ISBN 9789788422013
Pages 180
Dimensions 203 x 127 mm
Published 2009
Publisher Malthouse Press, Nigeria
Format Paperback

Matters of the Moment

by Tanure Ojaide

At the onset of this novel is the return of the journalist Dede Daro from the USA, where he had taken a graduate degree at one of the universities...Not surprisingly, Dede's return is the buzz of the town (Warri). In an overuse of proverbs, the elders make it known that they had expected him to go far. ..Amongst those eagerly awaiting Dede's return is of course the inevitable woman. In contrast to Dede's triumphant return, Franka is presented as the victim of life's terrible blows: she would lose her father to a snake's venomous bite; her not too educated but well- meaning mother had to work hard to see that her daughter got as good an education as the local schools could provide. Franka herself would undergo some dire deprivation in early life. Thus throughout the novel, it would seem as though the blight of poverty had marred Franka's judgments, when confronted with choices, about life. Her marriage to Dede ended in a bitter divorce, and while Dede meets another woman, Furu, with whom he was to know some kind of plenitude of his spirit, Franka descends from one fruitless relationship to another until, not surprisingly, she ends up in the bed of General Ogiso, the semi-literate and murderous military president of the country...

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About the Author

Tanure Ojaide

A renowned poet, Tanure Ojaide has won major national and international poetry awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region (1987), the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award (1988), twice the All-Africa Okigbo Prize for Poetry (1988 and 1997), and thrice the Association of Nigerian Authors' Poetry Prize (1988, 1994 and 2004. In 2016 Ojaide was awarded the the prestigious Fonlon-Nichols Award at the 42nd annual African Literature Association (ALA) conference in Atlanta.

For Tanure Ojaide, "the creative writer is never an airplant, but someone who is grounded in some specific place. It is difficult to talk of many writers without their identification with place. Every writer's roots are very important in understanding his or her work." He has read from his poetry in different fora in Africa, Britain, Canada, Israel, Mexico, The Netherlands, and the United States. Some of his poems have been translated into Chinese, Dutch, Spanish and French. He is currently the Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Visit Tanure Ojaide's website here: http://www.tanureojaide.com/

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