This is the work of a poet-activist who believes language is a tool of revolution. The words burn yet are sublime. They rage, they blaze, sometimes they sputter, but the flame of artistry is never extinguished.
Book Review
It is a collection which explores communal grief, and collective trauma. But the collection’s exploration of the communal, does not deny the place of the individual. Agarau represents himself and his anxieties in poems like “A Boy Writes a Poem About Anxiety,” and “Doomsday.”
Literature written to inspire and motivate often gets a bad rap, but if Nigeria desires to defeat a culture of apathy and instil an ethos of civic leadership in its youth, then the daring feats and accomplishments of everyday local heroes need to be documented in a format digestible by young audiences
Towards the end of the novel, as Chidi’s world begins to unravel, another character, Billy of Asia, surfaces as an older man who, once deep in internet fraud at its onset, gave it all up to go legit. It is through him that Okehʼs moral observations are most plainly voiced, as Billy laments the proliferation of digital fraud among Nigerian youths as a symptom of a dying society.
In May, the WHO confirmed a new Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.…
On Close Examination, Gloria Chinyere Okwu, 2026; Cognix, pp 324 “Everyone who is born…
Riding the Storm: The Untold Story of Africa’s Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic by Toni…
For Lagosians or Nigerians or anyone remotely familiar with Lagos, it is difficult to read…
One Leg on Earth does not merely establish these themes of class inequality and environmental degradation; it weaves them into a dreadful mystery that also incorporates strains of Yoruba folklore. As more pregnant women surrender to watery deaths, Yosoye is plagued by nightmarish visions and ominous signs.
However marginal Kanneh-Mason’s Britishness may be, it is an identity that confers her more than a modicum of privilege elsewhere and it is rather unfortunate that she does not probe this contradiction further. There is no mention, for instance, of the criticism her family has received in Antigua where their status as state-appointed cultural ambassadors is perceived to have come at the expense of local calypso artistes whose musical contributions are more entrenched in Antiguan society.
But The Comfort of Distant Stars is not exclusively a novel of lofty ideas and grave philosophy. Running beneath the intellectual current is the quiet drama of Ezeani’s troubled life and its constant entanglement with Anyanwu’s contested existence, driving a turbulent dynamic that keeps the novel emotionally tethered. And at the heart of it all lies the state of Ezeaniʼs mind, and Echeruo allows us to sit with the sobering possibility of mental debilitation, of genius misunderstood, dismissed, and finally consumed by its own weight.
At the centre of this strange and compelling universe stands Anyanwu, the sun god, a character rendered with both mythical grandeur and startling ordinariness. He is not confined to the heavens or trapped within ancient folklore. Instead, he walks among men. He goes to the cinema in Bodija, drinks palm wine and Fanta, laughs loudly while watching Chinese films, quarrels, fights physically with men and runs to fight another day. The blending of the divine with the mundane gives the novel its peculiar energy and originality. The supernatural is domesticated without losing its mystery, collapsing the boundaries between gods and humans, spirits and flesh.