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In this volume, African Canadian creative writers discuss the complexities of the writing experience. Most of the writers interviewed here are humanists: they see their work as serious depictions of the human condition, admit that their works are informed by an African Canadian ontology, and adhere to the notion that their books must delight and instruct. These interviews, therefore, are valuable additions to the creative process of the individual writers. Apart from identifying how the writers’ geographical and social origins have influenced their work, these writers also respond to the exigencies of craft, the manipulations of publishers, the criticism of readers, and the absence of a clearly identifiable market for their works. The writers include Austin Clarke, Bernadette Dyer, Althea Prince, Afua Cooper, M. Nourbese Philip, Cecil Foster, Lawrence Hill, David Woods, George Elliot Clarke, Wayde Compton, Robert Sandiford, Suzette Mayr, Claire Harris, Pamela Mordecai, and Ayanna Black.
Publishers:
Tsar Books |
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In Songs of the Fireplace Onwudinjo focuses on the tribulations and triumphs of the childless woman in an African patriarchy. Structured as ballads, these poems tenderly evoke the plight of an Igbo housewife and her struggles to hold her ground in the face of domestic and societal aggression towards her childlessness situation. It is said that with these ballads, which lure the reader to their wealth of ideation, the Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek has finally begotten a literary son in Nigeria's Peter Onwudinjo.
Publishers:
Wusen Ltd.
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Eclipse in Rwanda is a metaphor for the litany of conflicts ravaging Africa, from the backstreets of villages through the cities and corridors of political power. Joe Ushie, the poet, brings freshness and maturity to enliven his metaphors and neologisms. Puns and sounds create new levels of meaning. Ecipse in Rwanda is a remarkable addition to Africa's search for peace and a new dawn since colonialism and imperialism.
Publishers:
Kraftgriots
Ltd.
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Chin Ce's recent volume of poetry since two decades of Full Moon and African Eclipse. It is, in the words of the poet, 'the product of additional years of travel and sojourn through the lands of, rightly, my mothers and fathers. These journeys,' he notes, 'are both physical and, even more importantly, ...spiritual --the latter bordering on aspects of a heritage that transcends spatial and temporal dimensions of reality at least for us all in the human family.' In lucid viewpoints and gentle rebukes, the poet makes these memories blossom in a new awareness of reality that is as much present here as in his Visitor tale. Publishers: Handel Books
Para Vasco (For Vasco) is the first in Heaventree's series of translations of Lusophone African poetry. Dedicated to Vasco Cabral, the late freedom fighter, politician and man of letters, this collection, presented in Portuguese and English, represents the first opportunity for the English-speaking world to read the poetry of Guinea-Bissau. Beginning with poems of the war for independence, and moving through the postcolonial period to highlight contemporary writers its diversity of styles and gradual unshackling of poetry from the imperatives of the anticolonial struggle make it a significant contribution to the growing canon of West African literatures. Publishers: Heaventree Press.
Set in a modern third-world nation state, Chin Ce's third fiction is here concerned with the quest for wholeness signified in the retrieval of a lost memory. This story spans three dimensions of existence: past, present and future intertwined. However The Visitor is not so much concerned with the follies and frailties of human conduct as with the inexorable growth that attends our actions and pushes the frontiers of awareness beyond the ken of mundane lives. Publishers: Handel Books.
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Why
We Write: Conversations
with African Canadian Poets and Novelists
Songs
of the Fireplace
Eclipse
in Rwanda
Para
Vasco: poems from Guinea Bissau
The
