Poets are seers. Poets are always performance driven. They live to see their words impinge on others who do not see the world as they do. The gift of words they are bestowed with, although temporary, like a crest of a wave, makes its indelible mark, shapes the intellect psychically without permission being granted by any one living thing...

The heart of man is naturally corrupted and the things we used to see, that made our lives sing with hope and dance with rapture also pass by quickly, and quietly. But the truth is still hidden and the stories that we want to tell live with us as we grow with the rivers. We sometimes look for our stories from some other place, except ourselves. I wonder why we do not look within to find the best stories that will give our lives meaning...

In developed economies of the world where the basic necessities of life seem to have been met, the question as to whether the arts are relevant or not to practical living is no longer an issue. Thousands of American citizens would troop down to the auditorium in Bard College to hear Chinua Achebe's reading of his Things Fall Apart, not minding that they have heard the same reading over and over again, not minding that the book is over fifty years old...

The nursery of any writer is school, literacy and education from a young age. Yet schools are still divided. There are schools for the rich and schools for the poor. There are writers and poets for the rich and writers and poets for the poor. There are writers for God’s children knocking on every conceivable door in this day and age. Orphans, children growing up in poverty; weak, innocent, malnourished, abandoned and neglected...

Earlier in one lone week out of the now many blurry ones in my childhood memory, my father had unknowingly satisfied too much of my recurring curiosity by telling me how he got the tribal marks on his own face. He was born in the early forties when it was still acceptable and admirable for parents from his side of Yorubaland to scarify the faces of their children as markers of culture, tribe, social standing or just plain beauty...

Morning has coughed a dark mist on the town square. It has become truant and roguish in its mannerisms. Decades ago, it sighed with freshness, its visage displaying dimples of joy. Those were the days...Now it smokes industrial gases without a filter in its greenhouse tent of pilgrimage...

Over the years most of my Nigerian friends have wondered at the letters I used to get from Brutus, the legendary South African poet, author of A Simple Lust, Letters to Martha, Sirens, Knuckles and Boots, etc. Brutus and I have travelled the Lagos streets, and he lamented the shame that there were still open drains on Nigerian streets. But Brutus was not all complaints and seriousness, for he once suggested that we should co-author a book of erotica!

I have absolutely no problem with the term, “African writer,” I am an African writer. Everything depends on context. And it is true that we are the sum of our experience and folks are right to protest any definition that in their view limits the range of their identity and their life’s work. But I do think Gappah protests too much...

Nigeria, it appears, doesn’t offer Nigerians much of the positive side of the human experience. Why wouldn’t Nigerian writers write about what they experienced? When, for example, an Ogoni young man eventually begins to tell his story, what do we expect this story to be like? If he accuses Nigeria of having failed him, would any of us blame him for washing our dirty linen in the public?

I am the wind. I have disappointed myself and I feel the effects of that betrayal deep in my soul. The waters are still clean but they are completing an effect that will forever be here with those cool winds of the evening. I guess I long for my waters that make me fresh and clean. I am the wind....

Let those who want to be real poets return to their desks, to their privacy, to their consciences, where the only prize is the rigour of writing, the quest to touch humanity, the desire to surpass the self. It is hard to accept: paradoxically, literary prizes, in Nigeria and abroad, have reduced the worth of our literature!

I see no reason why the tide of bad news in Nigeria can not be stopped. Perhaps all it takes is a change of heart that begins with a radical rejection of the thought that the West is only interested in grubbing in the African compost...

Whilst a reading culture will not, in and of itself, resolve all of our problems, as there is a huge gap between knowledge and know-how, it will at least cause more of our youth to think and question their government’s actions and inaction and hold them to greater account...

In South Africa, Omoseye Bolaji's readers are legion. In Free State libraries alone, thousands of copies of his books are available. He is one author who knows how to grip and enthrall readers. He hardly strives for literary aesthetics, but this does not mean he’s entirely pedestrian. Because of his prolific publications, many people tend to overlook the fact that Omoseye Bolaji is actually a versatile writer...

Time had happened to my parents’ pain. The Pain had been worn down by the salts of loss in the washing of brine, the ebb and flow of sorrow. It had preserved the hurt in the recesses of their memories and had sealed it hermetically. It had economized their loss...

It is too glaring that Habila did not do any special re-working on his Prison Stories but hurriedly re-packaged it under a different title as a novel. Thence comes the failure of Waiting for an Angel as a novel.  Short stories, no matter how mystically re-arranged, cannot make a novel...