#young writers in Nigeria

[batrachised]

"I first read Anne of Green Gables to my grade 3 class in Vernon River. When we got to the chapter in which Matthew dies, we all sat still and quiet until one student said, “I didn’t know a teacher could cry.”'

-Deirdre Kessler, a former Poet Laureate of P.E.I. 

"I recall reading Montgomery at specific times and in particular places. I remember reading Anne of Avonlea with my best friend in her back yard after our grade 5 teacher had read Anne of Green Gables aloud to the class. We were hooked. I reread Anne of Green Gables and Anne’s House of Dreams in a residence room at Carleton University when I was preparing to go to Nigeria as a CUSO teacher. I read Volume I of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery while watching my young daughter play at a park. In more recent years I have gone directly to those passages that sustain me. I marvel at how deeply the words on the page connect writer and reader."

-Margaret Steffler, Professor Emerita at Trent University

"I grew up 27 kilometres and 98 years from Lucy Maud Montgomery: nearer in space than in time to her life and her creations. Growing up a writer within that circumference, it was hard to say if Maud cast a shadow or a gleam across the literary landscape and Island imagination. In the shadow of saccharine oversimplifications and commercialization, the writer was tempted always to challenge, to write against her legacy. But on an August day by a brook or on a December evening meeting a sharp-tongued character with a sharp eye on Island cultural characteristics, the writer is required to recalibrate: to recognize that we write, here, in her gleam. Happy 150 years since that first glimmer."

-Jane Ledwell, PEI writer

"For the past ten years I have lived in a small town in central Pennsylvania. (You can’t buy twenty pounds of brown sugar at the hardware store, but it’s that kind of place.) It’s nice enough, but it isn’t home. As someone who grew up in Toronto – attended a girls’ school – and then went east, I was probably fated to identify with Jane Stuart, Jane of Lantern Hill. I wasn’t born on the Island; I can’t make jam; and I was born decades too late to take the train from Union Station across on the Tormentine ferry. But I thrill to mornings on the Island and long for its sea winds, and just like Jane, I live through being away by never really being away: “Because in a very real sense Jane was still living on the Island.” I may live here, but I am there.

I’m glad that L.M. Montgomery understood how that feels."

-Claire Campbell is a double expatriate, a Canadian living in the United States and an Upper Canadian-born who misses the Maritimes.

"To me, teaching Anne of Green Gables in Iran was an unexpected journey that brought profound inspiration and hope. Little did I know that this classic tale of Anne Shirley’s resilience and feisty spirit would become a beacon of empowerment for my predominantly female students. Their connection with Anne's unwavering determination and her strong character ignited a spark within them that eventually helped spark an uprising against a relentless dictatorship. Witnessing these remarkable young women, who had once found solace in Anne's story, rise up against four decades of draconian rule in Iran has been nothing short of awe-inspiring. The Iranian women have taken the lessons of Anne’s perseverance to heart and channeled that spirit into a courageous struggle for justice and freedom. This is a testament to the enduring power of literature and the indomitable spirit of those who dare to dream of a better world."

-Sam Roodi, professor of Global Citizenship at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, Canada

"Recollections of childhood reading experiences tend to blur repetitively, but, for me, one memory is categorically singular. I was nine years old, home from school sick. My dad, on his way to work, stuck his head inside my bedroom door and said, “Here, try this.” He handed me a blue hardback of Anne of Green Gables. When he returned that night, I had finished it. For that whole day, I lived inside the skin of a different person. In a blur of astonishment and devastation, I learned that it was possible for a beloved fictional character to die. And I explicitly knew I was a different Margaret from the one who had woken up that morning. I remember my startled recognition, in so many words, that Thornton Burgess’s animal stories – hitherto completely satisfying – would never be quite the same again.  My life as a reader had suddenly and irrevocably expanded."

-Margaret Mackey is Professor Emerita in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta

"You inspired my mother to be a writer, when she was a little girl in Texas; you inspired my father, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, to see beauty all around. My little sister is named for your Anne. Every day I think about or read your work and try to imagine who you were within and between the lines. Thank you, thank you for giving me so many reasons and ways to read, to write, to connect with others, and to be."

-Elizabeth Rollins Epperly

"Maud’s writing first spoke to me when my own world had gone very quiet. I dwelt in a small town in regional Australia and was rarely able to leave my home due to chronic illness. Instead, I lived vicariously through her tales of girls and young women on an equally small island, about as far away from my own as it was possible to be. She showed me that life lived on a domestic scale could be just as vivid as that on the wider horizon. Unable to travel elsewhere, I gained strength from Pat’s decision to remain in a home to which she was so powerfully attached. Later, as a young teacher in a rural boarding school, I found comfort in my isolated state from Emily’s example of writing through her difficult feelings. Later still, when I reached Oxford, it was Anne’s experiences at university and her rich relationships with the kindred spirits she found there that resonated with special force. Maud’s words have been inscribed on each stage of my life, a tapestry of experiences that I have shared with her remarkable heroines, and which I will continue to weave in the decades yet to come."

-Chelsea Wallis

"My Maud testimonial begins with Brenda K Weber's testimonial. At an LMMI conference decades ago, she recalled a stuffy academic party during which a graduate student had approached her to make small talk. The student had a shaved head and a well-known enthusiasm for science fiction, and he wore black sneakers to this department party. When she told him she was about to attend a conference on Montgomery, his eyes lit up. "I love Emily of New Moon!" he exclaimed, and went on to babble about it for the next ten minutes. I love Weber's story as a reminder that we will find kindred spirits in the most unexpected places. I also love it because the graduate student in that story...was me. I discovered Weber's paper years later, and I think it captures me perfectly: a little too extraverted, a little fashion-ignorant, and still completely in love with Emily."

-Joe Sutliff Sanders is a specialist in children’s media in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge

"I open the cocoa-splattered, tatty book. Hand-written – hand-scrawled – memories of sensory pleasure: spicy, sugary, crunchy, hearty, homey. I open my mother’s falling-apart recipe book. In it are generations of recipes, passed on from great-grandmothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, friends, daughters, and daughters-in-law. A whole museum of feminine companionship.

You, too, held such a collection – a testimony to your own experiences of motherhood, of sisterhood, of friendship, of love. And when I open Anne of Green Gables, The Anne of Green Gables Cookbook, and then also Aunt Maud's Recipe Book, I share in these experiences. I find recipes to add to my own cocoa-splattered, tatty, hand-written recipe book. Liniment cake (with vanilla this time) made for birthdays, raspberry tarts for Sunday afternoon fun, ice cream that tastes of clouds … I open these books and I find comfort; I find love; I find motherhood."

-Daniella Dedekind is currently completing her MA at the University of Pretoria, South Africa

"On a recent spring day, I glanced out the window of my fourth-floor apartment and saw a flurry of white crab apple blossoms fluttering gracefully through the air, dancing upward on the wind. The whole urban landscape was transformed, and in that moment, I felt so thankful, not only for this glimpse of the wild nature of my city, but also for Montgomery and her nature-loving heroines, who taught me about Snow Queens and Wind Women and Flashes and how to live each day with eyes and heart and mind open to the beautiful surprises of the world around me. "

-Tara Parmiter is a Clinical Professor of Expository Writing at New York University.

"When I was in the third grade, my mother bought me Anne of Green Gables as a birthday present. I kept asking for sequels every year, and when I was in junior high, I learned that Prince Edward Island was a real place. During my university years, I visited the Island for the first time and stayed for three weeks. After several trips and working with a travel agency, I landed a job as a tour guide on PEI.

At first, I just liked to see the various seasons described in Montgomery’s books; then I wanted to feel the joy of spring after a long winter. Before I knew it, it had been 28 years in PEI.  Again, this spring, I'll go into the woods looking for mayflowers. Gilbert's love, expressed through gathering these small flowers for Anne, still touches my heart after all these years."

-Katsue Masuda 

"Like so many of us, my introduction to L.M. Montgomery came in childhood, at a time when I read voraciously, so hungry for departure. Back then, I had no clear sense of myself as a lesbian, but I knew intuitively that something about me was strange and “different” – or, as Montgomery herself might have put it, “queer.”

Because, at the time, there were so few novels for young readers with LGBTQ+ characters, I learned to find myself in other, less overt mirrors. It was in Montgomery’s books that I saw the clearest echoes of my own unarticulated desires. Emily Byrd Starr’s world is populated by older, unmarried female characters who show no interest in finding male partners. Valancy Stirling casts off the constraints of her disapproving family to pursue the existence she wants for herself. And Montgomery gave me Katherine Brooke in Anne of Windy Poplars, arguably her most overtly queer character.

I know, of course, that Montgomery wasn’t writing for readers who were gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender – and I know her opinions on lesbianism, expressed with such vehemence in her diaries – but she was writing for those of us who were “queer,” in the broader sense of the term. I’d like to think that she’d be able to understand my deep gratitude for the ways her work has always made me feel seen."

-Katharine Slater is an associate professor of children’s and young adult literature at Rowan University

"When my fifth-grade teacher read Anne of Green Gables to my class in the sixties, it was the comedic episodes of Anne dying her hair green and getting Diana drunk that made the book enticing. Throughout the decades since, as I aged and my interests changed, there was something new that appealed to me with each reading: a description of a beautiful garden as I planted one of my own, a reference to a special type of needlework as I learned to quilt, a humorous episode about Anne’s attempts in the kitchen as I also struggled in this regard, the love and bond between Anne and Marilla as I experienced those same emotions with my children and grandchild."

-Joanne Lebold

"L.M. Montgomery has not just inspired my family; she has shaped it. My great-grandma Cora first read the books aloud to her students in a one-room schoolhouse. Her daughter, my grandma Penny, and her daughter, my mother Christy, spent countless family vacations tracking down old copies of Montgomery’s books. It is pretty easy to figure out where my name and my sister’s came from (Emily and Anne, naturally). Montgomery has inspired our travel, showed us the joy in unraveling historical puzzles, supplied countless treasured memories, and connected us to friends all over the world. We have studied, collected, honoured, researched, discussed, savoured and loved Montgomery’s works. And we’ve done it all together. We have learned that Montgomery’s legacy is not just literary; it is intergenerational and personal."

-Emily Woster

#maud150 is a collection of tributes for Maud's 150th birthday. the above are a handful of my favorites.

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

“Freedom of Speech”, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Reith Lecture, 2022

Full transcript, with a link to watch at the end of the post.

“It’s a bit disturbing to have people be forced to clap for me. And I’m sorry. Thank you all for being here. I’m really happy to be here and I’m happy that you’re here.

It is a privilege for me to be here today to join in the distinguished tradition of the BBC Reith Lectures. When I was growing up in the 1980s on the campus of the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, I was a very curious child keen to hear every story, especially those that were no business of mine. And so, as a result, I sharpened very early on in life the skill of eavesdropping, a pastime at which I am still quite adept.

I noticed that each time my parents’ friends visited, they would sit in the living room talking loudly, except for when they criticised the military government. Then, they spoke in whispers. That whispering, apart from testing my eavesdropping capabilities, was striking. Why speak in such hushed tones when in the privacy of our living room, drinking brandy, no less? Well, because they were so attuned to a punitive authoritarian government that they instinctively lowered their voices, saying words they dared not say in public.

We would not expect this whispering in a democracy. Freedom of expression is after all, the bedrock of open societies. But there are many people in Western democracies today who will not speak loudly about issues they care about because they are afraid of what I will call, “social censure,” vicious retaliation, not from the government, but from other citizens.

An American student once accosted me at a book reading. “Why,” she asked angrily, “Had I said something in an interview?” I told her that what I had said was the truth, and she agreed that it was and then asked, “But why should we see it, even if it’s true?” At first, I was astonished at the absurdity of the question, then I realised what she meant. It didn’t matter what I actually believed. I should not have said it because it did not align with my political tribe. I had desecrated the prevailing orthodoxy. It was like being accused of blasphemy in a religion that is not yours. That young woman’s question, “Why should we say it, even if it’s true?” illustrates what the writer Ayad Akhtar has called a moral stridency, “a fierce, perhaps even punitive adherence to the collectively-sanctioned attitudes and behaviours of this era.”

To that, I would add, that this moral stridency is in fact, always punitive. We now live in broad settled ideological tribes. We no longer need to have real discussions because our positions are already assumed, based on our tribal affiliation. Our tribes demand from us a devotion to orthodoxy and they abide not reason, but faith. Many young people are growing up in this cauldron afraid to ask questions for fear of asking the wrong questions. And so, they practise an exquisite kind of self-censorship. Even if they believe something to be true or important, they do not say so because they should not say so.

One cannot help but wonder in this epidemic of self-censorship, what are we losing and what have we lost? We are all familiar with stories of people who have said or written something and then, faced a terrible online backlash. There is a difference between valid criticism, which should be part of free expression, and this kind of backlash, ugly personal insults, putting addresses of homes and children’s schools online, trying to make people lose their jobs.

To anyone who thinks, “Well, some people who have said terrible things, deserve it,” no. Nobody deserves it. It is unconscionable barbarism. It is a virtual vigilante action whose aim is not just to silence the person who has spoken but to create a vengeful atmosphere that deters others from speaking. There is something honest about an authoritarianism that recognises itself to be what it is. Such a system is easier to challenge because the battle lines are clear. But this new social censure demands consensus while being wilfully blind to its own tyranny. I think it portends the death of curiosity, the death of learning and the death of creativity.

No human endeavour requires freedom as much as creativity does. To create, one needs a kind of formless roving of the mind, to go nowhere and anywhere and everywhere. It is from that swell that art emerges. The German writer, Gunter Grass, once reflected on his writing process with these words: “The barriers fell, language surged forward, memory, imagination, the pleasure of invention.” As a writer, I recognised this intimately. As a reader, I have often felt the magic of literature, that sudden internal shiver while reading a novel, that glorious shock of mutuality, a sense of wonder that a stranger’s words could make me feel less alone in the world.

Literature shows us who we are, takes us into history, tells us not just what happened but how it felt and teaches us, as an American Professor once put it, about things that are “not googleable.” Books shape our understanding of the world. We speak of “Dickensian London.” We look to great African writers like Aidoo and Ngugi to understand the continent and we read Balzac for the subtleties of post-Napoleonic France.

Literature deeply matters and I believe literature is in peril because of social censure. If nothing changes, the next generation will read us and wonder, how did they manage to stop being human? How were they so lacking in contradiction and complexity? How did they banish all their shadows?

On a calm morning in New York this August, Salman Rushdie was attacked while just about to speak, ironically, on the freedom of speech. Imagine the brutal, barbaric intimacy of a stranger standing inches from you and forcefully plunging a knife into your face and your neck multiple times, because you wrote a book. I decided to re- read Rushdie’s books, not only as an act of defiant support but as a ritualized reminder that physical violence in response to literature can never, ever be justified.

Rushdie was attacked because in 1989, after his novel, The Satanic Verses was published, the Iranian regime declared it offensive and condemned not just Rushdie but all his publishers, to death. Horrors, of course, then followed: His Italian translator was stabbed, his Norwegian publisher was shot, and his Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was murdered in Tokyo. Here is a question I’ve been thinking about: would Rushdie’s novel be published today? Probably not. Would it even be written? Possibly not.

There are writers like Rushdie who want to write novels about sensitive subjects, but are held back by the specter of social censure. Publishers are wary of committing secular blasphemy. Literature is increasingly viewed through ideological rather than artistic lenses. Nothing demonstrates this better than the recent phenomenon of “sensitivity readers” in the world of publishing, people whose job it is to cleanse unpublished manuscripts of potentially offensive words.

This, in my mind, negates the very idea of literature. We cannot tell stories that are only light when life itself is light and darkness. Literature is about how we are great and flawed. It is about what H. G. Wells has called ‘the jolly coarseness of life.’ To that I would add that just coarseness alone will do, it need not be jolly.

While I insist that violence is never an acceptable response to speech, I do not deny the power of words to wound. Words can break the human spirit. Some of the deepest pain I have experienced in my life have come from words that somebody said or wrote, and some of the most beautiful gifts I have received have also been words. It is precisely because of this power of words that freedom of speech matters.

‘Freedom of speech.’ Even the expression itself has sadly taken on a partisan tribal tint. It is often framed, and I will put it crudely, as “say whatever you want” versus, “consider the feelings of others.” This, though, is too stark a dichotomy.

I cannot keep count of all the books that have offended me, infuriated me, disgusted me, but I would never argue that they not be published. When I read something scientifically false, such as that drinking urine cures cancer, or something gratuitously hurtful to human dignity, such as that gay people should be imprisoned for being gay, I desperately long to banish such ideas from the world. Yet I resist advocating censorship. I take this position as much for reasons of principle as for practicality.

I believe deeply in the principle of free expression, and I believe this particularly because I am a writer and a reader, and because literature is my great love and because I have been formed and inspired and consoled by books. Had any of those books been censored, I would perhaps today be lost.

My practical reason, we could also call it my selfish reason, is that I fear the weapon I advocate to be used against someone else might one day be used against me. What today is considered benign could very well become offensive tomorrow, because the suppression of speech is not so much about the speech itself, as it is the person who censors. American high school boards are today engaged in a frenzy of book banning, and the process seems arbitrary. Books that have been used in school curriculums for years with no complaints have suddenly been banned in some states, and I understand that one of my novels is in this august group.

I confess that there are some books I would fantasize about banning. Books that deny the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide, for example, because I detest the denial of history. But what if someone else’s fantasy was to ban a book about the Deir Yassin massacre of Palestinians by Zionists in 1948? Or a book about the Igbo coalminers massacred in Nigeria by the British colonial government in 1949? Above principle and pragmatism, however, is the reality that censorship very often does not achieve its objective. My first instinct, on learning that a book has been banned, is to seek it out and read it.

And so, I would say, do not ban them, answer them. In this age of mounting disinformation all over the world, when it is easy to dress up a lie so nicely that it starts to take on the glow of truth, the solution is not to hide the lie but to expose it, and scrub from it, its false glow. When we censor the purveyors of bad ideas, we risk making them martyrs, and the battle with a martyr can never be won.

I read newspapers from both sides of the political spectrum. I am, by the way, still puzzled that newspapers, ostensible bastions of objectivity, are politically differentiated. And I often say when I am feeling a little sanctimonious, that I am interested in the ideas of people who disagree with me because I believe that it is good to hear different sides of an issue. But the truth is that I am interested in their ideas because I want to understand them properly and therefore be better able to demolish them.

I believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech, and I recognize how simplistic, even flippant, that can sound. This is not to suggest that one should be allowed to say absolutely anything at any time, which to me is a juvenile position, for being fantastical and detached from reality. Free speech absolutism would be appropriate only for a theoretical world inhabited by animated ideas rather than humans.

Some speech restrictions are necessary in a civilized world. After the Second World War, when countries gathered to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, most agreed that “incitement to violence,” should be punished, but the Soviet Bloc wanted to add “incitement to hatred,” citing the Nazis as an example, which on the surface was reasonable. But their opponents suspected, rightly, that “incitement to hatred,” would end up being interpreted so widely as to include any criticism of the government.

This raises the question: who decides just how narrow and how clear restrictions should be? The nineteenth century English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, wrote that all silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility, and with all due respect to the Pope, nobody is infallible. So, who decides what should be silenced?

Mahatma Gandhi, after he was arrested for sedition, wrote: “Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a person or system, one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote or incite to violence.”

Most people would agree. But what about speech that does not directly incite violence but has nevertheless led to deaths by suicide, as has happened with people is so harangued on social media, so insulted and abused, that they take their own lives? I, by the way, use the word ‘violence,’ assuming that its meaning is self-evident. But is it really? For what is to be said of the idea prevalent today that speech does not merely incite violence – the kind of physical act as suffered by Salman Rushdie – but that speech itself IS violence?

The expression, ‘the answer to bad speech is more speech,’ in its beguiling simplicity, also fails to consider a central motif, which is power. Who has access? Who is in a position to answer bad speech with more speech? In arguing for the freedom of speech, one must consider all the limitations placed by unequal power relations, such as a mainstream press owned by fewer and fewer wealthy people, which naturally excludes multiple voices.

Even the definition of speech can be limiting, such as when the US Supreme Court decided, in the case of Citizens United, that money is speech. All those not wealthy cannot then ‘answer back,’ as it were. Most of all, the Social Media companies, with their mystical algorithms and their lack of transparency, exert enormous control on who can speak and who cannot, by suspending and censoring their users, something that has been called ‘moderation without representation.’

Yes, these companies are private but considering the outsize influence they have in modern society, they really should be treated more like a public utility. There are those who think that, because of these sorts of power limitations, we should robustly censor speech in order to create tolerance. A well-intentioned idea, no doubt. But as the Danish lawyer, Jacob Mchangama, has argued: “To impose silence and call it tolerance does not make it so. Real tolerance requires understanding. Understanding comes from listening. Listening presupposes speech.”

For all the nobility in the idea of censorship for the sake of tolerance, it is also a kind of capitulation, an acceptance that the wounded cannot fight back. When an anti-black poster was once displayed on the campus of Arizona State University, the university chose not to expel the perpetrators. Instead, a forum was organized, the poster discussed, and an overwhelming majority of students expressed their disapproval. One of the black students who organized this said, “When you get a chance to swing at racism, and you do, you feel more confident about doing it the next time.”

A troubling assumption underlying the idea of censorship for the sake of tolerance is that good people don’t need free speech, as they cannot possibly want to say anything hurtful to anyone. Free speech is therefore for the bad people who want it as a cover to say bad things. The culture of social censure today has, at its center, a kind of puritanism that expects us to be free of all flaws, like angels, and angels do not need free speech.

Of course, we all need free speech. Free speech is indeed a tool of the powerful, but it is also crucially the language of the powerless. The courageous protests by Iranian women, the ENDSARS protest in Nigeria, where young people rallied against police brutality, the Arab Spring: all wielded speech. Dissent is impossible without the freedom of speech.

The biggest threat to speech today is not legal or political, but social. This is not a new idea, even if its present manifestation is modern. That famed chronicler of American life, Alexis de Tocqueville, believed that the greatest dangers to liberty were not legal or political, but social. And when John Stuart Mill warned against the “tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling,” it reads as though he foresaw the threat that orthodoxy poses today. The solution to this threat can only be collective action. Social censure creates not just a climate of fear but also a reluctance to acknowledge this fear. It is only human to fear a mob, but I would fear less if I knew my neighbor would not stay silent were I to be pilloried. We fear the mob but the mob is us.

I want to make a case today for moral courage, for each of us to stand for freedom of speech, to refuse to participate in unjustified censorship, and to make much wider, the boundaries of what can be said. We must start again to assume good faith. In public discourse today, the assumption of good faith is dead and speech is by default interpreted in the most uncharitable way. Yes, some people are not of good faith which, I suppose, is what that modern word “troll” means, but we cannot, because some people do not act in good faith, then decide that the principle of good faith itself is dead. It is instructive to be reminded of American President James Madison’s words: “some degree of abuse is inseparable from the proper use of everything.”

We must start again to make our case, respectfully and factually. We must agree that neither sanctimonious condescension on the left nor mean-spirited hectoring on the right qualify as political arguments. We must insist not only on truth but also nuance. An argument for any social justice movement, for example, is stronger and more confident when it is nuanced because it does not feel the need to simplify in order to convince.

We must hear every side and not only the loudest side. While social media has re-shaped the traditional power dynamic by giving some access to the powerless, it has also made it easy to mistake the loudest voices for the truest. We must protect the values of disagreement, and agree that there is value in disagreement. And we must support the principle of free expression when it does not appeal to our own agenda, difficult as that may be, and I find it particularly so.

We must wean ourselves of the addiction to comfort. When I first left Nigeria to attend university in the US, I quickly realized that in public conversations about America’s difficult problems – like income inequality and race – the goal was not truth, the goal was to keep everyone comfortable. And so, people pretended not to see what they saw, things were left unsaid, questions unasked, and ignorance festered. This unwillingness to accept the discomfort that honesty can bring is in its own way a suppression of speech. Some Americans argue, for example, that students today should not be taught about the racist Jim Crow laws of the 1950s, because it will make them uncomfortable. And so, they prefer the disservice to young people of making them ignorant of their own history.

We must stop assuming that everyone knows, or should know, everything. I was once struck by how quickly an American journalist was fired from her job for saying something racist. Little was made public about exactly what it was she had said, and this not only gave a certain unearned power to her words, but also darkly suggested that perhaps they contained an element of truth. The public was also cheated of its right to hear, and perhaps, potentially learn. What was said? Why was saying it wrong? What should have been said instead?

We must demand that people behave on social media only as they would in real life, and we must also demand reasonable social media reforms such as the removal of anonymity, or linking advertising only to accounts with real names, which would provide an incentive to promote voices of actual people and not amoral bots.

What if each of us, but particularly those with voices, gatekeepers, opinion shapers, political and cultural leaders, editors, social media influencers, across the political spectrum, were to agree on these ideas as broad rules to follow? A coalition of the reasonable would automatically moderate extreme speech. Is it naïve? Perhaps. But a considered embrace of naivety can be the beginning of change. The internet was after all designed to create a utopia of human connection. A naïve idea if ever there was one, but it still brought about the most significant change in how human beings communicate.

Sometimes it takes a crisis for a naïve idea to become realistic. President Roosevelt’s New Deal itself was based on ideas that went against the prevailing consensus of the time and were generally considered naïve and impossible. But when crisis came in the form of the Great Depression, it suddenly became possible.

Social censure is our crisis today. George Orwell wrote that, “If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it.” To that I would add: We can protect our future. We just need moral courage.

Thank you.”

[have-you-heard-of]

Have You Heard Of?

“A man who would be intimidated by me is exactly the kind of man I would have no interest in.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie b.September 15, 1977

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is an award-winning author and an influential advocate of feminism. She has captivated people worldwide with her powerful storytelling and her outspoken campaign for gender equality. She was born in Enugu, Nigeria, and was raised in an academic environment that surely nurtured her passion for writing. As one of six siblings she grew up in the university town of Nsukka, her Mother was the first female registrar at University of Masuka and her father was Nigeria's first professor of statistics, and later became Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the same university. She attributes her success in part to her parents for, encouraging her self-confidence and being supportive by always showing that they had confidence in her. She began studying medicine and pharmacy at the university school her parents worked at; though, writing seems to have called to her, as she also edited the magazine created by the medical students. She left her medical studies after a year and a half when at nineteen she gained a scholarship to Eastern Connecticut State University in America, where she graduated summa cum laude (with highest honours) with a degree in communication and political science and continued her passion for writing by producing articles for the university journal. She went on to gain her master’s degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University, become a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, earned an MA in African Studies from Yale University, and she was awarded a fellowship by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. During this time, she has released numerous novels, including A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions. She holds strong feelings regarding gender equality and is proud of her femininity, taking pleasure in fashion whilst grappling with the knowledge that she will be judged for the way she chooses to dress. Her belief is that you should be happy to be who you are, without being forced into a mould society has decided fits your gender. Refusing to conform to a female academic stereotype, she loves make-up and has been the face of Boots No7 cosmetics. Now married with a daughter, she splits her time between Nigeria, where she teaches writing workshops, and the United States. All in all, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a world-renowned writer, acclaimed academic, fashion icon, beauty queen and a feminist warrior we all should have heard of.

“If you criticise X in women but do not criticise X in men, then you do not have a problem with X, you have a problem with women.”

Books and Novels

Notable Awards and Honors

35 awards, 21 are literary awards, including: Future… Award (Young Person of the Year category), 2008 Global Hope Coalition's Thought Leadership Award, 2018 Action Against Hunger Humanitarian Award, 2018 UN Foundation Global Leadership Award, 2019 Africa Freedom Prize 2020 Business Insider Africa Awards, 'Creative Leader of the Year', 12 April 2022 Influential people lists including: The New Yorker's '20 Under 40', 2010 '100 Most Influential Africans 2013', New African '100 Most Influential People' by Time Magazine, 2015 Fortune Magazine's List of 50 World Leaders, 2017 'World's Most Inspiring People in 2019' by OOOM Magazine Forbes Africa's '100 Icons from Africa', 2021 'Changemakers: 100 Nigerians Leading Transformational Change', 2022

“Teach her to reject likeability. Her job is not to make herself likeable, her job is to be her full self, a self that is honest and aware of the equal humanity of other people.”

Trivia

Her childhood home was one formerly occupied by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe

Beyoncé's song, "Flawless," features excerpts from Adichie's TED Talk.

Adichie thought she had invented purple hibiscus & was shocked to receive a call from her editor telling her they existed in America!

[didierleclair]

INSPECTOR WAZIRI LEADS THE INVESTIGATION

A Nigerian film about a difficult period to see if you have not already. It is October 1. The movie came out in 2014. However, the cinematographic work remains relevant today.

The story takes place a few days before Nigeria's Independence Day in 1960. This is where the title of the film comes from. Inspector Danladi Waziri (Sadiq Daba) investigates a series of rapes and murders of women west of the country, a small town called Akote, in Igbo region.

The director of this psychological movie, Kunle Afolayan, leads the historical and sociological plot masterfully. Danladi Waziri is an austere man, originally from the North. His appearance is very different from his compatriots in the West. Rather slender with a darker complexion, he has the withdrawn look of the men of the desert, of a Sahelian. He belongs to the Hausa people.

He is leading an investigation into a serial killer. It is the early 60s and almost no one knows what DNA means, including the inspector. He will investigate with the means at hand. Analysis of the crime scene, manipulation of the victims' bodies, the marks on the strangled women. They are virgin teenagers surprised in the darkness of a forest. Gradually, inspector Waziri will understand that he is after a criminal who knows the terrain and therefore a native of the country. However, local police categorically refuse to accept this hypothesis. They are convinced that no man from Akote can commit such atrocities. It is definitely someone from elsewhere. The man from the North is alone against everyone.

The local chief has a soothsayer who is worried about the murders in the area. The traditional priest tells his visitors that the killings will continue until the murderer is satisfied. Nevertheless, the inspector is unable to question the local soothsayer about his premonitory remarks. The police fear that the witch doctor will cast a bad spell on them if they dare to take him to the police station. Consequently, Waziri swims in a total enigma.

Yet this matter must be resolved before the handover of power from Britain to Nigeria. Inspector Waziri superior, a British man, plans to pack up and close the case once Nigeria is independent.

October 1 is much more than an African thriller. There is palpable ethnic tension, particularly when Waziri arrests a suspect like himself from the North. The local population wants to take justice into their own hands. The angry crowd gathers in front of the poor man's prison. Waziri knows he is innocent given the clues he has. However, the locals do not trust the investigator. They want to punish the suspect themselves because they are sure he is guilty.

We must add the difficult relations that the police officer maintains with the British colonizers. Their condescension and arrogance force the inspector to suffer frequent humiliations. His superior, a young man, insists on calling him “Dany Boy,” even though Waziri is his father’s age. However, Africa of the 60s is committed to respecting elders. It is inconceivable to treat a middle-aged African with no respect.

The reconstruction of the feverish atmosphere before independence is a success. In this film, there is a need to show young Africans what life was like during colonization.

All the actors played their respective roles with conviction. We come away won over by the quality of the dramatic acting. A film to see and appreciate.

Didier Leclair, writer Pic: (All Rights reserved)

[boricuacherry-blog]

On October 21, 2020 Beyonce's publicist, Yvette Noel-Schure responded to Beyoncé being called out by Tiwa. She wrote that, "Not all activists live on social media. Not all doers look for validation nor your approval. Not all work is for a Photo Op. Make it normal to stop judging people's actions based on posts. Posts don't make you an activist. Actions make you an activist. Whether in the background or out in the streets. We all choose a different path to get it done. Blessed are those who do not see yet they believe. Actions speak louder than posts! Stop Judging. S.T.O.P."

Beyoncé's mom gets into War of Words on Social Media with Tiwa Savage

On the same day, Beyoncé's mother, Tina Knowles also replied in a lengthy Instagram post as she wrote, "Good Morning, I am deeply saddened by the events that happened last night in Lagos! When people lost their lives and were beaten and abused. I understand the injustices that have been going on in Nigeria, it sickens me.

SARS came to my attention last week and immediately I posted about it! I had not heard of it before as I have not been following closely Instagram as much as I usually do due to some serious personal family challenges. As a result I have been mostly posting funny things to try to make people smile.

After researching on line I understood that SARS (a special task force supposedly to stop crime) were abusing their power and harassing young people. Very much like what we have been protesting for, here in America. Everyday we are disproportionately stopped harassed jailed and sometimes killed! These senseless killings of our black men and women! The brutal treatment of our people by law enforcement! No knock warrants, etc. Of course I guess much of the public does not think we have personal problems in our family. We are supposed to be superhuman and not have loss, or health issues or personal problems because our sole purpose is suppose to be of service and humility and take as much abuse from the haters as they choose to put on us. No matter what my daughter does she is scrutinized and torn apart!

She makes a record and uses all African artists, producers, writers. She is criticized because she didn't get artist from every country in Africa there are 52 countries! Then she makes a film that by the way she doesn't profit a penny off of, because she spent every penny in the budget on making something that celebrates our heritage!

What profiting off of you did she do? She made art!! She is an artist! That is what artist do. She is not your political leader and not your whipping board. They saw a 30 second trailer and critics and couch activist attacked!!!!! Yes I said it and I meant it!

They came out and did their usual thing about her being a culture vulture and saying some of the most ugly and vile things about her that were totally not true and insults galore.

Social media users reacted to Tina's online outburst:

[mybookplacenet]

Featured Post: The Ordained Demon: The Story of a Young Priest by Oladapo Osuntokun

About The Ordained Demon: The Story of a Young Priest: "The Ordained Demon" is an exciting book that combines self-help, Christian fiction, and thriller genres. It tells the story of a young priest named Michael who faces temptations and battles the demon possessing a man. With the power of God, Michael heals the possessed man and eliminates the demon. However, the demon returns and threatens to harm Michael. The book explores the consequences of ambition, abandonment, and failure to adhere to sacred vows. It highlights the importance of being attached to Jesus Christ and avoiding the traps of Satan. The story is cleverly woven and presented in a straightforward and easy-to-understand format. It will take readers on a thrilling journey and keep them engaged from beginning to end. Targeted Age Group: all Written by: Oladapo Osuntokun Buy the ebook: Buy the Book On Amazon Buy the Print Book: Buy the Book On Amazon Buy the Book On Barnes & Noble/Nook Author Bio: Dr. Oladapo. R. Osuntokun was born in Nigeria and emigrated to the USA many years ago. By the time he got on the plane, he was training to become an orthopedic surgeon. As the plane was air bound, he had an Epiphany. It was the voice of God gently instructing him about his impending mission. The voice was reassuring but gently instructing him that he would no longer heal people with a "knife but the words. He uses the words in various ways, including his current mission as an Author, a Psychiatrist, and a Pastor. Dr. Oladapo Richard Osuntokun is the Word of God Parish pastor in Luzerne, PA. A Pentecostal Spiritual filled Bible-based Church.He is a guest/ visiting Professor at Clark's Summit University, where he has taught African and World Religion since 2017 till date. Dr. Oladapo Richard Osuntokun is a board-certified pediatric and Adolescent Psychiatrist. He is also a board-certified General and Adult Psychiatrist. He attended the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Montefiore, Bronx, NY, from 2000 to 2005 for his education. Dr. Osuntokun is also an Associate Professor of Psychiatric Medicine at the Geissinger College of Medicine in Scranton, Pa. He has won the Top Doctor award for the past several years. The Marquis "who is who in America" has included Dr. Oladapo Richard Osuntokun as a biographical listee. Follow the author on social media: Learn more about the writer. Visit the Author's Website Facebook Fan Page Twitter Instagram Read the full article

[rockislandadultreads]

New Title Tuesday: Mystery

Last Seen in Lapaz by Kwei Quartey

When a whirlwind romance leads to the disappearance of a young Nigerian woman and a dead body, PI Emma Djan resorts to dangerous undercover work to track her down in Accra.

Just as things at work are slowing down for PI Emma Djan, an old friend of her boss’s asks for help tracking down his missing daughter. According to her father, Ngozi was just months shy of graduating high school when she became secretive and withdrawn. Suddenly, all she wanted to do was be with her handsome new beau, Femi, instead of attending law school in the fall. So when she disappears from her parents’ house in Nigeria the middle of a summer night, they immediately suspect Femi was behind it and have reason to believe the pair has fled to Accra.

During Emma’s first week on the case, Femi is found murdered at his opulent residence in Accra, and Ngozi still has not been found. Fearing the worst, Emma digs further and discovers Femi was part of a network of sex traffickers in several West African countries. Migrants from Ghana and Nigeria are duped into thinking they are on their way to success and riches in Italy. But once there—if they even survive the grueling trip across the desert—they are manipulated into sex work with little chance of escape.

As successful as Femi was, he took advantage of nearly everyone he met, leaving a trail of enemies in his wake, all of whom had motives to kill him. The question is, which one of them did it? Not only does Emma have to hunt the killer down; she’s in a race against time to find Ngozi before she ends up in a pool of blood like Femi.

This is the third volume in the “Emma Djan Investigation” series. 

A Mansion for Murder by Frances Brody

1930, Yorkshire. Intrigued by a mysterious letter from a stranger offering important information, Private Investigator Kate Shackleton arrives in the mill village of Saltaire. At nearby Milner Field mansion, overshadowed by its reputation for misfortune and untimely deaths, she expects to meet the letter writer, Ronnie Creswell.

Kate soon hears the shocking news that Ronnie has been killed. At first his death appears to be a tragic accident at the mill, but soon it becomes clear that Ronnie's demise was no mishap. Kate is enlisted to help investigate the murder.

Kate moves into the tower rooms at Milner Field, as she tries to uncover resentments, industrial espionage, and old secrets in the close-knit village. Although she doesn't believe in curses, she wonders what sinister truth lies behind this latest in the litany of deaths connected to the infamous Milner Field.

Then just when things couldn't get any worse, a young girl in the village goes missing, and Kate must use all her strength and skill to unravel the mystery around the mansion once and for all...

This is the 13th volume in the “Kate Shackleton” series.

One Extra Corpse by Barbara Hambly

May, 1924. It's been seven months since young British widow Emma Blackstone arrived in Hollywood to serve as companion to Kitty Flint: her beautiful, silent-movie star sister-in-law. Kitty is generous, kind-hearted . . . and a truly terrible actress. Not that Emma minds; she's too busy making her academic parents turn in their graves with her new job writing painfully historically inaccurate scenarios for Foremost Studios, in between wrangling their leading lady out of the arms of her army of amorous suitors.

So when one of Kitty's old flames, renowned film director Ernst Zapolya, calls Emma and tells her it's imperative he meet with Kitty that morning, she's not surprised. Until, that is, he adds that lives depend on it. Ernest sounds frightened. But what can have scared him so badly - and what on earth does cheerful, flighty Kitty have to do with it?

Only Ernest can provide the answers, and Kitty and Emma travel to the set of his extravagant new movie to find them. But the shocking discovery they make there only raises further questions . . . including: will they stay alive long enough to solve the murderous puzzle?

This is the second volume in the “Silver Screen Historical Mystery” series.

Paris Requiem by Chris Lloyd

Paris, 1940. As the city adjusts to life under Nazi occupation, Detective Eddie Giral struggles to reconcile his job as a policeman with his new role enforcing a regime he cannot believe in, but must work under.

He's sacrificed so much in order to survive in this new world, but the past is not so easily forgotten. When an old friend—and an old flame—reappear, begging for his help, Eddie must decide how far he will go to help those he loves.

The notion of justice itself quickly becomes as dangerous, blurred, and confused as the war itself. And Eddie’s morale compass, ever on unreliable foundations, will be questioned again and again as the ravages of the German occupation steadily attempt to grind him—and the city he loves—into submission.

Negotiating a path between resistance and collaboration, he can remain a good man and do nothing—or risk everything he has achieved in a desperate act of resistance.

[moochilatv]

Champ De Mars presents: Tomorrow

This song is part of the album, Halloween Leaves, which focuses on the story of a couple who have lost a child. However, this particular song was written the night before singer/songwriter David Bruns' mother passed away and therefore has some more autobiographical elements than other songs on the record.

Halloween Leaves was released in February of 2024 and features singles ‘Kids,’ ‘Tomorrow’ and ‘Monsters in the Kitchen.’ Video for ‘Kids’ was done by the German AI art group The Thor Brothers. 

Listen in Spotify:

Watch this videoclip:

Raised in the Sierra Foothills of Meadow Vista, California; David Bruns is a writer, musician, journalist, and videographer. His family had deep musical roots, during the 1950’s his mother studied Broadway voice while working switchboards at Decca Records in New York City.

In college at UC Davis, Bruns became obsessed with guitar and songwriting – particularly the work of Neil Young, REM and The Smiths. In the ensuing years, Bruns fronted a number of indie bands throughout the 1990’s in Northern California – including The Said and Bellstar.  Both bands released two albums.

In 2006, he moved to the East Coast to live in Washington, D.C. There, he released two solo albums, the wildly diverse Maryland, and Virginia – with Maryland deeply entrenched in alternative tunings and sonic complexity, and Virginia exploring alt-Americana themes with mandolins, banjos, and a hired fiddle player.  During this time he also released on Amazon his first novel The Silent Year - available on Amazon here.

Champ de Mars is the latest ‘band’ incarnation of his music. However, instead of the traditional three-piece, four-piece type ensemble – this band is more of an amalgamation of contributions from a number of people Bruns has made music with over the years.

Champs’ first EP Back from the West was recorded at our basement studio in Alexandria, Virginia throughout 2015.  

Recording for the first full length disc Rancho Seco Victory began in earnest in the fall of 2017 and continued throughout the winter, with mixing and mastering stretching into June of 2018.  It is currently available for order, as well as on iTunes, Spotify, Deezer and Google play. It also received a slew of very positive music reviews. 

In 2023, Bruns released a new disc that reimagined staple songs from his first band The Said. Titled, “Best of 1993-1996” featured the single ‘Martyr’ and is available on Spotify. 

Recording for the latest album, Halloween Leaves began in February of that same year. For this disc, Bruns experimented with using hip-hop drum loops as beds which he recorded piano loops over. Real drums were recorded in Sicily by respected session player, Federico Gucciardo. Bruns also hired a choir from Nigeria for three songs in the “Leaves” trilogy. Thematically the album primarily focuses on the story of a couple’s existence in different rooms of one house in suburbia during the pandemic. There’s allusions to wedding dresses in closets and desires to ‘have a baby,’ but also to relationship dysfunction, substance abuse, and reconciliation. The album’s centerpiece may be ‘Leaves in Winter’ which courageously confronts the societal taboo topic of miscarriage and the silent grief that couples often experience from it.

[ausetkmt]

Nigerian ‘Lovecraft Country’ Writer Tweets Offensive Slur Against African-Americans … HBO Does Nothing. Nigeria photo

In the African-American community, we have been witnessing a disturbing pattern of Nigerian-origin hateful rhetoric towards American descendants of slavery while burrowing themselves into the very same ecosystem that African-Americans have fought to create to give people of Nigerian-origin the pipeline to pursue opportunities in America.

What is more disturbing is these Nigerian-origin individuals engaged in hatred towards African-Americans appeared to be “sanctioned” by liberals/progressive platforms who are attempting to use black people from the Caribbean and Africa to appear as the “black narrative” in America.

Ihuoma Ofordire, who works on the HBO “Lovecraft Country” series, has revealed in a tweet she was warned by her mother about dating African-American men with the use of a Nigerian-origin slur called “Akata” that has a derogative meaning towards African-American people.

First of all, my reaction to this is probably the same as yours— this is weird and awkward, why would a bunch of Black people in Nigeria come up and devise an ethnic slur called “Akata” towards another group of black people in this world? Then their black Nigerian mothers are telling their Black daughters, not to date First-World African-American men like we some pieces of garbage out here? All of this makes no sense and unwarranted hatred considering how African-Americans actively contributed to the advancement of Black people worldwide in an unselfish and sacrificial manner. One of our Civil Rights heroes, Whitney Young died in Nigeria going over there to support them.

Furthermore, Ihuoma talks about being a proud “Igbo” — we African-Americans were the ones who accommodated the “Igbo” people from Nigeria in the 1970s when the state was massacring Igbos and taking over the Igbo kingdom — they got grisly macabre YouTube videos in case someone wants to forget their history. We African-Americans took Ihuoma people in here in America and the thanks we get is Ihuoma mother telling her about “Akata” and not to date them — that’s the thanks we get from Ihuoma moms and her.

The average African-American person like myself do not even know what is the context of “Akata” because this is something we don’t even expect to even realize a Black-on-Black slur word existed — we always thought of Black people around the world as our common family in the struggle against global white supremacy and oppression.

So why is this Ihuoma Ofordie tweeting out an ethnic slur against her own Black people in this world saying her mother is telling her not to date them? WTF is this BS?

Let me make something clear with anybody from Nigeria using slurs like “Akata” to African-Americans, this kind of hatred and slurs against African-Americans is beneath us and don’t even register on our radar. I can care less about some Nigerian old woman telling her Nigerian daughter not to date an African-American man — that sounds stupid and silly to African-American people that earned our position through blood, sweat, and tears to be the standard-bearer of blackness in this modern world.

I’m not even going to go there with how bad the actions of Nigerian nationals make everybody Black looks in this world — I can write a whole book on that with annotations if I want to go there. When I travel in remote parts of this world, you know what I get asked by people out of caution?

They ask me if I’m Nigerian. I say no, I’m American and they start smiling and talking about Muhammad Ali and James Brown — you Nigerians don’t have nor earned that kind of social capital to go around making up “Akata” slurs towards African-Americans. I’m not going to bring up the Nigerian and South African thing but we African-Americans are very well aware of that whole spat as well.

Furthermore, no one in America is going to protect anybody from the African Diaspora thinking they can come here to America and start disrespecting African-Americans. I don’t care what company, what liberal billionaire or what social media platform or blog platform is out there — African-Americans ain’t scared and we stand up to our oppressors and we don’t play with anybody around here. We fought and sacrificed too much to reach the station we are at today to play with crumb snatchers and bootlickers trying to undermine the legacy of African-American people and calling us names like Akata.

I will be in formal contact with AT&T as well as HBO over this Ihuoma Ofordie and her “Akata” hate tweet as well as other African-Americans who will not tolerate this mess. The sad and perplexing part is African-Americans have to figure out why the hell Nigerians even made up the word “Akata” as if we African-Americans has done something to the people of Nigeria to deserve this kind of hateful sentiment?

The first thing our Black mayors have done in America in the 1970s and 1980s was to create opportunities for Africans to migrate to places like Dallas, DC and more — the hell our African-American people done to Nigeria to be called something like “Akata” or Nigerian mothers telling their daughters don’t date African-American men? I’m very confused about that.

This “Akata” slur doesn’t even make sense to us but African-Americans will not be tolerating any more undermining hate towards us from anyone in the African Diaspora and we will come for any progressive/liberal groups and organizations sponsoring these Africans/Carribeans to feel empowered to come at African-Americans like this.

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 73: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin makes the case for why this is a multi-factor rebellion vs. just protests about George Floyd. He discusses the Democratic Party’s sneaky relationship with the police in cities and states under Dem control, and why Joe Biden is a cop and the Steve Jobs of mass incarceration.

[warningsine]

Chigozie Obioma is the Nigerian author of the novels The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), both shortlisted for the Booker Prize for their unique, folkloric tales of Nigerian life in decades past. Like them, his 2024 novel The Road to the Country is “tinged with fable and prophecy”. It’s set in the brutal Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1960, fought between Nigeria and the Republic of Biafra, a secessionist state which had declared its independence. This epic story of “a young man seeking redemption in a country on fire” is about a shy Lagos student whose brother disappears during the war. He sets out to find him and make right something that happened in the past. We asked Obioma about the work.

Why did you undertake this story; how did it reveal itself?

I knew I wanted to write this book from very early on. In 1993, during a visit to my parents’ eastern village for the first time, I saw a lot of people with physical deformities of all sorts. I was surprised by this, having grown up in a city where I hardly saw anything of that sort. I asked my mother why these people were like this and she said to me, simply: “The war”. The village is in the former Biafran territory.

That stuck with me, and I never forgot it, so that, years later, I began to research the war very avidly and as I read and read, I realised I was going to be writing about it.

Then a couple of years ago, I had the idea of a Yoruba man from the west of Nigeria being conscripted to fight for Biafra, whose army was primarily made up of Igbos and minority groups. That gave me the window into the story and, almost immediately, I found the narrative pulse of the novel, which is centred on the journey into war of a man called Kunle looking to atone for a mistake he made as a child and ending up finding love and regeneration.

Was it a painful experience to recreate the war scenes?

I think so – this is historical fiction and I was looking to recreate a time in history that has not received as much attention as it should. And these events actually happened to people. I know it’s a cliché to say that people who have experienced the horrors of war, especially combatants, do not like to speak about it, but Biafra is especially unique in that this was a war of unequal forces to the nth degree.

As I depict in the novel, much of the time the Biafrans were fighting without weapons. We are talking of a company of 70 soldiers with only 40 rifles and very limited ammunition going against a federal unit equipped with tanks and heavy weapons and aerial support.

Why is family and brotherhood such a central concern of yours?

I am interested in relationships, which for me is the energy for storytelling. How do people form connections, break those connections, and sometimes attempt to put those connections back together again? This is what I am interested in investigating in stories, and it so happens that familial relationships have been part of that (The Fishermen).

I have also explored varied relationships including romantic relationships between a man and a woman and a mystical relationship between a man and his spirit (An Orchestra of Minorities). In The Road to the Country, I investigate the relationship between Kunle and his comrades, and a romantic relationship between him and his love interest, Agnes. So, while brotherhood features in many of these novels, it has not been the only focus.

What role does Igbo identity play in the work?

I believe that a writer is a sum of herself. There is the sense of who you are, have become and are becoming. These are the things that shape your writing to a degree. That is to say that these things are malleable, and must constantly change or, at least, shift.

Identity is too stiff, too anchored to be useful for the serious writer – I think. So, it doesn’t play a role. That said, it is obvious that I am interested in Igbo worldview, cultures, traditions and history.

Part of the reason for this interest is that I see a lot of unmined treasures for storytelling there, rather than for any sentimental reason. But I am also curious about the Yoruba cultures, American, Turkish, Danish, Swedish, Indian, Jamaican and all the places I have lived in or am interested in.

That said, outside the page, I am of course Igbo, Nigerian, African, Black…

Why the war? Why is a younger Nigerian writer interested in it?

I don’t know who wouldn’t be interested in something of that scale. The Biafran War of Independence was a catastrophe of epic proportions in the history of Nigeria. It reshaped the country and helped birth Nigeria as we know it today.

I wanted to write this novel because I was surprised to find that there was an abundance of non-fiction written about the war. There is some war-time fiction: that is, fiction in which the war is the backdrop. What you don’t find are many war novels: fiction in which the war is the central focus. I wanted to write a novel very much focused on the war, like All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, which depicts the fighting in the first world war.

What do you want readers to take away?

I framed the novel as a general warning on the consequences of not engaging in dialogue. What starts wars? Isn’t it often years of neglect, inability to arrive at a meaningful dialogue and shared understanding? That is why large scale violence is still occurring today.

So, the war portion of the novel itself has been presented to us in its entirety as a vision of the future so that it appears as if this war, though a historical fact, has not yet happened and can somehow be prevented if only we heed the warnings of the seer. The prime question for any society in this world then is this: who is or are your seers? Are we listening to them?

[dankusner]

Joseph Awuah-Darko Accuses Kehinde Wiley of Sexual Assault

Joseph Awuah-Darko, a prominent figure on the Ghanaian art scene, has accused world-renowned artist Kehinde Wiley of sexual assault.

Awuah-Darko said that Wiley assaulted him twice at a June 9, 2021 dinner held in the artist’s honor at the Creative Art Council at the Noldor Artist Residency, which Awuah-Darko founded in 2020. Wiley has denied the allegations.

Awuah-Darko’s May 19 post said that the first assault consisted of Wiley groping his buttocks while he was escorting Wiley and another guest up a flight of stairs to the bathroom.

This contact was, he said, “categorically unwelcome and unprovoked.”

He said it was witnessed by another dinner guest, who is not named; Awuah-Darko did not immediately respond to an emailed inquiry about the identity of this person.

“The second assault,” Awuah-Darko said, “was much more severe and violent.”

He did not go into specifics.

Wiley responded in an Instagram post, saying: “Someone I had a brief, consensual relationship with almost three years ago is now making a false accusation about our time together. These claims are not true and are an affront to all victims of sexual abuse. I have no idea why he has decided to target me in this way—particularly when there is a litany of evidence showing his claims are false—but I hope he gets the help he needs for whatever he is going through. I kindly ask for privacy as I work to clear my name.”

In a longer statement supplied to Artnet News via his press representative, Marathon Strategies, Wiley added that Awuah-Darko “has been trying to be part of my life ever since we met, flying to Nigeria to attend my birthday party, attempting to visit my home in upstate in New York, sending me warm and cordial text messages, and almost a year ago to the day attending my exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco and posting to Instagram that the show by his ‘dear friend’ was ‘breathtaking.’”

The PR firm provided screenshots of several text messages between Awuah-Darko and Wiley dating from between the time of the alleged assault and Awuah-Darko’s Instagram posts, including the since-deleted May 27, 2023 post in which Awuah-Darko refers to Wiley as “my dear friend.”

Awuah-Darko, who is a collector, artist, musician, writer, curator and entrepreneur, was born in London to a family of Ghanaian financiers and lives in Accra.

He appeared on Forbes Africa’s “30 Under 30” list in 2019, where he was celebrated both as an artist and the managing director of the African Modern Art Fund.

The Noldor Residency supports African and diaspora artists.

He collects Ghanaian art stars such as Serge Attukwei Clottey and Gideon Appah.

On March 23, Awuah-Darko posted an Instagram video in which he said he had been assaulted but did not name Wiley.

In his post from Sunday, he said that it took him several months to “reconcile” with what had happened and said that given Wiley’s stature as a gay man, “formally reporting this assault in a West African country like Ghana (where anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiments are prevalent) would have been problematic at best—dangerous at worst.”

He also said that there are other victims of abuse at Wiley’s hands in New York (where the artist is based), Beijing (where he has a studio), Nigeria, and elsewhere; he added that other art world professionals “have quietly expressed witnessing this pattern of predatory behaviour [and] that this behaviour by Kehinde has been treated as an open secret within the art world for quite some time.”

Awuah-Darko did not immediately respond to an emailed request to expand on any of these claims.

No criminal charges have been filed against Wiley, according to a report in the New York Times, which also noted that Wiley’s lawyers sent Awuah-Darko a cease and desist letter demanding that the Ghanaian artist delete his Instagram posts and refrain from making what it said were false statements against Wiley. Awuah-Darko told the Times that he had not seen the letter.

“I thoroughly invite you to leverage your supposed credibility, your influence, your loyalists, and everything you have to gag those of us who come forward,” Awuah-Darko concluded in his Instagram post. “Because I assure you, you will need it.”

Since his first show with Sean Kelly in 2012, Wiley has rocketed to international stardom.

He received a U.S. State Department Medal of Honor in 2015 and ascended to even higher rungs of fame when he was commissioned to paint a portrait of President Barack Obama, which was unveiled in 2018.

In 2019, he made another splash when he founded Black Rock Senegal, a residency program in that country’s capital city, Dakar.

.

Museums Cancel or Delay Kehinde Wiley Shows in Wake of Allegations

The Joslyn Museum of Art in Omaha, Nebraska, the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), and the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) have shelved or postponed exhibitions by Kehinde Wiley.

These actions come in the wake of accusations of sexual assault against the artist.

The first was leveled by the artist-curator Joseph Awuah-Darko, on Instagram last month.

Since then, two others, activist Derrick Ingram and Nathaniel Lloyd Richards, have made claims of rape or groping, which Wiley has dismissed as “baseless.”

The Minneapolis show, an iteration of the survey “An Archaeology of Silence,” which debuted at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and later traveled to the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, has been canceled.

“Mia was considering taking the Kehinde Wiley exhibition, but as a result of these unfortunate allegations we will not be proceeding with this presentation,” the institution said in a statement to ARTnews today.

“An Archaeology of Silence” was scheduled to travel to the PAMM from July 2024 to January 2025, but a museum spokesperson said it has “suspended plans” to host the show.

The Flatwater Free Press, meanwhile, reported yesterday that the exhibition “Kehinde Wiley: Omaha” will not open on September 10 as scheduled, when the Joslyn Museum reopens after a more than two-year renovation.

“We are revisiting our exhibition schedule,” Amy Rummel, director of marketing and public relations, told the paper.

“The Joslyn will announce any updates at a later date.” The museum declined to answer questions about whether the delay was related to the assault allegations.

The exhibition was to focus on South Sudanese immigrants residing in Omaha.

While already widely known in the art world for portraits of young Black men in poses and settings that echoed those of the Old Masters, Wiley broke out onto a new level of global fame in 2018, when he was tapped by Democratic President Barack Obama to paint his portrait.

Wiley’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the museums’ actions or on the accusations themselves, but Jennifer J. Barrett, of New York firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, previously told ARTnews: “Posting something to Instagram doesn’t make it true. Yet, in today’s world, anyone can spread blatant lies with a single post, and the public accepts it at face value.”

Anti-Censorship Coalition Criticizes Cancellation of Kehinde Wiley Shows

The National Coalition Against Censorship, an alliance of nonprofit groups supporting free speech and civil liberties, has criticized the cancellation and postponement of Kehinde Wiley shows in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations.

Wiley, best known for his portrait of U.S. President Barack Obama, has denied allegations of sexual assault made last month by Ghanian art figure Joseph Awuah-Darko and two other men that later came forward.

Still, in the wake of the allegations, the Joslyn Museum of Art in Omaha, Nebraska, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami have shelved or postponed exhibitions of his work.

While the NCAC agreed that the allegations against Wiley are “serious and concerning,” the coalition argued that museums are not equipped to be moral arbiters.

“His stature as an artist would in no way excuse any such alleged behaviors or lessen their impacts,” NCAC said. “But the response of cultural institutions—to immediately rescind plans to exhibit the artist’s works—does a disservice to the audiences who wish to experience the work of one of the nation’s most well-recognized artists.”

The coalition said the response by the three museums implied a practice of scrutinizing the personal conduct of all artists they exhibit, saying that institutions are “not equipped or mandated to be enforcers of moral orthodoxy.”

Instead, the coalition suggested that museums should contextualize artworks that have artistic merit rather than canceling the artists.

Doing so, it said, would reduce the “complexity and quantity of art eligible for exhibition.”

As examples, it pointed to noted artists with “moral flaws,” such as Caravaggio, who was convicted for murder, and Picasso, who was known to be abusive to his lovers.

“Museums are, or at least should be, equipped to host exhibitions that probe the complexity of given artworks at the time in which they are presented, and host important discussions about ethical conflicts, should the need for them arise,” the coalition added.

The group called on the leadership behind the Joslyn, Pérez, and Minneapolis museums to go ahead with their respective Kehinde Wiley exhibitions, while acknowledging the allegations against the artist.

It further urged all museums to adopt “clear free speech guidelines” for future exhibitions.

[worldipday]

An Author Sparks Creativity Among Young Creators.

From immersing herself in the world of literature to crafting her own stories, Chidera Okolie has been nurturing her creative interests since she was a child. The Nigerian lawyer and writer is the author of two novels, When Silence Becomes Too Loud (2014) and Not Forgiven (2017). Beyond her passion for writing, Okolie is actively encouraging young writers in Nigeria to fulfil their writing dreams through her Idios Creatives initiative, which she launched in 2018. This is her story. Chidera Okolie set up Idios Creatives, a platform for young people to explore and express their creativity. “Through the Idios Creatives project, I wanted to provide a platform for a new generation of writers to embrace their creative power. It is my way of contributing to the development of young peopleʼs writing and other creative skills,” Okolie explains. To capture the attention of young people across Nigeria, in 2018, Okolie created the Idios Prize for Flash Fiction and Poetry. Over 300 schoolchildren took part in the competition. “We visited schools across Nigeria, collecting short stories from young writers. Eventually, we had about 300 stories, which we narrowed down to the best 100 for publication. This has helped showcase the abundance of creative talent in Nigeria,” Okolie notes. In setting up Idios Creatives, her strongest hope is that “young people are encouraged to read more and to explore their own creativity.”

Advancing IP and creativity in Nigeria

The author is also a champion of intellectual property rights, highlighting their crucial importance in recognizing, rewarding and supporting creators for their work. “IP allows you to protect your creative work from exploitation, illegal reproduction and misuse. It also ensures the preservation of your economic rights, in other words, your ability to earn income from your work, and your moral rights, including the right to be credited as the creator, and the right to protect the integrity of your work,” Okolie explains. While Nigeria has made progress in this regard, Okolie believes there is still more to be done to enhance the countryʼs copyright landscape. “Nigeria has long suffered from piracy, but the landscape is graduallyimproving. I strongly believe that IP rights play a critical role in emboldening artists to safeguard their work and use it for economic benefits. This becomes particularly significant when building a career based on oneʼs creativity,” she says. Okolie started writing her first novel, When Silence Becomes Too Loud, in 2014, without any intention of sharing it outside her personal sphere. “It was purely a personal endeavor,” she notes. But her father insisted that she have her book published. “I was hesitant to reveal myself so intimately and to allow others to delve into my innermost creative thoughts," she says. Despite her initial fears, Okolie started looking for a publisher and the bookʼs release, in 2014, exceeded all her expectations. “The book was widely acclaimed in my country and gained a lot of attention. It caught the eye of my countryʼs former president, who expressed his pride in associating with young people who strive to keep creativity alive in the country,” Okolie explains.

Her outstanding novel earned her three awards, including the 2016 Nigerian Writers Award for Best Fiction Writer of the Year and a nomination for the African Achieverʼs award. Building on her success, Okolieʼs second publication, Not Forgiven, is a collection of short psychological thrillers and also won accolades, paving the way for her to receive Most Outstanding Fiction Writer of the Year in 2017. In January 2019, Okolie was listed among the 100 Most Influential Young Nigerians by Avance Media.

[rashmeerl]

#thisweekthosebooks contextualises the rise of #young leaders in #Ireland and #Senegal:

A young activist’s ‘manifesto of the youth revolution’.

A masterpiece by one of Nigeria’s greatest writers on how youthful political idealism can falter and corrode.

Please read and share.

[brookston]

Holidays 4.10

Holidays

ASPCA Day

Black Hole Day

Commodore Perry Day

Day of the Builder (Azerbaijan)

Dust the Ceiling Fan Day

Encourage a Young Writer Day

Every Day Is Earth Day

410 Day

Frances Perkins Day

Global Work From Home Day

Godfather of Soul Day (South Carolina)

Golfer's Day

Humane Day

Hung Kings Festival (Vietnam)

Internal Troops Day (Tajikistan)

International Day of Sterilization Sciences

International Safety Pin Day

International Spy Day

Juan Santamaria Day (Costa Rica)

Judas Tree Day (French Republic

Lachesis Asteroid Day

Larry the Lobster Day (SNL)

National Biomechanics Day

National Bookmobile Day

National Calvin Day

National Erase Your Self-Negativity Day

National Farm Animals Day

National Femboy Day

National Hug Your Dog Day

National Library Outreach Day

National Love Our Children Day

National Nana Day

National Report IRS Tax Fraud Day

National Rubber Day (Thailand)

National Siblings Day

National Sprint Car Day

National Tamara Day

National Transplant Financial Coordinator Day

National Youth HIV and AIDS Awareness Day

Ram Navami (India, Nepal)

Safety Pin Day

Salvation Army Founder's Day

Semana Santa (Nicaragua)

Siblings Day

Son-in-Law Day

World Baton Twirling Day

World Day of West Syndrome

World Homeopathy Day

World Jaguar Day

World Sindhi Language Day

Food & Drink Celebrations

Cinnamon Crescent Roll Day

Tipopils Day (Italy)

2nd Wednesday in April

International Day of Pink [2nd Wednesday]

International Provenance Research Day [2nd Wednesday]

National Bookmobile Day [Wednesday of 2nd Full Week]

Festivals Beginning April 10, 2024

Wisconsin Association of Meat Processors Conventtion (Middleton, Wisconsin) [thru 4.14]

Feast Days

Aequinoctium Vernum X (Pagan)

Alfredo Sauce Day (Pastafarian)

April 10th Day (Church of the SubGenius)

Bademus (Christian; Saint)

Ben Nicholson (Artology)

Chocolate Overindulgence Day (Church of the SubGenius)

Clicksnizz (Muppetism)

Cybelle's Day (Ancient Roman Great Mother Goddess)

Day of Bau (Goddess Mother of Ea; Ancient Babylonia)

Feast of Bau (Ancient Babylonia)

Feast of Rivers and Seas (Ancient Sumerian)

Feast of the Third Day of the Writing of the Book of the Law (Thelema)

Fulbert of Chartres (Christian; Saint)

Holy Mother Earth Day (Starza Pagan Book of Days)

James, Azadanus and Abdicius (Christian; Saints)

Jean-Baptiste Isabey (Artology)

Kenneth Noland (Artology)

Macarius of Ghent (Christian; Saint)

The Martyrs under the Danes (Christian; Martyrs)

Mechtildes (Christian; Saint)

Michael de Sanctis (Christian; Saint)

Mikael Agricola (Lutheran)

Paternus of Abdinghof (Christian; Saint)

Paul Theroux (Writerism)

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Episcopal Church)

Pytheas (Positivist; Saint)

Sun Dances Day (Everyday Wicca)

William of Ockham (Anglicanism)

William Law (Anglicanism)

Islamic Moveable Calendar Holidays

Eid al-Fitr (Islam; 1 Shawwal) (a.k.a. …

Aïd al Fitr (Morocco)

Aid-El-Fithr (Burundi, Ivory Coast, Tunisia)

Aïd el-Fitr (Gabon, Mauritania)

Aïd el Fitre (Djibouti)

Aïd el Segheir (Burkina Faso, Mauritania)

Djouldé Soumaé (Cameroon)

Eid

Eid Al-Fater (Eritrea)

Eid Al Fetir (Ethiopia)

Eid al Fitr (Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Trinidad and Tobago, United Arab Emirates, Yemen)

Eid al-Fitr (Kosovo)

Eid-e-Fitr (Iran)

Eid’l Fitr (Philippines)

Eid-ul-Fiter (Bangladesh)

Eid-Ul-Fitr (Sierra Leone)

Eid ul-Fitr (Maldives)

Eidul Fitr (Pakistan)

Festival of Breaking the Fast

Hari Raya Aidil Fitri (Brunei)

Hari Raya Idul Fitri 1442 Hijriyah (Indonesia)

Hari Raya Puasa (Christmas Island, Cocos Islands, Malaysia, Singapore)

Idd el-Fitre (Uganda)

Iddi El Fitry (Tanzania)

Ide el Fitr (Comoros, Mayotte)

Id el Fitri (Nigeria)

idi Ramazon (Tajikistan)

Idulfitri (East timor)

Id-ul-Fitr (Parts of India)

Ied-Ul-Fitre (Suriname)

Iyd ul Fitr (Uzbekistan)

Korité (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Togo)

Kuthba-e-Ramzan (India)

Lesser Bajram (Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina)

Lesser Eid

Ozara Baramy (Turkmenistan)

Orozo Ait (Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan)

Ramadan Bairam (Suda)

Ramazan (India)

Ramazan Bajram (Macedonia)

Ramazan Bayram (Azerbaijan, Cyprus)

Ramazan Bayramy (Turkey)

Ramazan Hayit (Uzbekistan)

Sugar Feast

Sweet Eid

Uraza-bairam (Kosovo)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Butsumetsu (仏滅 Japan) [Unlucky all day.]

Dismal Day (Unlucky or Evil Day; Medieval Europe; 7 of 24)

Egyptian Day (Unlucky Day; Middle Ages Europe) [7 of 24]

Fatal Day (Pagan) [7 of 24]

Unglückstage (Unlucky Day; Pennsylvania Dutch) [13 of 30]

Unlucky Day (Grafton’s Manual of 1565) [20 of 60]

Premieres

Th Baby Seal (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1941)

The Barber of Seville (Woody Woodpecker Cartoon; 1944)

Birds of a Feather (Woody Woodpecker Cartoon; 1965)

The Boundary Bounders or Some Like it Show (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S1, Ep. 39; 1960)

The Carpet People, by Terry Pratchett (Novel; 1971)

City of Angels (Film; 1998)

Come On In! The Water’s Pink (Pink Panther Cartoon; 1968)

Daredevil (TV Series; 2015)

Deep Freeze Squeeze (Chilly Willy Cartoon; 1964)

Donald’s Snow Fight (Disney Cartoon; 1942)

East of Eden (Film; 1955)

Elton John, by Elton John (Album; 1970)

Even in the Quietest Moments…, by Supertramp (Album; 1977)

Excalibur (Film; 1981)

Ex Machina (Film; 2015)

Fear of a Black Planet, by Public Enemy (Album; 1990)

Ferngully: The Last Rainforest (Animated Film; 1992)

For the Stars, by Elvis Costello with Anne Sofie Von Otter (Album; 2001)

A German Requiem, by Johannes Brahms (Choral & Orchestral Work; 1868)

Going to Blazes (Oswald the Lucky Rabbit Cartoon; 1933)

The Great Gatsby (Novel; 1925)

Hannah Montana: The Movie (Film; 2009)

Hound About (Noveltoons Cartoon; 1959)

House of Wax (Film; 1953) [1st Color 3-D Film]

The Infernal Machine, by Jean Cocteau (Play; 1934)

Kubla Khan (Poem; 1816)

Newsies (Film; 1992)

Observe and Report (Film; 2009)

People Are Funny (Radio Game Show; 1942)

People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, by A Tribe Called Quest (Album; 1990)

Pipeye, Pupeye, Poopeye, and Peepeye (Fleischer Popeye Cartoon; 1942)

The Player (Film; 1992)

Psycho, by Robert Bloch (Novel; 1959)

Saint Louis Blues, by W.C. Handy (Song; 1925)

The Secret of My Success (Film; 1987)

She Was the Acrobat’s Daughter (WB MM Cartoon; 1937)

Sonic Temple, by The Cult (Album; 1989)

Titanic Requiem, by Robin Gibb (Orchestral Piece; 2012)

12 Angry Men (Film; 1957)

The Two Ronnies (UK TV Series; 1971)

Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry (Novel; 1947)

The Washington Whirl or Rocky Off the Record (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S1, Ep. 40; 1960)

Today’s Name Days

Ezechiel, Gernot, Holda (Austria)

Bonifacije, Ezekijel, Magdalena, Sunčica (Croatia)

Darja (Czech Republic)

Ezechiel (Denmark)

Hindrek, Imre, Indrek, Ints (Estonia)

Tero (Finland)

Fulbert (France)

Engelbert, Ezechiel, Gernot, Holda (Germany)

Anaksimenis, Dimosthenes, Dionisis, Epaminondas, Eteoklis, Fokion, Hercules, Herakles, Homer, Ifestion, Isocrates, Maximos, Miltiadis, Parmenion, Pelopidas, Pericles, Philopimin, Pindaros, Polyvios, Promitheas, Socrates, Sofocles, Themistoklis, Theofrastos, Thiseas, Timothy, Xenofon, Zinon (Greece)

Zsolt (Hungary)

Terenzio (Italy)

Anita, Anitra, Turaida, Zīle, Zilite (Latvia)

Agna, Apolonijus, Margarita, Mintautas (Lithuania)

Ingvald, Ingveig (Norway)

Antoni, Apoloniusz, Daniel, Ezechiel, Grodzisław, Henryk, Makary, Małgorzata, Michał, Pompejusz (Poland)

African, Maxim, Pompie, Terentie (Romania)

Igor (Slovakia)

Ezequiel, Miguel (Spain)

Ingvar, Ingvor (Sweden)

Caley, Callie, Cayla, Cayley, Ezechiel, Ezekiel, Ezequiel, Torey, Tori, Torrance, Torrence, Torrey, Tory (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 101 of 2024; 265 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 3 of week 15 of 2024

Celtic Tree Calendar: Fearn (Alder) [Day 25 of 28]

Chinese: Month 3 (Wu-Chen), Day 2 (Jia-Chen)

Chinese Year of the: Dragon 4722 (until January 29, 2025) [Wu-Chen]

Hebrew: 2 Nisan 5784

Islamic: 1 Shawwal 1445

J Cal: 11 Cyan; Foursday [11 of 30]

Julian: 28 March 2024

Moon: 5%: Waxing Crescent

Positivist: 17 Archimedes (4th Month) [Aristarchus]

Runic Half Month: Man (Human Being) [Day 1 of 15]

Season: Spring (Day 23 of 92)

Week: 2nd Week of April

Zodiac: Aries (Day 21 of 31)

Calendar Changes

Man (Human Being) [Half-Month 8 of 24; Runic Half-Months] (thru 4.24)

Shawwāl [شَوَّال] (Islamic Calendar) [Month 10 of 12] (Raised)

[brookstonalmanac]

Holidays 4.10

Holidays

ASPCA Day

Black Hole Day

Commodore Perry Day

Day of the Builder (Azerbaijan)

Dust the Ceiling Fan Day

Encourage a Young Writer Day

Every Day Is Earth Day

410 Day

Frances Perkins Day

Global Work From Home Day

Godfather of Soul Day (South Carolina)

Golfer's Day

Humane Day

Hung Kings Festival (Vietnam)

Internal Troops Day (Tajikistan)

International Day of Sterilization Sciences

International Safety Pin Day

International Spy Day

Juan Santamaria Day (Costa Rica)

Judas Tree Day (French Republic

Lachesis Asteroid Day

Larry the Lobster Day (SNL)

National Biomechanics Day

National Bookmobile Day

National Calvin Day

National Erase Your Self-Negativity Day

National Farm Animals Day

National Femboy Day

National Hug Your Dog Day

National Library Outreach Day

National Love Our Children Day

National Nana Day

National Report IRS Tax Fraud Day

National Rubber Day (Thailand)

National Siblings Day

National Sprint Car Day

National Tamara Day

National Transplant Financial Coordinator Day

National Youth HIV and AIDS Awareness Day

Ram Navami (India, Nepal)

Safety Pin Day

Salvation Army Founder's Day

Semana Santa (Nicaragua)

Siblings Day

Son-in-Law Day

World Baton Twirling Day

World Day of West Syndrome

World Homeopathy Day

World Jaguar Day

World Sindhi Language Day

Food & Drink Celebrations

Cinnamon Crescent Roll Day

Tipopils Day (Italy)

2nd Wednesday in April

International Day of Pink [2nd Wednesday]

International Provenance Research Day [2nd Wednesday]

National Bookmobile Day [Wednesday of 2nd Full Week]

Festivals Beginning April 10, 2024

Wisconsin Association of Meat Processors Conventtion (Middleton, Wisconsin) [thru 4.14]

Feast Days

Aequinoctium Vernum X (Pagan)

Alfredo Sauce Day (Pastafarian)

April 10th Day (Church of the SubGenius)

Bademus (Christian; Saint)

Ben Nicholson (Artology)

Chocolate Overindulgence Day (Church of the SubGenius)

Clicksnizz (Muppetism)

Cybelle's Day (Ancient Roman Great Mother Goddess)

Day of Bau (Goddess Mother of Ea; Ancient Babylonia)

Feast of Bau (Ancient Babylonia)

Feast of Rivers and Seas (Ancient Sumerian)

Feast of the Third Day of the Writing of the Book of the Law (Thelema)

Fulbert of Chartres (Christian; Saint)

Holy Mother Earth Day (Starza Pagan Book of Days)

James, Azadanus and Abdicius (Christian; Saints)

Jean-Baptiste Isabey (Artology)

Kenneth Noland (Artology)

Macarius of Ghent (Christian; Saint)

The Martyrs under the Danes (Christian; Martyrs)

Mechtildes (Christian; Saint)

Michael de Sanctis (Christian; Saint)

Mikael Agricola (Lutheran)

Paternus of Abdinghof (Christian; Saint)

Paul Theroux (Writerism)

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Episcopal Church)

Pytheas (Positivist; Saint)

Sun Dances Day (Everyday Wicca)

William of Ockham (Anglicanism)

William Law (Anglicanism)

Islamic Moveable Calendar Holidays

Eid al-Fitr (Islam; 1 Shawwal) (a.k.a. …

Aïd al Fitr (Morocco)

Aid-El-Fithr (Burundi, Ivory Coast, Tunisia)

Aïd el-Fitr (Gabon, Mauritania)

Aïd el Fitre (Djibouti)

Aïd el Segheir (Burkina Faso, Mauritania)

Djouldé Soumaé (Cameroon)

Eid

Eid Al-Fater (Eritrea)

Eid Al Fetir (Ethiopia)

Eid al Fitr (Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Trinidad and Tobago, United Arab Emirates, Yemen)

Eid al-Fitr (Kosovo)

Eid-e-Fitr (Iran)

Eid’l Fitr (Philippines)

Eid-ul-Fiter (Bangladesh)

Eid-Ul-Fitr (Sierra Leone)

Eid ul-Fitr (Maldives)

Eidul Fitr (Pakistan)

Festival of Breaking the Fast

Hari Raya Aidil Fitri (Brunei)

Hari Raya Idul Fitri 1442 Hijriyah (Indonesia)

Hari Raya Puasa (Christmas Island, Cocos Islands, Malaysia, Singapore)

Idd el-Fitre (Uganda)

Iddi El Fitry (Tanzania)

Ide el Fitr (Comoros, Mayotte)

Id el Fitri (Nigeria)

idi Ramazon (Tajikistan)

Idulfitri (East timor)

Id-ul-Fitr (Parts of India)

Ied-Ul-Fitre (Suriname)

Iyd ul Fitr (Uzbekistan)

Korité (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Togo)

Kuthba-e-Ramzan (India)

Lesser Bajram (Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina)

Lesser Eid

Ozara Baramy (Turkmenistan)

Orozo Ait (Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan)

Ramadan Bairam (Suda)

Ramazan (India)

Ramazan Bajram (Macedonia)

Ramazan Bayram (Azerbaijan, Cyprus)

Ramazan Bayramy (Turkey)

Ramazan Hayit (Uzbekistan)

Sugar Feast

Sweet Eid

Uraza-bairam (Kosovo)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Butsumetsu (仏滅 Japan) [Unlucky all day.]

Dismal Day (Unlucky or Evil Day; Medieval Europe; 7 of 24)

Egyptian Day (Unlucky Day; Middle Ages Europe) [7 of 24]

Fatal Day (Pagan) [7 of 24]

Unglückstage (Unlucky Day; Pennsylvania Dutch) [13 of 30]

Unlucky Day (Grafton’s Manual of 1565) [20 of 60]

Premieres

Th Baby Seal (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1941)

The Barber of Seville (Woody Woodpecker Cartoon; 1944)

Birds of a Feather (Woody Woodpecker Cartoon; 1965)

The Boundary Bounders or Some Like it Show (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S1, Ep. 39; 1960)

The Carpet People, by Terry Pratchett (Novel; 1971)

City of Angels (Film; 1998)

Come On In! The Water’s Pink (Pink Panther Cartoon; 1968)

Daredevil (TV Series; 2015)

Deep Freeze Squeeze (Chilly Willy Cartoon; 1964)

Donald’s Snow Fight (Disney Cartoon; 1942)

East of Eden (Film; 1955)

Elton John, by Elton John (Album; 1970)

Even in the Quietest Moments…, by Supertramp (Album; 1977)

Excalibur (Film; 1981)

Ex Machina (Film; 2015)

Fear of a Black Planet, by Public Enemy (Album; 1990)

Ferngully: The Last Rainforest (Animated Film; 1992)

For the Stars, by Elvis Costello with Anne Sofie Von Otter (Album; 2001)

A German Requiem, by Johannes Brahms (Choral & Orchestral Work; 1868)

Going to Blazes (Oswald the Lucky Rabbit Cartoon; 1933)

The Great Gatsby (Novel; 1925)

Hannah Montana: The Movie (Film; 2009)

Hound About (Noveltoons Cartoon; 1959)

House of Wax (Film; 1953) [1st Color 3-D Film]

The Infernal Machine, by Jean Cocteau (Play; 1934)

Kubla Khan (Poem; 1816)

Newsies (Film; 1992)

Observe and Report (Film; 2009)

People Are Funny (Radio Game Show; 1942)

People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, by A Tribe Called Quest (Album; 1990)

Pipeye, Pupeye, Poopeye, and Peepeye (Fleischer Popeye Cartoon; 1942)

The Player (Film; 1992)

Psycho, by Robert Bloch (Novel; 1959)

Saint Louis Blues, by W.C. Handy (Song; 1925)

The Secret of My Success (Film; 1987)

She Was the Acrobat’s Daughter (WB MM Cartoon; 1937)

Sonic Temple, by The Cult (Album; 1989)

Titanic Requiem, by Robin Gibb (Orchestral Piece; 2012)

12 Angry Men (Film; 1957)

The Two Ronnies (UK TV Series; 1971)

Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry (Novel; 1947)

The Washington Whirl or Rocky Off the Record (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S1, Ep. 40; 1960)

Today’s Name Days

Ezechiel, Gernot, Holda (Austria)

Bonifacije, Ezekijel, Magdalena, Sunčica (Croatia)

Darja (Czech Republic)

Ezechiel (Denmark)

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Independent publishers dominate Swansea shortlist

The shortlist for the world’s largest and most prestigious literary prize for young writers – the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize – has been revealed, featuring six emerging voices whose writing plays with formal inventiveness to explore the timeless themes of grief, identity and family.

Comprising of four novels, one short story collection and one poetry collection – with five titles belonging to independent publishers – this year’s international shortlist is:

A Spell of Good Things by Ayòbámi Adébáyò (Canongate Books) – novel (Nigeria)

Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson (Viking, Penguin Random House UK) – novel (UK/Ghana)

The Glutton by AK Blakemore (Granta) – novel (England, UK)

Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan (Faber & Faber) – poetry collection (Hong Kong)

Local Fires by Joshua Jones (Parthian Books) – short story collection (Wales, UK)

Biography of X by Catherine Lacey (Granta) – novel (US) 

Worth £20,000, this global accolade recognizes exceptional literary talent aged 39 or under, celebrating the international world of fiction in all its forms including poetry, novels, short stories and drama. The prize is named after the Swansea-born writer Dylan Thomas and celebrates his 39 years of creativity and productivity. The prize invokes his memory to support the writers of today, nurture the talents of tomorrow, and celebrate international literary excellence.

Namita Gokhale, chair of Judges, said: “The Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize has an important role to play in recognizing, supporting and nurturing young writers across a rich diversity of locations and genres. The 2024 shortlist has authors from the United States, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Nigeria and Ghana, and it has been a truly rewarding adventure to immersively read through this creative spectrum of voices.”

The only debut on this year’s shortlist is the astonishing new Welsh talent Joshua Jones, who is in the running for his highly acclaimed short story collection Local Fires – a stunning series of multifaceted stories inspired by real people and real events that took place in his hometown of Llanelli, South Wales.

The sole poet in contention this year is Mary Jean Chan – who was previously shortlisted for the Prize with their debut Fleche in 2020 – and is now recognized for the collection Bright Fear, which fearlessly explores themes of identity, multilingualism and postcolonial legacy.

Three of the four novelists have also gained their second nomination for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize: British-Ghanaian author Caleb Azumah Nelson is in contention for his second novel, Small Worlds, in which he travels from South London to Ghana and back again over the course of three summers to tell an intimate father-son story exploring the worlds we build for ourselves; Nigerian novelist Ayòbámi Adébáyò is shortlisted for her dazzling story of modern Nigeria, A Spell of Good Things, and two families caught in the riptides of wealth, power, romantic obsession and political corruption; and US author Catherine Lacey is celebrated for the genre-bending Biography of X, a roaring epic and ambitious novel chronicling the life, times and secrets of a notorious artist.

Completing the shortlist is British novelist AK Blakemore, recognized for her darkly exuberant novel The Glutton, which – set to the backdrop of Revolutionary France – is based on the true story of a peasant turned freakshow attraction.

The 2024 shortlist was selected by a judging panel chaired by writer and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival, Namita Gokhale, alongside author and lecturer in Creative Writing at Swansea University, Jon Gower, winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022 and Assistant Professor at Trinity College Dublin, Seán Hewitt, former BBC Gulf Correspondent and author of Telling Tales: An Oral History of Dubai, Julia Wheeler, and interdisciplinary artist and author of Keeping the House, Tice Cin.

The winner of the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize 2024 will be revealed at a ceremony held in Swansea on 16 May, following International Dylan Thomas Day on 14 May.

Previous winners include Arinze Ifeakandu, Patricia Lockwood, Max Porter, Raven Leilani, Bryan Washington, Guy Gunaratne, and Kayo Chingonyi.