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With several literary awards to his name and a skillset that excels in both poetry and prose, Syl Cheney-Coker is often regarded as one of the most exciting and distinguished writers to have emerged from Africa in recent years. Taking his influence from Africa, Latin America and Europe, he consistently produces complex, popular, but often misunderstood works. The book consists of illuminating interviews with Cheney-Coker, and a number of essays which analyse Cheney-Coker's influences and the cultural consequences of his work.
In The Road to Jamaica, which was announced over forty years ago, but suppressed, Cheney- Coker looks at a particular period of African history; the tragic, outward voyages of people and other social variants that have been part of what he calls his Afro-Saxon narrative. Crucially, the volume is divided into two sections: the first being a look at the shock of displacement, but also the remembrance of identifiable modes in the formation of a new cultural perspective. Looking back at remembered landscape, languages and cultural comforts, the poet has attempted to recreate as chapter of history that changed his and other people's idea of identity. The long poems that usher in Part 2 of the volume are, in a sense, reflections on that evolving template about our small world: the happenstances of regeneration, while at the same time an attempt to come to terms with the realities that societies, the world over, are bound to the inevitability of change. Given the smallness of that world, the oneness of our humanity, and the quiet personal awareness of aging, Cheney-Coker has, as usual, focused his lenses on them.
Stone Child is about the nameless gemstone child that became a great in the recent history of Sierra Leone, the poet's country. With compassion and moral deliberation, the poems in the first section of this new collection resound with the pain and love that the poet felt as he reflected on the tumultuous politics and tragic destiny of his beautiful land. Other poems are in homage to people and places around the world that have deeply touched the poet. Syl Cheney-Coker is a poet and novelist. His novel The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar won best book in the Africa region of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. He has also won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize; and his poetry has been translated into, Chinese, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
Winner of the 1991 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Syl Cheney-Coker's acclaimed debut novel, The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar traces the history of a nation's rise and fall, as prophesied by an ancient sorcerer. A military general sits in one of Malagueta's prison cells, awaiting his execution. He has just failed to overthrow the government. In the same land, over two centuries ago, the wife of a formerly enslaved man takes her first steps towards freedom. From the creation of Malagueta to its devastating fall, Alusine Dunbar, the wizened old diviner, has prophesied it all. And what he sees, he calls a tragedy. One of Sierra Leone's most renowned novelists and poets, Sly Cheney-Coker creates a world teeming with magical realism as he paints the journey from precolonial Africa to its shaky independence.
This study contextualizes magical realism within current debates and theories of postcoloniality and examines the fiction of three of its West African pioneers: Syl Cheney-Coker of Sierra Leone, Ben Okri of Nigeria and Kojo Laing of Ghana. Brenda Cooper explores the distinct elements of the genre in a West African context, and in relation to: * a range of global expressions of magical realism, from the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez to that of Salman Rushdie * wider contemporary trends in African writing, with particular attention to how the realism of authors such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka has been connected with nationalist agendas. This is a fascinating and important work for all those working on African literature, magical realism, or postcoloniality.
The reincarnation of a legendary nineteenth-century Caribbean emperor as a contemporary African leader is at the heart of this novel. Sacred River deals with the extraordinary lives, hopes, powerful myths, stories, and tragedies of the people of a modern West African nation. It is also the compelling love story of an idealistic philosophy professor and an ex-courtesan of incomparable beauty. Two hundred years after his death, the great Haitian emperor Henri Christophe miraculously appears in a dream to Tankor Satani, president of the fictional West African country of Kissi, with instructions for Tankor to continue Henri Christophe’s rule, which had been interrupted by “that damned Napole...
This anthology introduces the African literature of incarceration to the general reader, the scholar, the activist and the student. The visions and prison cries of the few African nationalists imprisoned by colonialists, who later became leaders of their independent dictatorships and in turn imprisoned their own writers and other radicals, are brought into sharper focus, thereby critically exposing the ironies of varied generations of the efforts of freedom fighters. Extracts of prose, poetry and plays are grouped into themes such as arrest, interrogation, torture, survival, release and truth and reconciliation. Contributors include: Kunle Ajibade, Obafemi Awolowo, Steve Biko, Breyten Breyte...
This anthology represents some of the best African poetry written in English in the last 30 years. The poets include Wole Soyinka, Dennis Brutus, Kojo Laing, Chenjerai Hove and Gabriel Gbadamosi.
Preliminary Material --Acknowledgements /Elsa Linguanti , Francesco Casotti , and Carmen Concilio --Introduction /Elsa Linguanti --Notes on Spanish-American Magical Realism /Tommaso Scarano --The Magic of Language in the novels of Patrick White and David Malouf /Carmen Concilio --Salman Rushdie's Special Effects /Shaul Bassi --Worlds, Things, Words Rushdie's style from Grimus to Midnight's Children /Carmen Dell'Aversano --Representing the Worlds Sanskrit poetics and the making of reality /Alessandro Monti --The Ragged Edge of Miracles or: A word or two on those Jack Hodgins novels /Lucia Boldrini --Bees, Bodies, and Magical Miscegenation Robert Kroetsch's What the Crow Said /Luca Biagiotti -...