Isidore Okpewho Research Articles

Space, Dominance, and Resistance: The Postcolonial Ecology in Isidore Okpewho’s Tides

Space, Dominance, and Resistance: The Postcolonial Ecology in Isidore Okpewho’s Tides

Explication of Ogba Proverbs as a Tool for Conflict Resolution

Proverbs originated orally based on the oral literature history of storytelling passed down from generation to generation through stories and sayings. However, some believed that they originated from written scripts. Proverbs are words of wisdom used to impart knowledge to people. In Ogba, proverbs are used predominantly by the elders to warn, advice, instruct and educate on issues of paramount importance to the society. Proverbs elu are epigrammatic in nature and usually misunderstood as idiom olu-eknurnu. Proverbs elu often use figures of speech, such as metaphors, similes or allusions to make a point. In the literary parlance, renowned African writers like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi and others adopt the use of proverbs in their works. This paper analyses the Ogba proverbs as a tool for conflict resolution in Ogba land of Rivers State, Nigeria. It is discovered that proverbs are used in major types of discourse involving the elders as evidenced in their use in palaces of chiefs to settle issues of marriage, land, chieftaincy, accusations of witchcraft and wizardry and other cases that are settled locally according to Ogba tradition and custom. This paper adopts the qualitative approach propounded by Isidore Okpewho. It concludes that proverbs are a veritable tool used by the elders to settle disputes in their homes, families and kindred.

Existential Tensions and the Ifá Divinity in Isidore Okpewho’s Call Me by My Rightful Name

ABSTRACT This essay explores Okpewho’s Call Me By My Rightful Name (2004) and its unique contributions to the discourse of the old African diaspora consciousness. It examines how Okpewho harnesses the extraordinary element of existential tensions as a significant strategy to reconnect the old African diaspora to their ancestral community in Africa. Showing how this novel is similar, different and transcendent to other old African diaspora narratives, I argue in this piece that Okpewho’s mastery and use of the Ifá divinity that functioned as a reminder, an emotional therapy and a tour guide to reconnect the old African diaspora to their African ancestry, is a critical way to underscore the “Nigerianness” of such a contemporary neo-slave narrative. Okpewho is an important African diaspora writer whose works have been largely ignored and by interpreting his creative ingenuity as regards the old/new African diasporic experiences, I bring a fresh contribution to the discourse of African literature in the diaspora.

The itineraries of agency and resistance in the petrofiction of the Niger Delta: Okpewho’s Tides and Ojaide’s The Activist

The impact from natural resource extraction finds expression in the petrofiction of the Niger Delta through the nature and role of characters that function in agency. A study of the major characters in Isidore Okpewho’s Tides and Tanure Ojaide’s The Activist reveals itineraries of human agency in their responses to the effect of oil extraction. While a group of characters shows that environmental action can become a counterpane for self-seeking and self-motivated intellectuals at the detriment of solidarity with all including human, nonhuman and the general economy, this study also reveals that there is still a set of intellectuals that remain consistent to the genuine need for a safe and clean environment. Our overall goal in this contribution is achieved through a renegotiation of the value of agency in both the work of Cajetan Iheka as well as that of Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin. Iheka privileges agency that is attuned to a shift from an emphasis on the human to the nonhuman. Huggan and Tiffin accommodate agency that underpins both human and animals. While acknowledging the importance of both positions, this article calls for a return to a focus on human agency especially in relation to the factor of accountability which remains an unfinished business. The call for general action against resource extraction and its impact will remain elusive as long as there are divergences in human agency.

Proverbs and African Modernity: Defining an Ethics of Becoming

African proverbs have, for good reason, attracted considerable attention from scholars, both African and non-African. One notable testimony to such attention is the international conference in South Africa from which came a monumental collection of scholarly articles now available on CD and in print. Another evidence of the interest the subject has enjoyed among African scholars is the wealth of publications they have produced in recent years, for example, Adeleke Adeeko’s monograph Proverbs, Textuality, and Nativism in African Literature; Ambrose Adikamkwu Monye’s Proverbs in African Orature: The Aniocha-Igbo Experience; Kwesi Yankah’s The Proverb in the Context of Akan Rhetoric: A Theory of Proverb Praxis; and my Yoruba Proverbs. In addition, there have been influential articles by Ayo Bamgbose, Lawrence. A. Boadi, Romanus N. Egudu, Kwame Gyekye, Yisa Yusuf, and a host of others whose omission from this rather abbreviated list is not meant as a slight. In a recent conversation, the preeminent paremiologist, Wolfgang Mieder, called my attention to the lineup of articles in the most recent issue of Proverbium [23: 2006], in which four of the five lead articles are by Nigerian scholars (Abimbola Adesoji, Bode Agbaje, George Olusola Ajibade, and Akinola Akintunde Asinyanbola) and on African proverbs, an indication, he said of the present effervescence of, and future potential for, proverb studies and publications on them on African soil. Because of these efforts we now know a good deal about proverbs as a cultural resource, their functionality and the protocols for their usage, but also their artistry-structure, wordplay, imagery, and so forth, especially after calls such as Isidore Okpewho’s (1992) that scholars pay due attention to the aesthetic dimensions of traditional oral forms.

The “African male literary tradition” and revisionist polemics in Isidore Okpewho’s writing

African literature has been very polemically, but usefully engaged, by feminists and other concerned gender stakeholders in the past three decades on the note that its foundational discursive platform of representation is patriarchal, largely representing the female body as ‘absent’ and ‘other’ in the imaginative landscape of canonical African(ist) expression. While these critical efforts have significantly succeeded in interrogating phallocentrism in African male writing, they have, however, failed to recognize several masculinist indicators in the latter that have purposively undermined the hegemonic/patriarchal frame of maleness. In this article I argue, through a reading of Isidore Okpewho’s first three novels, that certain representations of African male writing preceding those of the contemporary turn portray revisionist attitudes to patriarchy, or any form of hegemonic masculinity. In these, the African woman is made to gain visibility and she becomes active on her own social terms. I thus debunk popular feminist-oriented claims that the canonical African literary male tradition necessarily inscribes the African woman in the stereotypical narrative of being a ‘mother-nation/mother-Africa image’, ‘prostitute’, ‘witch’, or socio-cultural other. I suggest a more careful, distilled, and responsible approach toward the politics of agency and power involving gender and identity (re)formation in the African world, culture, and literature.

Portraits of the Nigerian Soldier in Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty and Festus Iyayi’s Heroes

An essential feature of Nigerian literatures is their capacity to exploit history and social experience to bring to light the human condition in society without compromising literary aesthetics. Thus, Nigerian novels often appear to be more educative than entertaining by their ability to illuminate social realities far more effectively than historical or sociological texts. This is evident in the representations of soldiers in Nigerian novels which are highly influenced by historical and social circumstances. This paper carries out a comparative and descriptive analysis of portrayals of Nigerian soldiers in Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty and Festus Iyayi’s Heroes from a new historical perspective. Most studies on the military in Nigerian novels often focus on their actions in war situations and their disruptive and undemocratic activities in politics. However, these studies frequently explore the military as a group with little attention to the texts as expositions on character types in the Nigerian military. This study therefore contributes to criticism on the nexus between literary representation, history, and society. It further highlights historical and social contexts of military explorations in Nigerian novels and their impacts on the perception of the Nigerian soldier in society. These are aimed at showing that depictions of the military in Nigerian novels go beyond their capacities for disruptions and destructions in society; they represent artistic probing of the nature and character of persons in the Nigerian military.

The Flux of Experience and The Aesthetic Transferential Psychology in Isidore Okpewho’s call me by My Rightful Name (2004)

The Flux of Experience and The Aesthetic Transferential Psychology in Isidore Okpewho’s call me by My Rightful Name (2004)

The Contribution of Patriarchy to the Concept of Manhood in African Societies: A Marxist Reading of Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty

This paper explores the concept of patriarchy as an undesirable ideology that promotes the oppression of the weak and vulnerable in society by the strong and powerful in Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty. It is widely held that patriarchy promotes the domination of men over women and promotes an artificial hierarchy of class in which women become subordinates to their male gender. Yet, patriarchy does not only make subjugates of women. Depending on the dictates and expectations of a culture, men, like women, can equally be made subjugates of patriarchy if they are deemed unworthy of the title of a man. This usually happens when they do not measure up to the standard of societal expectations, particularly, within African cultural setting. Using the theory of Marxism, this paper argues that patriarchy not only succeeds in creating a society that operates on classism in which women are the subordinates; men too become victims. In addition, patriarchy inflicts deep psychological trauma on men and women who suffer its tenets. The conclusion is that men and women collectively fight patriarchy in order to achieve an egalitarian society where synergy can be harnessed for the betterment of all.

The Sacred Door and other Stories. Cameroon Folktales of the Beba

The book contains a foreword by well-known oral literature scholar, Isidore Okpewho and a preface by the author.

“The concept of the heroic age as held by scholars is not a very healthy one”: An Interview of Isidore Okpewho by Nduka Otiono

“The concept of the heroic age as held by scholars is not a very healthy one”: An Interview of Isidore Okpewho by Nduka Otiono

Literary cum Philoso-Religious Periscope on the Nature of Man

The self-evident truth that man is a mystery to himself generates justifiable intellectual curiosity. Giving expression to such curiosity would help to further unravel the mysterious nature of man by means of philoso-religious investigations into the personality of some purposively selected major characters in the literary works of prominent African and non-African writers. Consequently, this study undertakes to investigate some creative works of world-acclaimed fame. Purposively selected for the study in this regard include Profs. Chinua Achebe and Isidore Okpewho’s fictions, Prof. Ola Rotimi’s The gods Are not to Blame, George Orwell’s narratives, Ngugi Wa Thiongo and Micere Githae Mugo’s The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, Marie Correli’s The Sorrows of Satan and Cheik Hamidou Kane’s The Ambiguous Adventure. These classics are selected, because besides being philoso-religiously oriented, their geographical settings cut across the world to validate the findings of the study. The objective of the investigation focused on the selected works is to help man understand himself now more than previously ever, especially in relation to the will of God, his creator. This objective is pursuant to the expectation that achieving it would significantly improve the quality of life on earth, and by extension, man’s eternal destiny. The theoretical premise which drives the investigation of man and his nature in the novels used for the study conceptualises man in relation to ethics and the metaphysical world. It, therefore, provides appreciable insights into man’s identity profile which distinguishes between the created man as an enemy of God and the redeemed man as a friend of God. Relying on some scientific basis, the theoretical framework establishes that God is an undeniable reality, concluding, therefore, that it translates to stark ignorance or gross senselessness not to know Him. The analysis done as part of the study confirms its hypothesis, namely, that literature is a mirror of life which is largely a reflection of the natures of the created man rather than those of the redeemed man. The confirmation of this hypothesis proves that humanity is farther away from God than she is close to Him. In other words, the final destiny of mankind, hereafter, is largely threatened. The pragmatics of this worrisome major finding is that the near-countable redeemed people of God in this generation, especially the clergy, should and must commit themselves to intensified effective creative evangelisation to forestall evil from overtaking the world. Positive response to this clarion call by the redeemed people of God found in all authentic religious sects is imperative, else, evil will eventually overtake the world and provoke God’s devastating wrath on humanity.

Gender, the Nigerian Civil War and Hard Choices: Nihilism or Absurdism (?) in Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty

Abstract This paper entitled “Gender, the Nigerian Civil War and Hard Choices: Nihilism or Absurdism(?) in Isidore Okpewho’s The Last Duty” evinces an evaluative excursion into the author’s delineation of gender in war and its concomitants regarding actions, inactions, and the mindset of the actors and the acted-upon (victims) of the fratricidal Nigerian conflict within a designated theatre. We demonstrated that the quantum impact of the war engages some near-totally nihilistic imperatives of the war. Nevertheless, we surmised, at the final count, that the war results in high-wire tension rather than erode the indices for hope regarding the war victims and victimizers alike; and by dangerous extension, the Nigerian nation. Although we conceded the presence of dystopia which is life-threatening and socially destabilizing, our calculation in the final analysis, is that the tensions generated against both genders in the war are essentially absurdist, not nihilist. In this vein of analysis, we concluded that Okpewho’s delineation retains deliberately enough rays for reconstructive, rehabilitative, regenerative and cohesive engagements that will pave the way for societal survival and continuity.

Buchi Emecheta (1944-2017): Beyond the dingy ditch

The media have in the past weeks been awash with the sudden demise of a great female writer, activist and publisher—Buchi Emecheta—on 25 January 2017 in London. Nigerians and, indeed, scholars all over the world have not yet recovered from their shock at the loss of two Nigerian literary giants, Elechi Amadi and Isidore Okpewho, only recently in 2016. And now another fatal blow has been dealt on the literary sphere at the dawn of a brand new year. It may be necessary to note that Buchi Emecheta passed on the heels of Isidore Okpewho’s death (an interval of just four months). Both were, incidentally, from Delta State. In fact, the three deceased writers—Amadi, Okpewho and Emecheta came originally from the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria.

Isidore Okpewho (1941-2016)

When Ediru, the elder son of Professor Isidore Okpewho, called to tell me that his father had passed away, I could only sigh in sorrow. The watch was over. His health had taken a sudden turn for the worse a few weeks earlier and we had kept watch as he battled for his life in the ICU. By the time he finally took his last breath on Sunday 4th September 2016, his immediate family and those close to them had been steeling themselves for the moment.

Colonial Mimicry and Postcolonial Re-membering in Isidore Okpewho's <em>Call Me by My Rightful Name</em>

In Call Me by My Rightful Name (2004), Isidore Okpewho harnesses the distinctive virtues of the African imagination and worldview to both complement and interrogate Western paradigms of knowledge. Where in his earlier novels The Victims (1970), Last Duty (1976) and Tides (1993) Okpewho conformed to the tradition of European realism, Call Me by My Rightful Name appropriates the techniques of magical realism that the novelist locates in African folk imagination. However, with both the techniques of orality and embodied textuality to excavate common bonds of black experience, Okpewho treads the challenging path between transvaluation and reification of colonial myths about Africa.

Raising Questions: Modernism, Genre, Text

Raising Questions: Modernism, Genre, Text Paula Marantz Cohen The first group of essays in this volume raises questions about what constitutes modernism and how works previously unconnected to the movement may relate to or extend our understanding of it. Matthew Levay explores the importance of Gertrude Stein’s detective novel, Blood on the Dining Room Floor, arguing that the work shows Stein combining an experimental aesthetic with a popular one, thereby bringing modernist ideas to a larger, middlebrow audience. The second piece, by Cecily Swanson, challenges the parameters of modernism through a discussion of Muriel Draper’s NBC radio program, It’s a Woman’s World, and her 1929 memoir of her music salon. Swanson maintains that Draper’s conversation about music with her mostly female audience adds a new dimension to our understanding of the musical medium and of the modernist enterprise: it both challenges the notion that music is impersonal and incorporates the responses of an audience of female listeners and readers into a blended oral and written aesthetic. The two essays that follow expand the way an individual work has been conceived within the modernist canon. Timothy C. Baker looks at James Leslie Mitchell’s A Scots Quair, traditionally viewed narrowly within Scottish literary canon, and shows its relevance to modernist ideas of fiction and romance. Likewise, W.E.B. Du Buois’s novel Dark Princess, often taken as a propagandist work, is recontextualized by Syndey Bufkin as an effort to relate the romantic tradition that it invokes to a utopian idea of the novel. The remaining pieces deal with more contemporary questions and forms of critical definition and reconsideration. Isidore Diala sees Isidore Okpewho’s 2004 novel Call Me by My Rightful Name as a departure from his earlier, more realistic work in its incorporation of magical realism, folk imagination, and orality. Diala argues that this work oppposes Western novelistic techniques while also, precariously, supporting myths about Africa. F. Meltem Gürle takes a revisionary approach to the Turkish Bildungsroman, arguing that the genre’s protagonist does not, like his Western counterpart, become a reformed idealist but ends, instead, in a state of pure contemplation. This, says Gürle, reflects the unresolved conflict between tradition and modernity in Turkish culture. Corinna K. Lee looks at Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio: From the Thirties, a work begun in 1932 but published in 1974, as an example of literary recovery — not an unfinished work but one that has been reclaimed according to a newer documentary aesthetic. Finally, Ondrea E. [End Page v] Ackerman discusses Robert Grenier’s provocative drawing poems as innovative explorations of what a text can be understood to be. The books reviewed at the end of this issue continue the discussion of questions raised in these essays. [End Page vi] Copyright © 2013 Indiana University Press

What do Kenyan artists get for their skill? Reforming compensation under copyright

This article responds to the question asked by Isidore Okpewho in 1992: ‘What do they (artists) get for their sweat?’ The article argues that Okpewho's question has not been adequately addressed by all research participants or in the literature. The argument commences by summarizing the debate between those who hold ‘compensation’ and ‘no-compensation’ positions, as well as the justifications for each position. It then proceeds to a discussion of research methodologies and the impact these have on artists, the commodification of art, legislative and regulatory safeguards and the ethical issues surrounding fieldwork. It concludes by proposing policy and legal reforms that can be employed to financially benefit artists.

Black Europe and the African Diaspora

Reviewed by: Black Europe and the African Diaspora Mahriana Rofheart (bio) Hine, Darlene Clark, Trica Danielle Keaton, and Stephen Small, eds. Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2009. Recently, there have been several publications that re-examine the contemporary or historical contours of diaspora such as Isidore Okpewho’s edited volume The New African Diaspora (2009); Patrick Manning’s The African Diaspora: A History Through Culture (2010); and Extending the Diaspora: New Histories of Black People (2009) edited by Dawne Y. Curry, Eric D. Duke, and Marshanda A. Smith (part of the same New Black Studies Series as the book being reviewed). Black Europe and the African Diaspora edited by Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton, and Stephen Small marks its own space among these texts in its constant critical assessment of both public and scholarly notions of blackness, Europe, and diaspora—all three of which are reconsidered in most, if not all, of the volume’s essays. Black Europe and the African Diaspora, which comes out of a 2006 symposium at Northwestern University of the same name, aims to examine migration, blackness, and diaspora beyond geographical and disciplinary boundaries, as articulated in Stephen Small’s introduction (xxiii). Among the essays in the volume’s three broad sections—one focused on history, one on specific European nations, and one on theory and representation—there are indeed a variety of disciplinary perspectives with essays relating to literature, film, political science, anthropology, and history. And while many of the essays examine what it means to be Black in Europe and to be a Black European, the most exciting intervention in the volume comes in the several essays that locate Black Europe beyond Europe as it is commonly understood. But all of the essays in Black Europe and the African Diaspora will prove both useful and unsettling for those who are researching the Black European experience. Section One of the volume, “Historical Dimensions of Blackness in Europe,” is well-structured and diverse. The section begins with Allison Blakely’s country-by-country overview of the history and current status of Africans living in Europe. At times cursory in its approach (focusing heavily on the positions of high-profile Blacks as a measure of [End Page 975] progress), Blakely’s essay nonetheless works well as an introduction to the more specific essays that follow. Dienke Hondius’s essay about a boat of “Moors” that found its way to the Dutch town of Middleburg in 1596 en route to the West Indies demonstrates careful historical research and the necessity for more of the same due to the fact that Blacks in Europe were kept invisible during the slave trade. In “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Josephine Baker’s Films of the 1930s and the Problem of Color,” Eileen Julien examines what two of Baker’s films reveal about French anxieties surrounding race, and Tina M. Campt looks at Black German family photographs that provide clues to gendered and racialized notions of national belonging in Germany before and during World War II. Campt additionally argues for a decentering of the United States in studies of the African Diaspora (64), a position significant to several later essays in the volume. The section concludes with T. Sharpley-Whiting and Tiffany Ruby Patterson’s essay, “The Conundrum of Geography, Europe d’outre mer, and Transcontinental Diasporic Identity,” in which the authors argue that France’s former and current overseas territories be included in explorations of Black Europe. Overall, the volume’s first section demonstrates that it is necessary to examine Black Europe from these unexpected perspectives because of the frequent invisibility of Blacks throughout Europe’s history, pointing also to the near impossibility of coming to a cohesive definition of blackness in the European context. The essays in Section Two, “Race and Blackness in Perspective: France, Germany, and Italy,” provide reflections on the status of contemporary Blacks in Europe. Alessandra Di Maio discusses black writing in Italian since 1990, significant as an essay contribution in part because black migrant writing in Italian remains a fairly unknown field, a fact not lost on Di Maio herself (120). Di Maio’s examination of...

The New African Diaspora. Edited by Isidore Okpewho and Nkiru Nzegwu.

The New African Diaspora. Edited by Isidore Okpewho and Nkiru Nzegwu.