tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5877162462326180752024-03-13T19:58:56.417-07:00Caine PrizeBen Phillips Photographyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14050478970583469714noreply@blogger.comBlogger52125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-4171773505312689502015-07-29T02:30:00.000-07:002015-07-29T07:54:40.821-07:00Podcasts of 2015 Shortlisted Stories<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.1999998092651px; line-height: 18.4799995422363px; text-align: justify;">The Caine Prize has commissioned podcasts of the 2015 shortlist, to run alongside the pdfs of each story that are uploaded for audiences to read in the run up to the announcement of the 16th Caine Prize winner on 6 July. Click the links below to listen to the stories.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.1999998092651px; line-height: 18.4799995422363px; text-align: justify;">Segun Afolabi (Nigeria) "The Folded Leaf" in Wasafiri (London: Routledge, 2014)</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.1999998092651px; line-height: 18.4799995422363px; text-align: justify;">Read <i><a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2015%20The%20Folded%20Leaf%20-%20Segun%20Afolabi.pdf" target="_blank">The Folded Leaf</a></i></span><br />
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<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/210747624&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%"></iframe>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.1999998092651px; line-height: 18.4799995422363px; text-align: justify;">Elnathan John (Nigeria) "Flying" in Per Contra (International: Per Contra, 2014)</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.1999998092651px; line-height: 18.4799995422363px; text-align: justify;">Read <i><a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2015%20Flying%20-%20Elnathan%20John.pdf" target="_blank">Flying</a></i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.1999998092651px; line-height: 18.4799995422363px; text-align: justify;"><a href="https://soundcloud.com/caine-prize/flying" target="_blank">Listen to Flying</a> read by the author, produced by Alice Lloyd.</span><br />
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<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/208617688&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%"></iframe>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13.1999998092651px; line-height: 18.4799995422363px;">Read <i><a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2015%20A%20Party%20for%20the%20Colonel%20-%20F.%20T.%20Kola.pdf" target="_blank">A Party for the Colonel</a></i></span></span></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.1999998092651px; line-height: 18.4799995422363px; text-align: justify;"><a href="https://soundcloud.com/caine-prize/a-party-for-the-colonel" target="_blank">Listen to A Party for the Colonel</a> read by the author, produced by Alex Feldman at Pixiu.</span><br />
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<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/208625827&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%"></iframe>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.1999998092651px; line-height: 18.4799995422363px; text-align: justify;">Masande Ntshanga (South Africa) "Space" in Twenty in 20 (South Africa: Times Media, 2014)</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.1999998092651px; line-height: 18.4799995422363px; text-align: justify;">Read <i><a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2015%20Space%20-%20Masande%20Ntshanga.pdf" target="_blank">Space</a></i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.1999998092651px; line-height: 18.4799995422363px; text-align: justify;">Listen to Space read by the author, produced by Times Media in Johannesburg.</span><br />
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<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/209527977&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%"></iframe>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.1999998092651px; line-height: 18.4799995422363px; text-align: justify;">Namwali Serpell (Zambia) "The Sack" in Africa 39 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014)</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.1999998092651px; line-height: 18.4799995422363px; text-align: justify;">Read <i><a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2015%20The%20Sack%20-%20Namwali%20Serpell.pdf" target="_blank">The Sack</a></i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.1999998092651px; line-height: 18.4799995422363px; text-align: justify;">Listen to The Sack, read by Chakuchanya Harawa, produced by Alice Lloyd.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13.1999998092651px; line-height: 18.4799995422363px; text-align: justify;"><br /></span><iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/216879242&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%"></iframe>caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-4518720060928224962015-07-04T04:02:00.000-07:002015-07-04T04:02:34.996-07:002015 Shortlist: Masande Ntshanga (South Africa) for “Space” <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGBPIrLrJFe0CdGrWE4jkKSrRgPfKV1BDROnB4iEeB-fHnLP2UiwrB-17zmiq20PwOcVVWmHfSYgjYyfs9tlshBjEH4gArK1V9y4-ZyIIjffG6OmMckqBJi__4GHl5_sKIPz8UgNC8A0SF/s1600/Masande+Ntshanga.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGBPIrLrJFe0CdGrWE4jkKSrRgPfKV1BDROnB4iEeB-fHnLP2UiwrB-17zmiq20PwOcVVWmHfSYgjYyfs9tlshBjEH4gArK1V9y4-ZyIIjffG6OmMckqBJi__4GHl5_sKIPz8UgNC8A0SF/s320/Masande+Ntshanga.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bio:</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Masande Ntshanga is the winner of the 2013 PEN International New Voices Award. He was born in East London in 1986 and grew up between Mdantsane, Zeleni, Bhisho, King William's Town, Estcourt, Pietermaritzburg and Cape Town. He graduated with a degree in Film and Media and an Honours degree in English Studies from UCT, where he became a creative writing fellow, completing his Masters in Creative Writing under the Mellon Mays Foundation. He received a Fulbright Award and an NRF Freestanding Masters scholarship. His debut novel, The Reactive, was published in 2014 by Penguin Random House.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What it's about:</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Set in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa in the early nineties,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Space</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #111111; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a window into the friendship of four school boys who discover a mysterious grey man. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Read it for: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A thoughtful exploration of adolescence and the politics of education, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666669845581px; line-height: 24.2880001068115px; white-space: pre-wrap;">sexuality, </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; line-height: 1.656; white-space: pre-wrap;">illness and family life. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Extract: </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My mother had banned video games at my house, citing a collective stink that stormclouded over a pile of our report cards, but even the homeland soldiers no longer excited anything in us, their jaws and manners just as rigid as the statues that kept vigil over the suits who worked in Parliament Hill. I mean, they never shot their guns. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So we shoplifted at the local OK Bazaar, which stood just across the street from the Amatola Sun Hotel, where the glass turnstiles were inviting but often kept us from slinking in and walking passed the casino, our bare feet moving us from the cold white marble and onto the lush red carpet, then through to the back where—just before the swimming pool where we saw the first white woman in our lives—they had a new Street Fighter machine glowing in the corner for only five bob a game. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At OK, during our short career there, I managed to nab a Bruce Lee poster and a Spider Man figurine; CK scored himself two twin sliver revolver BB guns. Then, one cold Saturday in the middle of April, one guy who wasn’t in our gang, this chubby laaitie who didn’t go to school with us down at the local, got caught and carried wailing into a dark room at the back of the supermarket. I don’t need to tell you which idiot’s parents were there. CK and I dropped everything we’d stuffed on ourselves and walked out slowly. We’d heard about the bald security guards who waited in that back room with their batons and shell-toe boots. They’d been put on the Earth to sort out precisely guys like us. </span></div>
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<a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2015%20Space%20-%20Masande%20Ntshanga.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Read the full story Space here</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Each shortlisted writer receives £500 and the winner of the £10,000 prize will be announced at an award ceremony and dinner at the Weston Library, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, on Monday 6 July. Each of these stories has been published in New Internationalist’s Caine Prize 2015 Anthology which is available</span><a href="http://newint.org/books/fiction/caine-prize-2015/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">here</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-77129009185807791902015-06-29T04:13:00.002-07:002015-06-29T04:15:59.344-07:00Responsibilities - Cóilín Parsons on Judging the 2015 Shortlist <div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; line-height: 1.2; white-space: pre-wrap;">I was well over three quarters of the way through the 153 entries for this year’s prize when I opened one story and found a courier shipping label. It had been neatly filled out by the author, with her name and address, and a description of the contents (6 copies of a short story; no monetary value). She had spent about £25 to send the packet to a very unlikely address—the Menier Chocolate Factory in London—and had surely wished it well as she dropped it off. She was, after all, sending it to be judged, asking a panel of strangers to determine whether it counted as among the best of African short stories. As I thought of that writer in Nigeria, I was struck by the weight of responsibility on my shoulders as a judge, and the duty of care I had towards each story and every author. That night, I dreamt that I had forgotten to read her story. It wasn’t the last time that I had an anxiety dream about the Caine Prize. The subject of the dreams was always the same—I dreamt that, whether by losing my box of stories, or having them stolen, or passing over some by mistake, somehow I had failed to read all of the stories in time for the shortlisting meeting in late April. The responsibility of judging the Caine Prize weighed heavily on me in the early months of this year.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">W.B. Yeats opened his 1914 collection, Responsibilities, with an epigraph marked by characteristically awkward Yeatsian locution: ‘In dreams begins responsibility’. Responsibilities was an extended poetic meditation on the politics of representation. Yeats worried about whether the poet could indeed represent his country in both senses of the word—to re-present it in his art, but also to stand in for it, to be its representative. In English we have the tendency to conflate these two senses, though they are quite separate. The latter responsibility weighed more heavily than the former, yet it was one that Yeats had long sought out, and would continue to cherish until the end of his life. At that time, when Ireland was emerging into nationhood and on the path of decolonisation (with all its utopian promises and dystopian realities), the question of who gets to be a representative of the people and how was one of the most pressing of the day. Now, one hundred years and many decolonisation movements and wars later, the issue remains just as fraught as it was then. African writing, whatever that may be, is frequently tasked with representing an entire continent, and the Caine Prize shortlisted stories are doubly </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">charged—they must represent both Africa and good writing. Did our entrant from Nigeria think of this as she wrote her story? Or only as she posted it to the Chocolate Factory? Or was it never in her mind at all? Did she, as I did, lie awake at night under the burden of responsibility? Did she wonder how her story might, if chosen for the shortlist, be asked to speak for Cameroon and Angola, Egypt and Botswana? I hope and suspect not.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While one author might be able to rest easy in the knowledge that she can only mistakenly be called on to represent an entire continent (as, no doubt, the winner will), a literary prize with ‘African Writing’ in its name carries a substantial burden of responsibility. The Caine Prize has, of course, become a lightning rod for questions of representation and responsibility—can or does it represent Africa? Can any prize claim to encompass such a diverse continent? Why should a prize awarded in the UK be the premier prize for writing in Africa? Does this or that winning story offer a new narrative for Africa or traffic in clichés? These are questions that treat of the Caine Prize as an institution, as a monolithic arbiter of what is good in literary Africa. But I came to realise as I sat in our shortlisting meeting (having, thankfully, managed not to forget any of the stories) that each jury constitutes its own values and its own criteria from the materials in front of it. The judges and the entries differ every year, and the shortlisted stories represent not the jury’s estimation of some vague thing called ‘African Writing’ but their determination of the five best stories on the table in front of them. It is a somewhat arbitrary process, then—a ‘bundle of accident and incoherence’, to repurpose another pregnant phrase from Yeats. But it is a happy accident and a necessary incoherence, for to be any otherwise would be to do an injustice to the complexity of all the authors and narrators and stories and characters in front of us. This is the genius of the board of the Caine Prize and its director, Lizzy Attree—they convene every year a disparate committee of judges, and gather together a multitude of stories from around Africa and beyond, and somehow what emerges is a coherent idea, ‘something intended, complete’. In short, the winner that emerges every year is genuinely outstanding, but never categorical—it does not define African writing, but only marks a special achievement </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; line-height: 1.2; white-space: pre-wrap;">under that broad umbrella. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All this talk of responsibility and representation—this sense that the prize and the prizewinner carry on their shoulders the burden of representing (in both senses) an entire continent—calls to mind a hoary old chestnut of postcolonial studies. When the American literary critic Frederic Jameson wrote ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital’, he was attacked for, among other things, implying that all literature from what we would now call the Global South was in thrall to the demands of the nation, unable to represent anything other than a story of decolonisation and national emergence. The essay also denies a space for specificity and creativity in the Global South—Aijaz Ahmad takes him to task for writing ‘All third-world texts are </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; line-height: 1.2; white-space: pre-wrap;">necessarily…’, a formulation that sweepingly refers to half a world as if it were indivisibly other. Despite the thorough debunking of Jameson’s essay, however, much of the criticism of the Caine Prize reprises his error, assuming and sometimes demanding that each story be a proxy for African Writing and each author an image of the African Writer. In one sense, that expectation is not unreal, given the title of the prize, but who demands that the winner of the National Book Award in the US define ‘American Writing’, or the winner of the Man Booker ‘International Writing?’ While writers from the Global North are seen as simply writers, unmarked and universal, those from the Global South are restricted to being representatives of their types—Indian or African or South American above all else. They become impossibly responsible for a whole people, state, or continent. When critics take the Caine Prize stories to represent African writing or Africa tout court, or even a ‘western’ view of African writing, they assume that such a project is unproblematically possible in a way that essentialises Africa. The argument is an old one, but it is worth repeating, for although this and all other prizes are marked by many and varied responsibilities, standing in for all of Africa is not one of those. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">None of the stories on this year’s shortlist purports to be definitionally ‘African’ in any way. F.T. </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; line-height: 1.2; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kola’s sympathetic portrait of a wife and mother’s agonizing evening; Segun Afolabi’s </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; line-height: 1.2; white-space: pre-wrap;">delicately woven tale of a journey filled with stories and disappointments; Namwali </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; line-height: 1.2; white-space: pre-wrap;">Serpell’s masterful account of disease and decay; Masande Ntshanga’s subtle and careful narrative of disease, parenthood, and estrangement; Elnathan John’s moving, textured story of surrogacy and love. Each of them offers something unique, surprising and clarifying, which is perhaps the best definition of a successful short. But they don’t make any large claims to stand in for a continent. Their responsibilities are to different scales and stories—to their characters and their settings, to the intimate and the local, to the present and the past, to the art of narrative and the short form. Their materials may be gathered from contexts throughout the continent, but they are comfortable in their skin as stories without national or continental allegories or burdens attached. I’ve spoken a lot about responsibility—as both burden and privilege—but very little about the other overwhelming feeling I had as I read all of these stories: pleasure. While I hope that the feeling of responsibility rests on the shoulders of the judges alone, I know that the pleasure of reading is something that we will share with everyone who picks up (or, more prosaically, downloads) these fine stories.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14.6666669845581px; line-height: 20.2399997711182px;">Read the shortlist </span><a href="http://www.caineprize.com/news_2015_shortlist.php" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #7a7a7a; font-size: 14.6666669845581px; line-height: 20.2399997711182px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">here</a><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14.6666669845581px; line-height: 20.2399997711182px;">. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14.6666669845581px; line-height: 20.2399997711182px;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Cóilín Parsons is Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he teaches Irish literature, modernism, and postcolonial literature and theory. His work on Irish, South African and Indian literature and culture has appeared in such journals as Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies,Victorian Literature and Culture, The Journal of Beckett Studies, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, English Language Notes and elsewhere.</i></span></div>
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caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-78299773188598973692015-06-24T04:23:00.000-07:002015-06-24T04:25:05.284-07:00Sex and the African Short Story- Neel Mukherjee Judges the 2015 Shortlist <div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘God, there’s a hell of a lot of sex going on in Africa,’ exclaimed one fellow- judge halfway through our reading of this year’s entries for the Caine Prize. In the year of the highest number of submissions for the prize – 153 stories – there is yet another record, dubious this time, which cannot pass unnoticed: the highest number of stories centred on sex. Masturbation features a lot, especially female masturbation. Male genitals, erm, dismembered (and disembodied), appear on a wall (yes, you read that correctly). There’s even sex – well, almost – with a tokoloshe. There’s an explicit little number, by no definition a story, in which a male narrator </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">justifies his infidelity by his wife’s refusal to shave her legs or blow him after their marriage. And there’s your common-or-garden variety sex as well; often called vanilla, I’m reliably informed. Oh, did I forget female orgasms and ubiquitous ejaculations? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">The judge who commented on the </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">pervasiveness of sex in Africa got an eye infection halfway through the reading because ‘all that ejaculation got into my eye’. What on earth is going on? One of the reasons behind this high incidence of writing about sex could be the (baneful) influence of Fifty Shades of Grey, the judges surmised. If this is true, then one can only lament. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">But it set me thinking: could it be that, after decades of being expected to write about poverty, famine, AIDS, corruption, dictators, writers from most of the countries on the continent are writing about whatever the hell they feel like writing about? But the problematics of this ‘liberation’ don’t need spelling out. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">The other problem is the knotty business of writing about sex. It’s notoriously difficult – bordering on impossible, in fact – to write well about it. While it is to be lauded that this has not held back some of the writers whose stories I have in mind – nothing ventured, nothing gained, </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">Two of the shortlisted stories show how to write about sex in extraordinary and powerful ways. One casts the briefest of glances at homosexuality in the subtlest way imaginable; it is barely a whisper. The other works by the suggestion of adultery or unfaithfulness -- the story leaves so much unsaid that one wonders if it is really that -- that casts a long shadow and seems to be one of the undersurface motors driving the motivations of the characters.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Read the shortlist <a href="http://www.caineprize.com/news_2015_shortlist.php" target="_blank">here</a>. </span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-452f7f31-00e1-d4b7-3355-6fb8a75f2f12"></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Neel Mukherjee is one of the <a href="http://www.caineprize.com/judges.php" target="_blank">2015 Judges</a> of the Caine Prize and the author of the award-winning debut novel, A Life Apart (2010). His second novel, The Lives of Others (2014), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He has reviewed fiction widely for a number of UK, Indian and US publications. He lives in London.</span></div>
<br />caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-79428429095273020402015-06-23T06:45:00.002-07:002015-07-29T06:09:18.467-07:00The Port Harcourt One Day Short Story Surgery - Feedback from Participants by Jinaka Ugochukwu<div class="MsoNormal">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiciAKkWHgzyAz2I2oGx8-qTUDlWDoDu6onutUkMy8cp5VoaHCCB-dTMdBLBcO0OOfzKxYRBzsWEuw33kxyrUYwU5HixAJnkpyPxB8qaN0HR3jyKr05RgV30mIGBaUexdxqUEzTidDGC_La/s1600/Pemi+Aguda.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiciAKkWHgzyAz2I2oGx8-qTUDlWDoDu6onutUkMy8cp5VoaHCCB-dTMdBLBcO0OOfzKxYRBzsWEuw33kxyrUYwU5HixAJnkpyPxB8qaN0HR3jyKr05RgV30mIGBaUexdxqUEzTidDGC_La/s320/Pemi+Aguda.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Pemi Aguda winner of 2015 Writivism Prize</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Congratulations to Pemi Aguda, whose story 'Caterer Caterer' has won the 2015 Writivism Prize. Pemi took part in the 2014 Caine Prize one day short story surgery, which Stanley Kenani wrote about in his <a href="http://caineprize.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/surgical-anatomy-bare-bones-of.html" target="_blank">blogpost</a> back in November last year. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">The short story is in rude health.</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It’s striding along inspiring competitions,
compilations and festivals in its name. </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">This year already there has been the </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Time of the Writer Festival</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> in Durban, the
</span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Costa Short Story Award,</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> the
</span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">London Short Story Festival</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> in June, the
</span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Commonwealth Short Story Prize</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">, </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Writivism</i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> and there's still the </span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">Short Story Day Africa Prize </i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">to look forward to</span><i style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">.</i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Last year <i>The
Port Harcourt Book Festival</i> was one such event in the calendar. Taking place in October and celebrating Port
Harcourt’s status as UNESCO 2014 World Book Capital, it also showcased the
short story form. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Africa 39 was launched there, a compilation of short
stories and excerpts from novels and The Caine Prize One Day Short Story
Surgery was facilitated there. 15
participants, selected from an open call for applicants were offered the
opportunity to <a href="http://caineprize.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/surgical-anatomy-bare-bones-of.html" target="_blank">‘become surgeons…to </a></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><a href="http://caineprize.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/surgical-anatomy-bare-bones-of.html" target="_blank">cut open their drafts and mess with the guts’<b> </b></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The one day surgery was the first of its kind for the
Caine Prize which has hosted annual 10 day<a href="http://www.caineprize.com/workshops.php" target="_blank"> workshops</a>, for the Prize’s
shortlisted writers and others who have caught the attention of the judges,
since 2003. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">The 3 facilitators of the short surgery were </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Ellah Wakatama Allfrey, Abubakar Ibrahim and Stanley
Kenani. Stanley Kenani has written about
the experience from the facilitator’s point of view here on the <a href="http://caineprize.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/surgical-anatomy-bare-bones-of.html" target="_blank">blog</a>. He outlines the group’s analysis of the key elements of storytelling
(setting, language and character) through critique of the participants’ own
work and that of 2010 winner, Olufemi Terry.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Writing advice can often
boil down to ‘write more and read more’ so did the participants, Jo Nwinyi,
Ndubuisi Newman, Tope Rotimi, Ikenna Okeh, Victor Emmanuel Idem, Nihinlola
Ifeoluwa, Kechi Nomu, Louis Ogbere, Chika Tobi Onwuasanya, Jennifer
Nkem-Eneanya, Yomi Kolawole, Adeniyi Mopelola Omayeni, Owoyemi Olorunfemi, Pemi
Aguda, find this approach useful?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Here is some of
their feedback:<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">So much learning and discovery stuffed like a
Thanksgiving Turkey into a few hours – Jennifer Nkem-Eneanya<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The Caine Prize Short Story Surgery opened for me a
whole new perspective on how to approach writing - Louis Ogbere<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">[The surgery was] validating for me as a writer – Victor
Emmanuel Idem <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">And perhaps only in
Nigeria, and other countries on CAT (Central African Time), would the
‘punctuality of the facilitators’ be something to highlight but that caught the
attention of Chika Tobi. She also, like
several participants, commented on the skill and expertise of the facilitators.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Ellah Allfrey [created a setting] which allowed
[all] to speak, encouraged [all] to listen and persuaded [all] to learn - Chika
Tobi<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The facilitators made it worth each of the 21,600
seconds it lasted - Anaele Ihuoma<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">And Tope Rotimi put it simply - the facilitators
were brilliant, warm and very well prepared<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">It was clear also
that the facilitators had had a longer term impact on the writing of the participants.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I constantly see Mr Stanley’s face before me when I
embark on too intense a description or explanation - Jennifer Nkem-Eneanya<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">[I learnt new things] especially not leaving my
characters alone as it allowed for them to travel backdown memory lane rather
than moving the plot(s) forward - Victor Emmanuel Idem<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I heard the phrase ‘thought verbs’ for the first
time [and I learnt] the importance of showing, not telling - Chika Tobi
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Resoundingly the day was a positive experience for the
writers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">They were pleased to have been plugged into social
media where they found out about the call for applicants and they enjoyed being associated
with the Caine Prize and they are looking forward to developing their writing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">[The] event reinforced my determination to pour out
my soul into my future writings - Victor Emmanuel Idem<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">There are things you feel you are good at until
someone else show you how to be better - Louis Ogbere<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">[It] was an exhilarating experience - Tope Rotimi<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Thank you for the experience of the workshop - Pemi
Aguda<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">So whilst there are no immediate plans to repeat the
event, ‘The</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> One Day Short
Story Surgery is a one off, for now’ says Caine Prize Director Lizzy Attree, </span><span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">it
would likely be a successful undertaking if it were.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Verdana","sans-serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">It was perhaps appropriate to have the surgery in Nigeria
a country from which there have been three winners, and from which its writers
are shortlisted almost every year and where year on year they contribute the
most entries for consideration. In
recent years workshops have been held in locations from which the Caine Prize
would like to encourage submissions. Let’s look forward to the future of these
15 writers and anticipate their future contributions to the ever growing short
story canon.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-24392054929440482832015-06-11T08:38:00.000-07:002015-06-11T08:48:33.286-07:002015 Shortlist: F.T. Kola (South Africa) for "A Party for the Colonel"<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;">As well as recognising the talent of established writers the 2015 shortlist, which includes <a href="http://caineprize.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/2015-shortlist-segun-afolabi-folded-leaf.html" target="_blank">one past winner </a>and two <a href="http://caineprize.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/2015-shortlist-elnathan-john-for-flying.html" target="_blank">previously shortlisted writers</a>, is also one to celebrate new talent. Shortlisted on the merit of her first published story, FT Kola draws on a childhood anecdote often told by her parents of the writer as a toddler growing up in South Africa. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOKgY9TsHbpVk_bT0daFtteQStYRWi19topwO-yF8IjLQJ717GUJ8VaqYZQNv1vFpmvvw4EG2ktH0yipSVRBnXzUFjTmd820x57QEJAMCrwNWadVAMc6UngQnkdVj-I8nCFbmulLMeU-cS/s1600/Fatima+Kola+Caine+Prize+.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOKgY9TsHbpVk_bT0daFtteQStYRWi19topwO-yF8IjLQJ717GUJ8VaqYZQNv1vFpmvvw4EG2ktH0yipSVRBnXzUFjTmd820x57QEJAMCrwNWadVAMc6UngQnkdVj-I8nCFbmulLMeU-cS/s320/Fatima+Kola+Caine+Prize+.png" width="267" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6666666666667px; line-height: 1.38; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-c4df72eb-d7c0-f52e-0017-40af58a538f8" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bio:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> F.T. Kola was born in South Africa, grew up in Australia, and lived in London and New York City before pursuing an MFA at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Austin, where she is a fellow in fiction. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What it's about:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: #fbfbfb; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13.333333333333332px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> grandfather trying to blend into a world in which he would never belong is inadvertently exposed at a party by the young child of his activist son. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Read it for: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Narrated through the eyes of the Colonel’s wife’s insecurities, an emotive look at the nuances and exploitative hierarchies of South Africa’s apartheid system from an Indian family’s perspective. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Excerpt: </span></div>
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<br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The more money the Colonel made, the more he was convinced that all along he had been right. But the Colonel’s wife, in private moments, thought differently. The Colonel’s money did not bring them favor, or let them into the forbidden places from which they would always be excluded: it merely let them pretend, sometimes, that Apartheid didn’t exist at all. Where the fact of inequality crept into their daily lives, the Colonel simply replaced the inevitable with the illusion of choice; going only to the Indian cinemas because there were no “for use by white persons” signs since no white people ever went there at all; sending Mohammed to a private school in Botswana; telling his wife to take a more scenic route from the market rather than the direct path through the cemetery where white children would hide behind the gravestones to throw rocks at her; never going to the annual Rand Easter show where a man of his color would be denied entry on certain days or to the nicest pavilions no matter how much he might pay for a ticket, but where the poorest white would be allowed to enter.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It had stung the Colonel’s wife a little when Mohammed, at sixteen, had come home on school holidays to admonish his parents for hiring Eunice, claiming that they imprisoned her, and asking why she was not permitted to eat dinner with the family. He followed Eunice around while she made beds and chopped vegetables and washed the floors, lecturing her on Communism. The Colonel’s wife had to shoo her son away—Can’t you see she’s busy?—and the Colonel and Mohammed had fought in the evenings once Eunice was safely away in her own room. The Colonel claimed that hiring Eunice was practically charity, and besides, this life was something he had earned, while Mohammed accused him of trying to live like a white man, blind to the fact that he would never be one. Though she would never say it to her husband, the Colonel’s wife agreed. They did not live in Houghton, or Hillbrow. The view from their windows was bleak, and the stink of frying from the café below made its way into every gold-embroidered sofa cushion and filigree cedar wood shutter. They would never be able to go any further than they had come.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Read the full story </span><a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2015%20A%20Party%20for%20the%20Colonel%20-%20F.%20T.%20Kola.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A Party for the Colonel here</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Each shortlisted writer receives £500 and the winner of the £10,000 prize will be announced at an award ceremony and dinner at the Weston Library, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, on Monday 6 July. Each of these stories has been published in New Internationalist’s Caine Prize 2015 Anthology which is available </span><a href="http://newint.org/books/fiction/caine-prize-2015/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">here</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. </span></div>
caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-87272384431491999142015-06-08T01:07:00.000-07:002015-06-08T01:08:49.585-07:00Chair of Judges, Zoe Wicomb, on the 2015 Caine Prize Shortlist, Child Narrators and Poverty Porn<span id="docs-internal-guid-ec7f991d-aee8-0e25-b9f0-c403173e7126"></span><br />
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-ec7f991d-aee8-0e25-b9f0-c403173e7126"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Caine Prize has of late been roundly criticized for favouring child narrators, the charge being that their perspectives contribute to the infantilization of Africa. This year’s <a href="https://www.blogger.com/"><span id="goog_623405949"></span>judging panel<span id="goog_623405950"></span></a> has failed to heed the warning; perversely, we have allowed three child narrators on the shortlist. Moreover, all three tell stories of impoverishment, the nasty addictive ingredient, we are told, that converts so readily into ‘poverty porn’. Have we then deliberately chosen to perpetuate the parlous condition in which the representation of African writing is said to find itself? If child narrators are accused of trading in pornographic sentimentality, our three chosen ones deftly sidestep such charges. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Yes, the stories (‘<a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2015%20Flying%20-%20Elnathan%20John.pdf" target="_blank">Flying</a>’, ‘<a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2015%20The%20Folded%20Leaf%20-%20Segun%20Afolabi.pdf" target="_blank">The Folded Leaf</a>’, ‘<a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2015%20Space%20-%20Masande%20Ntshanga.pdf" target="_blank">Space</a>’) deal with poverty and disadvantage, but literary value is, of course, not based on content. Stylistically, these stories prove irresistible; their simplicity is strategic; and far from infantilizing the societies in which they are set, they make extraordinary and sophisticated demands on readers’ inferential skills. Poverty is not presented as a single meaning, begging bowl in hand; instead, meaning proliferates as we are prompted to infer the unspoken: that which lies just beyond what can be seen, or what can be heard, said, or done under social restrictions and conventional morality (––or, in western words, beyond what-Maisie-knew). Beyond poverty and underdevelopment are the clear-sightedness, the aspirational, the will to truth, the empathy and the ethical that lie within reach of the child as artiface. Through the child narrators ambiguity and irony are introduced. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20.7000007629395px; white-space: pre-wrap;">These stories seem to go a long way towards answering a pressing question that we fail to ask whilst we focus on what African writing looks like from the outside: Why do so many literary writers choose the narrative perspective of children?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; line-height: 20.7000007629395px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://www.caineprize.com/news_2015_shortlist.php" target="_blank">Read the Caine Prize 2015 Shortlist</a></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNBWPLf9_42j0QChnIUNPbYkvsa-3KIXznl6zVNBXTkZ2iYqilP2jgeplzFtWckSCx7X3Q6SgDafRrQuNsUsQJ3Oz17AiJhLCiSvdIsQvTjosYJ8GRit9BUZxEl_WEYRIdyYjrx6O-Z9Ms/s1600/caine+prize+for+african+writing+2015+shortlist.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNBWPLf9_42j0QChnIUNPbYkvsa-3KIXznl6zVNBXTkZ2iYqilP2jgeplzFtWckSCx7X3Q6SgDafRrQuNsUsQJ3Oz17AiJhLCiSvdIsQvTjosYJ8GRit9BUZxEl_WEYRIdyYjrx6O-Z9Ms/s400/caine+prize+for+african+writing+2015+shortlist.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-ec7f991d-aeff-bcbd-e979-55618d75e9f4"><a href="http://www.caineprize.com/judges.php" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Zoë Wicomb</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a South African writer who lives in Scotland where she is Emeritus Professor in English Studies at Strathclyde University. Her critical work is on Postcolonial theory and South African writing and culture. Her works of fiction are You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, David’s Story, Playing in the Light, The One That Got Away and October. Wicomb is a recipient of Yale’s 2013 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction. </span></span></div>
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caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-44852381547620050082015-06-02T07:33:00.000-07:002015-06-02T07:33:15.619-07:002015 Shortlist: Elnathan John for 'Flying' (Nigeria)<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The five writer shortlist for the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing has been announced by Chair of judges, award-winning South African writer Zoë Wicomb. In a sign of the established calibre to be found in African writing and as the Caine Prize matures in its sixteenth year, the shortlist includes one past winner and two previously shortlisted writers including Nigerian writer Elnathan John for his story ’Flying’ published in Per Contra (2014). Elnathan John was previously shortlisted in 2013 for 'Bayan Layi' also published in Per Contra. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzlwmGHJ13Gel3Ytyune7rBfkr-qU-ppEjNnTNEPUn877BeGjxYQxFuq5nNPn-d4RdVg9HLm-ooNO7HYQzD3lKa-A6hq39KOLJW5oNTH8dS1wyh7nkWTDXdQpJy_C1e4xIJ3Sh4MeypNKG/s1600/elnathan-john-640x640.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzlwmGHJ13Gel3Ytyune7rBfkr-qU-ppEjNnTNEPUn877BeGjxYQxFuq5nNPn-d4RdVg9HLm-ooNO7HYQzD3lKa-A6hq39KOLJW5oNTH8dS1wyh7nkWTDXdQpJy_C1e4xIJ3Sh4MeypNKG/s320/elnathan-john-640x640.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bio:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Elnathan John is a full time writer who lives and works in Nigeria. His writing has been published in Per Contra, ZAM Magazine, Hazlitt, Evergreen Review, and Chimurenga's The Chronic. He writes political satire for a Nigerian newspaper and his blog for which he hopes to someday get arrested and famous. He has tried hard, but has never won anything. His first novel is due from Cassava Republic Press in 2015 and Grove Atlantic’s Black Cat in 2016. He is a 2015 Civitella Ranieri fellow. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What Flying is about:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> A young school boy growing up in the Kachiro Refuge Home who flies in his sleep. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Read it for:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> A soft exploration of self discovery, loss and re-incarnation. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Excerpt: </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I wake up in fright, earlier than I used to. I felt like I was disappearing. My night had no dream. No flying. No running and gliding. No choosing where to fly to. Nothing. Not even crashing. For the first time since I remember dreaming, I did not fly. I am afraid.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The minutes are passing slowly and my hands are trembling. I am sure Aunty Keturah will know what this empty night means. The earliest I can see her is during break and I don’t know if I can hold on for that long.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After cleaning the office, I sit in her soft black chair, with the record book in my laps. On Gideon’s page, I read, "found crying and abandoned in the market." Maybe someone even stepped on him as they went by, I think, feeling sorry for him. Then it comes back to me- my night without flying and I am afraid again. I turn to my name in the book even though I have told myself I wouldn’t look at it yet. I can hear my heart beating and it is hard to breathe.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Read the rest of ‘</span><a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2015%20Flying%20-%20Elnathan%20John.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Flying</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’ </span></div>
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caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-59785458924718834772015-05-26T03:19:00.001-07:002015-05-26T10:44:26.324-07:00Brian Chikwava on Why Being a Good Writer is Not Enough- Judging The 2015 Shortlist<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What makes a winning story is a question that has been discussed often on the Caine Prize blog by celebrated storytellers and previous judges. Nathan Hensley (Judge 2013)</span><a href="http://caineprize.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/caine-prize-material-by-nathan-hensley.html" style="line-height: 1.656; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">described</span></a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the tingle of responsibility of “doing the work of cultural consecration, separating “good” literature from “bad” and, inevitably, enforcing the standards that might determine what counts as good in the first place.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How do you determine that from just 3000 words? “Short, where narrative is concerned, is not easy: it requires more art.”</span><a href="http://caineprize.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/john-sutherland-judge-2013-columnist.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">argues John Sutherland</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (Judge 2013) in his reflections of the judging process, but an art that he says that “African writers are so damned good at.”</span><a href="http://caineprize.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/what-is-african-literature-tradition.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For Helon Habila</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (Judge 2014), “their plotting, focalizations, narrative voices, rhetorical devices, and structural features call into question the idea that there might be any single definition or model against which the African short-story might be measured.” But decides that </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“if it is a good book, people will make a beaten path it.”.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">However after going through the most recent shortlist announcement, Brian Chikwava, having won the 2004 Caine Prize for “Seventh Street Alchemy” and returned as a</span><a href="http://www.caineprize.com/judges.php" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2015 Judge</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, learned that “being a good writer alone is not enough to guarantee a place on the shortlist. One also needs luck. Plenty of it.”</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoiZ3C3bxEtCqtdx-V6gW41Gyk-8AFD22Xk-wzV358JPS4O9LvMCR_sgyTDBihZo3ZKmdhQnrfPQt_A8Gujs2iMZPl3aqHYa_ioEtj8WmKQjP2GQIGQ5vJkBeLpjYK5_DOf_GmAgSSJWxR/s1600/20150218_134520.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoiZ3C3bxEtCqtdx-V6gW41Gyk-8AFD22Xk-wzV358JPS4O9LvMCR_sgyTDBihZo3ZKmdhQnrfPQt_A8Gujs2iMZPl3aqHYa_ioEtj8WmKQjP2GQIGQ5vJkBeLpjYK5_DOf_GmAgSSJWxR/s400/20150218_134520.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Based on the frequency with which they appeared across the individual judges’ lists of the favourite ten, some stories initially gave the impression that they would sail into the final shortlist. But a surprisingly different picture began to emerge after illuminating discussions on the merits of each story, which perhaps speaks to the quality of the stories. One judge's reading may throw new light on a story whose strengths weren't so obvious to begin with, and suddenly…</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After pleasant agreement and disagreement it also became apparent that in some cases arguing for or against one story or another had reached its limit. A bit of horse-trading therefore seemed like a sensible way of moving forward. At this point the process can take on a political complexion so that the final shortlist to an extent hinges on how firmly held individual judges’ positions are with respect to competing considerations: whether taste, predilection, conviction and other perceived or urgent concern of fiction/writing can be traded in order to arrive at a result that leaves no one judge feeling short-changed.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Inevitably not all of the stories that we liked as individuals made it to the shortlist. I would have loved to see</span><a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BN2VBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA117&lpg=PA117&dq=Cat+Hellisen+Mouse+Teeth&source=bl&ots=1BGgI47D9a&sig=w6X4fHRFx9ub8bgBQ3mq5TQe3gk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=iNNdVbqYD8zQ7AbdjoPQAw&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=Cat%20Hellisen%20Mouse%20Teeth&f=false" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Cat Hellisen’s Mouse Teeth</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">and</span><a href="http://www.wasafiri.org/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=371" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Melissa Tandiwe Myambo’s Special Meal</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">on the shortlist. They are well crafted, engaging and there is a nice freshness in the treatment of their subject matters. I also loved Jowhor Ile's</span><a href="http://www.litro.co.uk/2014/06/somewhere-between-the-borders-supersonic-bus/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Supersonic Bus</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It does make me wonder about the debates that must have taken place when my story Seventh Street Academy was selected as the </span><a href="http://www.caineprize.com/winners_04.php" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2004 winner</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I would love to have been a fly on the wall during those discussions but no one wants to find out that a good outcome may not have been down to their staggering genius.”</span></div>
<span class="" style="background-color: white; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21.2999992370605px;"><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For more insight into the judging process of the Caine Prize read </span><a href="http://caineprize.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/bernardineevaristo-chair-of-judges-2012.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bernadine Evaristo</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (Chair of Judges 2012) and</span><a href="http://caineprize.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-ja-x.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Samantha Pinto</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s (Judge 2012, Assistant Professor, Georgetown University) descriptions of the kinds of questions that came to mind as they read the stories. </span></span><br />
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<span class="" style="background-color: white; line-height: 21.2999992370605px;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 13px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Find out who made the 2015 shortlist <a href="http://www.caineprize.com/news.php" target="_blank">here</a> and the full judging panel <a href="http://www.caineprize.com/judges.php" target="_blank">here</a>. </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Written by <a href="http://www.twitter.com/kiranyoliswa" target="_blank">Kiran Yoliswa</a></i></span></div>
<br />caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-39880195689661505252015-05-17T00:36:00.001-07:002015-05-18T14:44:04.111-07:002015 Shortlist: Segun Afolabi for “The Folded Leaf” (Nigeria)The five writer shortlist for the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing has been announced by Chair of judges, award-winning South African writer Zoë Wicomb. “For all the variety of themes and approaches, the shortlist has in common a rootedness in socio-economic worlds that are pervaded with affect, as well as keen awareness of the ways in which the ethical is bound up with aesthetics. Unforgettable characters, drawn with insight and humour inhabit works ranging from classical story structures to a haunting, enigmatic narrative that challenges the conventions of the genre.”<br />
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A previous winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2005 for ‘Monday Morning’, Segun <br />
Afolabi (Nigeria) has been shortlisted again for “The Folded Leaf” in <i>Wasafiri</i> (London, <br />
2014).<br />
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<b>Bio:</b> Segun Afolabi was born in Nigeria and brought up in the Congo, Canada and Japan. He <br />
lives and works in London. He is the author of <em>A Life Elsewhere</em>, a short story collection, and a <br />
novel, <em>Goodbye Lucille</em>. He is currently working on a new novel and collection of short stories. <br />
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<b>What 'The Folded Leaf' is about</b>: A young girl travels with her father and a group of sick children to Lagos to pray to one of Nigeria’s infamous celebrity pastors for healing.<br />
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<b>Read it for:</b> an expertly guided awareness of the narrator’s experience, a delicate allusion to <br />
homosexual love, and the rise and fall of a desperate hope. <br />
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<b>Excerpt: </b><br />
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Silence. Noise. Silence again. The sounds slipping away, returning — a seashell back and forth <br />
against my ear. I am both giddy and fearful. I have always been afraid, I know, of the night, of <br />
silence, of losing Mama or Papa, of Bola running away, never hearing from him again. More than anything, I am afraid the pastor will see right through me to my sin, my doubt, my disbelief. <br />
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I am frightened because, in spite of myself, I want so much for something to happen. ‘Tunde, Mrs Kekere — take this,’ Papa says. ‘Sam, Bola — one one for each of you.’ He must be distributing the funds we’ve raised in church, months of donations sealed in envelopes, used partly to pay for the driver and the minibus and today’s collection. <br />
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‘Stop trying to stand,’ Tunde says. ‘He wasn’t talking to you.’ </div>
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‘But I can feel something,’ Sam says. <br />
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‘Give all you can!’ a voice booms, though not Pastor Fayemi’s. ‘He sees into your hearts. Don’t cheat Him, oh!’<br />
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Read <a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2015%20The%20Folded%20Leaf%20-%20Segun%20Afolabi.pdf" target="_blank">The Folded Leaf</a></div>
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caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-15462618590706732202015-05-13T07:10:00.000-07:002015-05-13T07:21:51.053-07:00Caine Prize 2015 Writers Workshop by Nkiacha Atemnkeng<b id="docs-internal-guid-11cc44cf-4887-4136-4d98-d5d9514e963d"></b><br />
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-11cc44cf-4887-4136-4d98-d5d9514e963d"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nkiacha Atemnkeng is a young Cameroonian writer based in Douala who was one of twelve selected participants of the 2015 Caine Prize Writers Workshop. In a </span><a href="http://nkiachaatemnkeng.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/my-experience-at-2015-caine-prize.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">recent blogpost</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, Nkiacha shared his experience of the workshop held in Elmina, a picturesque coastal town in Ghana from April 6</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 9px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: super; white-space: pre-wrap;">th</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to 19</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 9px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: super; white-space: pre-wrap;">th</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-11cc44cf-4887-4136-4d98-d5d9514e963d"></b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW9UdvPPuS3RqdQcmmGYZzAWy95Q6I93GhcyLsU2kC4hbD8iud_8iH2rTSh7DMQc-8SVczq7akiVnlGTRByQgmrhLmCs9gOe3JkdxHcltQavJvHn0JZKobBLUdJYgkI6S3JHTBZwTczFdy/s1600/Caine+Prize+African+Writing+Workshop+Ghana+2015.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW9UdvPPuS3RqdQcmmGYZzAWy95Q6I93GhcyLsU2kC4hbD8iud_8iH2rTSh7DMQc-8SVczq7akiVnlGTRByQgmrhLmCs9gOe3JkdxHcltQavJvHn0JZKobBLUdJYgkI6S3JHTBZwTczFdy/s400/Caine+Prize+African+Writing+Workshop+Ghana+2015.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-11cc44cf-4887-4136-4d98-d5d9514e963d"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: Corsiva; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 20px; orphans: auto; text-align: justify; text-indent: 48px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 1; word-spacing: 0px;">(Left to Right) Diane Awerbuck (South Africa), Dalle Abraham (Kenya), Jonathan Dotse (Ghana), Facilitator Zukiswa Wanner (South Africa), Jonathan Mbuna (Malawi), Nana Nyarko Boateng (Ghana), Jemila Abdulai (Ghana), Akwaeke Emezi (Nigeria), Efemia Chela (Ghana, Zambia), Kiprop Kimutai (Kenya), Aisha Nelson (Ghana), Onipede Hollist (Sierra Leone), Nkiacha Atemnkeng (Cameroon), Facilitator Leila Aboulela (Sudan).</span></span></b></div>
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-11cc44cf-4887-4136-4d98-d5d9514e963d" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Arriving in Accra </span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">An immigration officer looked at me and said,</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6363636363636362; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“You’re a nice guy!” I was taken aback. Immigration officers in my country don’t lavish such beautiful compliments on anyone. They are either non-committal to you or they scold you. So I asked him,</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6363636363636362; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Why do you say that?”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“There are some people that when you see them, you begin to shiver. But you! I don’t think so. Where are you from?”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Cameroon,” I answered.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“It doesn’t matter where you are from, you’re a nice guy.” I felt flattered. Being airport staff myself, I knew he said that from his profiling of me, with respect to fake documents or illegalities.</span></div>
<br /><div dir="ltr" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6363636363636362; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The second officer who stamped my Visa pronounced my town of birth with a certain familiarity that something told me that he knew the place,</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6363636363636362; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Nkiacha, born in Kumba!” I halted, trying not to think of the exaggerated infamous stories of my birth place. But as he returned my passport, he added,</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6363636363636362; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I attended CPC Bali.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Oh! Really! Good to know.”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6363636363636362; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(CPC Bali is one of the first Secondary schools in Anglophone Cameroon.) We spoke French briefly after that. The “nice guy” one warmed up to my chat so much he even gave me his phone number.</span></div>
<br /><div dir="ltr" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6363636363636362; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I left for the arrival hall. A gentleman gave me a cart, placed my bags on it and told me,</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6363636363636362; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Welcome to Ghana”. It was another commendable act of gallantry. So off I went thinking about first impressions. “</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ghanaians are generally hospitable, friendly people, birthplace of pan-Africanism really.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">” Then a voice boomed,</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“This way sir, Customs.” (Damn it.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Okay.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Anything to declare? Currency? Goods?” the man asked, his eyes on my bags.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Nothing. Only clothing.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“So where are you from?” he asked, spotting my foreign accent.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Cameroon.”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6363636363636362; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He sighed. “You people came here in 2008 and eliminated Ghana in the semi-final of the Africa Cup of Nations,” he snapped and flung his hand away dismissively. The unexpected reproach made me laugh, as I remembered the 1-0 defeat. An eight year grudge! Does he know our team has suddenly become the dead lions?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I’m sorry about that.” </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Okay, first impressions. “</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hospitable, gentle Ghanaians, customs officer exclusive.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">”</span></div>
<br /><div dir="ltr" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6363636363636362; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Accra looked like the better behaved twin of my city, Douala, Cameroon’s economic capital. The commercial hustle and bustle was palpable. There were throngs of people in every street corner and avenue. I saw a multitude of impressive buildings and neat wide roads, garnished by lots of traffic lights and a glut of cars and taxis plying them. The names of the businesses were entertainment; Downhill Virgins, Shalom fast food, Glee Oil etc. We drove past the state house and I was puzzled that it is along the road. Ours is a swanky mansion safely tucked away from public view in Yaoundé. The Accra presidency looks more statehouse like, with its pentagon like, slightly circular frame and greyish compartments and floors, surrounded by high flying Ghanaian flags. Accra is also a city with better architectural symmetry than Douala. Traffic lights at almost every junction guide movement, especially during hold ups. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Driving to Elmina</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After lunch, we all hopped onto two buses and began our long drive to Elmina, the coastal town in the Central region where we were based. Brainy conversations trickled on all subjects in our bus and I was impressed by the intellect of young </span><a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2014_Chela.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Efemia Chela</span></a><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> who sat next to me, telling me about Ghanaian life.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6363636363636362; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Oh look,” she quickly pointed at a boy selling West African garden snails in a bowl and I gasped at their gigantic size as we drove past. I was asked about writing in English and not French, since I am from a “Francophone country”. I explained that I write in English which I am more versed in and some French which I studied in school. But I am Anglophone Cameroonian, though living and working in a Francophone city. Little correction, Cameroon is a bilingual country, though predominantly Francophone.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Our conversation sort of paused when we drove past a car accident scene. Pede Hollist finally broke the silence a few minutes later,</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6363636363636362; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I noticed we were all quiet. So what inference can we draw from that?”</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6363636363636362; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“It was heart breaking. But it seemed nobody died, only injuries. I saw a lady with some blood on her body,” someone answered. That was the only sad moment in our bus trip. Nature consoled us with scenic views of lagoons, fresh foliage and beautiful villages like Winneba and Anomabo, where we saw a clown who had disguised like a woman at a small beach party. We drove along the coastline, where hundreds of wild coconut trees lined the seashore and its waters breathed fresh breeze on us. The bluish green sea was quite a sight, as its gruff water currents splashed noisily against the shores, leaving behind a meshwork of brown seaweeds. After three and a half hours, we finally arrived at the eye catching, Coconut Grove Beach Resort Elmina, a plush seaside hotel built in a grove of wild coconut trees. It has entertained guests such as Kofi Annan, Serena Williams and Bono. After checking into our rooms, we later had dinner and chatted at length, to know ourselves better.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Workshop </span></div>
<br /><div dir="ltr" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6363636363636362; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There was a lot of entertainment the next day; delicious food and wine, swimming in the beautiful ocean, table tennis, crocodile viewing in the pond and horse riding. I rode a horse for my first time and saw my first donkey too. We all assembled in the conference hall at 5pm and our facilitator, wonderful Sudanese novelist and first winner of the Caine Prize, Leila Aboulela, gave us a guided imagery writing exercise to do, to send us into writing gear. We wrote and read the short pieces. From the readings and discussion of the short stories we intended writing, it was already evident how different and unique we all were. Our second facilitator, South African novelist, Zukiswa Wanner joined us two days later and she was another amazing and funny writer to complete the very panafrican group of fictioneers. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So it was on. We wrote and wrote and then wrote some more. Each evening, there were readings of work in progress by three writers. The facilitators gave feedback, suggestions and positive criticisms to make the stories better. The other writers did too. Each reader had the option to either accept, modify or reject the suggestions. I worked on one short story and stuck with it all along. I judged most of the feedback to my story helpful. Apart from the facilitators, I also profited from the knowledge of writers/teachers like Diane Awerbuck and Pede Hollist. The workshop was also an opportunity for me to network with other writers and understand their different creative processes. By the time our stories were concluded, it was no surprise that the range was so wide; from realist fiction to science fiction, tragedy to comedy, stories set in the earth’s water bodies to high up in the air, aboard a plane, to be published along with the 5 shortlisted stories this year in the Caine anthology in July by New Internationalist. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We also visited some secondary schools in groups, to talk about writing and reading and to encourage the students to do so. I visited the Catholic Girls Junior Secondary School, Elmina with Zukiswa, Dotse and Akwaeke. I read to the students from my children’s short story illustrations book, “The Golden Baobab Tree” and they enjoyed it. The girls showed so much interest in the book, relishing the cartoon illustrations and passing it on, so I gifted my copy to the school. We asked if they had written any short stories that they could share with us. They were initially shy but soon warmed up to Zukiswa’s arresting presence and produced three stories, read by three different authors. We were impressed by their writing skills. Akwaeke never forgot a beautiful line from one of the girls’ stories about a promiscuous female character, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"><b id="docs-internal-guid-11cc44cf-4887-4136-4d98-d5d9514e963d" style="font-weight: normal;"></b></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="display: inline !important; line-height: 1.6363636363636362; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<b id="docs-internal-guid-11cc44cf-4887-4136-4d98-d5d9514e963d" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“She was a rolling stone in the hands of men.” Wow! But there was a scene where a character received a “wonderful slap” and I gasped. </span></b></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6363636363636362; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: normal;"><b style="font-weight: normal;"></b></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="display: inline !important; line-height: 1.6363636363636362; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Before we left, we informed the headmaster about some children’s short story competitions and urged the girls to submit their stories online. </span></b></div>
<br />
<br /><div dir="ltr" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6363636363636362; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As I embarked the bus to the airport, I felt a deep sense of satisfaction, after participating in one of the prestigious creative writing workshops in Africa, in that hospitable land of Kwame Nkrumah, where many people and even the signposts tell you “Akwaaba” (welcome) and the people are always ready to make you their “Charle” (friend). </span></div>
<br /><div dir="ltr" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.6363636363636362; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Read Nkiacha’s full post on his blog </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://nkiachaatemnkeng.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/my-experience-at-2015-caine-prize.html" style="text-decoration: none;">here</a>. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://www.caineprize.com/workshops.php" target="_blank">Find out more about the Caine Prize workshops</a></span></div>
<div style="font-weight: normal;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
</b>caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-82000923685542790292015-03-25T05:27:00.000-07:002015-03-25T07:39:42.394-07:00TEDxEuston 2014 by Jinaka Ugochukwu<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">I'd spent most of the autumn looking forward to volunteering at <a href="http://www.tedxeuston.com/" target="_blank">TEDxEuston</a> on Saturday 6th December. It was, in my mind, a big deal to be part of an event; inspiring new ideas
about Africa. </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">So on many occasions, leading up to it, I’d animatedly tell friends and
family about how I’d be part of the bookstore team on the day. </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">It transpired that many people didn’t know the TED brand and fewer still knew
specifically about TEDxEuston.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">So I explained many times. And eventually I condensed my spiel to this tightly crafted paragraph:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">TEDxEuston's focus is Africa. It is a local and independent TED-like event; a conference platform for spreading ideas worth sharing. It encourages its speakers and audience to engage with the continent's challenges and embrace their passion and commitment to direct its future. </span></span><br />
<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">It is a day when the spotlight is on Africa and it shows a balance of its
landscape and not a myopic show reel.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">This year’s conference gathered speakers including Zain Asher (CNN news
anchor),<span class="skimlinks-unlinked"> Frances Mensah Williams</span> (founder
reconnectafrica.com), Sunday Oliseh (Nigerian former footballer and coach); Binyavanga
Wainaina (Kenyan writer), Chude Jideonwo (Managing Partner of Red Media Africa,
Y!Africa and <span class="skimlinks-unlinked">YNaija.com) and Yvonne Adhiambo
Owuor (Kenyan writer)</span>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The theme for the speakers on the day was ‘Facing Forward’; the ideal
counterbalance to the recent regression of the global media’s perspectives on
Africa. Catalyzed by the backdrop of the
Ebola outbreak, Africa had once again shrunk to a single homogenous country of
helpless inhabitants. So I was excited
to be at TEDxEuston and I was excited to be ‘engaging responsibly about Africa’
by promoting books which reflected some of its various voices and experiences.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The Gonjon Pin</span></i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"> and <i>A Memory This Size</i>, The
Caine Prize Anthologies for 2014 and 2013 were two of the books on the stand
that day. It was a pleasure to introduce
so many people to these stories and their authors and the work of the Prize.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">The Prize has done much to ‘foster writing in Africa and to bring new
writers to the attention of a wider audience’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Two former winners of the prize Binyavanga Wainaina (2002) and Yvonne
Adhiambo Owuor (2003) were amongst the speakers on the day. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Wainaina of course is well known for throwing down the gauntlet at the
Africa stereotype with his ‘mischievous and scathing’ 2005 essay <i><a href="http://annansi.com/2007/06/how-to-write-about-africa-by-binyavanga-wainaina/" target="_blank">How to Write about Africa</a></i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Over the last decade Wainaina ‘has sought, worked with, published, mentored
and promoted some of Africa’s most exciting new literary talent. He is the
founding editor of one of Africa’s leading literary institutions Kwani? (</span><a href="http://www.kwani.org/"><span lang="EN" style="color: windowtext; font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">www.kwani.org</span></a><span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">). In 2014, he was named by <i><a href="http://time.com/70795/binyavanga-wainaina-time-100/" target="_blank">Time</a></i> magazine as one of 100 most influential
people in the world.'<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">His powerful discursive storytelling was evident throughout his TEDxEuston
contribution, <i>Conversations with Baba</i>. Through the winding path of his father’s
illness and death, coming out as gay and various life events he proclaims that
‘the simple acceptance of our right to be and be diverse, is the biggest and
strongest thing to defend’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://ytimg.googleusercontent.com/vi/z5uAoBu9Epg/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/z5uAoBu9Epg?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></span></div>
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Watch <b><i>Conversations with Baba</i></b><i> </i>here.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor pondered the <i>Competing
narratives of a beautiful continent</i>.
She too observes the media’s shrinkage of the second largest continent
to ‘[a virus], a single country of mute sacrificial victims in need of
self-appointed messiahs’. She proposes
that we think about what Africa means to Africa before we think about what
Africa means for the world; looking forward is to look within. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://ytimg.googleusercontent.com/vi/T9Oe6U2zoAc/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/T9Oe6U2zoAc?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></span></div>
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Watch <b><i>‘Competing narratives of a beautiful continent’</i></b> here.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlXHiOCGSbLeaQCC8-NPnInABVbfn9yFUlKOq6IvKYVtpbLiTK0NuHGwQ0HEcUB0A0flTUu2At0nhuKW-aX0PEgZvI4decEqoonoleY5vUEYHgUEc8IE7bOe5-JtMmxBror6M_XG2JoTVC/s1600/dust.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlXHiOCGSbLeaQCC8-NPnInABVbfn9yFUlKOq6IvKYVtpbLiTK0NuHGwQ0HEcUB0A0flTUu2At0nhuKW-aX0PEgZvI4decEqoonoleY5vUEYHgUEc8IE7bOe5-JtMmxBror6M_XG2JoTVC/s1600/dust.jpg" height="200" width="128" /></span></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i><span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Dust</span></i></b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"> Owuor’s debut novel was available on
the bookstand and she was graciously available to sign copies. ‘</span><span style="line-height: 150%;">It is a novel about a splintered family in
Kenya—a story of power and deceit, unrequited love, survival and sacrifice’. </span></span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It was a popular
purchase; it was the first book to sell out. </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBPb9mpZY1d0-RgL26Tw48cHDxafoVGYwTqnhsY6nrIk3KFwVni17HsYe8ddFh7AmZJcowZv6Hcs-xI15GrMpmeY2tEEPnJll9wetizgl7ei-0u7Zj_W9AAriQQYlMT5IWbzQYIc7tDFHq/s1600/9781783781027.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBPb9mpZY1d0-RgL26Tw48cHDxafoVGYwTqnhsY6nrIk3KFwVni17HsYe8ddFh7AmZJcowZv6Hcs-xI15GrMpmeY2tEEPnJll9wetizgl7ei-0u7Zj_W9AAriQQYlMT5IWbzQYIc7tDFHq/s1600/9781783781027.jpg" height="200" width="125" /></span></a></div>
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<b><span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The UK launch of the book had taken place on December 4<sup>th</sup> at
Marlborough House hosted by Granta and Commonwealth Writers and in
collaboration with Kwani Trust, The Caine Prize, TEDxEuston, Numbi and the
Royal African Society. The book has
since be shortlisted for the 2015 Folio Prize.
<b><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/books/review/dust-by-yvonne-adhiambo-owuor.html?_r=1" target="_blank">See review here</a>. </b></span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">In total the bookstand carried over 14 titles. Including two by Frances Mensah Williams
(also a speaker on the day). Her debut
novel is being published by Jacaranda in 2015.
<a href="http://www.jacarandabooksartmusic.co.uk/" target="_blank">Jacaranda</a> and <a href="http://africawrites.org/" target="_blank">Africa Writes</a> also had stands on the day.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">There was a wide range of literature available at TEDxEuston; the enthusiasm
for purchasing it was at times palpable as too was the disappointment when titles
had sold out.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Working on the bookstand was a transformative way to experience the
conference. My interaction with the customers
was literally an education in some instances, pure entertainment in others and
overall a great source of pride in the veracity of the ‘Africa rising
narrative’.</span></div>
caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-85529605342483242762015-03-18T09:50:00.000-07:002015-03-18T13:33:51.639-07:00Berlin by Yvonne Owuor<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-AU">Berlin.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 28.4pt;">
<span lang="EN-AU">To venture into the interstices of implanted memory through the vehicle
of literature and a festival. The site is the <a href="http://www.literaturfestival.com/?set_language=en" target="_blank">Berlin Literature Festival</a>. Truth
be told, I am not there for the festival, my heart pounds at the thought of
encountering the corporeal notion of Berlin. Some words take on the texture of
emotion. <i>Berlin</i> is one of them. The substance
of history, the crossroads of human strangeness, mythic tangible and intangible
war frontier. I had always meant to learn German one day. When I was a child, I
discovered the word ‘Schadenfreude’. I thought that a language that can
encapsulate this sensation was worth knowing. Has not happened yet. But it also
seems everyone here speaks English.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-AU"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnhyphenhyphen-xNIKx7KgD2vfOZn0OhYC20_ZuprVIRvZkEyKjK-6hswPxjOdRLmIdb6zXeBAC0TwyWhgu0fbVAqyqk7zehFEi95O1YyLSLLpDq2YPMMnp_JXdrw0qvnUZlSM7Ddw9NxIJDGJm992E/s1600/Brandenburg+gate.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnhyphenhyphen-xNIKx7KgD2vfOZn0OhYC20_ZuprVIRvZkEyKjK-6hswPxjOdRLmIdb6zXeBAC0TwyWhgu0fbVAqyqk7zehFEi95O1YyLSLLpDq2YPMMnp_JXdrw0qvnUZlSM7Ddw9NxIJDGJm992E/s1600/Brandenburg+gate.jpg" height="252" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Brandenburg Gate</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
There is the Reichstag. There is the Brandenburg Gate. There are the
traces of the wall that fell twenty-five years ago. Here are the Berliners, a
people set apart, even in Germany. Here is the bus showing up on time. Here are
more Berliners. I like them, for no other reason than that they are Berliners,
but maybe because they are now real faces to people my pre-imagined Berlin. The
author of <i>‘A Woman in Berlin’</i> walked
these streets. Here where birds now sing, are echoes of old screams, the traces
of bad ghosts, the site of furious fires, here is where hope rose and was
murdered and emerged again, here again are memory labyrinths, here are where
thousands and thousands died.<br />
<br /></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX-yXtxJOGK8SdcrlCsJ0S9pz-rLZCxSJqtNr9iy31zRzPT91bP2Ixpl6XuchIOkBIL8b_iYnedmITEiJmxWON4MRcBOxj2rLxr6lSUyjMpvrctNOcgJw4PyE4556P19jzVbUXpj059mZq/s1600/Yvonne.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX-yXtxJOGK8SdcrlCsJ0S9pz-rLZCxSJqtNr9iy31zRzPT91bP2Ixpl6XuchIOkBIL8b_iYnedmITEiJmxWON4MRcBOxj2rLxr6lSUyjMpvrctNOcgJw4PyE4556P19jzVbUXpj059mZq/s1600/Yvonne.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yvonne with her 'guardian angel' Barbara</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU">The festival has assigned me a guardian angel. Her name is Barbara. A
gentle, self-deprecating lover of literature, who cooks the food that the books
she reads offer. She will share her Berlin with me. We will traverse the city
on foot, by bus and the metro. We shall sit together in the blue cathedral, and
stop and stare at the signals from history’s books. We will dash into gorgeous
clothes shops and exclaim over silhouettes—in Berlin. She will have to drag me
out of bookshops where I go insane. She will also arrange a surprise—a visit to
another bookshop where she has commanded the gleeful bookshop owner to display
my book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dust-Yvonne-Adhiambo-Owuor/dp/0307961206" target="_blank">Dust</a></i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><br /></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0ErktQ9TvAFFb730-kw3f1K7tqNSD2cm5dMqJjYWcIPLUhMV_vk8k1iebyK-v4YbFZ-MxFW4Ax2xjuTkrjx2YHDhfSKkEkTC1uQ9q0NyrC3aIsQf95txwUUt204XXdfNFa2vZh_duz9Xk/s1600/P10+Dust.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0ErktQ9TvAFFb730-kw3f1K7tqNSD2cm5dMqJjYWcIPLUhMV_vk8k1iebyK-v4YbFZ-MxFW4Ax2xjuTkrjx2YHDhfSKkEkTC1uQ9q0NyrC3aIsQf95txwUUt204XXdfNFa2vZh_duz9Xk/s1600/P10+Dust.png" height="320" width="212" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yvonne's debut novel</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Ah,
yes, the festival.</div>
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<span lang="EN-AU">Refined, elegant, tastefully disarrayed, intense, the universe of books,
writers, readers, words. Drinking in deeply, a sense of ‘home’, allowing that
other being, <i>writer</i>, to be, to
become, to engage, to listen, explore and speak. Turn left. In this sea of
faces, a deep nod and special grin for the ones you remember by reputation and
name. My first international outing with the book <i>Dust</i> unfolds here. The festival has appointed an actor to read a
German translation. I read the English. I listen to the German telling and
discern the feeling from the voice of the actor. I wish I could touch the book’s
words in German. In the audience are friends made in Kenya. Anna, and beautiful
Paul, fellow Middle-Earther, who flew in from Moscow. There are those who will
become new friends, Africans living in Berlin who come to show their support. It
is a gentle, loving, curious audience, the delightful kind who engage with
story and story worlds. The facilitator with a </span><span lang="EN-US">synaesthesia
secret</span><span lang="EN-AU">, Susanne, is
incisive, brilliant, and her questions prod, dig, and cause an honest
sputtering. She has read the book. Many times my answer is, “Amazing, I hadn't
thought of it that way.” I am not sure it helps her cause. I find that some
stories are no respecter of their <s>author</s> medium. They reveal their
meaning to others and then lurk in shadows to ambush their writer. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU">It is a most delicious evening. After the event, we gather around a
table basking in the afterglow (I fall into an ultra-campy red chaise longue— why
not?) and share good red wine in the writers’ tent. We talk about the world and
Kenya and laugh about nothing and everything under a balmy evening in Berlin.
We laugh until we must leave. It is a little past midnight. A day later, destiny
and the organisers will fling <a href="http://www.caineprize.com/news_2013_winner.php" target="_blank">Tope Folarin</a>, Ismael Beah and I together. We have
been invited to speak about those themes that writers connected to Africa are often
expected to address with competence—Death and Disaster and Disease; War and Woe. </span>Inner struggle.</div>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><br /></span>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdj2-suVHa8nB3MmSe84jn63sEa9Nj2qs6xEgK-S2gNWBnidwWDst3waipaYflxC82R7swHj3pryMIqJk_0SkC9XpEOXQtUmjEnLxpuyp3t8CsUOwTgvXeLLt47cCWnUyn2GHbxWWAiEyH/s1600/DSC00910.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdj2-suVHa8nB3MmSe84jn63sEa9Nj2qs6xEgK-S2gNWBnidwWDst3waipaYflxC82R7swHj3pryMIqJk_0SkC9XpEOXQtUmjEnLxpuyp3t8CsUOwTgvXeLLt47cCWnUyn2GHbxWWAiEyH/s1600/DSC00910.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Relaxing on the chaise longue after a busy day at the Festival</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-AU"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU">I would rather perch on a crag and howl at the metaphorical moon but my
parents, <i>aka</i> The Royal Owuors, raised
my siblings and me with a strict code of manners. We know how to be exemplary
guests: <i>Do not embarrass your host. Be
polite. Allow them their foibles. Do not judge. Be grateful for small gestures.
Above all, do not embarrass your host.</i> But see, I am neither a virologist
nor a security specialist. I would prefer to explore humanity’s sacrificial
predilections and its contemporary manifestation, and the language of value used
to obscure this. I wish to debate the application of semi-colons. I want to ask
Berliners what they think about JRR Tolkien, whose works <s>obsess over</s>
love more than I ought to.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU">A television crew gallops in our direction. Word is out that there are
three African writers in town. It is urgent that they interview us about . . .
Ebola. We agree to answer their questions, Tope, Ismael and I. The Ebola strain
we talk about is the Spooky Africa European Hysteria one. I do not think they
will air our views.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU">It sets the stage. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 28.4pt;">
<span lang="EN-AU">I suspect we may have been a little too hard on our audience </span><span lang="EN-AU">—</span><span lang="EN-AU">this was the ‘Africa Fundamentalism and Ebola’ session. Ah well. However,
in the end, I think we all understood one another. A tow-haired audience member
finally asked, suddenly struck by exasperated realisation, “Why are we asking you
writers to talk about Ebola? You aren't medical specialists.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 28.4pt;">
<i><span lang="EN-AU">Sigh.</span></i><span lang="EN-AU"> Exactly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU">Later, struck by the absurdity of demands inflicted upon most writers of
African linkage when abroad, Tope, Ismael and I exchange ‘war’ stories. We
laugh and laugh. Not sure if it is relief or resignation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-AU">This is my last night.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify; text-indent: 28.4pt;">
<span lang="EN-AU">In some places, my soul throws a moaning, “Why must we go” tantrum when it
is time to depart. It results in a horrible, lingering ache in the heart--Brisbane,
Gaborone, Maputo, Moscow, Dublin, Salvador de Bahia, New York, Santa Fe, Rome
and Unguja</span><span lang="EN-AU">—</span><span lang="EN-AU">I almost scoff (it was inevitable)
when Berlin enters the list. I have already told Berlin’s September sunset that
I shall return. </span></div>
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<i><b><span style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 28.4pt;"></span></b></i><br />
<i><b><span style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: 28.4pt;">Yvonne Owuor was the 2003 winner of the Caine Prize for her story "Weight of Whispers" published by Kwani? Her highly acclaimed debut novel "Dust," published last year is one of eight books shortlisted for the 2015 <a href="http://www.thefolioprize.com/" target="_blank">Folio Prize</a>; the winner will be announced on 23rd March 2015.</span></b></i></div>
caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-22967735130075600162015-01-22T03:02:00.001-08:002015-01-22T03:05:20.110-08:00A snapshot of the Ake Festival 2014 in Nigeria by James Murua<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The </span><a href="http://akefestival.org/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ake Arts & Books Festival</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> was hosted in Abeokuta,
Ogun State, Nigeria from 18-22 November.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The festival was organised by <b>Lola Shoneyin</b> and her team and
</span><a href="http://akefestival.org/index.php/features/aabf-2014-guests" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;">if this list is anything to go by</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> they successfully gathered a large crowd of
very cool artists at the literary festival.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.jamesmurua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Lola-Shoneyin-Governor-Ibikunle-Amosu-First-lady-of-Ogun-State-Ogun-State-Commisioner-of-Culture-and-Tourism-and-Commisioner-of-Culture-and-Tourism--300x200.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="http://www.jamesmurua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Lola-Shoneyin-Governor-Ibikunle-Amosu-First-lady-of-Ogun-State-Ogun-State-Commisioner-of-Culture-and-Tourism-and-Commisioner-of-Culture-and-Tourism--300x200.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">L-R Lola Shoneyin, Governor Ibikunle Amosu, First Lady of Ogun State and Ogun State Commissioner of Culture and Tourism </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And I couldn't find a single complaint from the guests which
for a bloggeratti like myself was a bit disconcerting, as controversy is my
lifeblood; drama and mishaps are the things that drive traffic. None seemed to
be forthcoming and for this I (reluctantly) salute the team.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The festival, supported by the governor of Abeokuta State
</span><b style="font-family: Calibri;">Ibikunle Amosu</b><span style="font-family: inherit;"> and his administration, hosted many events:</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">There were films and plays galore for those who wanted to
experience the written word acted by thespians who knew their craft. There was
no Nollywood type fare, of ghosts looking left and right before crossing the
road or mermaids with brooms for the tails, on offer. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.jamesmurua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Nollywood-Mermaid-300x221.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="http://www.jamesmurua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Nollywood-Mermaid-300x221.jpeg" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Nollywood mermaid fare</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The films and documentaries were from the likes of </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Yeepa</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> a
filmed play by </span><b style="font-family: inherit;">Tunde Kelani</b><span style="font-family: inherit;"> and </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">October 1</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> by </span><b style="font-family: inherit;">Kunle Afolayan</b><span style="font-family: inherit;"> and </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">The Art of Ama
Ato Aido</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> by </span><b style="font-family: inherit;">Yaba Badoe</b><span style="font-family: inherit;">. Then there were plays like </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Qudus: My Exile is in my
Head</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> and a musical </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Call Mr. Robeson</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">This blog is not dedicated to all the arts but rather it
focuses on literature from the continent and there was a lot on offer in this
respect for those lucky folks in Abeokuta State.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">There were book chats with authors like <b style="font-family: Calibri;">Okey Ndibe, Nnedi
Okorafor, Zukiswa Wanner, Nike Campbell-Fatoki, Yejide Kilanko, Barnaby
Philips, Chude Jideonwo</b>. And <b style="font-family: Calibri;">Olusegun Obasanjo</b>, President of Nigeria
(1999-2007) who has several memoir type books to his name.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There was the launch of </span><b style="font-family: inherit;">Beverly Nambozo's</b><span style="font-family: inherit;"> poetry anthology </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">A
Thousand Voices Rising</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">. And also in the house was Nobel Laureate </span><b style="font-family: inherit;">Wole Soyinka</b><span style="font-family: inherit;">
who we are all celebrating as he goes through Soyinka @ 80.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">There were many panel discussions where authors of prose and
poetry discussed such topics as <i>Mutation and Mutilation: Feminism in Africa,
What are publishers looking for in fiction, Poisonous Gas: The Crude Oil
Politics in West Africa</i> and many more. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There were also important announcements.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Caine Prize for African writing, of which Lizzy Attree
is Director, unveiled their </span><a href="http://www.caineprize.com/news_2015_judges.php" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;">2015 judging panel</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> to the public and they are Zoë
Wicomb, Zeinab Badawi, Neel Mukherjee, Cóilín Parsons and Brian Chikwava.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The </span><a href="http://writivism.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Writivism</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> team (<b>Dami Ajayi, Zukiswa Wanner, Lizzy Attree
</b>and<b> Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire</b>) announced the list of ladies and gentlemen who
could be the new faces of African writing. They will be attending workshops in different African cities run by <b>Dilman Dila</b> (Kampala), <b>Zukiswa Wanner</b> and
<b>Anne Ayeta Wangusa</b> (Dar es Salaam), <b>Yewande Omotoso</b> and <b>Saaleha Idrees</b> <b>Bamjee</b>
(Johannesburg), <b>Dami Ajayi</b> (Lagos), <b>Donald Molosi</b> and <b>Lauri Kubuitsile</b>
(Gaborone). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">As an East African the announcement closest to my heart was
that of the new </span><a href="http://kiswahiliprize.cornell.edu/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> prize for African Writing, a brainchild
of <b>Mukoma Wa Ngugi</b> and <b>Lizzy Attree</b>. The new award promotes writing in African
languages and encourages translation from, between and into African
languages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Prizes will be awarded for
the best entry of an unpublished book or manuscript, prose or poetry in the
Kiswahili language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Very cool.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">After the whole conference, without any drama to tout I
sadly add, the evening ended on Saturday with a shebang that was so loud (maybe
the neighbours complained hopefully?) we could hear the stomping of feet to
</span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiUarlxFhQ0" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Dorrobucci</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> from Nairobi where we were mourning the “mauling” of Arsenal by Man
United. And some other more national matters.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Here's a link to James Murua's original blogpost: </span><br />
<a href="http://www.jamesmurua.com/category/ake-festival-2014/">http://www.jamesmurua.com/category/ake-festival-2014/</a></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Here are a few other views from the people who were actually
there:</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
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<a href="https://caceafrica.wordpress.com/2014/11/25/the-writivism-experience-at-the-2nd-ake-arts-and-books-festival/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Writivism Experience at the 2nd Ake Arts and Books Festival</span></a></div>
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<a href="http://bnpoetryaward.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/the-ghosts-at-continental-suites.html" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Ghosts at Continental Suites, #Ake2014-by Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva</span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Here are some images from the festival events, courtesy of the artists and the organisers:</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.jamesmurua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Beverly-Nambozo-300x200.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="http://www.jamesmurua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Beverly-Nambozo-300x200.jpg" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Beverley Nambozo launches the anthology <i>A Thousand Voices Rising</i></span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.jamesmurua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Nnedi-Okarofor-300x200.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="http://www.jamesmurua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Nnedi-Okarofor-300x200.jpg" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(right) Nnedi Okarofor</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.jamesmurua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Oley-Ndibe-300x200.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="http://www.jamesmurua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Oley-Ndibe-300x200.jpg" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(left) Okey Ndibe</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.jamesmurua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Lola-and-first-lady-Mrs-Folusho-Amosun-300x200.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="http://www.jamesmurua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Lola-and-first-lady-Mrs-Folusho-Amosun-300x200.jpg" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">L-R Lola Shoneyin and First Lady of Abeokuta State Mrs Folusho Amosun</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.jamesmurua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Ukamaka-225x300.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="http://www.jamesmurua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Ukamaka-225x300.jpg" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Olisakwe Ukamaka</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.jamesmurua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Eghosa-Zukiswa-Wanner-and-Jekwu-300x168.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="http://www.jamesmurua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Eghosa-Zukiswa-Wanner-and-Jekwu-300x168.jpg" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">L-R Eghosa Imasuen, Zukiswa Wanner and Jekwu Ozoemene</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.jamesmurua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Mukoma-300x168.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="http://www.jamesmurua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Mukoma-300x168.jpg" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(left) Mukoma Wa Ngugi</span></td></tr>
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caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-77718282207565338662014-11-25T05:10:00.000-08:002014-11-25T05:10:11.394-08:00Una Well Done O. Bye Bye by Zukiswa Wanner<div class="MsoNormal">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2I7Ias5YEQGPe064Ps5cNEG7JBKB4nNKj2TIPowmM55CiZr_yfZ3VrMN06SzJ3KfMWa3PR9cQL4CAbmemRCMi-m_BJvYMx2nBp6vSTu88wsSyclPdMlInDopEuIFn1wPIdvrDnO6yi7PD/s1600/UNESCo.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2I7Ias5YEQGPe064Ps5cNEG7JBKB4nNKj2TIPowmM55CiZr_yfZ3VrMN06SzJ3KfMWa3PR9cQL4CAbmemRCMi-m_BJvYMx2nBp6vSTu88wsSyclPdMlInDopEuIFn1wPIdvrDnO6yi7PD/s1600/UNESCo.png" /></a></div>
<br />
In April
this year, a list of the top 39 writers from the African continent under the
age of 40 was released at the London Book Fair. There too, the baton was handed over from
Bangkok to Port Harcourt as the UNESCO 2014 World Book Capital. The Africa39
writers would attend Port Harcourt Book Festival in October to celebrate this
double achievement for the African continent. It seemed like a match made in
book heaven. <br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj96rRypfxp7aOXirdUzsSTjOJwGY5nVJr9E0eFHMgzaGU7axmVvkzcRmUH6KAR02qhF3m1QFN1IoKfZrPAndnrBcjYTdvrP7IcXj6xZJt_YmUQQnfOxZOpYBNJlKaW8g9vRoDvbDBWYKtA/s1600/Africa39.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj96rRypfxp7aOXirdUzsSTjOJwGY5nVJr9E0eFHMgzaGU7axmVvkzcRmUH6KAR02qhF3m1QFN1IoKfZrPAndnrBcjYTdvrP7IcXj6xZJt_YmUQQnfOxZOpYBNJlKaW8g9vRoDvbDBWYKtA/s1600/Africa39.jpg" height="200" width="128" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(Bloomsbury, 2014)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In my mind (as one of the
39), I started having ideas of my time in Port Harcourt with the other 38. I
would eat native soup while asking Taiye Selasi where I could buy a jacket like
hers; practice my very rusty French by asking Richard Ali Mutu to top up my
champagne glass; possibly photograph Lola Shoneyin, Hawa Golakai, Okwiri Oduor,
Nana Brew-Hammond and Shafinaaz Hassim in one of those girl-power poses with
fireworks in the background. All this of course happening at the opening night cocktail
event at the Governor’s mansion who I had read was a lover of literature and
studied it in university. My grandmother used to accuse me of always
having my head in the clouds. She was right. Twenty three of the 39 writers turned up in
Port Harcourt so obviously the festival was never going to live up to my
imagination. It appeared the festival organizers did not try to either (in
their defence, they had no idea of my lofty expectations).</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi28lLHJWgUOWu2kBfpLV2QioehMhRhlb13NaRWi8lcW1gzKGLdmv_R7dAvhw8RR9O1vGFV_NrovGEQc2Z3bZyJu1WfTfYHbDWj36CQZ3qrlv7y5bTqbXkP7CPGsbCZu_PBXDJ0axb_gB86/s1600/Africa39+book.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi28lLHJWgUOWu2kBfpLV2QioehMhRhlb13NaRWi8lcW1gzKGLdmv_R7dAvhw8RR9O1vGFV_NrovGEQc2Z3bZyJu1WfTfYHbDWj36CQZ3qrlv7y5bTqbXkP7CPGsbCZu_PBXDJ0axb_gB86/s1600/Africa39+book.jpg" height="257" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Africa39 (for photo credit see Brittle Paper blog)</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-US">I tend to
like planning ahead so the first thing I did on arrival after check-in at the
hotel on Sunday night was to ask for the programme. I was informed I would
receive one in 15 minutes. By Monday breakfast, I still hadn’t received it so
was unsure what was happening. I went to some of the young organizers and again
I was informed I would get it within 15 minutes. It didn’t happen then. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span lang="EN-US">Small tale of
cocktails <o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Having finally
found out that we had a free day which I spent gisting with Hawa Golakai,
Ukamaka Olisakwe and Chibundu Onuzo. We parted around four so we could shower
and dress up for the welcoming cocktail party by the pool. <i> </i> Ja. Ok. So it wasn’t at the Governor’s mansion
but that wasn’t going to deter any of us from wearing the special dresses for
this do. Hawa and I even wore heels. Me. In heels. And when we came downstairs
– fashionably late 30 minutes from when the cocktail party was to begin – the
cocktail party hadn’t started. We spotted Abubakar Ibrahim wearing a t-shirt and told him to return
to his room and change into something better. We weren’t going to allow him,
however brilliant and good looking he is, to be an Africa39 Brand Eroder
(thanks Bibi Bakare for this lovely phrase). We shouldn’t have bothered Abu. The
organizing staff who attended the event were mostly in their festival t-shirts.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">There were
no fireworks at the cocktail party. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">No
cocktails or mocktails either. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Just sodas.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">And a
goodie bag. With the programme (yay, finally); two hard covers entitled <i>Port Harcourt By the Book</i> and <i>NIGERIAN LITERATURE: A coat of many colours </i>,
the festival t-shirt, a festival-branded flask, a pen, a notebook (all of
which I was very grateful for). I also received a self-help book from Joel
Olsteen which, I suppose, was the World Book part of the World Book Capital. I
gave it to the woman in Housekeeping the next morning. She gave me extra water
bottles for the rest of the week.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span lang="EN-US">The Programme<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">There were
seven events that the Africa39 writers were expected to take part in. This may
sound like an intense schedule for a six day festival but it wasn’t really.
After the opening ceremony with Bishop Matthew Kukah as the Keynote Speaker
(this continent needs more conscientious clergy and humans like him) on
Tuesday, our next event was at the University of Port Harcourt on Wednesday.
Bless editor of Africa39 Ellah Wakatama Allfrey. She somehow managed to facilitate a
discussion with all 22 of us (Igoni hadn’t arrived yet) while holding the
attention of the audience of students and literature academics. There were two
more Meet the Author occasions with all of us on Thursday and Friday at Ken
Saro-Wiwa Centre and at Alliance Francaise respectively. There were also two Meet the Author panels at
the main venue where writers were split into groups of 11 per panel. As these panels were never more than two
hours, none of the writers ever had occasion to talk for longer than ten minutes. Tragicomic this because writers couldn’t share their wisdom. To be fair
though, anyone who isn’t a writer but has attended more than one literary festival,
should be able to regurgitate writerly wisdom to FAQs.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ0bw8Z2AkWYfNbV54hd6YHh778EO_BHkdB7-ByxhX7Cdq-IjW8arJ5ve5iaiNfTtdg5qzP743abzUw8RVyerrSx5GIT0sVR98jTFF1rfpSuIrw78jEvkCt6rT5t-scYiUfq7w7D4LSCGT/s1600/EA.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ0bw8Z2AkWYfNbV54hd6YHh778EO_BHkdB7-ByxhX7Cdq-IjW8arJ5ve5iaiNfTtdg5qzP743abzUw8RVyerrSx5GIT0sVR98jTFF1rfpSuIrw78jEvkCt6rT5t-scYiUfq7w7D4LSCGT/s1600/EA.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Caine Prize Deputy Chair Ellah Allfrey facilitating a discussion with Africa39 writers<br />
(photo credit: Brittle Paper Blog)<br />
http://brittlepaper.com/2014/11/lovely-photos-african-39-events-port-harcourt-book-festival/</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><b>Audience
Member:</b> How do I become a writer?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><b>Important
Writer</b> (takes microphone. Clears throat. Pregnant pause so perhaps profound
answer?): Read. Read a lot. And write.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><b>AM: </b>You
story talks about a prostitution/homosexuality. Don’t you feel that your
harlot/gayism writings go against our African culture?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><b>IW</b>
(thinking she/he is Jesus and can answer a question with a question): Which and
whose African culture?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US">The only
panel which seemed to have substance because of time permitted was the one on the
Caine Prize. On panel were three past winners: Rotimi Babatunde (2012), Tope
Folarin (2013) and Okwiri Oduor (2014). Ellah Allfrey led the discussion. Questions
that have been making rounds on social media on the validity and the Africanness of the Caine Prize were
ably dealt with by the panelists. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMEcfqkLWXmxKi45qtCH-mTS3XY4vrhQqYuNlQK_kg01BIno2_w7rQxUP2jaDcajTizqotvE49nqjw8dW9SMp1CRDfTqh5CTHmVuptlLPs7ojkyULFuBAkt8JGiTzRS8_N356JZ7TpNUun/s1600/Port+Harcourt2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMEcfqkLWXmxKi45qtCH-mTS3XY4vrhQqYuNlQK_kg01BIno2_w7rQxUP2jaDcajTizqotvE49nqjw8dW9SMp1CRDfTqh5CTHmVuptlLPs7ojkyULFuBAkt8JGiTzRS8_N356JZ7TpNUun/s1600/Port+Harcourt2.jpg" height="202" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Caine Prize 2014, 2013 & 2012 winners - Okwiri Oduor, Tope Folarin and Rotimi Babatunde<br />
(Photo Credit Brittle Paper Blog)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">It was fun
to hang around with writers I had known and admired from afar and meet new ones
during the Port Harcourt Book Festival. For this I shall always be grateful to the
organizers for inviting me. Some members of the organizing committee also took
time out of their schedules to show us around Port Harcourt after hours. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">Communication
between the organisers and the writers could have been better. Some authors
came with their books but were never told where to have them for sale. Too
often too, we were told to wait in the lobby to go somewhere at a certain time
only to find ourselves there for a pretty long time. I also couldn’t help
thinking when I checked out that, with a hotel bill of about 175 thousand Naira for
each writer who attended, perhaps we could have been better utilized. Panels should
have been smaller. Some writers could have done schools outreach.
We would have interacted more with people from the UNESCO World Book Capital better beyond
Hotel Presidential. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></div>
As it was,
what I took away from the Port Harcourt Book Festival was a warm welcome from
Nigerian writers including those who were not part of Africa39; the lingering
taste of suya brought from outside the hotel gate; the hospitality of Sarah and
Favour in the main restaurant; and from the organizers to my fellow 39ers and
me, a sarcastic ‘una well done o. bye bye.’<br />
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caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-63886631131446667412014-11-06T15:39:00.001-08:002014-11-06T15:42:05.762-08:00Surgical Anatomy - the bare bones of storytelling by Stanley Kenani<div class="MsoNormal">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Caine Prize One Day Short Story Surgery in Port Harcourt</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A day before the start of the <a href="http://portharcourtbookfestival.com/index.php/">Port Harcourt Book Festival</a>, <a href="http://www.caineprize.com/workshops.php">14</a> writers came to the Niger Delta from all parts of Nigeria. Fifteen writers were selected from a list of 46 eligible applicants. One, however, could not make it at the last minute. So, these participants gathered in one of the conference rooms of the Presidential Hotel for a day-long short story surgery.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGD_npNzqZKFN81i9lQGgwsT6Ixm257SROQmRlQCbSkH5ESqjfvB67SdqiWNDTrHQeVzswFmncyt8gy1qcSucy339hDP2QvhZzgdplBm4dZGhyphenhyphenej3DpSUpJ440xueazgasiNCrPg1TfEyx/s1600/20141020_170630.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGD_npNzqZKFN81i9lQGgwsT6Ixm257SROQmRlQCbSkH5ESqjfvB67SdqiWNDTrHQeVzswFmncyt8gy1qcSucy339hDP2QvhZzgdplBm4dZGhyphenhyphenej3DpSUpJ440xueazgasiNCrPg1TfEyx/s1600/20141020_170630.jpg" height="300" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The short story surgery participants at Port Harcourt (Photo credit: Jennifer <span style="background-color: white; line-height: 21.2999992370605px; text-align: start;">Nkem-Eneanya)</span></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The team of facilitators comprised three people: the lead facilitator was Caine Prize Deputy Chair, Ellah Wakatama Allfrey and the two co-facilitators were Abubakar Adam Ibrahim (shortlisted in 2013); and Stanley Onjezani Kenani (shortlisted in 2008 and 2012).</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoAEc_2brPyDud1EY-LqycY35t3mzS7Z_NHUOZaTt7_9G8tORzqC8P7weVrnDcb7OiUSvdq8gAQ7v_iFyyUjq2J7dHnC7YMFBs5bSQdTBQ9e8xB9EHUCXauIgN7K-EIsz5uK0puoonVFis/s1600/ALL.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoAEc_2brPyDud1EY-LqycY35t3mzS7Z_NHUOZaTt7_9G8tORzqC8P7weVrnDcb7OiUSvdq8gAQ7v_iFyyUjq2J7dHnC7YMFBs5bSQdTBQ9e8xB9EHUCXauIgN7K-EIsz5uK0puoonVFis/s1600/ALL.png" height="151" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Facilitator Ellah Allfrey and the two co-facilitators, Abubakar Ibrahim (left) and Stanley Kenani</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What, you may ask, is a short story surgery?</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In its typical sense, a short story surgery is a step-by-step strategy that allows students to cut open their drafts and mess with the guts, adding or removing chunks to a piece. It is a tool that appeals to kinesthetic learners – and to everyone who thought writing was boring.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But that is not what we did in Port Harcourt. The surgery was of a different kind.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">From the start we were worried about the methodology, about what to put in and what to leave out. The task was not made any easier by the fact that participants were of varying degrees of aptitude. There was a temptation to throw in everything: opening, voice, setting, point-of-view, character, dialogue, details, ending and many other aspects of the craft. But people spend years studying all these. A day was therefore far from enough. Besides, those with more polished skills could get bored if we dwelt on the basics.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKdW3mSmCN3rz5lV0aI14Hsdr_DjWT_PKzWUaNGYpT2q7Nxjz3t7yzL7Bk1ZO-Kmh55xlKu50ZdgZkGT9exQtnHtGlZE2Jkp6sILvI6-9uFIVskz6rEGjImimYzNsQBTbBiHxpC4mSKF2p/s1600/Femi+Terry+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKdW3mSmCN3rz5lV0aI14Hsdr_DjWT_PKzWUaNGYpT2q7Nxjz3t7yzL7Bk1ZO-Kmh55xlKu50ZdgZkGT9exQtnHtGlZE2Jkp6sILvI6-9uFIVskz6rEGjImimYzNsQBTbBiHxpC4mSKF2p/s1600/Femi+Terry+3.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Olufemi Terry</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After some email exchanges and a Skype conference call, the co-facilitators agreed on the way forward. We started by workshopping Olufemi Terry’s "Stickfighting Days", which was awarded the 2010 Caine Prize. We divided ourselves into three groups, and each group analysed the story based on a key element of the craft: setting, language and character. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsVH7EU39zf5xmd-aNXryLtapEMiqWTge4OmrfgHjl4Ik8I5DA4j-A2vKHv80NN_XtQApfHSu3SK3evjmer0JZdglarAuGVDN2s3rFZnwIMmIJx62NpclqvJlsLEi-uTQfVKlHgLLAUy5q/s1600/A+life+in+full.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsVH7EU39zf5xmd-aNXryLtapEMiqWTge4OmrfgHjl4Ik8I5DA4j-A2vKHv80NN_XtQApfHSu3SK3evjmer0JZdglarAuGVDN2s3rFZnwIMmIJx62NpclqvJlsLEi-uTQfVKlHgLLAUy5q/s1600/A+life+in+full.png" height="200" width="131" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Stickfighting Days" is published by </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">New Internationalist in the 2010 Caine Prize</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">anthology, </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>A Life in Full</i></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Perhaps no story could have been more suitable for the occasion. "Stickfighting Days" drew mixed feelings from the participants. There were those who liked how the story handled each aspect of the craft examined. Overall, students liked the cinematic feel of the story, and the fact that from its opening, “Thwack thwack”, we dive straight into action. But there were also those who questioned everything...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">•</span><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre;"> </span><b style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Character</b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">: Why are all the characters alarmingly violent? A participant went so far as declaring: there is nothing I like about this story – so violent!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><b>Setting</b>: Why doesn’t the author name the country in which the story takes place? “That could have made me understand the story better,” said a participant. I was in the camp of those to whom the naming of the place did not matter. “This makes the story universal,” said a participant who shared similar views. “The setting could be Nairobi, Mumbai, Lagos, Cape Town – anywhere. They have rubbish dumps in all those places and more.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><b>Language</b>: Why are characters using language such as ‘psychologically,’ yet they do not seem to have had the benefit of formal education? And what was the original language of the characters? English? Yoruba? Zulu? Against which others argued: does that matter?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The second part of the surgery involved discussing the stories of the participants themselves. Everyone had read these stories ahead of the surgery, and co-facilitators had made notes on each. Again participants were divided into three groups, and, with the author in a gag, each story was discussed in turn. Here, participants became surgeons: they tore into the stories as diplomatically as possible, providing vital constructive criticism in the process. Co-facilitators ended the day by providing one-on-one feedback to the participants.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYwN-_qmmF23Wt6qnE4BtCNEBTA51OTY8F7wQwdDSbZwtuh1XohQ13dU75bcIPLlmk6x_3k7H2Rp48d-mapU_uVbwzrC7Nq_hNdUMWwtxEDFtIsupv2H1xbCkX_LSHi-Xqs7LGgxLn-lqY/s1600/UNESCo.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYwN-_qmmF23Wt6qnE4BtCNEBTA51OTY8F7wQwdDSbZwtuh1XohQ13dU75bcIPLlmk6x_3k7H2Rp48d-mapU_uVbwzrC7Nq_hNdUMWwtxEDFtIsupv2H1xbCkX_LSHi-Xqs7LGgxLn-lqY/s1600/UNESCo.png" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">According to the Director of the Caine Prize, Dr Lizzy Attree, the Port Harcourt One Day Short Story Surgery is a one-off event, for now, and was devised with the Port Harcourt Book Festival as part of the celebration of their <a href="http://portharcourtworldbookcapital.org/">2014 UNESCO World Book Capital</a> status.</span><br />
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caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-13135383285845263702014-10-29T14:05:00.001-07:002014-10-29T14:30:49.420-07:00Outstanding line up at Nigeria's 2014 Ake Arts and Book Festival <div class="MsoNoSpacing">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfw_4OugJh3ZbbT-sMJdO3iJ28hT5Z8kkpE5MRBVMiyPAX9z6PmMGY7fx68lzT3uv3aWIS3WnkgjBb9TqNr4ain2QYkOMdXGqXSR9gv-qoW2LtBx6249VLa4NtUSGEEWsF5rX0bdqq3xwa/s1600/Ake+paint.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; display: inline !important; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfw_4OugJh3ZbbT-sMJdO3iJ28hT5Z8kkpE5MRBVMiyPAX9z6PmMGY7fx68lzT3uv3aWIS3WnkgjBb9TqNr4ain2QYkOMdXGqXSR9gv-qoW2LtBx6249VLa4NtUSGEEWsF5rX0bdqq3xwa/s1600/Ake+paint.jpg" height="144" width="200" /></a></div>
One of Africa’s largest literary events, the <a href="http://www.akefestival.org/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Ake Arts and Book Festival</span></a>, will run over five days from 18th-22nd November in Abeokuta,
Ogun State, Nigeria. The theme of Ake’s second ever festival is ‘Bridges and
Pathways’, with discussions focusing on ‘building bridges between Africa
peoples, especially along language, ethnic and gender lines, and charting new
paths with the aim of creating synergy and cultural cross fertilisation on the
African continent.’</div>
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The exciting <a href="http://www.akefestival.org/index.php/features/aabf-2014-guests">line up</a> includes
several writers who have been part of the Caine Prize journey over the years,
including Caine Prize <a href="http://www.caineprize.com/patrons.php" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Patron</span></a>, Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka; three <a href="http://www.caineprize.com/winners.php" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Prize winners</span></a>, Binyavanga Wainaina (2002), Olufemi Terry (2010) and Rotimi Babatunde
(2013); three <a href="http://www.caineprize.com/winners.php" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">shortlisters</span></a>, Florent Couao-Zotti (2002), Mukoma Wa Ngugi (2009)
and Abubakar Ibrahim (2013); and several <a href="http://www.caineprize.com/workshops.php" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">workshop</span></a> participants, including
Ayodele Morocco-Clarke (2011), Bryony Rheam (2014) and Clifton Gachagua (2014);
and former judge, Bernardine Evaristo (2012). Caine Prize Director Lizzy Attree
will also feature in the <a href="http://www.akefestival.org/images/AkePDF/Akefestivalprogramme.pdf"><span style="color: blue;">programme</span></a>, in the panel discussion entitled “What are publishers looking for?”</div>
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The festival will involve 13 panel discussions with stimulating topics
ranging from "Writing Back/Writing Forward: Representations of Africa in
New Fiction”, chaired by Lizzy Attree, to “Slave Narratives and the
Burden of Memory,” featuring the Jamaican poet <a href="http://underthesaltireflag.com/about/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Kei Miller</span></a>, who has recently won
the prestigious <a href="http://www.forwardartsfoundation.org/forward-prizes-for-poetry/about/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Forward Prize</span></a> for the best poetry collection of 2014, for <i><a href="http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781847772671" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way To Zion</span></a>,</i>
based on dialogue between a mapmaker striving to impose order on an unfamiliar
land and a Rasta-man who queries his project.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbRZABSADbVOtLy7RB70ZEhmTgfLIdl5Ue8QFK38ZhlLAl0OpqS5QZioyebsCK8PkpEbyGTX5Pt8oO6YuH9MQ6VGqeH5YPK8fMfFef336K1OidMfZGs6UuF8rxoY3ZP9l0dEtX-9RweDV5/s1600/Books.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbRZABSADbVOtLy7RB70ZEhmTgfLIdl5Ue8QFK38ZhlLAl0OpqS5QZioyebsCK8PkpEbyGTX5Pt8oO6YuH9MQ6VGqeH5YPK8fMfFef336K1OidMfZGs6UuF8rxoY3ZP9l0dEtX-9RweDV5/s1600/Books.jpg" height="114" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The books up for discussion at the Festival</td></tr>
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Other activities include master classes on science fiction writing,
comic drawing and documentary making from distinguished professionals; art
exhibitions; drama displays; documentaries; poetry readings; school visits; and
book chats. Ten books have been chosen for discussion, giving the audience
the chance to interact with the authors. One of the books up for discussion
this year is <span style="color: blue;"><i><a href="http://www.harpercollins.com/9780062277329/children-of-paradise" target="_blank">Children of Paradise</a></i> </span>written by acclaimed <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guyanese_in_the_United_Kingdom" title="Guyanese in the United Kingdom"><span style="background: white; color: blue;">British-Guyanese</span></a><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white;"> </span></span><span style="background: white;">poet, novelist and playwright <a href="http://www.freddaguiar.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Fred D'Aguiar</span></a><span class="apple-converted-space">, the novel explores the events surrounding the
Jonestown tragedy.</span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white;">The festival will also screen a new documentary, made by Yaba Badoe, about the Ghanaian writer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ama_Ata_Aidoo" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Ama Ata Aidoo</span></a>. </span></span><i><span style="background: white; color: blue; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><a href="http://amaatafilm.com/" target="_blank">The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo</a></span></i><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white;"> </span></span><span style="background: white;">celebrates
Aidoo and her work as one of Africa’s foremost women writers, and brings it to
new audiences.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvfDxHtbmyk04vd_r5CsDBJEtc8YqRCTBJVOS9pCNmqhoZUL9CJFQTuSQsSWIHoGADidTdk_R52nP18O5au9dufYDzF9kjMP6HGlS9D69P7ZlTRsu4JZy1ATtvGno7P79KxehYU26ncmpY/s1600/Ama+Ato+Aidoo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvfDxHtbmyk04vd_r5CsDBJEtc8YqRCTBJVOS9pCNmqhoZUL9CJFQTuSQsSWIHoGADidTdk_R52nP18O5au9dufYDzF9kjMP6HGlS9D69P7ZlTRsu4JZy1ATtvGno7P79KxehYU26ncmpY/s1600/Ama+Ato+Aidoo.jpg" height="185" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yaba Badoe's documentary about Ama Ata Aidoo will be screened at Ake Festival</td></tr>
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On the sidelines of the festival, an annual
multi-lingual, cross cultural literary journal called <a href="http://akereview.com/" target="_blank"><i><span style="color: blue;">Ake Review</span></i></a> aims to create a platform for showcasing and discussing current
trends in African arts and culture. Kola Tubosun recently
interviewed Caine Prize Director Lizzy Attree for Ake Review about how the Prize has developed
over its fifteen year history – <a href="http://akereview.com/a-prize-is-only-as-good-as-those-who-enter/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">A Prize is Only As Good as Those Who Enter</span></a>.</div>
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With the extraordinary line up of authors, and broad
ranging topics for discussion, participants are in for an exhilarating few days
in Abeokuta
this year.</div>
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caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-91444753777082106942014-07-12T02:54:00.001-07:002014-10-29T14:19:28.940-07:00The African Short Story in Question by 2014 Judge, Nicole Rizzuto<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIyiQI3k46UvWQAz1pZwC_0f8hBQsTr2gn5m2t4lVttL9cGkyJOTL0V5ftaB-GMkoUgK27rSgO4-vMH9HF7-AK-g7qtYmZS9vSl-TPMMiu7dyAjrRJmA5DW-UBxFw5v0BhqJLXMu4eKA_X/s1600/mudimbe.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIyiQI3k46UvWQAz1pZwC_0f8hBQsTr2gn5m2t4lVttL9cGkyJOTL0V5ftaB-GMkoUgK27rSgO4-vMH9HF7-AK-g7qtYmZS9vSl-TPMMiu7dyAjrRJmA5DW-UBxFw5v0BhqJLXMu4eKA_X/s1600/mudimbe.jpeg" height="156" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Professor V.Y. Mudimbe</span></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In a
foundational essay in African literary studies, the critic V.Y. Mudimbe once posed
the provocative question, is African literature a myth or a reality? (</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">“African Literature: Myth or Reality?” </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">African Literary studies, The Present State/L’etat présent</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, ed. Stephen Arnold, pp. 7-11. Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1985). </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">His answer is equally provocative: there is no
real, true nature of African literature we can locate that exists in itself.
This is not because, as some have argued, African literature is a copy of
literatures from elsewhere, a “belated” cultural form that imports techniques
of expression and modes of thought from outside of the continent.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Some such arguments have viewed the oral
tradition, not the literary, as the true form of authentic African culture. Mudimbe,
however, wants to question the oppositions posed between the indigenous and
foreign, authentic and inauthentic, the oral and literary. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The critic asserts
that the reason there is no such thing as an essential nature to African
literature is that African literature, like literatures from anywhere, cannot
be separated from the multiple contexts in which it emerges and to which it also
responds. These contexts—publishing houses both large and small, literary
journals, school classrooms, academic conferences, and now fanzines, blogs, even
twitter feeds —are always in the process of establishing and re-establishing
procedures for measuring, classifying, and defining what African literature is.
The Caine Prize for African Writing is another such context. The selection of
short stories submitted for the prize this year is a testament to the capacity
of contemporary writing to make us rethink assumptions that underlie such procedures
of judging. </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The short stories—nearly
one hundred and fifty of them received this year—challenged the very concept of
what an African short-story is, if we understand by this term a category
defined according to dominant taxonomizing conventions: the national, regional,
or continental origins of a work’s author; the institutions and media through
which it is published, diffused, and marketed; the topics it treats; the formal
strategies it employs; the genre it embodies.
These works possessed an astonishing range of subjects and styles, and were
written and published across multiple regions, nations, continents, and
platforms. They created literary worlds that were just as diverse, extending
from the prosaic to spectacular, the quotidian to the magical. </span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Rotimi Babatunde</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> In these worlds,
a household pet becomes an </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">esteemed and then disgraced local politician </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;"> (Rotimi
Babatunde,” Howl” in </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;"><a href="http://newint.org/books/fiction/caine-prize-2013/" target="_blank">A Memory This </a></i><br />
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<i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> <a href="http://newint.org/books/fiction/caine-prize-2013/" target="_blank">Size</a></i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">). </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirMS5Iz_pV6PFkaVFKv_9vypunrVknLC1WNv_gh0HI0F8j7bQ6Rw0U79KcORqG8BEossGQZQyIbG9Y2-K2v_SrIRQ8AIY8absXLNQH-NEA3nvRRE-mk-_i6MJ2CTLg21KJjnZJfjWDZ8RV/s1600/Jungle+Jim.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirMS5Iz_pV6PFkaVFKv_9vypunrVknLC1WNv_gh0HI0F8j7bQ6Rw0U79KcORqG8BEossGQZQyIbG9Y2-K2v_SrIRQ8AIY8absXLNQH-NEA3nvRRE-mk-_i6MJ2CTLg21KJjnZJfjWDZ8RV/s1600/Jungle+Jim.jpg" height="200" width="140" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJkhKjIRTSP7ch0vJhdy_rlLq3IRCeLYHSPiNrxZ6elL9ds0CBNj_qQDE8jc6BdMEGb7q2-Ki9MwKI00Wl3wJtF5jZAtJAuKZTFffwhp-P7-aYyxtx2qnyh0gLodRK-YGIX4fND5jLhJzU/s1600/Diriye-Osman-Photo-Credit-Boris-Mitkov.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJkhKjIRTSP7ch0vJhdy_rlLq3IRCeLYHSPiNrxZ6elL9ds0CBNj_qQDE8jc6BdMEGb7q2-Ki9MwKI00Wl3wJtF5jZAtJAuKZTFffwhp-P7-aYyxtx2qnyh0gLodRK-YGIX4fND5jLhJzU/s1600/Diriye-Osman-Photo-Credit-Boris-Mitkov.jpg" height="200" width="133" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Diriye Osman, <br />Photo credit <br />Boris Mitkov</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Sleeping Beauty fairytale is queered through the staging of a love story between
a young refugee from Somalia living in Moi’s Kenya and his kindergarten
classmate (Diriye Osman, “Fairytales for Lost Children” in <i><a href="http://www.junglejim.org/" target="_blank">Jungle Jim</a></i>). </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipFixaw3tJDE8dGqmh5r4XIOi5H2L3huWhAb7R_qkyR8MhVHjipiww7RLrjssftUWAqwneVtkWhfTdN1MYX6RMsmq270HrsNAZiJKAKeVHZkhC7P5mhZ3aimEsZu-N1S-iQ800Gja8w_gL/s1600/George+Makana+Clark.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipFixaw3tJDE8dGqmh5r4XIOi5H2L3huWhAb7R_qkyR8MhVHjipiww7RLrjssftUWAqwneVtkWhfTdN1MYX6RMsmq270HrsNAZiJKAKeVHZkhC7P5mhZ3aimEsZu-N1S-iQ800Gja8w_gL/s1600/George+Makana+Clark.jpg" height="200" width="136" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">George Makana Clark</span></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A man searching for redemption confesses his sins of “trafficking
in human souls” and traveling to the edge of the Portuguese empire and the
coastal city of Luanda in the 18<sup>th</sup> century with his father and an
abducted infant (George Makana Clark,
“The Incomplete Priest” in <i><a href="http://www.ecotonejournal.com/" target="_blank">Ecotone</a></i>). </span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaTjPsS8Ec5vcbNeEHGv1oHrLlGyuQZcMGpMFmmf74AyJaz2_YvlXO_XHg0dz96U3K4OBfVfDqITYeCbKXbt2mBQ0D5Q8TnSWjrgEk0gB48hQ8CUn5hfuCo6zII3YtqrIcgTQbSACFMB9M/s1600/Leonora+Miano.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaTjPsS8Ec5vcbNeEHGv1oHrLlGyuQZcMGpMFmmf74AyJaz2_YvlXO_XHg0dz96U3K4OBfVfDqITYeCbKXbt2mBQ0D5Q8TnSWjrgEk0gB48hQ8CUn5hfuCo6zII3YtqrIcgTQbSACFMB9M/s1600/Leonora+Miano.jpg" height="100" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Leonora Miano</span></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A new kinship formation emerges when a teacher becomes a surrogate parent to a
young woman thrown out of her house, accused by her mother of being a witch (Léonora
Miano, “The Open Door of Paradise” in <i><a href="http://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/transition" target="_blank">Transition</a></i></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">). </span></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYQo5YlKIpQgWoTzGrvVTlbDTqu-slAR-lqTH5EIIQtZ3WUJm5ylpxvIzvZyiU0EB8Uat1tqEbTan3EpcV3-QJCS9lCPhfHC7Rw3doNEReOtZxLds6Sau4hhIiXSX8yLQoUM7WUXNK0tfK/s1600/Annie+Holmes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYQo5YlKIpQgWoTzGrvVTlbDTqu-slAR-lqTH5EIIQtZ3WUJm5ylpxvIzvZyiU0EB8Uat1tqEbTan3EpcV3-QJCS9lCPhfHC7Rw3doNEReOtZxLds6Sau4hhIiXSX8yLQoUM7WUXNK0tfK/s1600/Annie+Holmes.jpg" height="200" width="166" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Annie Holmes</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And a teenager steals away with her girlfriend for sex during a family send-off
for her brother, whose fate in the Rhodesian Light Infantry she worries over as
his departure approaches (Annie Holmes, “Leaving Civvie Street” in </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.modjajibooks.co.za/queer-africa-new-and-collected-fiction-up-on-little-white-bakkie/" target="_blank">Queer Africa</a></i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Taken as a
whole, but also viewed individually, the stories not only stretched generic
categories such as modernism, realism, and naturalism, but also troubled </span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">attempts to separate the aesthetic from extra-aesthetic
spheres, the literary from the political, historical, environmental, or economic.
Their plotting, focalizations, narrative voices, rhetorical devices, and
structural features call into question the idea that there might be any single
definition or model against which the African short-story might be measured.
They give us a view into an African literature of the present and future in
ongoing conversation with, and re-imagination of, literary and historical
pasts.</span></div>
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caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-12233915354542143102014-06-24T03:34:00.001-07:002014-10-29T14:11:54.884-07:00A world in itself by 2014 Judge, Gillian Slovo<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8wmrqwncduHxNzcYgapQlKf6lOmcHO5W2tw5R4cpWgNYJb6h_Wygws619AgqOY6wTaP-nGrBGO2hvzAbWC6CDNCoydyaomCxrgj5H77ctH8nIm-nsSXPjp57JyAZ-OzdxKTEw2f3Z-FcA/s1600/Chuppah.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8wmrqwncduHxNzcYgapQlKf6lOmcHO5W2tw5R4cpWgNYJb6h_Wygws619AgqOY6wTaP-nGrBGO2hvzAbWC6CDNCoydyaomCxrgj5H77ctH8nIm-nsSXPjp57JyAZ-OzdxKTEw2f3Z-FcA/s1600/Chuppah.jpg" height="200" width="132" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I went to France last weekend, to celebrate the wedding of
the son of two of my closest friends to his long time girlfriend. Neither the
bride nor groom nor any of their close families are French but they chose to
have their ceremony in a garden in a French village because the location held
special meaning for their growing love. And,
continuing on this theme, they designed their wedding ceremony as a way of
joining their different identities. She comes from a devout Catholic family and he
comes from a long line of secular Jews, and theirs was a wedding of deliberate
inclusion. It took place in a French garden, under a <i>chuppah</i>, the traditional Jewish canopy, with a contingent of
Norwegian women relatives wearing <i>drakter
–</i> the long robes that they don once
a year to commemorate their community’s past – and the whole ceremony was
presided over jointly by a male Catholic priest, and a woman rabbi. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrhCkXBOce5hd2XOw7kjWFEuUZNknz1sfyVk_UoyYEkVKWhcRubBbixLBvETMB33HBQLbsAz-h8RgwtxJ5J0vsljLCukj1ko6HQC44vOuQWPYBOi5o5YJqi0irZwNjPxC1dm-P1NuN9CZ-/s1600/Helon_Habila5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrhCkXBOce5hd2XOw7kjWFEuUZNknz1sfyVk_UoyYEkVKWhcRubBbixLBvETMB33HBQLbsAz-h8RgwtxJ5J0vsljLCukj1ko6HQC44vOuQWPYBOi5o5YJqi0irZwNjPxC1dm-P1NuN9CZ-/s1600/Helon_Habila5.jpg" height="200" width="133" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As the ceremony unfolded I was reminded of my fellow judge,
Helon Habila’s thoughtful <a href="http://caineprize.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/what-is-african-literature-tradition.html" target="_blank">blog</a> for the Caine prize where he talked about what
makes tradition. Helon quoted TS Eliot’s assertion that tradition cannot be
inherited but be must be made by great labour. I thought about the
ramifications of this as I stood witness to two young people who were using
their wedding to begin to carve their new tradition out of their different
pasts. As I thought about this, some of
the multi-stranded stories that I had the privilege to read as a Caine juror
came back to me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I thought about the stories we had shortlisted – and how
much I was going to enjoy reading them again for the final stage of the judging
process - and then I thought about the stories that we had reluctantly to leave
out of our shortlist. I thought about Annie
Holmes’s "Leaving Civvy Street" from the <i><a href="http://www.africanbookscollective.com/books/queer-africa" target="_blank">Queer Africa</a> </i>collection<i>. </i> It’s a story set in the former Rhodesia and peopled
by white characters we used to call “old Rhodies”. Although I am not
Zimbabwean, these characters were so familiar to me from a now mercifully
changed South African past so that while I was reading Annie’s story I was
simultaneously re-visiting my own past and seeing it with new eyes. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx0BwSXwaxiweJ1td63Z6mtaDnaA_k2zyYPh2DVXmlbHGfu3k_r85Y7-UdwAMIZhg4FTRW4TIY2kxCWZhktAmY_PAVnVN8dlUgGBsuoe_Mr5sZxMHtW7IonJWw70C3GxRAKsBEpKzWU9Ok/s1600/mukoma-photo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjx0BwSXwaxiweJ1td63Z6mtaDnaA_k2zyYPh2DVXmlbHGfu3k_r85Y7-UdwAMIZhg4FTRW4TIY2kxCWZhktAmY_PAVnVN8dlUgGBsuoe_Mr5sZxMHtW7IonJWw70C3GxRAKsBEpKzWU9Ok/s1600/mukoma-photo.jpg" height="200" width="160" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Mukoma wa Ngugi<br />(photo credit:<br /><span style="background-color: white;">David Mariampolski)</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And then I thought about <a href="http://www.mukomawangugi.com/" target="_blank">Mukoma wa Ngugi</a>’s "Wounded Men"<i>: </i>the life, in a few pages, of
a boxer who crossed continents only to end up dying a typical Kenyan death. I
am a novelist, accustomed to the long form, but what Mukoma wa Ngugi did for me in such
a short number of words was invite me
into a world of men that was unfamiliar, but which I understood as I watched it unfold on the page. And from wa Ngugi I re-visited a
different story: Maurine Ogbaa’s "<a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo/v036/36.1.ogbaa.pdf" target="_blank">Chariot</a>" that
summoned up a world of women struggling to retain their identities, and make their own lives, in near
impossible circumstances. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What all of these stories, and the ones we selected for our
shortlist, did for me was to immerse me in worlds that I knew to a greater or
lesser extent but that I came away, having read the stories, knowing from the
inside. I didn’t worry about which
country, or which tradition, I was reading: instead I found myself gripped by
the characters, their histories and their immediacy. Each story a world in itself and which, like
the couple whose wedding I went to celebrate, were using their pasts, their
presents, and their imaginations, to
create narratives that continued to intrigue me long after I had turned the
last page.</span></div>
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<br />
<o:p></o:p>caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-13180610219119676042014-06-11T06:51:00.001-07:002014-10-29T14:17:01.025-07:00Tradition and the African writer by 2014 Judge, Helon Habila<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 150%;">What is African
literature, who decides what it is, who reads it, who reviews it, who is
African? These are questions that have been asked ad nauseum over the years. It
is a question that I believe the Caine Prize for African Writing has been
helping us answer over the last decade and a half.</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 150%;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 150%;">Not by ivory tower literary critics, but by
writers, story by story, sentence by sentence.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This year we have
looked at stories as diverse in style and theme as one can imagine, many of
which didn’t get shortlisted (at a point we despairingly asked the Director,
<a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v044/44.2.attree.html" target="_blank">Lizzy Attree</a>, if it is possible to enlarge the shortlist to six instead of
five). There was “Howl”, from <i><a href="http://newint.org/books/fiction/caine-prize-2013/" target="_blank">A Memory This Size</a></i>, about a learned dog, by former winner, <a href="http://www.caineprize.com/winners_12.php" target="_blank">Rotimi Babatunde</a>, written in the folkloric tradition; there was “Calculus in the
Afternoon” from <i><a href="http://www.kwani.org/" target="_blank">Kwani?</a></i>, by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qJMFlVUwCQ" target="_blank">Mehul Gohil</a>, raw and heartfelt and beautifully written about an
Asian/African student in Australia; and there was the faultless and humorous “Bury
Babu on Sandy Bay” by <a href="http://www.fordfoundation.org/regions/southern-africa/team/achmat-dangor" target="_blank">Achmat Dangor</a>; there was a strangely beautiful detective
story “Eloquent Notes on a Suicide” by <a href="http://www.amabooksbyo.com/writers/Blessing_Musariri/" target="_blank">Blessing Musariri</a>; there were fantasy
stories about people disappearing into their computer screens, about strange
visitations by even stranger beings; there was a lot of sex, gay and straight,
and yes, this is all African fiction…<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Looking at this
diversity and profusion of style and theme it feels strange to remember that
there was a time, and not too long ago, when some theorists tried to limit what
can or cannot be called African literature; some said a work can never be
African literature unless it is in an African language – and actually, people
like Ngugi wa Thiong’o still believe so. I wonder what people like Obi Wali,
the arch-proponent of ‘African literature in African languages only’ would say
now if they were to hear that there are writers who write their novels in
languages like Flemish and Italian and who unapologetically refer to themselves
as African writers. Clearly there is more to it than language and style – it is
most importantly about tradition.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Stories like “<a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2014_Chela.pdf" target="_blank">Chicken</a>”,
by Efemia Chela, is clearly aware of this sense of tradition. It opens with a
family oriented, very African feast, and then moves on to a theme of exile and
loneliness in another land; and to such “unAfrican” themes as lesbianism and
the selling of the narrator’s eggs for money – perhaps the furthest it can get
from the family oriented opening section. But of course the story is about
survival away from the community, a <i>bildungsroman</i>
if you like, about the African traveling and surviving in the wider world, about
the African writer embracing other themes and acknowledging that the
traditional “African issues” alone no
longer suffice to define African writing. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Tendai Huchu’s
story of Zimbabwean exiles in London, "<a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2014_Huchu.pdf" target="_blank">The Intervention</a>"<i>,</i> told with humor and lightness of touch, dealing with a
serious subject matter, continues what I call the “post-nationalist” theme. By
placing the African outside the boundaries of the continent, the story is challenging
the literary pass-laws that sought to restrict where African literature can go.
Not only that, it is also thematising and interrogating the notion of that most
colonial of constructs, the “nation”, itself. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The other stories
on the shortlist, Billy Kahora’s "<a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2014_Kahora.pdf" target="_blank">The Gorilla’s Apprentice</a>", Okwiri Oduor’s "<a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2014_Oduor.pdf" target="_blank">My Father’s Head</a>", and "<a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2014_Awerbuck.pdf" target="_blank">Phosphorescence</a>" by Diane Awerbuck all contribute to, and widen our understanding of what
African literature can be.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">***<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here one is made
strongly aware that a new generation of African writers is announcing itself
with fanfare. But we must always
remember that any new generation is nothing but an offshoot of that which came
before it. This new African literature is a culmination of certain historical
moments in Africa; it owes a lot to the overseas scholarship students in the
60s and 70s; the anti-intellectualisms of the military dictatorships in the 80s
which led to the brain drains of the 90s; all these led to a re-interpretation
of the word nation, to a larger understanding of the idea of tradition. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4nSrGFWxhxPw8NWjb3kR-oGUW1_tKfcrBvbKyXwBCoo3lH4NVikqs4LLOQWyXs81TluW5oq291D830dE1qgVYAR9lDEaNjIy99cgw4_aKhKMmRgo5tghYsGZrMpmRH9RMj2ML1Tc04VcW/s1600/Sunjata.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4nSrGFWxhxPw8NWjb3kR-oGUW1_tKfcrBvbKyXwBCoo3lH4NVikqs4LLOQWyXs81TluW5oq291D830dE1qgVYAR9lDEaNjIy99cgw4_aKhKMmRgo5tghYsGZrMpmRH9RMj2ML1Tc04VcW/s1600/Sunjata.jpg" height="200" width="125" /></a><span lang="EN-US"></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 150%;">And so even though
less and less emphasis should be laid on the word ‘African’, and more and more
on whether a story is good or not, still, we must remember at the bottom of it
lies a certain tradition. The “literature” of Africa predates and supersedes
the invention of Africa, it was there in the </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 150%;">Sundiata</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 150%;"> epic, in the </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 150%;">Chaka </i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 150%;">epic,
in the ritual plays and </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 150%;">Ijala</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 150%;"> chants
of the Yoruba, in the folktales and songs and historical narratives of the </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 150%;">griots.</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 150%;"> It transcended city borders and
languages and political leanings; it defies simplistic definition. The
geographical term “Africa” cannot contain or limit it, it can only aspire to
describe certain salient aspects of it.</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPSFMDs9LIXOvbVBobhBfw3Hnfx_JreYhI7wnG5yQlYysd-kRDWQtSty4xPYNvdOgQ9H02zXTP6NEc5Udm_-VsIX97vV-AIjefEO6FwPGAXpU1z9_yMpB_BOa1GVRaHZQ-4sz6aXhcpppd/s1600/Chaka.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPSFMDs9LIXOvbVBobhBfw3Hnfx_JreYhI7wnG5yQlYysd-kRDWQtSty4xPYNvdOgQ9H02zXTP6NEc5Udm_-VsIX97vV-AIjefEO6FwPGAXpU1z9_yMpB_BOa1GVRaHZQ-4sz6aXhcpppd/s1600/Chaka.jpg" height="200" width="127" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 150%;">Of course every
writer is free to decide for himself or herself what they want to be called. A
lot have already declined the term “African”, preferring only to be called “writers”.
There are also those who question why their books should be in the African
authors section, calling it a “ghetto”.
These writers have already accepted and internalized the perception of
Africa as a ghetto. For me, where a book is placed in a bookstore is less
important than what is in the book; if it is a good book, people will make a
beaten path it. </span><i style="line-height: 150%;">Things Fall Apart</i><span style="line-height: 150%;"> is
a fixture in the “Africa” section, and yet that doesn’t stop it from selling
over a hundred thousand copies yearly in America alone.</span></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course with
some of these authors it becomes a matter of personality, or as TS Eliot
calls it in his essay, <i>Tradition and the
Individual Talent</i>, “emotions”. They
think: how dare you place me in the same section as these other writers,
clearly I am more talented, I am more complex, I am more European than African.
I was born in London and went to Cambridge and Oxford and I live in Rome,
surely I can’t be an African writer? Again, I say, it is a matter of choice. You
are not African because you are black, or because your parents came from an
African country, again to quote Eliot: <i><o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US">Tradition is a matter of much wider
significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by
great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense... This
historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal
and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer
traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely
conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEBYysnbm5aYcLZa978Sxv14hkdrEqLzqjKvQv_EwF_DzqzcsEGPXQPy5i4Gsfh16M0DMxIk1Ij14QKeG24YqiyaNt0ShIRJKDAsLbSnAz8FDb0_bZwN6mohtX0alLotkMFuRU-5NWS5-t/s1600/A+question+of+Power+by+Bessie+Head.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEBYysnbm5aYcLZa978Sxv14hkdrEqLzqjKvQv_EwF_DzqzcsEGPXQPy5i4Gsfh16M0DMxIk1Ij14QKeG24YqiyaNt0ShIRJKDAsLbSnAz8FDb0_bZwN6mohtX0alLotkMFuRU-5NWS5-t/s1600/A+question+of+Power+by+Bessie+Head.jpg" height="200" width="130" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US" style="line-height: 150%;">I don’t aspire to write
like Achebe, or Ngugi or Bessie Head, but understanding them and the history
and aesthetics that shaped their work improves and also shapes my work.</span><span lang="EN-US" style="line-height: 150%;"> This is not mere copying or imitation, it is not indulging in what
Eliot calls mere “archeological reconstruction”, it is having a sense of
tradition. The beauty of it, as Eliot again points out, is that a
contemporaneous work always alters the meaning and the perception of works that
came before it, for in a canon no work is greater, none is better, they just
make use of different materials. </span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The best metaphor
to describe this idea would be that of a building, built over many generations,
each generation doing its own part. Some clears the site for the building,
another generation lays the foundation, yet another generation raises the
walls, another comes and lays the roof, and so on, with plumbers and
electricians and fitters and furniture builders, all doing their part. But what
is important is that none is more important or less important that the other.
They all build with the same keenness, the same purpose; they simply use
different materials and different skill sets. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US">But of course in
this age of superstar writers and commodification of literature it makes sense
to try to stand out, to be different and thereby raise the value of ones stock.
But again, a word of caution from Eliot (I am quoting him for the last time, I
promise): </span><span lang="EN-US">“No poet, no artist of any art, has his
complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation
of his relation to the dead poets and artists.”</span><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgECwkNXmppXLSk-WIRnbb1P9WCbMdoc9IJRjD8E7Juu_7tK7WzBOlmtBkIVuWffFwKwk-0IyDVWF18pOXwdVFcSFIT71yEAeiorUTLvioaO1dhXfh4SFyz-Q-fqwk6QyejVWzpLWRv1cGw/s1600/Toni_Morrison.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgECwkNXmppXLSk-WIRnbb1P9WCbMdoc9IJRjD8E7Juu_7tK7WzBOlmtBkIVuWffFwKwk-0IyDVWF18pOXwdVFcSFIT71yEAeiorUTLvioaO1dhXfh4SFyz-Q-fqwk6QyejVWzpLWRv1cGw/s1600/Toni_Morrison.jpg" height="200" width="173" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Toni Morrison</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 150%;">Toni Morrison, in her
brilliant essay, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” shows this awareness
of an obligation, a duty to what she calls the community, or the “village”, and
goes on to say that whatever she writes if it means nothing to the village,
then it is worthless. We all have to decide who and what that village or
community is for us. This is not a circumscribing of freedom, but actually a
setting free, for no artist is ever free who is without a sense of belonging, a
sense of history.</span></div>
caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-85748615269079477262014-05-28T06:49:00.000-07:002014-10-29T14:18:09.273-07:00Podcasts of 2014 Shortlisted Stories<div style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; padding: 0px 20px;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This year the Caine Prize has commissioned podcasts of the 2014 shortlist, to run alongside the pdfs of each story that are uploaded for audiences to read in the run up to the announcement of the 15th Caine Prize winner on 14 July. Click the links below to listen to the stories.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #333333;"><br /></span><strong style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Diane Awerbuck</strong><span style="color: #333333;"> </span><span style="color: #333333;">(South Africa) "Phosphorescence" in</span><span style="color: #333333;"> </span><em style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Cabin Fever</em><em style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </em><span style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">(</span><a href="http://www.randomstruik.co.za/struik-umuzi.php" style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #cc0000; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Umuzi</a><em style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, </em><span style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Cape Town. 2011)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2014_Awerbuck.pdf" style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #cc0000; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Read Phosphorescence</a></em></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://soundcloud.com/caine-prize/phosphorescence" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;"><i>Listen to Phosphorescence</i></span></a> <span style="color: #333333;">read by the author, produced by Daniel Breiter at <a href="http://www.formusiclovers.co.za/" target="_blank">For Music Lovers</a>, Cape Town.</span><br /><strong style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br /></strong></span><br />
<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/151668212&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_artwork=true" width="100%"></iframe>
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<strong style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Efemia Chela</strong><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(Ghana/Zambia) "Chicken" in</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><em style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Feast, Famine and Potluck</em><em style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </em><span style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">(</span><a href="http://shortstorydayafrica.org/" style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #cc0000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Short Story Day Africa</a><span style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, South Africa. 2013)</span></div>
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<em style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2014_Chela.pdf" style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #cc0000; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Read Chicken</span></a></em></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><span style="color: red;"><a href="https://soundcloud.com/caine-prize/chicken" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">Listen to Chicken</span></a> </span></i>read by the author, produced by </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Daniel Breiter at </span><a href="http://www.formusiclovers.co.za/" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">For Music Lovers</a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, Cape Town.</span><br />
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<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/151666204&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_artwork=true" width="100%"></iframe>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br /></em><strong style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Tendai Huchu</strong><span style="color: #333333;"> </span><span style="color: #333333;">(Zimbabwe) "The Intervention" in</span><span style="color: #333333;"> </span><em style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://www.openroadreview.in/the-intervention-by-tendai-huchu/" style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #cc0000; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Open Road Review</a>, </em><span style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">issue 7, New Delhi. 2013</span></span></div>
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<em style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #cc0000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2014_Huchu.pdf" style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #cc0000; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Read The Intervention</a></span></em><br />
<span style="border: 0px currentColor; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.openroadreview.in/the-intervention-by-tendai-huchu/" style="color: red; font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Listen to The Invervention</a><span style="color: red; font-style: italic;"> </span>read by the author for <i>Open Road Review.</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Billy Kahora</strong><span style="color: #333333;"> </span><span style="color: #333333;">(Kenya) "The Gorilla's Apprentice" in</span><span style="color: #333333;"> </span><a href="http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/The-Gorillas-Apprentice" style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #cc0000; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><em style="border: 0px currentColor; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Granta</em></a><span style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> (London. 2010)</span></span></div>
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<em style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2014_Kahora.pdf" style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #cc0000; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Read The Gorilla's Apprentice</span></a></em></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><a href="https://soundcloud.com/caine-prize/billy-kahora-the-gorillas-apprentice-podcast" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;">Listen to The Gorilla's Apprentice</span></a></i> read by <a href="http://www.nzaramba.com/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Ery Nzaramba</span></a>, produced by Alex Feldman at <a href="http://pixiu.co.uk/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Pixiu</span></a>, London.</span><br />
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<iframe frameborder="no" height="166" scrolling="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/154011627&color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_artwork=true&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%"></iframe>
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<strong style="border: 0px currentcolor; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Okwiri Oduor</strong><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(Kenya) "My Father's Head" in</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><em style="border: 0px currentcolor; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Feast, Famine and Potluck (</em><a href="http://shortstorydayafrica.org/" style="border: 0px currentcolor; color: #cc0000; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Short Story Day Africa</a><em style="border: 0px currentcolor; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, </em><span style="border: 0px currentcolor; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">South Africa. 2013)</span><br />
<a href="http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2014_Oduor.pdf" style="border: 0px currentcolor; color: #cc0000; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Read My Father's Head</i></span></a><em style="border: 0px currentColor; color: #333333; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"></em><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="https://soundcloud.com/caine-prize/okwiri-odour-my-fathers-head-podcast" target="_blank"><span style="color: red;"><i>Listen to My Father's Head</i></span></a> read by Njoki Wamai, produced by Alex Feldman at <a href="http://pixiu.co.uk/" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">Pixiu</span></a>, London.</span><br />
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</em>caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-53346842096987214352014-05-28T03:23:00.000-07:002014-10-29T14:24:01.890-07:00Taxi to Chitungwiza by 2014 Judge, Percy Zvomuya<div class="MsoNormal">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3D9Hw7Nv9SDognHhh4rDER5eebeL_hZiToHIjj92H7QZA1euWle4Iw61y_z_RXrdSGFesLZYh18foOuiEmKSyFX8EL3ebM9S62wfdBl9btytHvzmrHzxqiRji4Ke3ohAzpIlFbvOrEMUa/s1600/Harare-skyline.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3D9Hw7Nv9SDognHhh4rDER5eebeL_hZiToHIjj92H7QZA1euWle4Iw61y_z_RXrdSGFesLZYh18foOuiEmKSyFX8EL3ebM9S62wfdBl9btytHvzmrHzxqiRji4Ke3ohAzpIlFbvOrEMUa/s1600/Harare-skyline.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Harare skyline</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a></span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The life and fate of Chitungwiza, it seems, is to forever skulk in the
shadows cast by Harare’s miniature sky scrappers and lead-soaked fumes. Chitungwiza’s
small-time status is undisputed; in official and semi-official literature, it
is routinely referred to as Harare’s dormitory town, though it is populated by a million people. It is just 30km removed
from Harare, although it seems doubly-detached; the ever present air of
fatigue, inertia and desertion that now hangs over Harare is thicker and more
toxic in Chitungwiza. </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Percy Zvomuya</span></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It was while on the way
to Chitungwiza that I experienced one of the most literature affirming moments
I’ve had in a long time. <o:p></o:p></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It was
literature’s eureka moment, if you will, the football equivalent of which is hugging a
stranger when your team eventually scores the winning goal in the last minute
of extra time.</span></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO0FaisdiGgs3SXLCVEZsDhEVQ4d_-y2SSbahpi2I0VUWFQXrtiFLp0jSvayGIwT3LAs9mRQakV7PsCtnDIBMBJ3Ea0JnABqxP4jfdILpe95JH9cTNMFeDlinCeXi9nfR6WYI0tbvlIwOI/s1600/kombi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; display: inline !important; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiO0FaisdiGgs3SXLCVEZsDhEVQ4d_-y2SSbahpi2I0VUWFQXrtiFLp0jSvayGIwT3LAs9mRQakV7PsCtnDIBMBJ3Ea0JnABqxP4jfdILpe95JH9cTNMFeDlinCeXi9nfR6WYI0tbvlIwOI/s1600/kombi.jpg" height="132" width="200" /></a></div>
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I had boarded a commuter minibus taxi and sat in the third or fourth row, two people to my left and someone else on my right. About the people on my left I don’t recall a thing; about the person on my right, I remember almost everything: sex, height, and the conversation we had. <br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;">I had hauled out
of my satchel sheets of paper on which was printed </span><a href="http://www.banipal.co.uk/selections/68/186/omar-el-kiddi-keddi/" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;" target="_blank">“The World’s Longest-Held Prisoner,”</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;"> a short story by Libyan writer </span><a href="http://www.banipal.co.uk/contributors/598/Omar%20el-Kiddi%20(Keddi)/" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;" target="_blank">Omar El-Keddi</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;">; the story is one of 140 short pieces of fiction submitted to the 2014 Caine Prize for African
Writing. Almost instantly I had become
aware that I had company. The man to my right was staring intently at the
sheets of paper in my hands. He meant it to be unobtrusive but his interest in
the papers in my hands was obvious. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Nelson Mandela</span></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It could have been
the startling title which caught his attention. Southern Africa has its fair
share of famous political prisoners; there is Robert Mugabe; late nationalist Maurice
Nyagumbo; and, most celebrated of them all, is, of course, St Nelson Mandela. (With
the World Cup a few weeks away, the saint is now in heaven where he is probably
pondering football tactics with St Luke. It goes without saying that he is putting
on an Argentina shirt since his own team Bafana, perennial underachievers,
didn’t make it to Brazil, but that’s a story for another day). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Or maybe it was
the easy, unheralded way the story begins: “After failing his middle class
exams, Saleh al-Shaybi decided to join the army. He saw his fellow villagers
and men from the neighbouring villages return with new clothes, pockets filled
with cash, wrists weighed down by watches, smoking cigarettes from full packs
and lighting them with gold lighters. He decided to follow in their footsteps,
and wrote down ‘please take me' on his application.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Whenever I flipped
a page, leaving my neighbour behind, he would remonstrate. After twenty or so minutes,
in which I had turned a couple of papers, him always in tow, he took down the
details of the story. He would go on the
internet, he said, download it, and read it for his own pleasure and at his own
pace…<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Later, finding my
way through the inertia of Chitungwiza, I pondered the communion I had partaken
in with the stranger. Even though reading is a profoundly solitary exercise,
this was the closest that we had come to exploding that piece of wisdom. </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-63072294961425258892014-05-14T03:30:00.000-07:002014-10-29T14:26:03.988-07:00Stories That Make a Difference by Jackie Kay, Chair of Judges 2014<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiQpfc7U2v6DdhfA8KD6yV6PuvVdGCT7puldyZkfpyxh8NiBlPrPuQAiXl1VgsOjwpX18ZkWm_FRjFBTOLon_vgUX_gz9PO0XbkLFgeOsEc1gD6Jt_Jj4yxzDzPasQoNPysi4gf1N_xEBn/s1600/130929_bpp_277.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiQpfc7U2v6DdhfA8KD6yV6PuvVdGCT7puldyZkfpyxh8NiBlPrPuQAiXl1VgsOjwpX18ZkWm_FRjFBTOLon_vgUX_gz9PO0XbkLFgeOsEc1gD6Jt_Jj4yxzDzPasQoNPysi4gf1N_xEBn/s1600/130929_bpp_277.jpg" height="200" width="133" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Photo credit Ben Phillips</span></td></tr>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US">I am in Ullapool right now, a beautiful town
surrounded by hills on the edge of Loch Broom in the north west of Scotland. </span>At<span lang="EN-US"> the <a href="http://www.ullapoolbookfestival.co.uk/" target="_blank">book festiva</a>l
here I was asked if stories make a difference. I said something bland like that
I hoped that <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/11/reality-reality-jackie-kay-review" target="_blank">my </a></span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/11/reality-reality-jackie-kay-review" target="_blank">s</a><span lang="EN-US"><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/11/reality-reality-jackie-kay-review" target="_blank">tories</a> might hold up a mirror to the reader's life but that I
thought writers were deluded if they thought stories could make a difference to
the world we live in. Then a woman came up to me later and said, </span><span lang="EN-US">“</span><span lang="EN-US">Your stories made a difference to me.</span><span lang="EN-US">”</span><span lang="EN-US"> She had suffered a brain injury and had
only just been able to start reading again, and found that the short story form
was something she could contain. My
stories were the first things she'd been able to read after five years of not
reading. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPMFkI2zVywF2uTd0GRZ_QBEH7wCUfbaB1DzzsQEhVI-eabvFbQNwWW0ltkaVOIriAMjsdPfSw1gF7qmWqpFaxcOc3qI8bucGvKRf79avHLSC7fLATPzEldZHMLUWosiyfxJdNfwjQjlOP/s1600/Spencer-Tunick-Desert-Spi-010.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPMFkI2zVywF2uTd0GRZ_QBEH7wCUfbaB1DzzsQEhVI-eabvFbQNwWW0ltkaVOIriAMjsdPfSw1gF7qmWqpFaxcOc3qI8bucGvKRf79avHLSC7fLATPzEldZHMLUWosiyfxJdNfwjQjlOP/s1600/Spencer-Tunick-Desert-Spi-010.jpg" height="252" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Desert Spirits by Spencer Tunick</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US"><br /></span></span><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US">The short story is such a fascinating hybrid
form. It shares</span><span lang="EN-US"> </span><span lang="EN-US">the poet's particular love of image or lyricism</span>,<span lang="EN-US"> of not wasting a
single word, with the novel's wide narrative lens. It takes people often at a
moment of change or trauma and distils and invests that moment with something
wider, something that in turn helps, by the narrowing of focus</span>,<span lang="EN-US"> to understand the
wider world. It is wide open. It has stretched across the continent. </span>I<span lang="EN-US">t is the perfect form
for our time. It can be carried around in the head, the whole story. You should
be able to lay it down on a vast plain and it would still glow. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US">We were inspired this year by the range of
subject matters in the Caine Prize short-listed stories, the different
approaches to this pioneering and </span>inventive
form. <span lang="EN-US"> During our <a href="http://www.caineprize.com/judges.php" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;">judges</span></a> meeting we returned again and again to what made a story work for us and
what stories made a difference. Was it because we believed the character's
voice? Was it the style and tone? Was it the structure of the story? Was it
because the story can be philosophical? What is it we were looking for in the
stories</span>? </span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We
were looking for different stories. Fresh, inventive, surprising. We were
looking for stories that make a difference.</span></span></div>
caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-587716246232618075.post-17198291972541604082014-05-06T03:34:00.002-07:002014-05-06T04:15:46.046-07:00Caine Prize Reflections by Bella Matambanadzo<pre style="background-color: white; color: #444444; line-height: 21.299999237060547px; white-space: normal;"></pre>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9TXb2xNgzgVJjXh_RUG5btGbHpmq0Ypy3O1DGRsbi90YP9WCG4XpLS1x3Q5bp4A1MHhqQEKzoHUeDa92l7uqBS_nHEs3S2g5a6mdzLJ-j9-8i7LeccYh9J8i4vR-gucMwpj7mmEuf4zqW/s1600/Bella.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9TXb2xNgzgVJjXh_RUG5btGbHpmq0Ypy3O1DGRsbi90YP9WCG4XpLS1x3Q5bp4A1MHhqQEKzoHUeDa92l7uqBS_nHEs3S2g5a6mdzLJ-j9-8i7LeccYh9J8i4vR-gucMwpj7mmEuf4zqW/s1600/Bella.jpg" height="262" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bella Matambanadzo</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">No writer worth her salt would turn her nose up at the opportunity to take part in the Caine Prize for African Writers' <a href="http://www.caineprize.com/workshops.php" target="_blank">Workshop</a>. Being included in a group of 12 published and promising writers from 6 African countries whose short stories are produced into an anthology that sees 8 publishing houses work together is not the sort of gift an author receives everyday. I am looking forward to seeing the final collection stitched together. Its themes of place and belonging, of legacies and futures are inspired as much by our everyday experiences on the continent we call home, as they are by the places elsewhere that we visit, either in the flesh or through the magical realm of our imaginations. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21.299999237060547px;">We will be published by local book houses in </span><a href="http://www.amabooksbyo.com/" style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21.299999237060547px;" target="_blank">Zimbabwe</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21.299999237060547px;">, </span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/bookworldzambia" style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21.299999237060547px;" target="_blank">Zambia</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21.299999237060547px;">, </span><a href="http://www.femriteug.org/" style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21.299999237060547px;" target="_blank">Uganda</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21.299999237060547px;">, Ghana, </span><a href="http://jacana.co.za/" style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21.299999237060547px;" target="_blank">South Africa</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21.299999237060547px;">, </span><a href="http://www.kwani.org/" style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21.299999237060547px;" target="_blank">Kenya</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21.299999237060547px;"> and </span><a href="http://www.cassavarepublic.biz/" style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21.299999237060547px;" target="_blank">Nigeria</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21.299999237060547px;">. Off the continent, we have publishing deals secured in the United States and in the </span><a href="http://newint.org/" style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21.299999237060547px;" target="_blank">United Kingdom</a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21.299999237060547px;">. Our work may additionally be translated into French, the first time the Caine Prize is doing so for its annual anthology. I hope this is the beginning of an expansion in the languages formally associated with the Caine Prize. Perhaps in future collections will be published in Kiswahili, Fulani, Wolof, isiXhosa, Hausa and Africa's many other languages, that given the global nature of where Africans live in today's world, and where our works are read, would mean an expansion of readings and writings in our very own tongues. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As a creati</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">ve artist and thinker the precious gift of time to focus on the craft of writing and re-writing is something that I will cherish for many, many years to come. Time with other writers who serve as a loving group of peers, giving feedback and reactions to work that goes from draft to final version in less than ten days. The writing escape is organised in a formula that permits you to write what you want and share it firstly with other writers through daily reading sessions. Artistic independence is a hallmark of the workshop. You can either accept, or reject the feedback given you. Experienced editor/mentors offer one-on-one sessions where they see your words and suggest what works, what is incomprehensible, and where improvements can happen. Nothing is off limits. We were guided, urged in fact, to stretch our creative imaginations and push down traditional literary boundaries, break up and recreate language and show no respect whatsoever for prepositions.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbsPLN-cJjrDYNNh-5e7sxLCPanV08sLsNhn1t-jjUtXEjsdqGiDrd10ZjLUFyeFTCPqXnj0EneI7ad7SJgiDd5uV37L1CNU6M6Py3oQAcbjPLWasuOg5k4N0FfVfpQsf9yIxarmeGkcjS/s1600/Vumba1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbsPLN-cJjrDYNNh-5e7sxLCPanV08sLsNhn1t-jjUtXEjsdqGiDrd10ZjLUFyeFTCPqXnj0EneI7ad7SJgiDd5uV37L1CNU6M6Py3oQAcbjPLWasuOg5k4N0FfVfpQsf9yIxarmeGkcjS/s1600/Vumba1.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I came back with 6 complete stories. The one that will go into the Caine Prize collection, and the 5 others that I am presently submitting to other publishers who have asked for stories. In terms of output that means I wrote a story every two days. The other writers were even more productive, knocking out stories and ideas more adeptly.
We met as strangers, and we left with a sense of camaraderie that means although there will eventually only be one winner for the £10,000 prize announced at a ceremony this July because we shared so much as writers, listened to each other's ideas an stories, edited for each other, had great laughter together the collection honours us all. In the end we will all be winners because we worked as a team and everyone brought the best of themselves to our writer's retreat held in the perfect peace of <a href="http://www.theleopardrock.com/" target="_blank">Leopard Rock Hotel</a> in the Vumba, Zimbabwe.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4bhw9okvjBnd0czsnxkqq7IJ5Ymxz3bK5WgeVFjmWQwFkYRRMFoba0CHrVcJDLWTU6UqTt5mHv8AteQheXuIIf0MfaxMi2wzLVS7ojay3UpC86EXD1wdb9SkqEPstuDKTnYWdn-UB8ZUG/s1600/City+Library.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4bhw9okvjBnd0czsnxkqq7IJ5Ymxz3bK5WgeVFjmWQwFkYRRMFoba0CHrVcJDLWTU6UqTt5mHv8AteQheXuIIf0MfaxMi2wzLVS7ojay3UpC86EXD1wdb9SkqEPstuDKTnYWdn-UB8ZUG/s1600/City+Library.jpg" height="148" width="200" /></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The visits to schools in the surrounding community brought us face to face with young writers, almost 800 of them spread across four different schools. Schools that have produced many of Zimbabwe's most profound literary achievers. At </span><a href="http://caineprize.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/workshop-writers-visit-hartzell-school.html" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Hartzell</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, we could taste and feel the atmosphere evoked and immortalized in Tsitsi Dangarembga's </span><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Nervous Conditions</i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">. At </span><a href="http://caineprize.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/a-visit-to-st-werburgh-school-in-bvumba.html" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">St Werburgh's</a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> mission school we read what the students in the young writers club were crafting in their journals: poems, short stories and songs that they plan to publish in a newsletter. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAkloNQfGS9u5v_2R3P_QNscbdgIF9KOSAK8jU9UNTFsZVP1DsVm0BnscQ4-ZWlni5DXDJDiveCAGam_LU1D_8mjsNSkEEsqmEorA8OFRzHZs-IGN_QO9Z3S17EzKIrr-fLtFqHnLa3hmB/s1600/Nii+Library.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAkloNQfGS9u5v_2R3P_QNscbdgIF9KOSAK8jU9UNTFsZVP1DsVm0BnscQ4-ZWlni5DXDJDiveCAGam_LU1D_8mjsNSkEEsqmEorA8OFRzHZs-IGN_QO9Z3S17EzKIrr-fLtFqHnLa3hmB/s1600/Nii+Library.jpg" height="148" width="200" /></a>Back in Harare at the <a href="http://www.hararecitylibrary.org/" target="_blank">City Library</a> we saw traditional literature coming into contact with tech experimentation. Zimbabwe's geek generation, and yes, it really exists far away from Silicon Valley, is building apps for books to stream via mobile phone. My aspiration now is for writing opportunities, and publishing prospects to expand in Africa, rather than diminish. I have found a thirst for books so rare here that it reminds me that literature is by no means dead. It's gaining a new morphology.<br />
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<i style="line-height: normal; text-align: start;">A shorter version of this article was published in <a href="http://www.hararenews.co.zw/" target="_blank">Harare News</a></i></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja9x9Emcx-EzRTAwynHsmOljR6z2ho7-x9r7HyrlLd2CfMl6LwQi9f7711DApHjpAajo_c5HUogvkEG7asfhzHxVQjNiK13N2-TMpBKX2RYdD2wgbDLeaELeBYaAOQtvNFxiGGIBknlv5Y/s1600/IMG_1291.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja9x9Emcx-EzRTAwynHsmOljR6z2ho7-x9r7HyrlLd2CfMl6LwQi9f7711DApHjpAajo_c5HUogvkEG7asfhzHxVQjNiK13N2-TMpBKX2RYdD2wgbDLeaELeBYaAOQtvNFxiGGIBknlv5Y/s1600/IMG_1291.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Years later and here I was in the Bvumba once again, attending a Caine Prize workshop. Towards the end of our time there, we were divided into groups of four and sent off to different schools to give a talk about our writing. St. Werburgh is situated on the Burma Valley Road, on the other side of the mountain that dominates Leopard Rock. It is an Anglican school, started in 1897, but it receives no funding from the church. Originally situated on white commercial land, from whom it received some financial help, the school is now on its own, relying on US$25 a term school fees from its 900+ pupils. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The other groups of writers went to secondary schools to give talks whereas we were invited to speak to the primary school’s Young Writer’s Club, a group of 8-12 year olds. That the school had such a group was of great interest to me as an English teacher. From my own experience, such clubs are attended by few and usually run out of enthusiasm quite quickly. However, the 40 or so children who all trouped into the classroom to meet us proved that this was a writing club with a difference. Luckily, it is headed by teachers who are keen to teach and share their ideas with the children in their care. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDK17U4V5npZiKpphSh7j1U75Tlky4t-6e07yQbPjbg-oOYcYAvrzKzW8pArsCmTeMJhSiaNjS6mfVJ4zg6JCNYn4uCL-mO9oO3ICN3RCIL68aeLnKbEHc0hnc-7WOtuN4F2_PM30cc5Hc/s1600/IMG_1302.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDK17U4V5npZiKpphSh7j1U75Tlky4t-6e07yQbPjbg-oOYcYAvrzKzW8pArsCmTeMJhSiaNjS6mfVJ4zg6JCNYn4uCL-mO9oO3ICN3RCIL68aeLnKbEHc0hnc-7WOtuN4F2_PM30cc5Hc/s1600/IMG_1302.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We were shown their writing books in which they had recorded details about their families - many of them are being brought up entirely by their mothers – and about trips away to a nearby waterfall and the museum in Mutare. They had also written an imaginative story; one about a rat who ate the back of a man’s coat sticks in my mind. The man wore the coat, not knowing that the back was missing and everyone laughed at him as he walked down the road! </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What really struck me as I read the children’s work was how good their English was. I work at a private school in Zambia where school fees are between US$3000-5000 a term (depending on if they are primary/secondary and boarding/day-scholars) and yet the standard of English is incredibly poor. The pupils I teach are not all first language English speakers, but they all speak English at school. At the age of fifteen, they struggle to hand in an essay which is more than one side of an A4 page long and which has a clear beginning, middle and end. Yet these children in a remote government school in Zimbabwe have already got to grips with the basic structure of a story. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQnroQNOvjUHy5lqI1C1bS6qmEcDSDbbRjCIhsgC4J8np5BOfWQQ9NRg5baN5DdOQwkSIO2rQrMGJEsJJc6MIcU7PmS8wX27qZ4hV0xxOSTMywx1_vICT9K3xBrf9Cr18BFPEFvDXrDcMR/s1600/IMG_1298.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQnroQNOvjUHy5lqI1C1bS6qmEcDSDbbRjCIhsgC4J8np5BOfWQQ9NRg5baN5DdOQwkSIO2rQrMGJEsJJc6MIcU7PmS8wX27qZ4hV0xxOSTMywx1_vICT9K3xBrf9Cr18BFPEFvDXrDcMR/s1600/IMG_1298.JPG" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another thing which impressed me was the ease with which the children could stand up and recite poems to the audience. Not many students I teach could do that from memory or they would mumble and look self-conscious and try to slink off without being noticed. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is a generally accepted fact that if anyone wants to be a good writer, they have to be a good reader. I give talks to parents about the importance of reading to their children because more and more children are writing within a vacuum. They have nothing to stimulate their imaginations because no one is reading to them, including teachers, who often don’t value reading as it’s not ‘part of the </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">syllabus’. At St. Werburgh the problem is a different one. They don’t have any books to read to the children. Unfortunately, the suggestion to download free books off the internet, was not a particularly practical one in an area with no cell phone signal, never mind internet access. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPqhpmfkz5eKhM-ocrROezJ7iZXvuUgZ2cXsgpOe8kiqFJyEHTec-NkVdJILbX1PtFLA5j_kyDqviGmx2HlXISi5d-vC5mkpKOSNB4ys40H5pUXDlvGn91hCXQ4u7za_smw82Tx4Nyauwy/s1600/IMG_1304.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPqhpmfkz5eKhM-ocrROezJ7iZXvuUgZ2cXsgpOe8kiqFJyEHTec-NkVdJILbX1PtFLA5j_kyDqviGmx2HlXISi5d-vC5mkpKOSNB4ys40H5pUXDlvGn91hCXQ4u7za_smw82Tx4Nyauwy/s1600/IMG_1304.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The children sang for us and we were also taken on a tour of the school before being offered mealies to eat. On the tour, we saw the IT department and the special needs class. There is also a class for children with autism and downs syndrome. One of the girls is brain damaged after being hit by a car. What I saw in the classrooms is some very progressive teaching practice. There is a rota on the wall for cleaning the classroom; the children are taught skills such as knitting and the teacher plays music through her cell phone to provide stimulation. She says that ideally they would like a CD player and I can feel that hint in her voice that hopes I might be the provider of such a machine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I was impressed by the amount of pictures on the wall, some standard Ministry of Education posters about cholera and the importance of washing hands, but also handmade ones, some out of old corn flakes packets – vowel sounds and times tables. It occured to me that the reason these children’s English is of such a good standard is because the basic teaching practice in Zimbabwean government schools still focuses on spelling rules and multiplication tables. This is something that has been forgotten in many private schools and only recently has its significance re-emerged in the UK. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKJJkDX1bkR4FKVExDSrCeouwCnZhwFlNbTOfIsZM6vtiJma-ubt4rh48Zyj5U1E7iPBAjGOvVhv7lmlDw0ejnwn6pYB_u6lL5vtRKP8RNbteOvQ-kFT2wqeui0KLS2vBWoyx1vLeCpn0w/s1600/IMG_1312.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKJJkDX1bkR4FKVExDSrCeouwCnZhwFlNbTOfIsZM6vtiJma-ubt4rh48Zyj5U1E7iPBAjGOvVhv7lmlDw0ejnwn6pYB_u6lL5vtRKP8RNbteOvQ-kFT2wqeui0KLS2vBWoyx1vLeCpn0w/s1600/IMG_1312.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Abdul Adan with children from St Werburgh school</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Abdul Adan made a name for himself by </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">learning part of a Shona song and also teaching a large group of school children who had gathered round him a Swahili song. The area the school is situated in is a truly beautiful one and I couldn’t help envying the children for living in such an area. However, it is also a place of incredible hardship. Most of the parents who send their children to this school are subsistence farmers. As they all tend to grow the same crop, maize, the price of a bucket of mealies is dirt cheap. US$25 a term in school fees may not sound like a lot of money, but it certainly is for these people. Some of the children faint during the school day as they have had nothing to eat all morning and the school cannot possibly feed them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is hard sometimes, considering the history of Zimbabwe in the last fifteen years, to understand why education is still so valued in the country. Many of the children wrote how they wanted to be pilots or lawyers because ‘that’s how you make lots of money’. Yet the country wide pass rate for ZIMSEC O level is 16%. Even if these pupils do go on and get their A Levels, what then? According to one of the teachers, the best thing to do would be to teach the pupils a skill so that they can actually do something practical, besides farming, when they leave.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Some of the children live as far as ten kilometres away, up the mountain and must not delay in their start to the long walk home. They walk in groups as there is a danger that, especially girls, may be attacked and raped if they are on their own. In the past, some children have disappeared, probably taken for body parts, although this hasn’t happened for a while. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We leave after an exchange of email addresses and phone numbers. Can I get any of the teachers a job in Zambia? An average teacher in Zimbabwe earns just short of US$500 a month, regardless of experience and qualifications. A government school teacher in Zambia can earn around US$1000 a month and they are often given car and housing loans. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As we drive away, I marvel at the resilience of these teachers, people who obviously pour so much of their time and effort into teaching these children and who receive very little monetary recompense for it. The landscape is incredibly beautiful as the car bumps and bounces down the road. I think again of our family holidays, how there was always this feeling of security, of knowing what was going to happen. Today I feel that we spend too much time ticking off places we have gone to. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5hyphenhyphenGYx8ow6EFmrTLF-7AQ2evBzb0BBAslV1K_SWeHCq_blmIUfq6bWL39Ze6XIyKJjTxTb7CUhN7a-8hrI0AO3K2uc5mvuerCgp6WcnB3dtsQSN2S1qWxdxQu2W3En06w1BiDA-i0Nizt/s1600/IMG_1340.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5hyphenhyphenGYx8ow6EFmrTLF-7AQ2evBzb0BBAslV1K_SWeHCq_blmIUfq6bWL39Ze6XIyKJjTxTb7CUhN7a-8hrI0AO3K2uc5mvuerCgp6WcnB3dtsQSN2S1qWxdxQu2W3En06w1BiDA-i0Nizt/s1600/IMG_1340.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bryony Rheam</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Holidays must always be somewhere different, somewhere exotic. Yet there is something endearingly comforting about having a favourite place. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is a long time since we spent those holidays in the Bvumba and much has happened in both my family life and the life of Zimbabwe, and for me the country of my birth is a paradoxical mixture of love and incredible sadness. I wish in many ways that the workshop had been held elsewhere, in a place with no emotional investment for me. I think of my story that I have written over the course of the workshop. It is sad, but it is also about letting go. I suppose that’s what I want to do really, let go. But in my heart of hearts, I can’t. It’s under my skin, you see, and that’s why it’s me who can never really leave it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Don't you know, little fool, you never can win? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Why not use your mentality - step up, wake up to reality? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But each time I do just the thought of you </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Makes me stop just before I begin </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">'Cause I've got you under my skin. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yes, I've got you under my skin.</span></div>
caine prizehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06945533175773971411noreply@blogger.com0