Mandela the Spear and Other Poems


Book Description

The strength of Mandela the Spear and other Poems lies in Okais burning desire to celebrate the black experience and culture, through the iconic figures who symbolize those struggles and triumphs. Thus, not surprisingly, one encounters names like Mandela, Nadine Gordimer, Amilcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, to name a few. Okai has long established himself as one of the towering figures in the field of modern African poetry in English. He is regarded as one of the pioneers of a vigorous reinvention of the poetic genre that revolutionized the poet/audience relationship, changed the mode of expression from scriptography to narratology, and the role of the audience from that of passive reception to active participation.







Mandela and Other Poems


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Mandela the Spear


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Fertile Crossings


Book Description

In retracing some of the routes followed by West African literature in English over the course of the last three decades, this book employs an original multidimensional approach whereby the three main genres - narrative, poetry and drama - are considered in the light of their intricate web of fecund rapport and mutual influence.Authors such as Tutuola, Armah, Aidoo and Awoonor translated the fluid structures of orality into written prose, and consequently infused their works with poetic and dramatic resonance, thereby challenging the canonical dominance of social realism and paving the way for the birth of West African magical realism in Laing, Okri and Cheney-Coker.Starting in the 1970s, poetry on stage has become a mainstream genre in Ghana, thanks to performances by Okai, Anyidoho and Acquah.Boundaries between literary theatre and other genres have undergone a similar dissolution in the affirmation of the concept of 'total art' from Efua Sutherland to ben Abdallah, Osofisan and others. Fertile Crossingsoffers a study of these topics from various viewpoints, blending in-depth textual analysis with reflections on the political import of the works in question within the context of the present state of African societies, all supported by interviews with most of the authors.




Mandela's Bones and Other


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Chinua Achebe and Nelson Mandela at DOWNING: Poems in Five Senses


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Chinua Achebe & Nelson Mandela at DOWNING is an impressive poems collection from an AFRICAN. The volume is a MUST READ anywhere. Take it at bed, in the library, in your coffee room, office and on transit its all possible. It is the voice from Africa after year of emptiness. Standard language and style with a range of poetic themes that will take you into the moon smiling. What is the Downing of the personality in the continent? Hold it read and find the African taste in the world of poems.




Mandela: Echoes of Apartheid and Impunity


Book Description

Mandela: Echoes of Apartheid And Impunity is a compilation of 26 humanistic and passion-sustained poems on the Late Dr Nelson Mandela, the defunct Apartheid Regime in South Africa and global human rights struggles. The poems written over a period of 31 years by a Nigerian poet and physician, capture in a compelling chronological sequence, the origin, course, hurts of Apartheid and local and global efforts orchestrated to overcome it. It further portrays the author's vision from the perspectives of man's inhumanity to man, impunity and unnecessary power display by man, white or black, and celebration of such rare virtues as courage, discipline, doggedness and the spirit of forgiveness found in the likes of Mandela, the anti-Apartheid hero, who volunteer to suffer persecutions and abuses in the course of liberating their people. The book which prophesied the capitulation of Apartheid from the outset, proffers solutions to racism and corruption. It ends up on sanguinary note, pontificating that man's liberation is in his hands though divine intervention is necessary and that human rights activism and liberation struggles do not always disappoint since the likes of Mandela and Gani Fawehinmi of Nigeria, though chronically incarcerated, lived to old age, and even idolized by all before death.




A History of Gay Literature


Book Description

Account of male gay literature across cultures and languages and from ancient times to the present. It traces writing by and about homosexual men from ancient Greece and Rome through the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the twentieth-century gay literary explosion. It includes writers of wide-ranging literary status (from high cultural icons like Virgil, Dante, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Proust to popular novelists like Clive Barker and Dashiell Hammett) and of various locations (from Mishima s Tokyo and Abu Nuwas s Baghdad to David Leavitt s New York). It also deals with representations of male-male love by writers who were not themselves homosexual or bisexual men.




The Mandela Writings


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