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I am enjoying
several books at once. I just finished reading EC Osondu’s ‘Voice of
America’. The title story alone is worth the price of the book. Osondu
uses crisp language, shorn of gimmicky frills to tell engaging, funny
stories. The stories spoke to me personally, and took me to an era I am
intimately familiar with. Osondu wrote about the past and it seemed
like it was here.

Uche Nduka has a
volume of poetry with the enigmatic title ‘Eel on Reef’. I adore Nduka,
I believe he is one of Africa’s most important poets, he writes with
care, erudition, vision and affection, every word in place, almost
fastidious, but still bold. Find that book and devour every luscious
word, this is how to write poetry.

The journal AGNI
(72) has a portfolio of African Fiction edited by EC Osondu and William
Pierce. Some of Africa’s best writers are assembled under that canopy,
having a good time with their muses and demons. I read ‘The Treasonable
Parrot’ by Ogaga Ifowodo. It is pretty good, with an edgy hilarity.
Victor Ekpuk has some art pieces in there nicely breaking up the
monotony of text. There is a harrowing piece by Chuma Nwokolo
(‘Sentencing for Six’). If you don’t know Nwokolo, please run, don’t
walk to www.African-writing.com, he is addictive. Victor Ehikhamenor is
up there cracking ribs with his patented njakiri. I shall be reading
Igoni Barrett’s piece next. Barrett is darkly brilliant, enigmatic and
eclectic, one of the younger literary Turks to watch. Oh, please go to
AGNI online and read Akin Adesokan’s affecting short story, ‘Knocking
Tommy’s Hustle’.

I am officially in
love. With Abimbola Adunni Adelakun’s book, ‘Under the Brown Rusted
Roofs’. They say never judge a book by its cover. When I first got the
novel, I took one look at it, spied some typos in the first few pages
and tossed it into a corner of my bedroom where books that I don’t care
for go to die. This is one poorly produced book; the editor and the
publisher should not be allowed to touch another manuscript again,
ever. I only went back to the book after reading an interview in which
Professor Niyi Osundare gushed over it. I see now why Osundare loves
this book. Adelakun studied Yoruba customs, folklore and mythology,
apparently not in a classroom, but on the gritty streets of Yorubaland.
There are strong shades of Ola Rotimi’s intimacy and proficiency with
Yoruba folklore. The dialogue is straight from the street’s pots, no
pretense. I am going to start a campaign to find a good editor and a
real publisher that will take ‘Under the Brown Rusted Roofs’ to the
heights that they deserve.

Hear Adelakun:
“Afusa never went to school, but always taught her children their
homework. She taught her first son the alphabet by gazing into his
alphabet book for long and mastering the letters… Afusa was worn out
with the stress she had gone through in the day but while she waited
for the herbs to boil, she made her son, Sikiru, who had just started
school, read the alphabet. ‘A for APPLE,’ the boy read. ‘Hen-en. Go to
the next one.’ The boy paused and asked her what an apple was. ‘Why
didn’t you ask your teachers?’ The boy shrugged. ‘See. It is the thing
they drew on the page. Look at it. It is round like a ball.’” A for
Apple! Oh Nigeria, what have you done? This book makes me sad, but I am
deeply in love with it.

I am reading Chukwuemeka Ike’s ‘The Potter’s Wheel’ again. Ike is
one of Africa’s most unsung writers. Hear him describing a
nine-year-old spell a jawbreaker: “Obu spelt his name slowly and
correctly. The teacher was satisfied. ‘Now, we shall see.’ He switched
over to English. ‘Spell me em – em – tintinnabulation.’ The whole class
shouted as the jaw breaker rolled out of the teacher’s mouth like bombs
from the hatch of a bomber. No one in the class had heard a word so
bombastic before. Obu rolled his big head from one side to the other
and accepted the challenge. ‘We shall see’ was at the blackboard with a
piece of chalk waiting to write the letters down as Obu spelt them.
‘T…i…n…’ The teacher wrote the letters down. ‘t …i… n … n
…’ Obu bit his lips, held his chin with his left hand, looked at the
seven letters on the board and saw the rest of the word dearly in his
mind’s eye: ‘a…b…u…1…a… t… i…o…n’. The teacher dropped
the chalk without writing the last letter on the board, and rushed to
shake the small hand of his new-found genius. ‘Wonderful Terrifious!
Marvellous! We shall see this year.’ Obu was the kind of boy every
teacher wanted in his class – young, full of brain rather than brawn,
the type who was destined to enter Government College, Umuahia if it
reopened after the war.” Read what you enjoy. Toss the rest. Life is
short.