Review/Criticism
War Without End in Nigerian Literature | A review of The Road to the Country
Only the dead have seen the end of war- George Santayana Book: The Road to the Country, Author: Chigozie Obioma Publisher: Masobe Books, Lagos Year: 2024 The Nigeria civil war (1967-70) has produced so many literary works that it would be a surprise if definitive course (s) on the war is not already in our […]
A Psychosocial Reading of Saddiq Dzukogi’s Your Crib, My Qibla
John Pepper Clark, the renowned Africa poet, playwright and scholar, in his acclaimed poem “The Casualties” offered a profound postulation on the complexity of war and victimhood when he remarked that “The casualties are not only those who are dead…” as a response to the divisive rhetoric and counter accusations that trailed the Nigerian civil […]
Forging Memories of Moments and Places
If his debut collection, Where the Baedeker Leads: A Poetic Journey, enacts place-centric imagination and diasporic consciousness, James Yeku’s latest work, A Phial of Passing Memories, articulates further “memoir-poetic” narratives in 60 poems coordinated in five sections that detail diverse encounters in moments and places. His poetry picks on well-ranged, everyday experiences: birth, parenting, death, […]
The Devil’s Sermon of Ryan Coogler in Sinners
See, I’m full of the blues, holy water too – Preacher Boy At the time of death, legendary Delta blues musician, Robert Johnson, was only 27. He had disappeared quietly, so quiet that the world did not hear a word about it until nearly three decades later, when a researcher stumbled upon his death certificate […]
Thinking Erasure in African Literature
There is a peculiar fate in literature: some books die and some books are killed, not because they weren’t read or weren’t loved, but because they were regarded as unbearable. And some simply refuse to vanish. They exist as whispers, as rumors in footnotes, as echoes in the margins of other people’s stories. Mohamed Mbougar […]
Toward The Lossless Translation | Review by Tádé Ìpàdéọlá
“The work itself is a study in how the ideology of the novel works, I think.” —Akin Adeṣọkan, 2013. Chief Isaac Delano was one of the most important Yorùbá writers of the 20th century. The ‘Chief’ in his title and the spelling of his surname “Delano” may carry American echoes but they are emphatically African. […]