Learning Calabar
Notes from a Poet’s Year in Nigeria
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Advance Praise
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents
- My Finger Inquires of the Map—Where?
- Learning Calabar I
- Day Begins in Calabar
- Order and Disorder
- The Slave Museum
- Chaos and Poetry
- Nigerian Dresses
- Geography Test
- Nigeria
- The Calabar Acrostics
- Learning Calabar II
- Effiong and Mary Slessor
- Interlude: Oron
- Creek Town Soon
- Margaret Ekpo
- Creek Town
- Return
- Carter’s Grove
- Still Learning
- The Ekorinim Suite
- How to Take a Cold Bath
- Harvest
- The Walls of Calabar
- Roosters
- Laundry
- A Place Called Biafra
- Everything Depends Upon
- Mary Making Moi Moi
- Everything depends
- The Children of Ekorinim
- Mary Okoi’s Garden
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
- Further Reading
- Useful Websites
- Catalog of the Acrostics
- Index
- Postscript
Learning Calabar I1
Calabar was not a place I ever learned about in school. I could not have located it on a map. I did not know the richness of a culture that pre-dated the slave trade along the banks of the Calabar River or that Calabar was the fifth largest slave-trading port of West Africa. I did not know that Nigeria was a colony of Great Britain until as late as 1960 when it became an independent nation.
I did not know that this southeastern corner of Nigeria was once called Biafra,2 site of a bitter civil war that filled the U.S. news of the late 1960s with images of starving children.
I knew nothing of attempts at democracy that were time and again thwarted into dictatorship.
When I set out to spend a year living and working in Calabar, my ignorance was immense, though I had learned to locate it on a map and had given myself a crash course on current politics. En route to Calabar, I made a required stop in Lagos for a briefing.←3 | 4→
Details
- Pages
- XII, 116
- Publication Year
- 2022
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781433193811
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781433193828
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781433193804
- DOI
- 10.3726/b19181
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2022 (March)
- Published
- New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Oxford, Wien, 2022. XII, 116 pp., 2 b/w ill., 12 color ill.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG