World
On Speech and Gender Relations in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
“Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten,” says the narrator of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (TFA). Here is the place of speech (and its absence) in Umuofia, the fictional Igbo community where TFA is set, since conversation is the art of […]
Does the Body Ever Get Familiar with Grief?
–For Oby, Albert, Quadri, and everyone who left us too early Does the body ever get familiar with grief?This sinking, this drowningGoing underwater and unable to find an anchor Does one ever get used to sorrow?The smile on the face of a strangerThe singsong laughter of a passer-byA look that reminds of exactlyHow much you loved life Is there […]
Epiphany of Trauma in Rasaq Malik Gbolahan’s ‘The Other Names of Grief’
The tragic exploits of killer-herders in Zamfara and Igangan, Edo and Ondo; a breadwinner razed in fire for the twin crimes of blasphemy and heresy by self-appointed custodians of faith and morals; orphans dying of the throes of hunger; a woman beaten to death for the womanly crime of being a wife and mother, the […]