Globetrotter & Hitler's Children- Amatorotsero Ede
Black Goat/Akashic Books, 106 pages
Reviewed by Brian Joseph Davis
It is Toronto's burden to inspire only complicated love in its citizens. Sure, some days we may long for that simplified, all-consuming loathing that Los Angelenos feel for their town or to have the capacity for brazen boasting particular to New Yorkers. I'll take Toronto's comfortable ambiguity any day and nominate as poet laureate Amatoritsero Ede.

As a Nigerian-born, now Canada-based poet, Ede is well positioned to chronicle the realities of our city, as he does in Globetrotter, the first half of his diptych portrait of two countries.
It is a paean but it is a suitably complicated and dead-on one. Ede's style is amazingly compositional, using short percussive phrases to sculpt an exegesis of Hogtown — as it sees itself and how those outside see it. "toronto is / Amsterdam / adrift at sea," Ede writes on his opening page. "toronto is / Prague / without her anchoring of / narrow streets narrow sky / and / virgin-tight apartment blocks."

For a city that, uniquely, swings between Protestant practicality during workdays and weekend-long orgies, Ede's particular style is consonant with his subject. Old-fashioned techniques, like his judicious use of the exclamation mark, blend in with his evocative word clusters, such as "shelled like lobster / caught / in a frying pan fray / fried flag red." Also, has Toronto's summer ever been described as cannily as in this passage: "summer's riot is loud / as it boils / you moonwalk / wade hung-armed / and bat-blind / through hot glue"?

If Ede's second section isn't as satisfying, it is mostly by comparison to the strength of the book's first 59 pages. Built around the author's experience of contemporary Germany — something less liberal than the ideal vision of itself the country presents to the rest of the world — Ede damns the country's abysmal treatment of its immigrant community. There's anger, passion and Ede's great writing, but the poet wanders into subjects ranging from the meaning of war to love with sometimes too-thick imagery.

Individually, the pages of Globetrotter work, but wholeness proves elusive. That said, there's no more perfect line of poetry this year than, "Evil is a professor," and, where another poet might get bogged down in qualifications, Ede is not afraid to describe succinctly any empire's primary villains: "men / with balls like cannon / thugs in bow tie...." Published by Eyeweekly.com, July 15, 2009

On Black Sisters' Street - By Chika Unigwe
Reviewed by Bernadine Evaristo
Not many novelists would wander around the seedy red-light district of Antwerp in a mini-skirt and thigh-high boots to carry out research. But this is what Nigerian writer Chika Unigwe did for her novel about the lives of African sex workers in the Belgian city. She also spent time persuading these women to share their stories. Her diligence has paid off. On Black Sisters' Street is a probing and unsettling exploration of the many factors that lead African women into prostitution in Europe, and it pulls no punches about the sordid nature of the job.

Four naive young women, Sisi, Joyce, Ama and Efe, fall under the money-making spell of pimp-daddy "Senghor Dele" in Lagos. Rich, vulgar, ruthless, he specialises in exporting girls to work in Belgium for a modest fee of 30,000 euros. This they must pay back in monthly instalments over many years of turning tricks ten hours a day. They don't all know that this is what lies in store but, fake passports withheld, the consequences for those who try to escape are dire.

Sisi, around whom most of the novel's suspense revolves, is an ambitious graduate unable to find suitable work. Efe is a teenage mother struggling to raise her son with no support from his father. Ama has escaped an abusive childhood only to find her dream of escaping Nigeria crushed by a dead-end job. Joyce, without family, home or money, is abandoned by her boyfriend. The women's dreams come in different sizes, from financial support for struggling relatives back home to the allure of big houses, fancy cars, gold jewellery and expensive plait extensions. Unigwe's vigorous prose is at its best when describing the utter humiliation Sisi feels when forced to dress like a hooker in "a gold-coloured nylon skirt" that rode up her legs when she walked and "showed her butt cheeks when she bent". So too with the degradation of her first encounter with a client in a toilet: "She baptised herself into it with tears, hot and livid, down her cheeks, salty in her mouth, feeling intense pain wherever he touched, like he was searing her with a razor blade that had just come off a fire".

Men in this novel are generally drunks, murderers, rapists, weak, cold-hearted, pathetic - although Unigwe avoids the fallacy of women as passive victims. Hers make choices, for which there are consequences. But their choices are restricted by circumstance and the Lagos they leave behind is a harsh place to survive, where "on any given day one was likely to find a corpse abandoned by the roadside". She shows what the women become, too. Sisi, who felt she was living the dream on her first day in Belgium because she was eating jam, can "no longer bear to look at herself", while Efe's plan is to run her own brothel one day when she has paid of her debt. What Unigwe does brilliantly is to delve into the psychology of each woman, eliciting different levels of empathy. This is an important and accomplished novel that leaves a strong aftertaste. Unigwe gives voice to those who are voiceless, fleshes out the stories of those who offer themselves as meat for sale, and bestows dignity on those who are stripped off it. Published in The Independent on Friday, 3 July 2009

The Shadow Speaker - Nnedi Okorafor
Disney/Hyperion, Pages: 336
Reviewed by Craig Gidney
The world is a changed place in 2070. A bomb created to counteract a nuclear attack unwittingly opens dimensional gates between worlds, ushering in magic that alters the landscape. Spontaneous forests appear out of nowhere one day, and are gone the next. Storms are sentient. And some human beings are born with strange powers. Some can control the weather, and others can fly. All this exists simultaneously with technology that sometimes doesn't obey the known laws of physics.

In Nigeria, fourteen year old Ejii has been born with strange powers that allow her to commune with shadows, who reveal people and animal's deepest secrets. Her mutation is misunderstood and feared by her father, who reacts to the sudden changes by becoming a despotic traditionalist leader. Her father takes on a couple of wives, essentially disowning Ejii and her mother, who is an outspoken critic of his regime. Her father is beheaded by the charismatic and legendary woman warrior Jaa, and a new, progressive system of governance is installed, one that encourages the metahumans to embrace their powers. But remnants of the old regime still linger, and superstitions and mistrust are hard to destroy. One evening, Ejii overhears Jaa speaking to her mother about imminent change. Jaa says that she will be leaving the village of Kwamfa asks Ejii to be her apprentice. At the same time, Ejii feels the Call that plagues all maturing Shadow Speakers, that urge them to seek their destinies. Against her mother's wishes, Ejii follows Jaa, bringing along her talking camel Onion and a portable water gathering machine across the Sahara. Along the way, Ejii meets many different people and creatures, most notably, Dikeogu, an escaped child slave with secrets of his own.

The Shadow Speaker is a compelling adventure story, drenched in magic and futuristic extrapolation. The episodes move swiftly, and readers will exult in both the energy of the stories and Ejii's resourcefulness. Ostensibly for a young adult crowd, it has a unique African flavor; with its speaking animals, spunky heroine and technological gadgets, it is a kind of like an African The Golden Compass. Without spoiling it too much, Ejii, like The Golden Compass's Lyra, is a catalyst figure whom the fate of several worlds rests. Adult readers will find deeper resonances. There are references to African author Chinua Achebe, postcolonial theorist Franz Fanon and revolutionary Che Guevara. While not overly explicit, there is considerable violence in the novel. Sexism in an Islamic culture is a strong issue in the novel.

"She didn't know many boys who liked to be led. It's not right for me to lead, she caught herself thinking. She frowned. The ideas of her father, again. What of Jaa? She leads everyone, she thought. And Dikeogu doesn't seem to mind me making the decisions…" While Okorafor has some serious things to say about both modern and futuristic Africa, she also doesn't skimp on the magic. Her futuristic Developing World is convincingly conjured, with Islamic prayer rugs and the ever present net existing alongside flying carpets. Her magic has a mythic resonance—Yoruba and Igbo folktale imagery seeps into everyday life (Ejii carries a portable computer called an e-legba). When she and her friends cross over into another dimension Ginen, the author has a sly allusion to the mythic Yoruba otherland Guinee. The sections in Ginen are beautifully written. It's a lush vegetable paradise full of botanical technology, where metahumans like Ejii are the norm. It is reminiscent of Ben Okri's wild imagery in The Famished Road. Her characters are well drawn and complex – even the marvelous Jaa has a murderous side. Ejii's struggle to understand her power and the world(s) she lives in are compelling. It is refreshing to read fantasy and science fiction about people of color. Okorafor continues the legacy left by the late Octavia Butler and Virginia Hamilton. Published by BSCreview 2008

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