectual recounts, aimless personal wanderings and physical social interactions. There are allusions of great intellectual stimulations flying off at each page. An important note to prospective readers of this book would be; Open City does not patronize details to you with end to end interruptive annotations of where you may have been confused; it really doesn't. That is one thing I admire about the way the book is written. You are to follow it through rapt study. That is never to submit the sentences are complex. The words are relaxed that you pick them at your own pace. You wouldn't find Open City in a boxed space of what it wants itself to be. In fact, the book never panders to the reader's mindset for a particular interpretation and appreciation; it takes you in, makes you wander amidst your own speculations and direct belief and hopefully takes you to where you say; Oh! This is what Open City is. It is as psychological and mentally stimulating as that. You have the personal responsibility to go on an adventure of discovery with Julius, the main character, as he roves through cities {New York and Brussels}, giving breath to places and things that speak of many historical memories.

***

Julius is the book. Open City is Julius. A sapient character of an observing kind, Julius lights up New York and makes the nerve of the city come alive. He knows everything about it; the paintings in the gallery, the movies in the cinemas, the monuments and statutes that are mundane features of the city, the historical topography and the invisible melancholic voices throbbing from various reconstructed sites. If I had accepted reading Open City without studying Julius; that would simply have meant going through inchoate sentences. Julius is the core of the book. He is the God, for all other things take a minor category in his scholarly world. Nothing eludes Julius' close observations. From music to paintings, cinemas, books and historical facts, he dissects things down to the trivial of details. In his voice, the past is relived. Unlike the normal conversations in novels that carry the distinctness of individual character with sound-bites and quotes, dialogues in Open City are made in Julius internal monologues. This gives him an infallible pristineness. Nobody is as faultless as Julius. When you meet him you would remember I said so.

Farouk almost put Julius' erudite soundness to task. He initially awes Julius as he generously arranges knowledgeable analogies and names into small talks; engaging Julius in academic thinking. He stretches Julius's brilliance to tautness. But when he slipped, Julius nails him and quickly concludes his fatal faultiness in arriving at serious decisions. Farouk has at the first meeting in the café coined a word to describe Mohamed Choukri as an autodidact, but changes the appropriation of the same adjective to his self at their subsequent meeting, claiming he had used it so in their previous talk. Julius is a man of memories – triffling and significant; little slips off his memory. Farouk instantly becomes the victim of his own words.

Farouk speaking with Julius at an earlier interaction;

"To be a writer in exile is a great thing. But what is exile now, when everyone goes and comes freely? Choukri stayed in Morocco, he lived with his people. What I like best about him is that he was an autodidact…. He was raised on the street and he taught himself to write classical Arabic but he never left the street. " {p104}

This is where Farouk falls;

"But my deeper project is about what I said last time, the difference thing. I strongly believe this, that people can live together, and I want to understand how that can happen… But as I told you, I am an autodidact, so I don't know what form this other project will take." {pg. 113}

Open City's characters lavishly command meaningful significances in ordinary pleasantries. No attention is given to explanations and apologetic refrains. There is a way allusions are embedded into conversations that you just want to know why they are so important to have been mentioned. An exploratory instance is where Farouk, Khalil and Julius engage themselves in discussion at the bar in Brussels. Historical peoples and places become the very instruments of dialogues which are unfurled in Julius' internal monologues. There is the Holocaust, the 1940s Auschwitz concentration camp, the ethnic rivalry of Delaware and Iroquois, Finkelstein's and Noam Chomsky's dissimilarity. Henri Cantier's Decisive Moment, Nabokov's Pinn, Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello and various relevant theories of; Zionism, anti-Semitic, Piety, Ummah, etc.  Google is your partner in this reading. You wouldn't only be reading Open City as you browse through piles of valuable references. At least, without the Internet, Encarta program will do some assists.

I was more than astonished when I venerated Julius in a side notepad. I asked myself questions and conversed with my thoughts; how did Julius get to know of the various buildings formerly occupying the site World Trade Centre was built on? How was he so informed of the streets that passed through this place; some of which dated back to late 1800s? About music, paintings, books and places; doesn't he seem to know so much? This character must be a genius or his creator, Teju Cole, is.

If I had the chance to converse with Julius, I would vehemently question his anecdotal narrative of Obatala and his creation. There are numerous shades being added to the story of Obatala, Eledumare and iseda omo eniyan daily. I have gathered some, check here, here and here. With the popularity of Internet, these shades are constantly overshadowing the truth of this Yoruba creation story. A day will come, when historians will be left with only doubts and the frustration of tracing the real story. In classifying the cripple and the vehemence they bear against their creator, Obatala, Julius' slide to it amuses me;

"…Obatala did well at the task (creation) until he started drinking… he became inebriated, and began to fashion damaged human beings… he made dwarfs, cripples people missing limbs, and those burdened with debilitating illness… They worship Obatala in accusation; it is he who made them as they are. They wear white, which is the color of the palm wine he got drunk on" {p25}

I love Julius for his ingenuity and dislike him for his egocentricity. He determines what becomes fleeting and what stays on with meaningfulness. Julius' personality is in a messy split. How could he have trodden on Terry's poeticity in that manner? Terry can't have known the burdening blow he suffers from Professor Saito's…? Julius can just be that inhuman at times. Sex is a beautiful thing – a stint of it can't cause permanent forgetfulness as is with Julius. Moji; how I so pity her in the web called Julius. This Julius is so puzzlingly enigmatic.

***

A friend called me during my reading of this book and asked how I was doing with the book. I only had this clipped response for him; Open City is a piece of numerous lateral natures spiraling into the main meaning the reader takes away from it. Everything the book has to get across is at the proportion of the various readers' deep knowledge of the issues as sweepingly alluded to in the book. Yes, my opinion of the book was true then, even when I had just barely gotten farther the middle of its pages' length.

This is Open City. I, Julius, welcome you. Correction; I am Joseph Omotayo. I will never be him. I can't be that complex. Welcome to the review of Teju Cole's Open City.

---------

Bookerbay, a wall-less library is making gallant history in literature. They got this book to me. All I did was to nominate the book with a few friends who supported the nomination. This is a right step in a good direction. Now that I am through with the book, I really need to pass it on to another reader as the rules direct. Thank you Bookerbay, I appreciate the effort, Adebiyi Epistrophy Olusolape.

At CLR, we wish You a Happy, Happy 2012!

Disdaining the Literary Pyre: Biyi Bandele's Burma Boy

Above all, a good review should be informative and deeply reflective of the issues in the book it focuses on. You, the reader, are to conclude on what side this review should be commended for. But most importantly, pertinent questions are asked. Questions not only the readers should provide answers to. The book's writer and editor are questioned too. CLR leaves you here with Oyebanji Ayodele's take on Biyi's Burma Boy. Read and comment.

^^^^

As my eyes meandered with passion through the lane of texts that an author's pen has cleared before them, I was made to put into consideration the level of a pen's potency in bridging the titanic gulf between man and history. The mere understanding of the storyline lands with a thud in my mind the Yoruba proverbial saying that:

If the mountain doesn't deem it fit to move close to Mohammed,

On Mohammed lies the onus to move close to the mountain

Here is a sliver of man's history which has been creeping out of his reach into oblivion being chased back to its dwelling by a writer's pen. Truly, a pen is mightier than a rapier. The novel is a manifestation of Biyi Bandele's refusal to allow issues relating to the Second World War lie on a literary pyre. His culinary adroitness in concocting Tommy Sparkle's, his father's, Burma tales with other historical ingredients which his voracious reading taste produced is also evident.  We are all invited to take a sip from the urn of ages – Literature.

The griot in Biyi Bamidele through this novel seeks to inform the mind that cares to know that there was once a realistic battleground on which the Schwarzenegger simulations of blood, courage and death were better acted out (without rehearsals). The Second World War drama is presented based on the experiences of a fantastic Ali Banana, a young and inexperienced black soldier whose desire to fight for kingi Joji of Ingila (king George of England) results in a situation no reader could have prognosticated. Want to know more about this baby soldier? Hear him speak:

"I'm the son of Dawa the king of well digggers whose blessed nose could sniff out water in Sokoto while he's standing in Samanika. I'm the son of Hauwa whose mother was Talatu whose mother was Fatimatu queen of the moist kulikuli cake, the memory of whose kulikuli still makes old men water at the mouth till this day." (Page 37)

As a strong reminiscent of war, one sees nothing but war and more war…

When two mammoths engage in a free for all, grasses suffer all for free. The reader is made to see the involvement of the blacks in a war which has its causes subsumed in the white clouds of their black understanding. One striking thing about the war as recorded in the novel is that nobody is coerced into the army. Here is the message:

"Kingi Joji, monarch of Ingila is fighting a war in a land called Boma and he wants our help. He wants all able – bodied men to go to Kaduna and join his band of warriors." (Page 43)

What then pushes the like of Pash, Ali Banana, Danja and other Burma boys into joining the army? Love for their fellow humans you say? Never! Fellow humans who before the war and even after subjected them to imperialism. Ignorance is the word! I want to believe these characters are not in any way like the Biblical Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego who weren't only impudent at the sight of the furnace but who also strove into it with confidence. The war front is never a kulikuli market as Aminu Yerwa sees it.

"When the OC asked Aminu why he brought so much with him, he said he'd been hoping to keep some for himself and to sell the rest in small portions to the boys when we got to India." (Page 53)

Whereas, the only ware for sale at the warfront is death!

If the attainment of manhood means death or some inane thing, I'd rather be a boy all my life. Samanja Damisa posits that "a boy is a man when he feels he's a man." Imagine Pash becoming a man with one leg; Samanja Damisa himself becoming a man with just one ear and Ali Banana… Why not read that up?

What if I say once a thespian is forever a thespian? The mode of narration of the story is an attempt by Biyi to hide behind a visor – Thespis' palm – which in this situation is transparent enough for the reader to discover that the work is better described as a novel written in four acts with its own prologue and epilogue. The ingenious diction which the author employs can be likened to that of an oral artist. The book is fraught with proverbs, songs and other literary embellishments with which the conflict is doused. Listen to this:

"A man does not run on thorns for nothing: either he's chasing something or there's a snake chasing him" (Page 96)

And indeed, they are running on thorns for something:

"… He is there to kill you or die trying…His commanders tell him that if he's taken prisoner when unconscious, he should stuff his tongue and choke himself to death…Our mission is to insert ourselves inside his gut" (Page 27)

Moreover, as detailed as the narration is, the narrator (or maybe the editor) leaves the reader to puzzle out an instance of contradiction.

Consider this:

"… my tale is long but I'll make it short. That very night, Yusufu, Iddrisi, and I set out on foot and headed as the crow flies, in the direction of Kaduna" (Page 43)

In relation to:

"They didn't ask me to come with them that night. In fact, they laughed in my face when I asked if I could come with them. I had to wait a month before I made my own way to Kaduna" (Page 49)

 Which do we believe?

The misuse of the word "anorexia" on page 179 also calls for notice:

"Quite soon the men began to fall sick, exhibiting symptoms ranging from flatulence to anorexia…"

Anorexia at the war front where there is little or nothing to eat!?

The sincerity of the story is apparent in its characterization. That it is complex is enough to be taken as an attestation to the fact that the stage on which war is acted out is large enough to take a large number of soldier-actors (as far as they can kill and may be killed). The story is one that can be likened to a scalpel slicing through a pregnant woman in labour. A monster is born rather than a baby. Via the convincing voice of the griot, the repulsive story of those who killed and died in the service of a history which is not theirs refuses to be laid on a pyre.

"Blackbird" by Jude Dibia

©Joseph Omotayo

@omotayome

John Steinbeck would have to be opposed on this one. I am a firm follower of his analyses, but certainly not where Blackbird is concerned. When Steinbeck opined that only a big book fulfils its mental and emotional obligations to its readers; he surely didn't realise there could ever be a Jude Dibia's Blackbird. In a little more than 300 pages, Blackbird lucidly rolls out an almost forgotten historical setting that could be grouped in the same class with genocidal slaughter. Really, past Nigerian leaders need to be undressed and whipped on their buttocks. Those who especially contributed to the community disintegration the Maroko exercise of 1990 caused should be manacled and pelted with putrid tomatoes before the noose throttles life out of them. That the case has remained unattended to till now, wallowing in the murkiness of crawling judicial processes, clearly portrays our complacency with mucous ills. Few decades from now, I wonder if our society would still be in a good communal grip. There are things to be forgiven; the 1990 Maroko incident which rendered approximately 300,000 citizens of the country homeless shouldn't just be passed under the rug and waltzed on. Blackbird's daring attempt at revisiting that archived scab of ours successfully pulls in our shared political hypocrisy.

Blackbird is an artistic bisque; it goes off the tongue juicing it with a tang that would colonize the aftertastes of subsequent meals. What etches the book on the memory is its near trueness to the details of the subject it dominantly touches. With the 1990 Maroko eviction as the central theme, Blackbird is a colourful pixel of assorted stories heading to an all-clasping resolution. Every chapter is bursting at the seams with demanding issues. Historical novels as this often lack the certitude of conclusion; meandering between opinions and objectivities at mushily prepared intermissions; hiding under the hypocrisy that fiction only plays out the imagination of the writer and as a result should not be held accountable when it doesn't align well with aptly detailed instances. To this, Blackbird is partially not. Blackbird does not suffuse itself with the messianic inclination of a literature that tends towards total healing. It only souses history in fiction to relive one of the country's neglected pasts.

Descriptive languages are wonderful seasonings of enjoyable narratives. Connecting mere strings of words with a lively portraiture of reality could be quite a labourous task. Without breathing imageries of strong senses, the writer would always have the concealed meaning of his piece to himself alone with only mangled appreciations from readers. Blackbird is fast-paced, the plot-construction is never leaden and padded. It is like Jude Dibia makes the very art of penmanship an effortless venture. The mental images are easily connectable with living realness. Adroitness at the creation of mental picturesque sceneries is a quality feature of the fluid descriptive excellence of a word-merchant; Jude Dibia is no less an astonishingly evolving wordsmith.

The imageries are clear and well classified. Some are olfactory:

"Her mother stood at the centre of the kitchen, flipping fish from one side to the other on the spitting hot palm oil. The fumes of the bleached oil hung over their heads like clouds cushioning the ceiling"(p35-36)

Others are visual and tactile:

"Now when her nipples stood erect and cried to be kissed and touched, there was no one to attend to them. When the mouth of her cervix clenched and unclenched with desire, she had to content herself with her fingers..."(p29-30)

"Underground City. A conglomeration of roguishly built shanty homes, it flanked the Sambo creek, a torrid expanse of water twisting like loins to the sea… It had its own lost soul and palpable body; its own vibe, expressed by a pandemonium of car horns, mixed with the cacophony of tired bus engines, overlaid by a multitude of voices that talked, whispered, shouted, traded curses, laughed, cried, sang and sighed… "(p105)

The book is about Nduesoh, the ugly and high heeled wife of Edward Wood. She is comfortable and at the same pace threatened. Blackbird also subplots the wavy path love takes in homes under pressures; Omoniyi and Chimaya tries rescuing marital tranquility in the dire face of economic downturn and stricture. In all, with the 1990 Maroko event being the themes' driver, Blackbird narrates the plights of Nigerians when a privileged minority controls all.

Measuring Punctured Personalities

Nduesoh (Identity Hemorrhage and Emotional Displacement): Even Jude Dibia is at a loss describing the total unfortunateness of Nduesoh. Hers cannot be properly placed using routine adjectives; she suffers from psychological torture than the ugliness a superficial observation would have one believe. It seems her internal scar always outgrows the elite status her matrimony with Edward Wood grants her. More than the troubles and rejections she bears from family and friends, she thrashes about futilely to ascertain who she really is and why she is who people define her to be. She seeks her answers everywhere: in the comfortable loneliness of her wealth; in her decryption of a husband that has changed her social class; in the abuse she suffers at the fingers of the policeman caressing her labia; and in the sexual stint she forces Omoniyi into. Nduesoh's personality and emotion is singed in different crimson traumatic fires. Her unsightliness is just the taproot of the numerous evils she contends with.

Scorpion & Ominiyi (Picturing the real Maroko): Maroko before the eviction was a community to those whose survival technique scares the very harshness they were confronted with. Maroko was a class to motley of livings and aspirations just like as obtainable in any community. Scorpion and Ominiyi are two allegorical sides of that society that must cohabit in great contrast and complement. Maroko's only sin in 1990 was in her adjacency to the high social caste that would only breathe well in the gentrification of Maroko's shanty town. What was understood as a slum was just the simple opposite of the towers and flowers-lined mansions in Victoria Island.

Ominiyi is educated and full of hope of the opportunities immanent in education. In Shiloh, he constitutes a group that thrives to maintain some standard in a community purportedly populated by hazy citizens. Scorpion (Deji) is a foil to whom Ominiyi is. For Ominiyi to subsist in a time labour market is being bloated; when industries are winding up and workers being downsized, Scorpion must act the deux machine to his mystery. Scorpion is a rogue, a hirer of blow-jobbers and a one-man suzerain of decadence. When Underground City is similarly cleansed and unbarnised; Ominiyi must now pay Scorpion in the same favour Scorpion has always shown him (Ominiyi) since childhood. With the destruction of Shiloh comes another definitive terror, exactly like the aftermath the displacement of Maroko's inhabitants to neigbouring communities of Ilasan, Ikota, Maroko-Beach, Aja and Okokomaiko did set off.

Edward (Neo-Colonialism): Edward Wood is different from what his colleagues are. He is pure of heart and humble even though his skin gives him unfair advantages from the groveling blacks. Edward is not thoroughly the kind of character Jude tries to depict. In his shallow differentness, he appears too smarmy. He combines the trait of neo-colonialism with unmatchable rectitude. In the way the colonial masters would today ensure their role of the Big Uncle is constantly played, his every step and attitude passes quick judgment on what are wrong with the country. Edward is too impatient to comment on the things that are not being done in the upright norm. His unchecked leaning to the allure the female black skin gives him does not end with his marriage to Ndeusoh. He soon becomes tired of her and always wanting to extend his trident to fish for other black roundedness. Females' blacks' beauty becomes the artifacts he must acquire, feel and possess.

Plucking the feathers off the Bird

   The insolvability of the issue in the prologue sours the book for me. An issue as complicated and historically relevant as the Maroko eviction exercise can't just be given to the random indecisiveness of writing to ruin its tangibility. The uncertainty of the rationale behind the assassination of Katherine sides against the very excuse that brought about the Maroko incident initially. Katherine's massacre is projected to be one of the characterizing frequencies plaguing the slum. Katherine's case can't just be fobbed off in that manner; Scorpion carries out a contract killing, that isn't a blitz attack that the absence of its resolution in the book shows. Blackbird might not have been written as a thriller, the indetermination of its prologue doesn't seat well with the brass tacks of an historical novel.

Maroko's event cannot be properly recorded without the Oniru's royal family role clearly stated. Maroko is an important history revolving around numerous unresolved conflicts. Any subtraction of core details thins down the essence of the retelling. In the Oniru's instance, the dynamic characterization of the Arebi's family would have been a perfect depiction of the Oniru's contribution to the whole scenario in 1990. The passivity of the Arebis is a big wasted material in the book.

With the editing flop in the book, I should be hiding my head in shame, having once praised Jalaa Writers' Collective here. Now, only the silent spirit would know what the cassava tubers and its paraffin fellow would be saying in whispers, chortling in the glory Jalaa's professional sloppiness has given them.

Used sources:

www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4156/the-art-of-fiction-no-45-continued-john-steinbeck

www.eau.sagepub.com/content/9/2/271.full.pdf

www.newmediaadvocacy.org/PDFs/SERAC_v_Nigeria.PDF

www.josephomotayo.blogspot.com/2011/08/promoting-books-jalaa-way.html

www.josephomotayo.blogspot.com/2011/11/on-maroko-writing-and-blackbird-talk.html