ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Literature category.

Excerpts from Noah Town by Leke Adesanya

If you ever come to Noah Town, you’ll probably arrive by coach. The long buses come off interstate trunk roads from far and near, from smaller towns and villages were dreams of making it in the big city still has its allure. The buses pour out streams of young men and women hourly at almost a clockwork rate. They come with their dreams and aspirations, their bags and little savings. They are drawn to a metropolis where the street lights never go off and there is money to be made with beautiful bodies, willing hands or daring minds. I know them. I was once like them.

Your coach should come to a stop at the terminal on Main Street, just at the beginning of the two mile stretch of long dual rows of hardware stores, fashion stores and business offices. As you disembark , in the mornings, you might hear the dull drone of street sweeper trucks vacuuming the road. A soft feminine voice will welcome you to Noah Town over the terminal’s public address system , advising you to mind your luggage.

Touts may accost you, offering to help you get a cheaper hotel or unlicensed taxi , some with the intent to unburden you of your few valuables. You would be better off strolling to the Visitor Centre to book a cab or walk a bit farther down the road to catch a local bus ride. Or maybe someone, perhaps a relative or friend has arranged to pick you up.

Whatever are your options on arrival, you wouldn’t help but notice two old grey storey buildings situated almost opposite each other. Their Brazilian architecture with mock Roman marble columns add a air of gravitas that make them stand out amid melange of functional matchbox shaped buildings. They are the two big banks of Noah Town.

Scores of men with crew cuts in blue or black suits march in confident strides in and out of the two grand old buildings. On the right, if you are coming from the Terminus, next to the divisional police office is the local branch of National Bank. And on the left, behind a fibre glass fountain cast of an elephant pumping water out of its trunk, is the local land bank owned by former loan shark now turned legit financier, Mr Barido Freeman. Everybody calls him Barry.

He is reputed to be very influential. I have had occasion to meet him myself, informally of course, and I found him intimidating. He owns a significant portion of the businesses and real estate in Noah Town. Sixty years old and not looking a day younger, Barry is big boned and tall, slightly balding but still working that regal look. What was left of his receding hairline, he grew into big white halo with brown dusts.

When you are told by your guide that he started out as an immigrant with nothing on him but a knapsack slung across his shoulder, you would probably be impressed too by what he has made of himself. You would think, if he can, maybe you can. He is the stuff of which legends are made.

Barry manages to keep his family out of the tabloids. Although he has never married , he had a love child, twenty years old Norah whose mother has been out of the picture since like forever. Norah, I have heard, was worth her weight in trouble and then some. Twice expelled from expensive boarding schools abroad where Barry had hidden her, she eventually dropped out, called it quits and came back home.

Barry got her an office in the family business and engaged Cuba, an ex-cop as her bodyguard, mainly to keep her out of trouble. Cuba used to be an ambitious police officer on the rise till one day he shot a teenage kid playing with a toy gun and the top brass threw him under the bus. Taking care of Norah was a better paying job however and he intended to keep it forever. A shrewd guy, he kept Norah out of trouble mainly by making sure Barry never heard of it.

A major challenge for Cuba on job was handling Nora’s long list of hangers-on, most of whom were willing to get whatever Nora requests of them even if it were illegal. Prominent in that clique was Vera, her BFF and confidant. Vera used to be a bartender at a night club on Boardwalk, Noah Town’s entertainment district, where she met Norah and the two hit it off.

Like any street hustler, Vera knew she had found a winning lottery ticket with Norah. How did I get involved with this clique? Stay with me, I was going to explain.

Vera and I once dated, very briefly. Vera also happens to have a twin brother called Jude. Jude and I, we go way back to the time we were still hungry backpackers just come off a bus on Main Street. That was a life time ago, of course.

Jude and I are now business partners, we run a little taxi operation that is thriving very well, thank you very much. Nothing fancy, just a dozen old cars in great working condition and a long list of repeat loyal patrons.

We started out as two unlicensed cab drivers willing to work all night in what was then the notorious Boardwalk. Later we formed a partnership, got licensed and started adding more cars and drivers. We evolved into an effective relationship; he handles the drivers’ scheduling and getting of corporate customers while I take care of the back office and car maintenance issues.

Once two guys have had a big fight and then gotten over it, they tend to bond well. That was what happened to Jude and I. I could implicitly trust him to have my back, at least until the events I am narrating to you now started.

One ordinary Tuesday, Jude dropped by at lunch to inform me that we have an inquiry from a prospective investor. Barry – yeah, that Barry – wanted to buy out our little operation. Could I look at our books and come up with a working valuation, just in case this turned out to be a real deal?

Sure, I replied. I acted all cool about it though I was very, very excited. I mean if the price is right, like five times annual revenues, surely why not? But then he clarified. What he really wanted to know was, at what price was I willing to cash out. They wanted to buy me out and let Jude run the operation.

By the way, by then, he was hanging out a lot with Norah . And I was worried about her Daddy. Barry was like the king of Noah Town and rumour had it, he might or might not have had mob ties. If you don’t cooperate with his type, there was the unspoken threat that he might not be pleased. This was scary to me. I don’t want to end up drowning in the Noah Lagoon like some overconfident yokel who dared above his match. And since I love the feel of fresh cash stacks in my palm like the next guy, I felt I had better play along.

I doubled my calculated asking price, asked for not half but all of five times annual revenues. We shook hands over that and he said I should give him some time to iron it out with his principal, Barry. I started to look at Jude funny from then on. But I am getting ahead of myself.

I started to daydream of the day I’ll get to seat with Jude, Norah & co. , and firm up the terms of sale. I knew what I would do with the money when it hits my account. I would take a long holiday first, to somewhere far from Noah Town. I have earned it. I’ll go somewhere where it is cold in summer. Maybe I could learn to ski in middle age, who knows?

Those were my thoughts until a Saturday, some days later, when I picked up a copy of the local evening tabloid and read the headline, “Barry’s Girl Kidnapped”. I had a premonition that, after that event, things wouldn’t turn out exactly as planned.

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Blurb

It was meant to be a safe job. They fake a kidnap of the millionaire’s daughter, collect the ransom and share it with her. But then things started to go wrong. As the body count continues to rise, Tony finds himself in the cross-hairs of a deadly gang as he tries to save his best friend’s widow.

Links

Available on Okada Books :

http://www.okadabooks.com/book/about/noah_town/12419

Available on Kindle ;

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01MG4KELQ

Aké Festival 2016: How History is Made

A festival is just a festival, isn’t it? A gathering of tribes, a place of ideas and relationships, a week-long commingling of the most cerebral kind. But it is also something else: an annual attempt to write the history of the continent’s literary track in the minds of its practitioners and for posterity. This latter purpose is usually the least stated on the invitation brochure.

Participation in this year’s events, I’ve said elsewhere, is my most memorable, but not for the obvious reason of my meeting (and working with) Ngugi wa Thiong’o who is the guiding light of my work in indigenous language advocacy. Or perhaps that is the reason. It won’t matter anyway. The history of this year’s events is being written in different inks and by different observers towards different but complementary ends.

A while ago, someone wondered whether canons are being built around conversations on African language literature, and I responded that festivals, Facebook conversations, and interactions surrounding relevant seminal works of criticism all contribute, in small ways, to the complete tapestry whose form may not always be evident from the current standpoint of one literary thread. I still believe that. For all the memorability I’ve ascribed to this year’s event, I was not there when this apparently notable conversation took place, and I’m all the poorer for it. But the questions raised by this subsequent review of the event by Mr. Rótińwá, separate from the mass cheering on the spot that may have convinced a casual observer of a different takeaway, will live on. And there are many more of those.

A panel I moderated (video below), set up ostensibly to explore the similar and divergent themes in the memoirs of two important African writers (of different languages), ended up on an even more memorable note: the relevance of archiving and the role of manual writing in the preservation of a writer’s legacy and growth. When I thought of questioning the Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou about what he described as an obsessive write-and-destroy habit that had his travel box littered with disposed writings on paper that he no longer liked, I wanted to satiate my curiosity. But I also thought of the episode as possibly illustrative of the obsessiveness of writers generally during the process of creating. In the end, I – and, as it turned out, the audience – got enlightened by a more substantive conversation around the place of preservation of paper drafts (and archiving in general) in the understanding of the writer’s creative and personal trajectory, thanks to Emma Shercliff, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Alain himself.

What the conversation illustrated for me, among others, was a lack of consensus, today, on the “proper” way of creating and shepherding manuscripts. Those of us who grew up in the internet age have taken for granted the benefit of crowd storage and the power of an easy copy/paste/delete on a word processor to care about the true grit of manual writing, crossing out, and re-writing until the draft is perfect, while still keeping the original draft either as a guiding light of the initial intention and insurance against future impulsiveness or as sentimental record of the individual step in the process. But more than that, as Alain and Ngugi pointed out, there is also a financial (as well as archival) incentive for this old-school process: there are scholars, students, and future enthusiasts of the writer’s life and work that will pay a fortune to have access to the initial drafts of whatever eventually becomes a well-accepted work. This helps the culture of criticism and better opens up the writer to perhaps better study.

When he writes on the computer, he said, Alain treats each line of writing as an indelible record that needs special care and preservation. As he puts it, he has different versions of the same work on his computer and would rather create a new one each time than edit the already written one – in spite of the ease given by computers to do so. Isn’t that fascinating? To think that the ubiquity of computers isn’t yet sufficient motivation – in relevant writing quarters – to ditch the drudgery of manual or manual-like documentation. Perhaps not enough has been written about this rebellion and/or the benefit of such active labour in this age of 140-character fickleness. Forget the fight between the Kindle and paperback books. Pen vs Keyboard is where the conversation needs (and will continue) to happen. I will likely forget many of the other questions I asked on that panel but the response to (and conversation around) this one on pen and paper writing and documentation will, and should, live forever.

The Makerere Conference of 1962 is notable today for a particular conversation on the use of English (and other colonial languages) in African literature. Not much from that conference has lived on in popular lore as that particular debate has. In every edition of the Aké Arts and Book Festival, looking out for such usually short but relevant spark that outlasts a week of commingling has become my yearly obsession. It is to the credit of the organisers that the opportunities are many for such dynamic conversation, debates, arguments, fawning, performance, and even lust (as this report rebelliously recalls). But we remember differently, as it is often said, which is probably for the better. It all comes together eventually. And the culture is richer for it.

Press Release: Irawo Poetry Anthology

PRESS RELEASE – Ibadan, November 21, 2016

Irawo Poetry Anthology:

48 poems celebrating 48 years of Irawo University Centre, Ibadan

We are glad to announce that 48 poems have been accepted for publication in the 2017 Irawo Poetry Anthology.

Irawo University Centre is a private hall of residence for male students, principally of the University of Ibadan. This Centre is one of the numerous educational and social welfare projects promoted by the Educational Co-operation Society, a non-profit oriented body. Irawo was established in 1969, admitted her first residents in 1972 and moved to its definitive site in 1990. That same year, the University of Ibadan recognized Irawo University Centre as “a private hall of residence associated with the university” – the first to be thus acknowledged in the Nigeria University System. The key aim of Irawo is to contribute to the academic, professional, human, cultural and spiritual formation of the student. To do this, emphasis is placed on creating in Irawo an atmosphere conducive to serious academic work.

It will be recalled that earlier this year we made a call for submissions for the Irawo Poetry Anthology as part of activities to commemorate the 48th Anniversary of Irawo University Centre. The proceeds from the sale of the anthology will be ploughed into the Irawo Development Fund. The themes for the call for submissions were poems reflecting the following: justice, unity, strength, perseverance, progress, love and diversity. The call for entry closed at 12 midnight of August 31, 2016.

We received a total of 107 submissions from 54 Nigerian poets. The poems went through a blind review process by three renowned Nigerian writers. The three distinguished judges are: Tádé Ìpàdéọlá (lawyer, author of Sahara Testaments which won the 2013 NLNG Prize for Poetry and winner of the 2009 Delphic Laurel in Poetry), Mark Nwagwu (Professor of Molecular & Cell Biology and author of the poetry trilogy – Helen not of Troy, Cat Man Dew and HelenaVenus) and Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún (Fulbright scholar, writer, linguist, Editor of The Sail Literary Anthology and Founder of YorubaName.com).

The 48 considered suitable by the judges for the Irawo Poetry Anthology are listed below.

S/No	Title	Poet
1	Crux	Lawrence Aniawana
2	Timi	Uchenna J. Obi-Ibeh
3	The Voice	Ogunlaye Olatunde
4	A Letter to the Future	Chidiebere G. Udeokechukwu
5	The Key	Stanley Aduaka
6	Broken	Boluwatife Afolabi
7	A Song of Colours	Boluwatife Afolabi
8	Can Two Be One?	Oluwatoyosi Agbaaikin
9	Is Love?	Oluwatoyosi Agbaaikin
10	Ifunaya….	Ololade Akinlabi
11	The Scales, the Blindfold and the Sword	Obinna Amaji
12	Bed of Stone	Amamchukwu Chinonoso
13	Ife Mi	Amamchukwu Chinonoso
14	Friendly Foes	Amamchukwu Chinonoso
15	Awaken	Sandra Arukwe
16	Tomorrow	Sandra Arukwe
17	Herald	Bukoye Emmanuel
18	One	Bukoye Emmanuel
19	Vigor and Vapor	Kelvin Enumah
20	Quake; the Future at Stake	Kelvin Enumah
21	A Fu Gi Anaya	Norbert Gora
22	The Broken Last Straw	Ikeobi Samuel Chukwubuokem
23	Sapele Water	Emuobome Jemikalajah
24	Ikenike	Emuobome Jemikalajah
25	Lost Ones	Fumbi Ajumobi
26	Dear Dunni	Mofoluwawo O Mojolaoluwa
27	The Sun Will Smile	Chuks Obi
28	Behind Bars	Chuks Obi
29	The Sun Shall Soon Shine	Ojo Oreluwa
30	Let’s Stay Together…	Segun Onaade
31	Abiku	Teleola Onifade
32	Kafanchan	Ayomide Owoyemi
33	Kiniun Onibudo	Ayomide Owoyemi
34	Palm Tree	Oluwatobi Moses Sotanmide
35	One Day	Oluwatobi Moses Sotanmide
36	Innocent Till Proven Guilty	Chidi Joe Umechukwu
37	Virtual Reality	Olufemi Abidogun
38	My Memorabilia	Tumilara Adesina
39	Story of our Toppled Storey	Tumilara Adesina
40	Moving Clouds	Ebisike Chinedum
41	Unity	Mofoluwawo Favour Ona-Ara
42	Dawn	Taiwo Olawehinmi
43	The Housewife	Luke Ogar
44	The Ghost Town	Luke Ogar
45	Island of Ice	Emmanuel Nwobi
46	Rumble in the Jungle	Emmanuel Nwobi
47	The Repose of an Anthill	Emmanuel Nwobi
48	Back to our Roots	Mahuemolen Odibo

Nwachukwu Egbunike and Emmanuel Nwobi

Editors

Irawo Poetry Anthology

In Pursuit of a Canon

One of the issues that came out of the conversation, yesterday, at the Q&A part of the Press Conference to announce the winner of the Nigeria (LNG) Prize for Literature is whether the judges on the award panel are too old to understand contemporary literature. It was an indirect hit in form of a question from one of the journalists in the room about the currency of the judges’ knowledge about current trends. But the chair of the advisory council, Professor Ayọ̀ Bánjọ, picked up the snark and addressed it fully, defending his team’s savvy and curiosity: “Because we’re old doesn’t mean that we don’t know what is going on. We try to keep up.” Or something to that effect.

But he also went on to suggest that the public make their work easier (if not also superfluous) by generating sufficient debate around each year’s long-listed (and shortlisted) works in order to enrich the canon with smart takes, appraisal, and criticism of each of the work during and after the process of the Prize announcement. He said, and I’m paraphrasing, If you don’t engage the work and create an industry of conversations around them and around the trade, we as judges, may be denied an opportunity to be familiar what is new, and we’d be forced instead to judge the works we are given by the standards with which we are familiar, which may not always be modern. It was both a humble cry for help and a smart take on the state of literary criticism in the country.

Perhaps aware of a criticism of the Prize as being rich in money but not in the elevation of the craft, Professor Bánjọ was throwing the challenge back to the community to not leave the important work of the whole process – criticism, which enhances the value of the work and engages the audience on a second level – to the judges alone. Notable was the fact that no one was rewarded this year with the prize for Literary Criticism which had always been a part of the annual award.

He has a point. Many writers who have won the Nigerian Prize – as also pointed out by another questioner – have gone into oblivion with no follow-up work, as if the cash payout of the award had delivered a knockout punch to their creative ability or drive. Certainly, the point can be made that if the work of past winners of such a prestigious prize do not gain more critical interest after such an honour, or increase in sales at the bookstores, or even show up in more quantity on book stands as a result of the award boost, the Prize would have failed in a major way. And what creates this kind of interest is not just the distribution of the books at the award ceremony as the NLNG already does, or a donation of copies to public libraries which is also a good thing, but a critical engagement by other writers and critics of each work as soon as the long list is made, and before/after the award winner is announced.

This is where the indictment of the community is deserved.

The Caine Prize is a much smaller prize in terms of cash reward, but has been deemed way more prestigious across the continent for its sustenance of critical conversation on African literary production though it only rewards writers working in the short story form. There is a couple of reasons for that. The prize has an active online engagement strategy that covers the continent, involves the writing community, and stays connected to the source of important conversations regarding the writers it shortlists. It also has an annual retreat/writer’s workshop in which writers are made to produce works that are then published as an annual anthology. It does this on a budget most likely smaller than that of a prize that awards $100k to an individual every year.

But perhaps more importantly, for the Caine Prize, is that writers and critics also pay attention to each shortlisted story, which are usually carefully reviewed online before the prize announcement. Notable among these annual exercises is the Caine Prize Blogathon founded by Aaron Bady through which interested critics take on each or all of the shortlisted stories each year, and review them individually and as against the criteria of the prize. I have been a part of this exercise since 2013 and enjoyed the process, which brings me much closer to the works than I would ordinarily have. We’d never know how much this annual exercise affects the decision of the judges, but responses to past editions of the Blogathon shows that the large literary community across the continent does pay attention to what is being said and how. It enriches the profession, helps the writers, benefits the readers interested in critical engagement, and makes the prize better.

We need the same for the Nigerian Prize for Literature. All shortlisted books should be made available for free – if possible – to interested reviewers for critical engagement on online and print platforms. Maybe it will make the prize better. But certainly, it will enrich the community of Nigerian readers, and writers.

The Nigerian Prize For Literature 2016: The Judges’ Report

Editor’s note: Today, at Sheraton Hotel, Ikẹjà, Lagos, the winner of the 2016 Nigeria Prize for Literature was announced as Abubakar Adam Ibrahim for his novel Season of Crimson Blossoms (Parressia, 2015) and for the “competent manner in which Ibrahim demonstrated the execution of his work.” Here is the full speech given by Emeritus Professor Ayọ̀ Bánjọ, the Chairman of the Advisory Board for the Prize, on the justification for the prize, and other commentary on the whole judging process.

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GENERAL COMMENTS ABOUT THE 2016 COMPETITION BY PROFESSOR AYỌ BÁNJỌ

The Nigeria Prize for Literature is an annual competition which awards annual prizes to winning entries in the literary genres of Prose Fiction, Drama, Poetry and Children’s Literature on a rotational basis.

This year, the genre in focus is Prose Fiction. The following advertised rules were applied during the process of short listing and selecting the winning entry.

Eligibility: The competition is open to all Nigerians anywhere in the world. This does not mean that writing about other peoples and cultures in a foreign setting is acceptable.

Relevance should be interpreted as consistency with the goals and aspirations of the Nigerian nation and its peoples – specifically, respect for their traditions and their identity as Africans.

Publishing: The prize is meant to encourage local publishing and book distribution, among other goals. Books published outside the country are eligible for entry. Only properly published texts are acceptable. However, efficient editing and good presentation of text are considered essential parts of publishing and are taken into account during the process of evaluation. The quality of the language is important, and errors of style and grammar are considered major blemishes; these errors may not pass as typographical errors.

Genre: for this year’s competition, a basic distinction is drawn between fiction – that is imaginative prose which may incorporate factual materials and non-fiction like history, biography and sociological tracts which sometimes feature in the submissions for the competition.

This year’s completion has attracted a strong field with such high quality that even without this current shortlist of 3 books there would have still been a winner.

COMMENTS ON SHORTLIST OF THREE BOOKS

All the three shortlisted texts cover a wide range of urgent societal and cultural issues such as the status of women in a patriarchal society, the education of youths, the search for identity, the danger of youth unemployment, corruption, insurgency, religious hypocrisy, migration, broken homes and single parenthood and attendant impact on women and children who are usually at the receiving end of most of these problems.

Chika Unigwe’s Night Dancer, tells the familiar story of the continuing marginalization of women in Igbo society. The author shows a strong awareness of this context by the flavoring of the narrative with linguistic and cultural insertions. The novel tells the story of Mma, a young woman’s anguished search for her roots from the opening of the novel when she feels that she has been denied by her mother, until she gradually discovers that her mother had been deeply hurt by both her matrimonial and maiden families. In the course of Mma’s adventures in excavating her identity and her mother’s past, she is predictably confronted by the same cultural inhibitions that her mother had rebelled against. Mma’s own denunciation of those traditions and her belated adulation of a mother she had despised at the beginning of the novel is a slow and painful process of discovering the truth of her family background, and a radical change in her perception and understanding of this background. All this is aimed at validating Unigwe’s passionate call for the extension of the frontiers of women’s space in society.
Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday is a book about contemporary Northern Nigerian Society as seen through the eyes of a young man. The narrative is told from within a deviant community seen through the first person consciousness of street boys, popularly described as al-majiri. Virtually abandoned by parents and community the young boy, who tells the story in his own words, finds his survival through a brotherhood of other street boys. Their small outcast community is exploited by politicians and the brutally victimized as scapegoats by law enforcement agencies. They inevitably patronized and taken over by leaders of religious sects and become a source of recruitment terrorist groups. One of the strong points of the novel is its insight into the social mechanisms that lead to national crisis and terrorism or the social processes that give rise to religious fundamentalism and political hypocrisy, corruption and exploitation.

Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms is a very skillful and sympathetic narrative handling of a most psychologically and emotionally painful between an aging widow, who seeks release from her culturally imposed sexual repression, and a young outcast leader of a group of “weed” – i.e. hard drug – dealers who are ready thugs for politicians. In the background as immediately cause of the widow’s troubles, is the violent history of ethnic hatred and conflicts in Jos, placed within the larger context of contemporary Nigerian history with its complex and sometimes violent intertwining of politics, religion and culture. The novel moves from its evocative and passionate first sentence through a web of anxious moments to a tragic and painful conclusion with hardly a moment of respite. All through its projects through is main action, the implications of certain key social issues for younger audience – key issues such as early marriage, drug abuse and impact of relationships on human action. It is a novel whose narrow domestic action has wider universal relevance beyond its relevance for its immediate setting.

On behalf of the advisory board of the Nigeria Prize for Literature and of the judges and international consultant, I have the pleasure of announcing as the winner of this year’s entry, Season of Crimson Blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim.

________

The award ceremony will take place early next year.

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