Funso Aiyejina Born 1949

Gurara Falls

Baobab tree

Lagos

Amos Tutuola Born 1920

Chinua Achebe Born 1930

Flora Nwapa

Christopher Okigbo Born 1932

Wole Soyinka Born 1935

Ken Saro-Wiwa

Buchi Emecheta Born 1944

Ben Okri Born 1959

Babatunde Olatunje Ebenezer Obey King Sunny Ade Fela Kuti

Sokari Douglas Camp

Iriabo Woman

Bird Masquerade

Hippo Masquerade

Pablo Picasso Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

Big Masquerade

Flying Fish with Bubbles

To Abuehnameh at Four No, son, I was not going to the hospital to my brother. He died.Yes. He did. Not as in games about doctors and patients which you now play With your brother Since your encounters with the surgeon's art earlier in the year. He died: In spite of the doctors: in spite of the nurses: in spite of hope. He died on the last day of April::April::the cruellest month! But we are now safely into May::May::the month of your birth! And after our sad loss at the end of April's showers Let us welcome back your day of mirth Into the month on whose wet wings of flowers You danced triumphant into our expectant world. Child of the ministering rains of the month of May And of green branches garnished with bird-songs of love, Long may you survive the cruel April of the poet's calendar.

No, son, I was not going to the hospital to my brother. He died in April. For real. The doctors couldn’t save him. But now it’s May, the month of your birth! Let’s celebrate your birthday instead of mourning! May you live through many terrible Aprils to beautiful Mays!

No, son, I had not gone to see my brother. ‘Twas April when the illness took his life. But now that month has turned into another, A month of joy for me and for my wife. Forget about the sorrow that can hound us, And think of how your birthday comes today. Let happiness and pleasure now surround us, As melancholy April turns to May!

Allusion

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour, Of which vertu engendred is the flour Geoffrey Chaucer opening of The Canterbury Tales

April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. T.S. Eliot opening of The Waste Land

Trinidad

A View of the Caribbean and Its Memories of Our Not-so-Recent Collective Past (To Helen, whose gift of a picture of a West Indian harbour made it possible)

History-stretched between forgotten ancestors and cussing new world cousins, I pause to count our combined sins of blood and our collective crimes of eternities by the wavelashes that shatter the calm of the mirror-surface of your sun-framed fortunes and I contemplate your holiday resorts into mosaics of silhouette slave ships that sit safe in protected harbours to await the arrival of auctioneers and cheap labour merchants shadows that cast shadows to map out your white sea breakers into the mast-sails that once floated ships which were pregnant with our ancestral limbs,

luminous dusk-glow that stays the mind on the last constants of primordial nightmares and details that accentuate details to whip our past awake into our present pains. Still, like the sea that now gives you a home and a name, I wonder if the tidal waves of your brave new world have whirled you beyond the bedrock of your sea and washed you past the memorial beacons of those ancient dreams that predators from within and without our ranks conspired to discredit and freeze into museum pieces. luminous dusk-glow that stays the mind on the last constants of primordial nightmares and details that accentuate details to whip our past awake into our present pains. Still, like the sea that now gives you a home and a name, I wonder if the tidal waves of your brave new world have whirled you beyond the bedrock of your sea and washed you past the memorial beacons of those ancient dreams that predators from within and without our ranks conspired to discredit and freeze into museum pieces.