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Literature remains one of the few disciplines that reflect the experiences, sensibility, worldview, and living realities of its people. Contemporary African literature captures the African experience in history and politics in a multiplicity of ways. Politics itself has come to intersect and impact on most, if not all, aspects of the African reality. This relationship of literature with African people’s lives and condition forms the setting of this study. Tanure Ojaide’s Indigeneity, Globalization, and African Literature: Personally Speaking belongs with a well-established tradition of personal reflections on literature by African creative writer-critics. Ojaide’s contribution brings to the table the perspective of what is now recognized as a “second generation” writer, a poet, and a concerned citizen of Nigeria’s Niger Delta area.

Narrow Escapes: A Poetic Diary of the Coronavirus Pandemic is a poetic journey that is at once emotional and spiritual. In over 200 distinct poems, the reader follows the poet's musing from the pandemic's outbreak to the onset of the second wave. The poems are shaped by and reflect the persistent fear induced by the ubiquity of the virus and the accentuation of life's uncertainty as never experienced before. In diary form, the poet deploys specific images to present the virus as a leveler because its victims are not defined by class, race, ideology, nationality, or culture. The poems invite readers to go beyond our obsessions with self and materialism by embracing compassion, love, sacrifice, and sensitivity to others. Ranging from the personal, familial, and public to the political and economic, the poet reminds readers of the lurking presence of nonhuman beings and the ways in which they intertwine with human beings. The poems are themselves therapeutic, painting as it were on the canvass of a shaken world, broad strokes of poetic language that render a much better version of an imperfect world.

Narrow Escapes: A Poetic Diary of the Coronavirus Pandemic is a poetic journey that is at once emotional and spiritual. In over 200 distinct poems, the reader follows the poet’s musing from the pandemic’s outbreak to the onset of the second wave. The poems are shaped by and reflect the persistent fear induced by the ubiquity of the virus and the accentuation of life’s uncertainty as never experienced before. In diary form, the poet deploys specific images to present the virus as a leveler because its victims are not defined by class, race, ideology, nationality, or culture. The poems invite readers to go beyond our obsessions with self and materialism by embracing compassion, love, sacrifice, and sensitivity to others. Ranging from the personal, familial, and public to the political and economic, the poet reminds readers of the lurking presence of nonhuman beings and the ways in which they intertwine with human beings. The poems are themselves therapeutic, painting as it were on the canvass of a shaken world, broad strokes of poetic language that render a much better version of an imperfect world.

Contemporary African Literature: New Approaches comprises essays that go beyond conventional literary studies to open new vistas for critical excursion. It deals not only with purely literary issues of canonization, language, aesthetics, and scholar-poet traditions that have barely been addressed directly in recent studies but also with diverse interdisciplinary topics in literature as of migration, globalization, environmental and human rights, and gender. Written from his scholar-poet position, Tanure Ojaide's essays address pertinent issues that need to be either examined or reexamined in the current condition of Africa in the age of globalization and democratization. The collection of essays also brings literature to bear on issues that have become new concerns for writers and the general African populace. It widens the scope of the African experience in literature as never before. This book is part of the African World Series, edited by Toyin Falola, Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin. "This book is a worthy read, and its panoramic view will leave any reader familiar with African literature, especially in the areas of poetry and fiction, with ample cause to appreciate Tanure Ojaide's literary foresight and the merits of his scholarship." -- World Literature Today

Love Gifts is a love sequence: the poetic rendering of the relationship between the minstrel and his muse over a long period. The poet uses the relationship of the two personages to investigate the human condition; hence the poems deal with dreams, desires, frustrations, hopes, contentment, and seeking meaning in life. The poetic canvas links the two figures to other relationships and happenings of their time in an all-embracing manner. In a way, minstrel and muse, lovers, are in these "songs" sharing a unique relationship with readers as they affirm their humanity and tell the complicated passage they navigate hourly and daily as members of a particular society. The relationship develops from the inexperience of neophytes, unsteady in their ways, to the stage of adepts who are sure of themselves and their "rites." The poems are thus a sort of courtship sequence.

Set in the Niger Delta this novel tells the tale of a women's struggle for equality in a traditional patriachal society. Against the backdrop of a once-in-a-generation festival at which the one chosen by the gods performs the dance of "the mother mask", Ojaide weaves a tale of suspense while at the same time displaying the traditions and religious beliefs that define the Niger Delta.

The Beauty I Have Seen. A Trilogy comprises three phases in a poetic journey, ranging from the poet (here called a minstrel) as a public figure, a traveller and observer of humanity, to one grounded in the landscape and fate of his native land. In the various sections of "The Beauty I have Seen", "Doors of the Forest" and "Flow and other Poems", Tanure Ojaide expresses multifarious experiences, private and public, that capture the poet's sensitive life in sensuous images. In these poems that flow like a narrative, form and content fuse into a mature poetic voice at once passionate and restrained, relaxed and poignant.

History and Its True Colors is the poet’s reflection on history from the multiple positionalities of creativity and self, personal relations, society, nationality, race, humanity, and life. The nine unique and yet interrelated movements of the collection not only memorialize the African past but also represent the journey to the past, for its remains still affect human experiences today. It is a past that has not fully passed because the past and the present are connected and capable of shaping the future. The poems also reflect a journey within and without the poet’s life experiences.