Ona is a college student and the only child of her parents. By the Nigerian folk tradition of Ogwashi-uku, Ona is an Idegbe--a "Male Daughter" and "Female Husband"--who isexpected to remain at home to bear children to continue her family line. However, if she insists on marrying out to a man as her husband, she must "marry a wife" to take her place in the family. These alternatives are unsavory to the western educated Ona, and she rebels. How the traditional society with Ona's doting father grapple with their challenged-destiny sets the drumbeats of the drama.
Onwueme has meticulously and brilliantly restitched many of these traditional and modern elements into plays that are temporally cyclical, thematically modal, ideorhythmically intricate, and histrionically edifying.
Renowned playwright Osonye Tess Onwueme's powerful new drama illuminates the effect of national and global oil politics on the lives of impoverished rural Nigerians. What Mama Said is set in the metaphorical state of Sufferland, whose people are starving and routinely exploited and terrorized by corrupt government officials and multinational oil companies-that is, until a voice erupts and moves the wounded women and youths to rise up and demand justice. Onwueme's powerful characters and vibrant, emotionally charged scenes bring to life a turbulent movement for change and challenge to tradition. Aggrieved youths and militant women-whose husbands and sons work in the refineries or have been slaughtered in the violent struggle-take center stage to "drum" their pain in this drama about revolution. Determined to finally confront the multinational forces that have long humiliated them, Sufferland villagers burn down pipelines and kidnap an oil company director. Tensions peak, and activist leaders are put on trial before a global jury that can no longer ignore the situation. What Mama Said is a moving portrayal of the battle for human rights, dignity, compensation, and the right of a nation's people to control the resources of their own land.
"Set in an unnamed African country, Shattered Calabash is at one and the same time a drama of marital conflict and an expose of corruption in government circles." "The wife and son of a high-ranking official discover, first, that he is a serial adulterer and second, that he has been siphoning off the national wealth and depositing this in European accounts." "Conflict is inevitable. The dialogue through which that conflict is carried out is frank and often funny. Tunde Fatunda has produced a drama that has much to say about misgovernment and about the continuing exploitation of Africa by western interests."--BOOK JACKET.
SHAKARA: DANCE-HALL QUEEN Shakara is 17 years-old and a school drop-out, who can no longer stand her poor mother with her "born-again" sister as squatters in a shanty, where the single mother toils to raise them with her meager income from being nanny and chief laborer for Madam Kofo a drug baroness and socialite in the city that is split between the rich and the poor. Shakara joins a gang and flees home; then the unexpected happens.
A twisted take on Narnia, this warmhearted, dryly comic novel from the award-winning author of the Peculiar Crimes Unit series starring Bryant & May transports readers to the last poignant moment of freedom before growing up. Kay Goodwin is a sixteen-year-old boy with a smart mouth and too much imagination, trapped in the most dismal place in England at the worst possible time: the early seventies. Marooned in the rundown seaside resort of Cole Bay, with its crumbling pier and grumbling pensioners, Kay experiences each day as a horrible comedy of errors—until he discovers a faraway land with characters who are impossibly exotic yet strangely familiar. In the kingdom of Calabash, he can have everything he’s ever wanted from life. There’s only one small problem: Calabash doesn’t technically exist. In a country that’s still hungover from the sixties, Kay finds it all too easy to retreat from reality. But he’s prepared to risk everything to find out what makes him different, what his life really holds, and what happens to those who believe in the impossible. Look for Christopher Fowler’s fantasy and horror classics, now available as ebooks: CALABASH | DISTURBIA | PSYCHOVILLE | RED GLOVES | ROOFWORLD | SPANKY
With her award-winning debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was heralded by the Washington Post Book World as the “21st century daughter” of Chinua Achebe. Now, in her masterly, haunting new novel, she recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria during the 1960s. With the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Adichie weaves together the lives of five characters caught up in the extraordinary tumult of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Ugwu is houseboy to Odenigbo, a university professor who sends him to school, and in whose living room Ugwu hears voices full of revolutionary zeal. Odenigbo’s beautiful mistress, Olanna, a sociology teacher, is running away from her parents’ world of wealth and excess; Kainene, her urbane twin, is taking over their father’s business; and Kainene’s English lover, Richard, forms a bridge between their two worlds. As we follow these intertwined lives through a military coup, the Biafran secession and the subsequent war, Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise, and intimately, the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place. Epic, ambitious and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a more powerful, dramatic and intensely emotional picture of modern Africa than any we have had before.
