Abstract
Introduction
Johwor Ile has become the first Nigerian to win £15,000 Etisalat Prize for Literature. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie praised his debut novel, And after Many Days, three years before Penguin published it in 2016. Reviewed in the New York Times by Chigozie Obioma on 1 April 2016, Ile’s novel is part of the three first books by young west African writers that writer and editor Adewale Maja-Pearce referred to as “the Successors”. The second is Ghana’s Yaa Gyasi whose Homegoing, published by Vintage, was praised by African American writer, Ta-Nehisi Coates: Gyasi’s characters are so fully realized, so elegantly carved – very often I found myself longing to hear more. Craft is essential given the task Gyasi sets for herself – drawing not just a lineage of two sisters, but two related peoples. Gyasi is deeply concerned with the sin of selling humans on Africans, not Europeans. But she does not scold. She does not excuse. And she does not romanticize. The black Americans she follows are not overly virtuous victims. Sin comes in all forms, from selling people to abandoning children. I think I needed to read a book like this to remember what is possible. I think I needed to remember what happens when you pair a gifted literary mind to an epic task. Homegoing is an inspiration. (http://www.randomhouse.com/highschool/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781101947135&view=print)
The third of Maja-Pearce’s “Successors” is Elnathan John with his book, Born on a Tuesday, published by Grove/Atlantic Inc., a rare novel about terror and hopelessness in Northern Nigeria. Indeed, we may be witnessing a renaissance of West African writing with Teju Cole’s collection which, though in the form of essays, is written with the cadence of poetry to address a wide range of issues from travel to photography. Cole’s talk “I Write What I Like” (delivered at the Aké Arts & Book Festival at Abeokuta, Nigeria, late in 2016) speaks to the unbounded spirit of these writings.
Imbolo Mbue’s debut novel, Behold the Dreamers selected in 2017 for Oprah’s Book Club, can be said to be a novel without boundaries. Set in New York City during the 2009 financial crisis, the novel reflects as Mbue says in her National Public Radio Interview, how “[f]or me, personally, the financial crisis laid bare a lot about the way in which the American dream is not that accessible to everybody”.
2016 was a year of spectacular debuts that included Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms, winner of the 2016 NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature. The $100,000 prize for Prose Fiction is awarded every four years. Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers was highly anticipated for the six-figure contract the author signed with her publisher as part of a multi-book deal.
The Collected Poems of Gabriel Okara, Cheney-Coker’s The Road to Jamaica and Kwame Dawes’s chapbook set are among the outstanding poetry from West Africa in 2016. With the exception of Adichie, the first generation of writers appear to dominate critical attention.