All posts by Tade Ipadeola

By Tade Ipadeola

• Title: Writing Namibia: Literature in Transition
  
• Editors: Sarala Krishnamurthy and Helen Vale
• Publisher: University of Namibia Press
• Number of pages: 379
• Year of publication: 2018
• Category: Essays

Namibia hosts pristine terrain, geologists and biologists tell us, holding vital clues from the time the planet became the right temperature to support life. The country is also host to perhaps the oldest desert in the world – more than 50 million years old, with life hidden in crevices as cyanobacteria amidst apparent aridity. The Namib Desert inspired the name of the country. Colonised since 1884 and known for a long time thereafter as South West Africa, becoming independent in March 1990 and by then known as Namibia, she would be renamed ‘Nambia’, twice, by a not-so-literate head of a foreign superpower in September 2017. What does the literature of Namibia have to say to us once we step out of the prehistoric Namib and the range of malapropism’s microphones in America? More…

By Tade Ipadeola

• Title: Animist Chants and Memorials 
  
• Author: Harry Garuba
• Publisher: Kraft Books Ltd
• Number of pages: 79
• Year of publication: 2018
• Category: Poetry

‘Can we ever again shred the drapery of the word

and return to the fullness of the spell and the chant?’ – Harry Garuba, ‘In the House of the Tongue’

‘What heart is large enough to store a question so long

it troubles every answer that history trades and analysts provide’ – Harry Garuba, ‘Girl and the Dancing Hoop’

The poet Harry Garuba has now published two volumes of poetry 35 years apart. The first of the volumes came from a 24-year-old mind and the second a 59-year-old consciousness, if consciousness can be reckoned by the calendar. Again, installing an eskhatos of any sort to benchmark the poetic output of Harry Garuba may not be a terribly useful undertaking because, like Rilke, even when Harry Garuba is washing his hands, he cannot help being a poet. In the annals of African poetry, the two events matter all the same because they touch – tangentially at first and then emphatically, on a way of seeing, and a way of reckoning and rendering reality that is closer to the geologic than it is to the chronologic – on ‘modern’ temper. More…

By Tade Ipadeola

• Title: Remains of a Tide (Poems 2014–2017)
  
• Author: J P Clark
• Publisher: Mosuro Publishers
• Number of pages: 70
• Year of publication: 2018
• Category: Poetry

‘Yes, calls will come of all kinds in the course

Of the day; some on notice; others

At random, the nice with the nasty; then

Finally, of course, the call, that will be

Recorded missed, the caller, having come

And gone away with the one for whom it rang’. – ‘Waiting for the Call’, J P Clark

Though praised early for his lyricism and by mid-career lauded for his stunning mastery of idiom, what stands the poetry of J P Clark apart has always consisted of a certain je ne sais quoi. The scholars search for it in his syntax and rhythm, exercise themselves in mapping it throughout his staggeringly varied oeuvre and now have a chance to plumb for it in Remains of a Tide (Poems 2014–2017), coming out of his octogenarian years and as stalwartly Clark as any collection from his youth. You will not find him changed from the man you knew, only surer of what he always held true as man and artist. More…

By Tade Ipadeola

• Title: Between Two Worlds
  
• Author: Amma Darko
• Publisher: Sub-Saharan Publishers
• Number of pages: 524
• Year of publication: 2015
• Category: Fiction

Generations of novelists from Ghana have added to the variety of styles and substance of African fiction in many ways. From Ama Ata Aidoo to Ayi Kwei Armah to Kojo Laing and Amma Darko, no two styles of writing are even remotely the same and the paths each have chosen have found followers from all over the continent. A certain pith, a certain depth and scope characterise the best fiction from Ghana and the land has not failed to yield new discoveries to date. More…

By Tade Ipadeola

• Title: Little Birds and Ordinary People
• Author: Deji Haastrup
• Publisher: Bookcraft Ltd
• Number of pages: 406
• Year of publication: 2017
• Category: Memoir

Recent Nigerian memoirs that are not at the same time hagiographies are very hard to come by indeed. The pleasure of encountering Little Birds and Ordinary People, a work straddling the nexus between the written meditation and the compte rendu was therefore welcome relief from the monuments of literary dross littering the landscape much like what passes, for the most part, for contemporary Nigerian architecture or legal practice or broadcasting. More…

By Tade Ipadeola

• Title: Otared
• Author: Mohammad Rabie
• Translator: Robin Moger
• Publisher: Hoopoe
• Number of pages: 341
• Year of publication: 2016
• Category: Fiction

The Ukrainian poet, Yuri Andrukhovych, once said that the formula for being human is memory plus hope. It is a neat formula and if he is correct, no novelist alive has subverted his vision as exhaustively as Mohammad Rabie. In a sprawling meditation on the phenomenon of Cairo, Egypt, the Arab Spring, colonialism and capitalism, Rabie presents his reader with a world utterly savage in the extreme. Otared is as far removed from the Cairo of Naguib Mahfouz as is imaginatively and stylistically possible. More…

By Tade Ipadeola

• Title: Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun
• Author: Sarah Ladipo Manyika
• Publisher: Cassava Republic Press
• Number of pages: 118
• Year of publication: 2016
• Category: Fiction

The newest novel by Sarah Ladipo Manyika tackles the human phenomenon of ageing and loss. It begins in an old house far away in San Francisco. It is a house that has survived significant stretches of time and even earthquakes. The novel ends in the same city, in a fast, low car fondly named Buttercup by its owner, the heroine of the tale. In between the opening movements of the novel and the denouement, the reader is taken on a wide-ranging journey through literal time zones and through varying geographies. The tale touches India and Nigeria, it touches French and Yorùbá, it slaloms through passages of love and perfumed mists rising from the wake of obdurate passion, it pants as a determined, quixotic, mule dripping with voluptuous confectionery meant for a sizzling, enigmatic sun. More…

By Tade Ipadeola

• Title: Song of Lawino
• Author: Okot p’Bitek
• Publisher: East African Publishing House
• Number of pages: 216
• Year of publication: 1966
• Category: Poetry

‘A song is a form of linguistic disobedience, and its sound casts doubt on more than a concrete philosophical system: it questions the entire philosophical order’. – Joseph Brodsky

In 1966, Okot p’Bitek, who wrote first in Acoli, then English – who made his mother his main muse – published Wer pa Lawino or Song of Lawino to wide acclaim, in Africa, by the East African Publishing House. At the time, there was no way of telling just how far Song of Lawino would travel. What was evident was that the poet had inaugurated a practice which defied easy categorisation and which ruptured the established conventions of poetry written in English or French or Portuguese and published on the continent. More…

By Tade Ipadeola

• Title: Full Tide: Collected Poems
• Author: J P Clark
• Publisher: Mosuro Publishers
• Number of pages: 423
• Year of publication: 2010
• Category: Poetry

‘Then struck the five hunters
But not together, not together.
One set out on his own into the night,
Four down their different spoors by the sea:
By light of stars at dawn
Each read in the plan a variant…’. – ‘Seasons of Omens’, J P Clark

A nation’s fortunes can be measured by the lot of her poets. In the case of Nigeria, it is a manifold tale of many dramatis personae and attitudes. Like Ireland, Nigeria has such a varied line-up of poets that it simply staggers the mind to list the players. Collectively, Nigerian poets have lifted the nation into a plane of regard such as few African nations can rival. The Congo, Ghana, Madagascar and South Africa are all strong contenders but Nigerian poets have so decisively weighed in that these other nations must ask: why are they so blest? More…