In the middle of 2006 Ayi Kwei Armah's The Eloquence of the Scribes, an intriguing memoir and a classic of expository prose arrived without fanfare. This was not surprising; an announcement complete with publicity notices, book tours, author's profiles, interviews, etc. would have been out of character for the writer with a well-known aversion to the limelight.
Not long after the explosions at the Nigerian Army munitions depot at Ikeja, Lagos, in early 2002, I spoke over the telephone with a sister-in-law living in the city. I had called to enquire about her and a few other relatives of ours who had been affected by the accident. She and her immediate family had narrowly escaped it, but two of those I enquired about were not so lucky.
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Well, I've had a few brushes with language translation one way or the other before now. One of them was the task Professor Egbokhare tossed to our group in the lexicography class second semester of my third year in the university. There he had challenged us to find equivalents of technical terms in electrical electronics in our mother tongues, specifically those terms that had never before been translated or brought into common usage. That was all we needed to do to graduate from the class. Initially, that was (for me) a back-breaking trial-by-ordeal which would only end with my expulsion from the class, because There's absolutely no way I would be able to express all those technical words successfully and sufficiently in Yoruba!
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About 25 years ago, Ayi Kwei Armah was a visiting writer at what is now called the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University. As a member of Cornell's creative writing staff, I was introduced to him. He is one of the few people I've met-most of them writers-with whom I at once sensed, rightly or not, a spiritual affinity.
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Not long after the explosions at the Nigerian Army munitions depot at Ikeja, Lagos, in early 2002, I spoke over the telephone with a sister-in-law living in the city. I had called to enquire about her and a few other relatives of ours who had been affected by the accident. She and her immediate family had narrowly escaped it, but two of those I enquired about were not so lucky.
Read...
I was in a bit of a reading rut, recently. You know when that happens, it's like you can't concentrate, you really want to read but you're intensely bored etc. So anyway, I started reading The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (thanks Uncle Geoff!) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid and have now finished both. R
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