MY MOTHER’S DAUGHTER SPELLS HER NAME BACKWARD by Anthony Okpunor
MY MOTHER’S DAUGHTER SPELLS HER NAME BACKWARD
by Anthony Okpunor
by Anthony Okpunor
Author Spotlight On Nadine Gordimer
A towering figure in the history of political activism, Nadine Gordimer remains one of the greatest legends to ever put pen to paper on the black continent. Throughout her career, she published works which did not just entertain but repeatedly questioned the inhumane racial superstructures of her society. She is remembered today as a voice which lives on, continually reminding us of the magnificent power of truth as a lasting virtue.
Gordimer was born on November 20,
Being rather precocious, her first published work “The Quest for Seen Gold” was released at age 15. She published her first work of adult fiction the following year.
In 1947, she gained admission to study at the University of Witwatersrand but only studied for a year before dropping out and moving to Johannesburg.
Gordimer’s literary career cannot be divorced from her life as an activist. Her bibliography is full of themes of race, class, and politics in South Africa.
Though she had become involved in the anti-apartheid movement ever since she was an undergraduate at the university, meeting with other student-activists, she did not become fully involved until 1960. This was inspired by the arrest of her best friend, the radical activist Bettie du Toit and the Sharpeville massacre of black protesters on March 21, 1960.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, she was outspoken against racial injustice in her country, with focus on the apartheid system. Her works were deeply critical of the system. While her writing got her international renown during this time, it also made the government of South Africa very displeased with her. It began to censor her works. Her novel, “The Late Bourgeois World” was banned in 1976 for a whole decade. Another work of hers, A World of Strangers faced total censorship for 12 years.
She joined the rebel party, the African National Congress; fighting against discrimination of black South Africans. She was reported to have hated discrimination so much that she rejected a spot on 1998 shortlist for the Orange Prize because the award only recognizes female writers.
Over time, her international fame and recognition grew even larger and her works reached a global audience. This prominence of hers culminated in the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Nadine Gordimer
Photograph accessed via Channel 24
Gordimer’s literary career cannot be divorced from her life as an activist. Her bibliography is full of themes of race, class, and politics in South Africa.
Exceptional storytelling coupled with a dogged belief in freedom from the shackles of apartheid placed Gordimer on a legendary pedestal when compared to her peers. However, during her reign of brilliance in the world of letters, there were some notable figures dishing out delicious literary meals to humanity. In her class, we have names such as Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Gunter Grass, Doris Lessing, Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison, and J.M. Coetzee.
Gordimer died on July 13, 2014, at age 90, survived by at least two children.
Nadine Gordimer
Photograph accessed via Achievement.org
Below is a list of most of Gordimer’s published works:
Novels
Short Stories
Essays
In conclusion, Gordimer’s life is a testament to the product of a marriage between purpose and passion. Though she is no more, her works resonate through history as one of the voices that pierced the thickets of apartheid in South Africa. Her love for activism and superb writing are inseparable, and these two traits made her a glowing light that guides young stars to the home of honor.
Now, it’s your turn to share your thoughts. What is it that inspires you about Gordimer and her works? Let us know in the comments section below.
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We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2018 Kreative Diadem Creative Writing Contest.
Winning entries for flash fiction were chosen by TJ Benson, author of ‘We Won’t Fade into Darkness’ (Parresia 2018). The winning poems were selected by Wale Owoade, poet and founding editor of Expound Magazine.
by Chizoma Emeka Joshua
You are sure if you entered a bus from your house at Ajah and stopped at the general hospital at Obalenede, if you let the doctors there run their tests and flip through their big books, they’d find a suitable title for what ails you. But you would not. Because you have learnt that when a man gives a disease a name, he breathes life into it and lends it the ability to become a thing that could be like him. Or become him. You are afraid that in your case, this now named thing would cling to you, move into your flat, try on your new shoes, and begin to go with you to the bank where you work as a cashier. It would become as conspicuous as the yellow dress you wear to work on Fridays and everybody would notice and point and laugh.
At one point you had taken the symptoms to Google. Google was better than doctors. Less intrusive. It did not ask if your family had a history of mental illness or whether you had been under a lot of stress lately (Both useless questions because doctors were always embarrassed to ask the former, and the latter was just plain silly, I mean, what banker is not under a lot of stress daily?)
But Google provided no solution. Perhaps the problem had been with how you typed the question. In the search area you had written:
1: is sadness a person?
2: what condition is it that makes one feel like oceans are threatening to spill through her mouth whenever she is alone?
For a long time after Google had spewed articles about ocean animals that left you the more
With time, you teach yourself to manage the storm. At nights when you feel most
Other times what you mutter is the twenty-third
But there are nights this storm would refuse to be caged. It will hit against your barriers with such intensity that your affirmations would be ill-prepared to stop it. Nights when you lie awake in the spare bedroom because you got into one of your frequent fights with your neighbor who had then hurled her insult of choice: barren woman, and you needed a safe place to hide from your shame. Or the nights when your husband had used his fist to communicate his rage at your childlessness or any other of
In
You are lying on a hospital bed. You are tired. There is a hand in yours. Smooth, little hands. Baby hands. They are the reason that even though you feel sharp pains in between your legs from where you had just pushed out another human, you are content, proud of yourself. On your lips is the taste of joy, and it takes like nothing you’ve ever had before. It is foreign in the way a lot of things are foreign to you. You would nibble at it. Careful not to gobble it up, so there’d be some for next time.
It is this joy that you visit. The feeling you felt in that moment. It is a safe harbor where physical pains cannot break through. Where raging storms cannot reach across to place their hands on your heart. Where you feel most worthy of things you do not deserve. In that house called joy, you are everything, and everything is you.
Those nights, you are also careful not to go beyond this point. Because past it, there is another picture of you. In that one, you are two years away from sixteen. Your parents are standing behind you, a scowl on their faces. The camera clicks shut as you are handing your baby to a man who in return hands you an envelope within which you would find, over the course of 8 years, a university degree, a job at a bank and a flat where you lie on cold nights with an aching heart and a resentful husband to keep you company.
by Chukwuebuka Ibeh Leonard
She would wait for him to come home from football practice, to have a quick bath and come downstairs for dinner together, to lead her to the bedroom and make love to her swiftly and ferociously before she tells him she’s leaving. She plans to make it undetailed, a simple, self-explanatory sentence. I’m leaving, Nedu. She pictures his expression; impassive, as though uncomprehending. He would tilt his head sideways to get a good view of her face and then pull the covers up as though she had not spoken. And she would smile and say nothing.
But when he comes home, smiling and smelling faintly of alcohol, she finds her voice is gone. The routine follows it’s course, except in place of a break-up, she tells him her name; Kamnelechukwu. He tilts his head to watch her face, his eyes a question, and she knows she is supposed to smile and brush it aside, but instead she sits up and repeats her name. It’s Kamnelechukwu, she says, not Ngozi, not Bisi, not Maria. She would appreciate it if
*
He is different, her man. She had known that the first time she saw him, at the club in GRA where they both sat facing each other at a corner of the dimly-lit bar. She watched the strippers twirling on the pole with startling expertise, declining offers from eager, bright-eyed men, offering her to buy her a drink. She had been in the process of turning down one of such offers -the insufferable man would not take a direct no for an answer- when she looked up, bored, and saw him for the first time. His features were striking; chocolate skin and oval face with lips curved slightly to the side in what could have been a smile, but it was his eyes that particularly got her attention, something about the directness of his stare that was disconcerting, and made her -strangely- shy. He did not look away when she met his gaze squarely and arched her brows for an explanation of sorts. She smiled at him already think of the best polite way to shut the man in front of her. It had to be the alcohol getting to her. The bar was getting too hot and her vision slightly blurred, and on cue, she stepped out for a smoke knowing he would follow her, and he did. They stood side by side on the veranda, quietly overlooking the still, serene pool in front of them. He reached out to touch her face, running his fingers over her lower lips and it did not occur to her to stop him. She did not stop him too when he took the cigarette from her fingers and held it in between his. She expected him to take a long drag from it and probably puff the smoke on her face, but he held it mid-air for seconds before he tossed it into the pool. She would later come to learn that he was allergic to cigarette smoke, but that night she thought him, of all things, brave, and a little rude. It did not stop her from typing her number into his phone, did not stop her from letting him drive her home and kissing him in the car in front
*
The first time he called her by another name, she was not sure what she felt. It had been six months since they started dating, a few weeks since she moved into his apartment, and she had never had cause to question his fidelity, and yet he had called her by another name. She waited for him to realize his grave error and be horrified, to stutter in his attempts at justification and end up confessing and apologizing. But he sat there smiling at her, totally at ease with himself, and it took her a moment to realize it was not a mistake. He genuinely thought she was someone else. And so when he called her by a different name the next time, she knew it wasn’t just his tongue slipping, and to her surprise, she replied.
It was the same way she would come to accept him, his flaws and his idiosyncrasies; same way she would listen to him go on and on about things they had done in the last six years ago even though they had barely been together for two years. It was the same way she indulged him when he talked about using cuffs and whips during sex even though she longed to tell him that the mere idea of using those eliminated the intent of the act in itself, which was
*
Her friends think he is erratic, unstable, psychotic? But she knows he’s fine. He just needs someone who gets him. When they see a man who’s bipolar at best and outright crazy at worse, she sees a man who’s broken and easily misunderstood in a world that thrives on convention; a man who’s stuck between two selves, a man who needs saving.
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