The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar
The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar

Author: Syl Cheney-Coker

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-01-01

Total Pages: 587

ISBN-13: 1803288876

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Winner of the 1991 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Syl Cheney-Coker's acclaimed debut novel, The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar traces the history of a nation's rise and fall, as prophesied by an ancient sorcerer. A military general sits in one of Malagueta's prison cells, awaiting his execution. He has just failed to overthrow the government. In the same land, over two centuries ago, the wife of a formerly enslaved man takes her first steps towards freedom. From the creation of Malagueta to its devastating fall, Alusine Dunbar, the wizened old diviner, has prophesied it all. And what he sees, he calls a tragedy. One of Sierra Leone's most renowned novelists and poets, Sly Cheney-Coker creates a world teeming with magical realism as he paints the journey from precolonial Africa to its shaky independence.

Sacred River
Sacred River

Author: Syl Cheney-Coker

Publisher: Ohio University Press

Published: 2013-03-11

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 0821444654

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The reincarnation of a legendary nineteenth-century Caribbean emperor as a contemporary African leader is at the heart of this novel. Sacred River deals with the extraordinary lives, hopes, powerful myths, stories, and tragedies of the people of a modern West African nation. It is also the compelling love story of an idealistic philosophy professor and an ex-courtesan of incomparable beauty. Two hundred years after his death, the great Haitian emperor Henri Christophe miraculously appears in a dream to Tankor Satani, president of the fictional West African country of Kissi, with instructions for Tankor to continue Henri Christophe’s rule, which had been interrupted by “that damned Napoleon.” Ambitious in scope, Sacred River is a diaspora-inspired novel, in which Cheney-Coker has tackled the major themes of politics, social strife, crime and punishment, and human frailty and redemption in Malagueta, the fictional, magical town and its surroundings first created by the author in The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, for which he was awarded the coveted Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Sacred River is equally about love and politics, and marks the return to fiction of one of Africa’s major writers.

Coterminous Worlds
Coterminous Worlds

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-10-12

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 9004434763

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The present collection of essays endeavours to furnish informed responses to central questions posed by the editors: Is the fact that the marvellous coexists with the factual and never resolves itself into the supernatural an indication that the whole literary project of 'magical realism' is an instrumental and representational form which can be regarded as particularly suitable for reconciling dichotomies and oppositions otherwise experienced as intolerable? Was 'magical realism' an explosive process in cultural dynamics, taking place at intersections of heterogeneous cultures most favourable to the efflorescence of this type of literature? The authors of the various essays - on Patrick White and David Malouf, Ben Okri, Syl Cheney-Coker, Robert Kroetsch, Gwendolyn MacEwan, Jack Hodgins, Salman Rushdie, Janet Frame, Wilson Harris and others - provide a dynamic focus on the reality at stake beneath the surface representations of 'magical realism' in post-colonial literatures.

An Introduction to the African Prose Narrative
An Introduction to the African Prose Narrative

Author: Lokangaka Losambe

Publisher: Africa World Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 9781592211371

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This collection of essays introduces students of African literature to the heritage of the African prose narrative, starting from its oral base and covering its linguistic and cultural diversity. The book brings together essays on both the classics and the relatively new works in all subgenres of the African prose narrative, including the traditional epic, the novel, the short story and the autobiography. The chapters are arranged according to the respective thematic paradigms under which the discussed works fall.

Stone Child, and Other Poems
Stone Child, and Other Poems

Author: Syl Cheney-Coker

Publisher: Hebn Publishers

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789780812089

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Stone Child is about the nameless gemstone child that became a great in the recent history of Sierra Leone, the poet's country. With compassion and moral deliberation, the poems in the first section of this new collection resound with the pain and love that the poet felt as he reflected on the tumultuous politics and tragic destiny of his beautiful land. Other poems are in homage to people and places around the world that have deeply touched the poet. Syl Cheney-Coker is a poet and novelist. His novel The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar won best book in the Africa region of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. He has also won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize; and his poetry has been translated into, Chinese, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Magical Realism in Postcolonial British Fiction
Magical Realism in Postcolonial British Fiction

Author: Taner Can

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-06-01

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 3838267540

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This study aims at delineating the cultural work of magical realism as a dominant narrative mode in postcolonial British fiction through a detailed analysis of four magical realist novels: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel (1989), Ben Okri's The Famished Road (1991), and Syl Cheney-Coker's The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar (1990). The main focus of attention lies on the ways in which the novelists in question have exploited the potentials of magical realism to represent their hybrid cultural and national identities. To provide the necessary historical context for the discussion, the author first traces the development of magical realism from its origins in European Painting to its appropriation into literature by European and Latin American writers and explores the contested definitions of magical realism and the critical questions surrounding them. He then proceeds to analyze the relationship between the paradigmatic turn that took place in postcolonial literatures in the 1980s and the concomitant rise of magical realism as the literary expression of Third World countries.

Memories of the Slave Trade
Memories of the Slave Trade

Author: Rosalind Shaw

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-04-04

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 022676446X

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How is the slave trade remembered in West Africa? In a work that challenges recurring claims that Africans felt (and still feel) no sense of moral responsibility concerning the sale of slaves, Rosalind Shaw traces memories of the slave trade in Temne-speaking communities in Sierra Leone. While the slave-trading past is rarely remembered in explicit verbal accounts, it is often made vividly present in such forms as rogue spirits, ritual specialists' visions, and the imagery of divination techniques. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research, Shaw argues that memories of the slave trade have shaped (and been reshaped by) experiences of colonialism, postcolonialism, and the country's ten-year rebel war. Thus money and commodities, for instance, are often linked to an invisible city of witches whose affluence was built on the theft of human lives. These ritual and visionary memories make hitherto invisible realities manifest, forming a prism through which past and present mutually configure each other.

Routledge Handbook of Minority Discourses in African Literature
Routledge Handbook of Minority Discourses in African Literature

Author: Tanure Ojaide

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-04-29

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 1000053059

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This handbook provides a critical overview of literature dealing with groups of people or regions that suffer marginalization within Africa. The contributors examine a multiplicity of minority discourses expressed in African literature, including those who are culturally, socially, politically, religiously, economically, and sexually marginalized in literary and artistic creations. Chapters and sections of the book are structured to identify major areas of minority articulation of their condition and strategies deployed against the repression, persecution, oppression, suppression, domination, and tyranny of the majority or dominant group. Bringing together diverse perspectives to give a holistic representation of the African reality, this handbook is an important read for scholars and students of comparative and postcolonial literature and African studies.

The African-British Long Eighteenth Century
The African-British Long Eighteenth Century

Author: Tcho Mbaimba Caulker

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2009-03-16

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0739134876

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Tracing the development of British colonial administration in West Africa over the course of the long eighteenth century, Caulker illuminates the solidification of the administration as it goes through a learning process of power. This book analyzes the documents and treaties that the indigenous peoples of eighteen-century Sierra Leone made with their future British colonizers, and compares them with the writings of Adam Smith to uncover a colonial philosophy linking European economic success with the process of civilizing Africa through moral education. A discussion of other archival materials demonstrates the ways that an emerging anthropological science and pseudo-scientific methodology contributed to colonial ventures and exploration. The book concludes with an analysis of the postcolonial novel The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, demonstrating that the study of this long eighteenth-century archive has as much to do with the present postcolonial era as it does with the period of African colonization.