All posts by Kwabena Agyare Yeboah

By Kwabena Agyare Yeboah

• Title: The Fishermen
• Author: Chigozie Obioma
• Publisher: Cassava Republic Press
• Number of pages: 301
• Year of publication: 2015
• Category: Fiction

One day in the lives of four brothers, the eldest, Ikenna, comes home with an announcement stuck in his pocket. He assembles the rest of his brothers. His voice clean and shiny, he says to them that they would become fishermen. They would ply their trade in the Omi-Ala River. The river has seen great years. Once the source of life for the early settlers of Akure, the combined effect of modernity and time has rendered it useless, ‘A cradle besmeared’ (p 21). At the riverbank, they meet Abulu, a man who is equally gifted with seeing and insanity. His prophecy will bind and break the brothers. Their career will last nearly six weeks but they will bear the name – The Fishermen – for life. More…

By Kwabena Agyare Yeboah

• Title: The Road to Jamaica: Poems, 1968–1970, and New Poems, 2012–2013
• Author: Syl Cheney-Coker
• Publisher: Karantha Publishing House and Sierra Leonean Writers Series
• Number of pages: 67
• Year of publication: 2015
• Category: Poetry

In 2014, Richard Oduor Oduku wrote an essay that was essentially a lamentation. He was worried about his old, unpublished poems, about the fact that those poems might not be a good representation of his evolution and current thinking, about the fact that his old voice, which bore witness to a part of history, could be lost to time. At the end of ‘Where Do Old Unpublished Poems (and Stories) Go?’ he asks these questions:

Still, in your own life as a creator, where do your old unpublished poems (and stories) go? Do they acquire a life of their own and live undeterred in the darkness inside box locks or digital backups? Are they historied or they die off and reincarnate as new poems and stories? More…

By Kwabena Agyare Yeboah

• Title: Life, Love, Lies
• Author: Fonkeng E f
• Publisher: Langaa RPCIG
• Number of pages: 32
• Year of publication: 2015
• Category: Essays

Life, Love, Lies reads like a Twitter rant. What is contained in the book is the conclusion of a thought process, but we are not privy to the thought process itself. This makes the conclusion both difficult and easy to disagree with. At the end of it, the meaning-making of the book is subjective, just as our meaning-making, everyone of us, is subjective.

Life, Love, Lies is a book full of contradictions. The introductory note first warns that these ‘reflections are not presented as philosophy, nay theology’ and then it cautions the reader to ‘stay off the more or less mysterious path even if a number of reflections might end up projecting that (Socratic-Aristotelian-Platonic) aura’. More…

By Kwabena Agyare Yeboah

• Title: The Birth of Illusion
• Author: Jumoke Verissimo
• Publisher: Fullpoint Publications and Communications
• Number of pages: 83
• Year of publication: 2015
• Category: Poetry

‘Once upon a time in one’s land not far not near

Pigs ruled men and ate their carcass for lunch

Men became pigs and ate themselves for dinner

And then pain designed poetry into gelatin brains

To conjure feelings in the stitched spines of papers’

The quotation above is from Jumoke Verissimo’s poem, ‘The Birth of Poets’, which appears in the collection The Birth of Illusion. The quoted lines set up what the collection concerns itself with. It paints the idea that the world is full of absurdity. And, that is why there is poetry and poets. Poetry is for the people and the poet is one of the people. She, the poet, should speak to power. She should unsettle. She should interrogate the establishment. She should be an enquirer of the human soul. More…

By Kwabena Agyare Yeboah

• Title: London – Cape Town – Joburg
• Author: Zukiswa Wanner
• Publisher: Kwela Books
• Number of pages: 337
• Year of publication: 2014
• Category: Fiction

Zukiswa Wanner’s witty prose excites, unsettles and discomforts in shocking ways. It reminds the reader, in certain ways, of Ama Ata Aidoo’s prose, but Wanner’s prose is subtler and her work is richer than art that is directed solely at provoking the establishment. More…