Akachi Ezeigbo Revisits The Civil War - By Abubakar Abdullahi
Memories of the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War will reverberate on June 25, 2011 when Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo reads from her latest novel, Roses and Bullets, at the highly-acclaimed Guest Writer Session. An initiative of the Abuja Writers Forum (AWF), now in its third year, the event holds at the Pen and Pages Bookstore, White House Plaza, Plot 79, Adetokunbo Ademola Crescent, Wuse 2, Abuja and has featured an exciting array of emerging and established writers. A professor at the University of Lagos, Mrs Adimora-Ezeigbo has established herself as a profilic creative writer with publications in poetry, fiction and children’s literature.

These include five novels, The Last of the Strong Ones, House of Symbols and Children of the Eagle (a trilogy), Trafficked and Roses and Bullets; four collections of short stories, Rhythms of Life: Stories of Modern Nigeria, Rituals and Departures, Echoes in the Mind and Fractures and Fragments; three poetry collections, Heart Songs, Waiting for Dawn and Cloud and Other Poems for Children; and twenty children’s story books. While two of her children’s novels have been translated into Swahili and Xhosa, two of her unpublished plays, Hands that Crush Stone and Barmaid and the Witches of Izunga, have been performed by the students of the Departments of Creative Arts and English at the University of Lagos.

Born in the south east of Nigeria, Professor Adimora-Ezeigbo started her career as a teacher in the north and settled down to adult and working life in the south west. Her sound educational background is informed by knowledge acquired from various institutions: St John’s C.M.S. Central School, Ekwulobia, Municipal Council School Port Harcourt, Archdeacon Crowther Memorial Girls’ School, Elelenwa, Port Harcourt, University of Lagos and University of Ibadan. From these institutions, she got her certificates, degrees and other honours ranging from WASC O’ Level to the Ph.D.

Though she published a short story, “The Call of Death”, as a teenager in Spear Magazine in 1971, her publishing career really started in the 1992 and she has gone on to win several literary and academic awards inside and outside Nigeria. She was a Commonwealth Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, a Research Fellow at the University of Natal (now KwaZulu Natal), Pietermaritzburg, in South Africa, a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for African Studies, University of Bayreuth, Germany and more recently a Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. She was Best Researcher in the Arts and Humanities at the University of Lagos in 2005. Professor Adimora-Ezeigbo has participated in many literary festivals including Time of the Writer Festival, Durban, South Africa, Zabalaza Festival in London, Femwrite Literary Festival, Kampala, Uganda, Runnymede Festival in Egham, UK and Garden City Literary Festival in Port Harcourt.

Her passion for Gender issues informs her writings, research and lectures. Little wonder that her novels capture the feminist perspective through the presentation of women characters that challenge conventional roles for women in African society. Her most recent novel, Roses and Bullets, is based on the events of the Nigerian/Biafran War of 1967 to 1970.

In a recent interview, she explained that the Civil war has been part of her life in various ways and writing a novel about it was inevitable. “I started writing it in 2003. I got all the materials I needed from writing my thesis; it was not difficult writing the novel but I did not have time. It was when I got a one-year fellowship at the Royal Holloway University (London) in 2006 that I had time to write. I completed the book in 2007. I have been reworking it and giving other people to read, and now it is ready for publishing.

“It is basically about two important characters, a young man and a young woman in a period of war. The war affected their love; it actually destroyed it. It is about their lives and their families. The girl is the most important character.

“The story widens to bring in the war experience and other characters who are affected by it. Roses and Bullets is a love story set before and after the war. I have read everything on the Nigerian civil war. Apart from witnessing it, I have been able to transmute ideas and facts into fiction.”

Professor Adimora-Ezeigbo is a member of the Jalaa Collective which seeks to bring seriousness and excellence into writing, by being a model for other collectives to emulate, and copies of Roses and Bullets are available at Sahad Supermarket, Garki, Abuja.

The event which will include the usual side attractions of poetry performance, mini art exhibition, and a raffle-draw will also feature live music. The Abuja Writer’s Forum meets three Sundays each month and hosts a reading on every last Saturday at the International Institute of Journalism and Pen and Pages respectively.

Ihenyen’s Polemics Beats Aesthetics - By Tunji Ajibade
The Guest Writer Session of Abuja Writer’s Forum took place on May 28, a day to the Presidential Inauguration ceremony. Its focus was on the nation’s socio-political realities as well as the travails of its literature A university lecturer called attention to it and in effect drew the battle line between the message and the aesthetics of poetry. It has become a recurring issue in poetry writing in this clime where, according to the lecturer, Prof. Unoma Azuah, writers get carried away with the message they intend to pass across to the extent that the craft, the aesthetics is overlooked.

The same was at the centre of the May edition of the Guest Writers’ Session organized by Abuja Writers Forum (AWF). But it was not the only burning issue on the table. There was also the angle of structures, organized basic developmental structures, that are central to moving literature forward, but which are lacking in the nation. It was the Guest Writer himself, Senator Ihenyen, who identified this and brought it into focus. But that was in the course of the day’s event.

The literary evening that had in attendance literary enthusiasts as well as literary giants took place at the Pen and Pages Bookshops, Abuja. And to them Ihenyen read from his poetry collection: Colourless Rainbow, a work that has its thematic position expressed in seven movements, namely – The Mirror, Chameleons, Camouflage, with Images on the Breaking Walls of My Heart serving as an interlude. The other movements are Masquerades, Crossroads and The Tide.

Through these movements, the author brings to his audience the socio-political realities of the time, a thing he captures in poems such as ‘Colourless rainbow’, ‘Camouflage, ‘My Country is an Emere’, ‘Our Waterloo’, ‘A Poem is enough for the Wise’, ‘Memories’, ‘Umbrella in the Rain’, as well as ‘May 29’, section three and the final part of which reads: ‘As balloons are blown to the sky to make yet another merry on May 29/I hear drums rumbling without dances/Rainbow blood of those whose hearts were silenced in the shadow of the night/now painting colours in our democratic skies/Those who quenched the sun when its rays flickered with hope/have become the new messiahs of our numbered days’.

Those who commented on the texture and themes of some of the poems that Iheyen read at a near-performance level included established and upcoming writers. “I classify your poems as protest poetry.” That was from Professor Azuah, a lecturer in Creative writing in the United States of America. She went on to point out that protest poems are difficult to write. And that is because most protest poets sacrifice the aesthetics of poetry for the message they wanted to pass to their readers.

In that case, they hit the message so hard that it may appear repetitive, boring, raw, largely unedifying to the reader. Specifically, Azuah mentioned what she considered the burdensome effects on the learned reader of clustered adjectives that appear in some of the pieces read such as ‘dewy dawn, ghostly night, hazy horizon’. While she commended the work, she noted that finesse becomes crucial if writers must obey one of the rules that are so fundamental to poetry - its aesthetics.

Other attendees such as El-Nathan John would comment on the same, but from a slightly different perspective. El-Nathan pointed out that more symbols and less metaphors could have been adopted in the light of the title of entire collection –Colourless Rainbow. The poem, ‘May 29’, came in specifically for this observation and as he pointed out: There are clustered metaphors that in his opinion are like a message forced down the throat of the reader the same way a mother would repeat to her young daughter the need to beware of boys. “Use more of skill to pass on the message instead of energy,” he sated, adding that when skill is used, it usually produces a more beautiful work.

To buttress the importance of aesthetics, other commentaries noted that poetry requires that what comes to the heart is sieved by the brain before it goes on paper. This is taken to mean that pouring everything down as it comes raw from the heart, and leaving it that way tends to weaken poetry. The success of a poem, especially protest poem, it was agreed, has less to do with pouring down of the message, but more of sieving the message. And there were words of counsels from Ihenyen’s audience, which is relevant to all writers: “You can write a love poem, yet it will look like a protest poem. When you write, let it have the capability of being interpreted in so many ways”. This can only be achieved when even the protest message is beautified, its aesthetics raised by several notes, a thing that makes the difference between any writer and those that have mastered the craft of their trade.

While the Guest Writer responded to some of the remarks and questions asked in the course of the Question and Answer Session, he noted that issues of clusters of adjectives were part of his attempts to “show” rather that just “tell”, although he admitted that there was room for improvement in any form of writing. In terms of his messages, Ihenyen was of the view that there was a need for writers with African background not to oversimplify, or else the realities of everyday life is forgotten.

He further pointed out that there was so much of images, symbolism and colours in Africa’s way of life that attempts to pack everything into a jacket of sonnets and the rest of poetry forms may kill what Africa has on offer that is peculiar to it. And in that case, the message may be lost, “and we need to hear the messages; this is no time to miss the messages,” the Guest Writer observed to a spontaneous round of applause from his listeners.

Other comments focused on the challenges of writing and getting works published, and the Guest Writer’s response showed that hard work put into a manuscript still counted for something. Stating his experience, Ihenyen said he had sent the manuscript of Colourless Rainbow out for an independent opinion. The man offering the opinion decided that he liked the collection and he chose to have it published in his publishing company. But Ihenyen went on to observe that many writers put materials on paper, but publishing them remains a problem because the writing industry does not have the structure that should support writers.

He stated, “From the time I write my poems, to the time it gets to the table of the reader, there is a whole process it has to go through.” It is exactly this, he noted, that the nation needs to improve upon if its literature to move forward. And to the Guest Writer, the work is not for somebody, it is for everybody – every writer.

Between the two sessions of reading that the Guest Writer had, there was life music performance by Ubong E. Ukor, and there was a raffle draw that enabled participants to win prizes of books. The next Guest Writer Session holds on June 25.

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