The titular story ‘The Visit’ which takes on the perspective of a ghost shows a willingness to look past realism and venture into speculative fiction. This experimentation is repeated in ‘The Curse’ in which supernatural and material realities coexist, and ‘Going West’, an imagined future where Lagos is engulfed by terrorist attacks. Although the story in ‘The Curse’ feels incomplete and the chronological sequence of certain events in ‘Going West’ could be more finely tuned, these are minor missteps in the grand scheme of things.
Book Review
Even so, Why Does God Need a Gun? achieves something noble: the creation and preservation of an important voice. Its poems, dense with lyricism, challenge us never to stop questioning our realities and beliefs, celebrating the boundlessness of human thought and consciousness as the closest thing possible to true divinity.
Ultimately, the poems of Jazz Negotiations celebrate music, sound, and the possibilities of language as they entwine intimately with every corner of existence. To read these poems is to appreciate the ingenuity of the collection’s structure, the depth and wisdom interlaced with melodic exhortation, the effortless movement from reverence to activism to observation to philosophy, so that one is ferried across borders: from protest to testimony, from recital to homage, from dirge to rapture.
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.
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.
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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.