ktravula - a travelogue! » Reading

Poetry Reading…

Kola — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 12:56:10 +0000

Hanging out with writers and poets at a cafe downtown last night…

The open-mic poetry reading was sponsored by the English Language and Literature Association. Poets and readers include Jason Braun, David Rawson, Geoff Schmidt and others. Earlier in the day was a similar event at the school library featuring Eugene B. Redmond, the Poet Laureate of East St. Louis.

I read four unpublished poems.

Reading in Lagos

Kola — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 09:22:24 +0000

Join the Jalaa Writers Collective this weekend for a day of reading by some of Nigeria’s most promising writers. Join them as they address questions about publishing in Nigeria and what a Writers’ Collective may offer, what Jalaa Writers Collective offers. The event is FREE!

Date: August 13, 2011

Venue: Freedom Park, Broad Street, Opposite. General Hospital. Lagos.

Readings by:

A. Igoni Barrett, one-time editor of Farafina Magazine is the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His first book, the story collection “From Caves of Rotten Teeth”, was published in 2005 in Nigeria. His second story collection is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2013.

Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo is a lecturer, writer, novelist, critic, essayist, journalist, and administrator. She has written over twenty books. Her latest work “Roses and Bullets”, published by Jalaa Writers’ Collective is about the Nigerian Civil War. The former winner of the NLNG Prize for Literature, the biggest prize for literature in Nigeria, heads the Prize’s panel of judges this year.

Jude Dibia is the author of “Walking With Shadows”,” Unbridled” (winner of the 2007 NDDC/ANA sponsored Ken Saro-Wiwa Prize for Prose and finalist in the 2007 NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature) and the newest, “Blackbird”.

Odili Ujubuonu is the award winning author of Pregnancy of the Gods (Winner, 2006 ANA/Jacaranda Prize for Prose), Treasure in the Winds (winner, 2008 ANA/Chevron Prize on Environmental Issues) and the newest, “Pride of the Spider Clan.”

Uche Peter Umez is one of the 24 winners of the 2006 and 2008 Commonwealth Short Story Competition. No, he is not the actor. He is the winner of the 2006 ANA/Funtime Prize for Children Literature for his unpublished novel,” Sam and the Wallet, and 2008 ANA/Funtime Prize for Children Literature . He is the author of Dark through the Delta (poems), Tears in Her Eyes” (short stories) and “Aridity of Feelings” (poems). His latest work “The Runaway Hero” is on the NLNG Prize shortlist for 2011.

More information on Facebook.

Be Like the Road

Kola — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 17:11:42 +0000

Another excerpt from the reading presentation on campus last month. The poem is “Be Like the Road“, along with a short background story already familiar to regular readers of the blog.

Enjoy

Books Everywhere

Kola — Mon, 16 May 2011 22:18:41 +0000

As soon as school closed last week, professors emptied their shelves onto a table in our building. Old and new books, from fiction to plays and journals, poetry collections and textbooks lay spread there competing for attention. They were free to be taken away. By evening everyday, the best of the books would be gone. But by the next morning, there would be another load, and the process continued. I made a few selections every day of the week, including The Book of Yeat’s Poems by Hazard Adams and Exploring Language edited by Gary Goshgarian among many others.

Just last month, a colleague gracefully handed me a box filled with books of African writing published in the 70s. He had cleaned out his shelf and thought that I might be interested in the collection. I was. It is times like this that I wish that I was rich enough to pay for shipping costs to send tonnes of books no longer useful to their owners to small-town libraries and bookstores in Ibadan where young literary minds can get access to them. When I’m done with these, I’ll have to hand them to someone else who might find them useful. It’s hard to think that in a few years, the concept of books itself will have eventually become archaic, especially in these parts.

America Tonight (visuals)

Kola — Fri, 13 May 2011 15:02:48 +0000

As a guest of the S.P.E.A.C (Students/Professors Exploring All Cultures) club at SIUE last month, I read a couple of (in-progress as well as already published) works to a small but diverse audience in the Willows Room. Here’s me reading America Tonight and sharing a little background story.

The poem itself was first blogged here, and later published here. Enjoy

Of Books and Used Books

Kola — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 15:05:39 +0000

I like books, but only to the extent that they don’t become a physical burden. When I was younger, I used to like the idea of a stacked bookshelf filled with books of different kinds – even when I didn’t get to read them all. My room when I was between fourteen and eighteen was filled with over two hundred books that I’d gathered from all around the house. I studied library archiving methods from books and made a list of all of them, delighting in the ability to monitor their movement whenever anyone borrowed them.

Much of those book were pass-me-downs from father and elder siblings. Father gave me tonnes of Readers’ Digest issues from the 60s and 70s along with series of novels from a writer called Dennis Robins. Sisters read James Hardley Chase and Harold Robins and a few Mills and Boons series. There were also books from the African Pacesetter series that provided an opening into a world of new adventures. The real heavyweight literature texts however were from Shakespeare (father gave me his copy of The Complete Works), Wole Soyinka (we had a copy of The Lion and the Jewel as well as The Jero Plays. I never did figure out who owned them. They could have strayed in somehow from borrowings. I remember vividly when father handed me his copy of Ake, saying, “This is one of his most accessible prose works. Even I can understand it. It turned out to be one of the writer’s most delightful reads.), Chukwuemeka Ike (The Bottled Leopard, The Naked Gods), D. Olu Olagoke’s The Incorruptible Judge, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o's Weep Not Child, Nkem Nwankwo (Danda and some other one I can’t remember now), Efua T. Sutherland’s Edufa, Chinua Achebe’s trilogies, and his outstanding Chike and the River which I read in primary school. I also remember Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge which I never read because at that time for a silly reason that it was too big a book to be read without accompanying pictures. Along with all of those were the Yoruba texts: all of D.O. Fagunwa’s books including the famous Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale, Bamiji Ojo’s Menumo, Adebayo Faleti’s Ogun Awitele, Akinwunmi Isola’s Efunsetan Aniwura (which we read in the Yoruba class in secondary school), father’s own poetry and prose collections, among so many others.

The house was a wonderland of sorts with such very many ideas locked in the pages of creative texts that I delighted not only in reading, but in making mine. I called the home library The Virgo Library and made a catalogue of all borrower. I also made a rubber stamp out of flip-flops and branded all of them with coded numbers all starting with VL. Much of the said library became depleted between 2000 and 2005 of undergraduate studies through lending and book exchanges with friends. In turn, I exchanged them for an introduction into a world of new texts and so called “adult” literature of Rushdie, Joyce, Marquez and the rest of them.

Then there was the other realization that half of the books we should even be reading didn’t even get to Nigeria on time, except occasionally through professors (like Niyi Osundare and Remi Raji) who brought them in truckloads after every return trip. We read voraciously from the many book exchanges with such trusting professors. It was a good thing that books – like the sea – renewed their buoyancy after each use, and the knowledge in them went around. Sometime when I think about it now that I’m in the US with Amazon.com at my fingertips, I wonder how much we missed out of back then because we didn’t have anywhere to buy books, or sometimes even the means to do so. Great books were encountered only in random places either in the shelf of a travelling professor, or in the corner of a used bookstore by the side of the road.

Most of the books on Amazon.com today have used equivalents that cost between $0.01 and $1, excluding shipping. What a delight, especially to find out when they arrive that they actually look as good as new. But what if they didn’t? Who cares? A book is a book is a book. The content will remain the same through pawings, markings, note taking, and dogearings. I’ll read it, leave a few notes in some of the margins, and hand them over to the next reader. These days I don’t keep books with me anymore. I find the concept of a stationary shelf of books to be tiring and not just because of the cost to move them around through airport baggage weight scanners. It might be why the Kindle or the iPad have become the next best companion of the itinerant reader. As clichéd as it might sound, there’s still an allure to the feel of real books, and I won’t tire to buying and reading them. And this, my friends, is why those who take a look at my new Amazon wishlist will find a list of books I’ve wanted to read, along with a few gadgets that have stolen my interest, including the iPad. (Hint: Mr. Jobs, here’s your chance to win me completely over).

What is the value of books, or knowledge, or even Christmas gifts? A delight, I tell you. Or ask a fifteen year old boy discovering the world, discovering himself through the words of others in the dead of night.

__________________________

Picture source: http://www.binarydollar.com/category/frugal/, http://stkarnick.com/culture/category/culture101/

Good Friends We Lost

Kola — Wed, 05 May 2010 06:18:52 +0000

I never met him in person, but his spirit reached out to me from as far back as 2000 at such a distant place as a negligible classroom in the University of Ibadan when I first read Nwokedi. The play featured blood, gore and very very angry philosophical retorts to life. I do not remember any of the lines in the play now, but I still carry its name in my head everywhere I go – was one of my first books to challenge my self-inflicted limits of playwriting imagination. My eyes hang heavy now. Esiaba Irobi, the roaring poet and playwright, has gone to be with the elders. He was greatness personified. I feel as pained to think of him in the past tense as I write a tribute to someone that I got to know only for a fleeting moment, but not nearly enough.

Rarely have books moved me the way Nwokedi did. Perhaps it was my innocence, or my search at that time for meaning and answers, or perhaps the mixed feeling that overwhelmed and sustained me from page to page as I pored over a work nuanced in poetry with satire and anger. I had always wanted to know who he was. Thinking about it now, it must also have been from the amazement that someone with that firebrand imagination and craft could have eluded popular discourse for so long. All we heard then was Wole Soyinka and Femi Osofisan in the field of playwriting. Where was Irobi when these great names were compiled? And why was I discovering this gem only in a first year course in my first week in the University? I forgot about the first year drama class, but I did not forget the name.

And then in 2006 or 2007, I joined the Wole Soyinka Society Yahoo group and was happy to find the man in the same creative space as I. We did not become friends, but we did exchange ideas about so many things. That group owes the robustness of its archives to that man. He was frank and unpretentious, and he was as fiery in his thinking as he was gentle in his appreciation of the little things of life. He wrote love poetry. (Who could tell?). He missed Nigeria and he reminisced about the frustrations he had while living there. At a point in 2008, he volunteered to donate his books free to people in Nigeria who were ready to start a reading club. On his own expenses, he was ready to ship as many as fifty books to whoever had asked for them. I asked for some on behalf of the Union of Campus Journalist in the University of Ibadan whose president I was for 18 months before I left the University, but I didn’t follow up on the request. He promised many other people as well.

A few months later, I learnt that he was fighting cancer. His participation in discussions on the forum dwindled until it was finally nil. And yesterday, I heard of his passing – a very very terrible loss. Those who know him will say how cerebral, and how genuinely personable he was. I can’t say as much, but from the snippets from his brain and person that I met through his novel Nwokedi and another one I read shortly afterwards, and from testimonies of his teaching style, fervour and humour, I wish I had met him. This Facebook Group made for him had celebrated his life for a couple of years now. Now, only tributes mark the wall.

Rest in Peace, oh great intellectual of repute; a joyful fellow, playwright, poet, educator, lover of all things good, storyteller, and in the words of tribute by one of his students in Ohio University where he finally got tenure after years of working, “the most brilliant teacher I’ve ever known.” Sleep well.

Now I have to go find Nwokedi to read again.

Books On My Desk

Kola — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:49:39 +0000

On Black Sisters’ Street by Chika Unigwe. This is a powerful book about the lives of prostitutes from Nigeria in the brothels of Belgium. To write this very moving account of an oft neglected but very crucial social phenomenon, the author had to travel to the red light districts of Belgium and conduct one-on-one interviews with the prostitutes, and record their stories. In a recent interview, she confessed that she was able to earn their trust only because they didn’t believe that she was a writer, but a novice hoping to learn the secrets of the trade by asking around. The author Chika, a Nigerian writer, lives in Beligium with her family. Her first book De Feniks was the first work of fiction to be written by a Flemish author of African origin. Get the books, and read them. As soon as I finish reading it, I hope to come back with a mini-review.

In Dependence by Sarah Ladipo Manyika. In judging this book first by its cover, I give deserved kudos to the artist who placed the map of my home town and the town of Oxford, UK on the two unknown faces that grace the pink cover. The novel itself tells the story of love that spans generations, continents, amidst several obstacles , passion, idealism, courage and betrayal. Of the book, this has been said: “…has the subtle power of a well woven work, nothing is out of place… it is full of surprises” among other nice things by journalists and reviewers.

The first chapter begins thus in a sentence of quite enticing prose: “One could begin with the dust, the heat and the purple bougainvillea. One might eve begin with the smell of rotting mangoes tossed by the side of the road where flies hummed and green-bellied lizards bobbed their orange heads while loitering in the sun.” So far, it is a very good read.

I can’t explain why I read so many books at once, as I can’t explain why I keep acquiring them. All I know is that some times my mood requires a different kind of literary satisfaction. At some other times, another. I recommend these two good books for their entertainment as well as their literary value.

For my copies of the book, let me thank Tayo who got me an autographed copy from Sarah Manyika, and sent the book to me all the way from Nigeria, and Ikhide who gave me his copy of “On Black Sister’s Street” along with his review notes within its margins. Then Chika Unigwe, the author herself who graciously sent me a copy from Belgium.

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