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The celebrated Nigerian writer Tanure Ojaide relates here his experience of living in the United States where he has been based teaching and writing since 1996. Drawing the Map of Heaven picks up where his earlier memoir, Great Boys. An African Childhood which charted his upbringing in Nigeria by his Grandmother, left off. Less a purely personal tale and more a story of the many other African immigrants in the United States Ojaide in the text uses 'we' to speak collectively for a traditionally communal society now residing in an individualistic setting. As much a reflection of an African background as an American experience Drawing the Map of Heaven is a unique portrait of the African in the United States
Stars of the Long Night
(2012)
Set in the Niger Delta this novel tells the tale of a women's struggle for equality in a traditional patriachal society. Set against the once-in-a-generation festival at which the one chosen by the gods performs the dance of 'the mother mask', Ojaide weaves a tale of suspense while displaying the traditions and religious beliefs that define the Niger Delta.
The Beauty I Have Seen. A Trilogy comprises three phases in a poetic journey, ranging from the poet (here called a minstrel) as a public figure, a traveller and observer of humanity, to one grounded in the landscape and fate of his native land. In the various sections of 'The Beauty I have Seen', 'Doors of the Forest' and 'Flow and other Poems', Tanure Ojaide expresses multifarious experiences, private and public, that capture the poet's sensitive life in sensuous images. In these poems that flow like a narrative, form and content fuse into a mature poetic voice at once passionate and restrained, relaxed and poignant.