Moofy's "Sauti na" feat. Buzo Danfillo

My friend, rapper Buzo Danfillo just sent me this video of singer Moofy's "Sauti na" that he features on. I haven't heard any of Moofy's music before, but I love her voice. It's a really fresh sound, quite different from the usual auto-tuned "nanaye." Enjoy.

Mo Sabri - I Believe In Jesus (lyrics)

Here is a song I have been completely obsessed with tonight, after I read this article "Muslims who Follow Jesus" by Carl Medearis. He highlights the music video "I believe in Jesus," by Muslim Pakistani-American musician Mo Sabri, which points to the many similarities in the way that Muslims and Christians think about Jesus. The most important thing, he says, is not the differences in belief but that we are following him.

I was so touched by this song--seriously, I am filled with joy whenever I watch it--that I transcribed the lyrics, which you can find below the embedded video.

You can follow Mo Sabri on Facebook and on Twitter.


a

Mo Sabri: “I believe in Jesus.”

“The angels said, ‘O Mary, indeed God gives you good tidings of a word from Him, whose name shall be the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary.’” Surah Al-Imran, Verse 45

Verse 1:

This ain’t a song about bottles in the club

This is about a role model filled with love.

A teacher, a preacher, with guidance from above,

Sent to represent a message of peace, like a dove.

In the West, they call him Jesus, in the East they call him Isa,

Messiah, Christ, the same person that you speak of.

Ask me why I wrote this song, and I will tell you because

There’s too many people silent, it’s time for me to speak out.

The son of a virgin, they say it is illogical, probably improbable, but God made it possible.

Gabriel told Mary that her son would be phenomenal,

His voice was always audible, the opposite of prodigal,

He overcame the obstacles, people attacking him. He was a walking hospital,

with heathen he was compassionate.

He healed the sick, raised the dead. Shout out to Lazarus.  I’m talkin’ about Jesus of Nazareth.

Chorus:

If we don’t have peace, we’ll end up in pieces.

Treat people the way that you want to be treated.  

If you do believe it, sing it and repeat it.

I am not afraid to say that I believe in Jesus.

Jesus. I believe in Jesus. I am not afraid to say that I believe in Jesus.

Jesus. I believe in Jesus. I am not afraid to say that I believe in Jesus.

Nananananana, Nanananana, I believe in Jesus. Nanananana, Nanananana I believe in Jesus.

Verse 2:

Ah, I’m just a follower of Jesus.

What that means is I follow what he teaches.

I’m not the type of person that just wants to give speeches.

I’m trying to be the person that will practice what he preaches.

Yeah, cause I’ve observed people just say the words.

But faith in him now is more like a verb. That’s why I wrote this verse.

To remind us to serve. Cause if you haven’t heard, faith is dead without works.

How can we say we believe that God exists when we always act the opposite.

It’s ominous, how we only care about our own accomplishments,

and we’re quick to break our promises. We got to put a stop to this.

We all sin. I know that we are human.

But we cannot keep  on using the same excuses.

Now is the time  we need to prevent the abuses.

Listen up, I got the solution.

Chorus:

If we don’t have peace, we’ll end up in pieces.

Treat people the way  that you want to be treated.  

If you do believe it, sing it and repeat it.

I am not afraid to say that I believe in Jesus.

Jesus. I believe in Jesus. I am not afraid to say that I believe in Jesus.

Jesus. I believe in Jesus. I am not afraid to say that I believe in Jesus.

Nananananana, Nanananana, I believe in Jesus. Nanananana,  Nanannana, I believe in Jesus.

Verse 3:

Why does our religion always have to cause division?

In reality, we’re all more similar than different.

Jesus wanted unity, but nowadays it’s missin’. 

We gotta use our vision if we want to do his mission.

Can’t you see we’re all children of Adam, brothers and sisters.

If you don’t agree, you haven’t read the scriptures.

Picture when Jesus comes back to Jerusalem.

Will he be happy with the way you’ve become?

We’re livin’ wrong. But today’s a new dawn.

So sing along to this song like David singing the psalms.  

Now raise up your arms to give alms with open palms.

Cause Jesus brought a message, let’s follow it till we’re gone.

Shout out to my dad and mom for blessing me in my youth.

God’s insistent proof that his message is the truth.

This song is just a lesson to remind me and you,

to ask ourselves this question, “What would Jesus do?”

Chorus:

 If we don’t have peace, we’ll end up in pieces.

Treat people the way  that you want to be treated.  

If you do believe it, sing it and repeat it.

I am not afraid to say that I believe in Jesus.

Jesus. I believe in Jesus. I am not afraid to say that I believe in Jesus.

Jesus. I believe in Jesus. I am not afraid to say that I believe in Jesus.

Nananananana, Nanananana, I believe in Jesus. Nanananana,  Nanannana, I believe in Jesus.

Skit:

Mo Sabri: Hey man, you forgot your wallet

Man (that looks like Jesus): Wow. Thanks. Why did you come all this way to give it to me.

Mo Sabri: Man, I just want to treat people the way I want to be treated. What made you do all those good deeds earlier?

Man (that looks like Jesus) : Man I just try to live my life according to the way Jesus lived his.

Mo Sabri: That’s awesome man, I believe in Jesus.

Man (that looks like Jesus): That’s tight man, I had no idea. Tell me more.

Chika Unigwe's novel On Black Sister's Street wins the NLNG Prize

The Nigerian Liquified Gas Limited (NLNG) Prize has just announced that Chika Unigwe's novel On Black Sisters Street: A Novel (Modern African Writing Series)
 has just won the $100,000 literary prize.

Premium Times writes: 

Chika Unigwe,  a Nigerian writer based in Belgium, has won the NLNG  sponsored Nigerian prize for Literature, 2012.

Ms. Unigwe was announced winner of the literary award on Thursday 1 November at a world press conference held at the Ocean View Restaurant in Victoria Island, Lagos.

Chika won for her novel, On Black Sisters Street.

“What is striking about Chika Unigwe’s novel is the compassion that informs it,” Abiola Irele, chairman of Judges for the prize said.

[...]

Chika Unigwe was born in Enugu, Nigeria, and now lives in Turnhout, Belgium, with her husband and four children.

She is the first foreign based Nigerian writer to win the NLNG prize which was hitherto reserved for locally based Nigerian writers.

I have not yet read the novel but just ordered two copies on Amazon (one for me, one as a gift!). The novel describes the lives of  four African women who are lured to Belgium in hopes of a better life but end up working as sex workers in Antwerp. 

Unigwe did more than just library research on the lives of sex workers. In this interview with Black Voices, she describes the "participant observation" ethnography she did to be able to understand the lives of these women:

BV: You were so curious about the lifestyle that you bought clothes and thigh-high boots and spent two years among women in the red-light district. What was that like? Would you do it again and would you recommend it for others? 
CU: I spent two years researching and writing the novel. I went to the women because I had no idea about their lives as prostitutes, and because I wanted to know what it felt like to walk those cobbled streets of the red-light district. I wanted to feel what it was like as a woman to be on that street, and to be looked at as a possible worker. It was only by doing that that I could somehow, in a very small way, inhabit the skin of my characters and write them truthfully. It was awkward at the beginning. Would I recommend it to others? I think as long as one is comfortable doing it, that sort of research helps more than any literature.

On Black Sister's Street beat out two other novels on the short list: Olusola Olugbesa's Only A Canvas, which unfortunately, no one I know knows how to get a hold of, and Ngozi Achebe's Onaedo - The Blacksmith's Daughter

An NLNG press release on the short list (I have not yet seen a press release about the winning novel) describes the jury who made the choice:

The chairman of the panel of judges is Prof. Francis Abiola Irele, Provost of the College of Humanities at the Kwara State University and Fellow of the Dubois Institute, Harvard University.  Other members of the panel are Prof. Angela Miri, Head of the English Department at the University of Jos, Prof. Sophia Ogwude, Dean of the Faculty of Arts at University of Abuja, Prof J O J Nwachukwu-Agbada, Professor of African Literature in the Department of English, Abia State University and Dr. Oyeniyi Okunoye, a Senior Lecturer at the Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife and a Section Editor of Postcolonial Text, a journal affiliated to the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. 
Other members of the Advisory Board, besides Professor Emeritus Ayo Banjo, are Dr. Jerry Agada, former President of Association of Nigerian Authors and Prof. Ben Elugbe, President, Nigeria Academy of Letters.

To learn more about Chika Unigwe, who writes in both English and Dutch, check out her website. She is the author of six other novels, and many other works of short fiction. You can also read her first reactions to the prize in several lovely interviews: Elnathan John interviews her for Daily Times. Abubakar Adam Ibrahim interviews her for Weekly Trust. And Uche Umez interviews her on her favourite books for his blog.

You can purchase On Black Sister's Street on Amazon here: 

A Kindle version of the book is also available here: 

Amazon also sells two other titles that include her short fiction:

and

If you are interested in the nine other books longlisted for the NLNG, I've copied a list (quoted from an NLNG press release) below, as well as links to those available on Amazon. I hope the longlisting will help give publicity to those books published in Nigeria and which are yet not available online. Maybe a publisher who has access to Kindle will buy the rights?

The list, in alphabetical order of the authors' surnames, is as follows:

1. Ngozi Achebe Onaedo: The Blacksmith's Daughter
2. Ifeanyi Ajaegbo Sarah House
3. Jude Dibia Blackbird
4. Vincent Egbuson Zhero
5. Adaobi Tricia Nwuban I Do Not Come to You by Chance
6. Onuora Nzekwu Troubled Dust
7. Olusola Olugbesan Only a Canvas
8. Lola Shoneyin The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives
9. E E Sule Sterile Sky
10. Chika Unigwe On Black Sister's Street

Ngozi Achebe's Onaedo--The Blacksmith's Daughter. I have just started reading this, and it looks like the sort of historical fiction I devoured as a high schooler. I'm looking forward to reading more!




Ifeanyi Ajaegbo's Sarah House is available on Kindle, but I was not able to access a link to the cover. Ajaegbo was the winner of the 2005 African Region Prize for the Commonwealth short story competition.


I haven't yet read Jude Dibia's Blackbird, but it is currently sitting on my bookshelf, as one of my to-read books. I have, however, read his striking Walking With Shadows , one of the first Nigerian novels I've read that deals with LGBT issues (though there were a few that preceded it, notably Al-khamees Bature's Hausa novel Matsayin Lover that has a few lesbian charachters, and a story in Labo Yari's collection A House in the Dark (Heart to heart) "Cavalier of the Plain," which very obliquely presents several lesbian charachters. Lola Shoneyin's novel, The Secret Lives of the Four Wives: A Novel
 also longlisted for the NLNG prize this year also presents a charachter with same sex desires.

Vincent Egbuson's Zhero  is listed at Goodreads here. I found it for sale on MaryMartin.com, but I can't vouch for the reliability of the vendor.

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani's I Do Not Come to You by Chance actually beat out Chika Unigwe's On Black Sister's Street in 2010 to win one of the Commonwealth Prize, Africa region prizes in 2010. I Do Not Come to You by Chance is a hilarious, though thought-provoking, novel that takes you behind the scenes of Nigeria's famous 419 scams. I highly recommend!

I couldn't find Onuora Nzekwu's Troubled Dust for sale online, but it was also listed on Goodreads. Tribune has an article about the launch of Troubled Dust, and you can read an interview with the author on Bivnze's Space.

Likewise, I could only find Olusola Olugbesan's shortlisted novel Only a Canvas, on Goodreads. His facebook page, however, describes where you can find the novel:

The book is one of the 15 nominees for The Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa 2012 & one of the LAST 3 FINALISTS of the NLNG PRIZE FOR NIGERIAN LITERATURE 2012. Book Available @ MOSURO PUBLISHERS. 5 Oluware Obasa Street, Bodija,PO BOX 30201, Ibadan,Nigeria. Tel: 0803-322-9113. E-mail: mosuro@skannet.com

Without having read any of the shortlisted novels, I think Lola Shoneyin's stunning novel The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives deserved to make the short list. I just read this novel last week, and I had to sit down and just think for about two hours after I finished reading. It alternates first and third person narrative to tell the intertwined stories of a polygamous household. It's one of the best novels I've read this year.

In 2008, I had the privilege to read an early draft of E.E. Sule's novel Sterile Sky, a coming of age tell of a young boy growing up in Kano amidst ethnic and religious crisis. I just got a copy two weeks ago and am looking forward to re-reading it and seeing how Sule developed and polished it before it was published in the new African Writer's series.

Amazon-ing my blog

I have long resisted monetizing any of my blogs, mostly because the ads seemed to make the blogs look cheap and crappy. However, tonight I did a little bit more exploration and realized that I could link to Amazon for books and films I am already talking about on my blog and get a 4% commission from any book bought by clicking through my blog (as long as it was bought within 24 hours). As I am in the last agonizing year of my dissertation and on a tight budget, the idea of getting a little income for something I already do, whether blogging or freelance seems like a good idea to me. I've added what I find to be a rather attractive slideshow of some of my favourite books/movies/music at the top and bottom of this blog, as well as a "my favourites" widget. If you find the slideshow to be annoying, you can just click on pause and it will stop scrolling. And as I have time, I might go through and put in amazon links to books and films that I've reviewed in previous posts. (Update: I've also started working on a "bookshelf", that shows off some of my favourite books and provides links to them.)

I also run a wordpress blog, which i post on more often, but they don't allow advertising, so I might have to start posting more often here on this long neglected one!

Anyway, dear reader--if there are any dear readers left--I hope the monetization of the blog doesn't annoy you, and if you do see a book you have been wanting to read displayed here, clicking through and buying on Amazon will give me 4% of what you pay!

Cheers, T-C

Here is an experiment on linking to a book, African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory
, a really useful anthology I have been using a lot as I write.

Lil Wayne - How To Love [Official Music Video]

sad, beautiful, it made me cry....

I often complain about the "NGO aesthetics" of what scholar Jane Bryce has called "donor films"--the sort of didactic "message oriented" films you see made on HIV prevention, VVF, and other social ills. I was speculating the other day, that the predominance of such films makes it very difficult to deal with serious issues like HIV in creative ways that don't turn off any audience who have seen and heard the message a hundred times before.

I don't know the background of Lil Wayne's music video, How To Love,

and whether there was any NGO involved in it. I doubt it, but I think filmmakers working with "donor" agendas could learn something from it. Perhaps there's something about the emotional punch of the short form of the music video, the expectation of sexy context from Lil Wayne, and the uncontrived sincerity in it that catches you unaware. There is a message here, but it feels more like "truth" than "propaganda", and I can watch it over and over again.

soyeyya [love] by XDOGGinit

My current music video obsession. I think this may be one of the best Hausa-language music videos I have ever seen. The camera-work is great, and the story is well-told, and the rap beat is so catchy I have been listening to it non-stop since yesterday. Interestingly, this was apparently made in 2006 (which you can tell if you know the Kannywood stars featured--who have aged somewhat since the making of the video), but only just uploaded to youtube a few months ago. The Hausa is a bit non-standard (the use of danmama, danbaba, instead of yar for a girl) but exciting all the same. X-Dogg init is definitely a musician to keep an eye out for.

the stubborn woman of ithica

One article submitted, on to the next.

writing of the last article was aided by spartan sleep schedule. to bed at 8pm. arise at 2am to begin spinning out words.

this weekend threw off the schedule, and late this morning, I sit on a painfully slow internet connection, listening to a playlist of bollywood soundtracks, hausa nanaye, and eminem.

I have at least three more articles to write and a dissertation, and all i want to write is poetry.

my creative inspiration at these moments of procrastination often comes from mythology, the greek and norse and indian myths i devoured and dreamed about during my teenage years. those ancient half-formed contradictory stories which can be gathered and molded/fused into something new.

recently i have been thinking a lot about penelope and ariadne, both women whose love is embodied in their weaving/spinning--both women who are abandoned by their l

overs.

penelope weaves and unweaves a shroud for twenty years while waiting for a strayed odysseus to return to her. odysseus plays his manly war game and then spends years dawdling with circe and calypso before continuing his journey home to his chaste wife grown old with waiting.

ariadne spins a young theseus (who was later the first abductor of Helen) out of a maze, with her red thread, only to be abandoned by him. stories alternatively tell of her dying in child

birth with Theseus's child or being married (by force?) to the god of wine, dionysus. in my s

tory'

i cast forward my web of red threadthrough a maze of pages
when i come to the entrance to meet him

i discover he is already gone my thread severed
and stained dark
with blood'


ariadne would have been an appropriate goddess to keep watch over penelope's long nights of unravelling.
when penelope married odysseus, it was after a contest in which he beat her father at a race. her father begs her not to leave with odysseus, but she pulls her veil over her face and follows the lover who will leave her for twenty years before returning to ithica disguised as a beggar to drive off the other suitors she has resisted during his long journey.

i have written about ariadne in the past, and also of that fierce goddess medusa, but this t

ime it is penelope who appeals to me. this stubborn woman, who left her family for odysseus, wh

o refuses every other lover, weaving a never-finished shroud every day and then unweaving every night, while everyone else is sleeping.

what waking dreams did she have in those dark hours? Did she weave them into the shroud

during the day, the stories of her husband lying in the arms of a jealous island mistress--firmly unweaving them at night, reaching out and running her fingers through his dreams so that they become a tangle of unformed memories rewoven and redirected into an urge to leave, leave each mistress, cast himself on the sea to continue the journey back home to ithica.



'these mornings when the sun rises, weary,
i take up my thread again. Ariadne,
guide my fingers,
may he lying in darkness,spent
of lust,
dream of our youth

laughter as we glide free,
on open seas toward ithica,
sweet companions tugging sails

the wind carries us
Odysseus sings
i sway with roll of the ship

dancing questions in my eyes

may he dream
of
the way i sighed
at his first touch,
springs welling
in our courtyard
those tender months

before he left to lead an army,
through distant cities more glamourous
than ithica,
for women more seductive
than me.

[...]

i weave, unweave,
my laugh grows stern
my hair grows grey,

other men are rude shadows,

i go to bed alone,
leave them gambling in drunken competitions
in the feasting hall,

i rise at midnight, slip past tables where they snore
over drying pools of wine,

to unweave your shroud,
unravel your deeds,
pick out the rough threads

of my suitors' proposals,
blunt their swords with harsh
wool,

I want to undo it all,
release every thread that wove you away,
I want
to weave the promises of ivory you offered

laughter in the garden
children playing hide and seek
Early mornings of love as dawn's fiery
fingers light the sky

but there are too many years
to undo in one night

dreams are hard to unravel, wayward, drifting things-

not all we glimpse in them will come to pass…*

[...]

years you spend, Odysseus, caught
in the grasp of another woman,
a small but jealous,
goddess who turns her lovers to beasts
and devours them
so that they will not leave her
when the song of their first love
comes faint on the wind


listen, love, in the quiet hours
while she sleeps drunk. slip
away on feather-clad feet
past sleeping lions

through gates of polished horn
come back to me


[...]
Yet--

'what does a woman do with a husband
twenty years gone?
a man grown droopy
from years of fat lost at sea,
a man filled with stories
of wars in distant cities, memories
of a hungry goddess he pleasured while
i wove'

[...]
the shroud is finished
spread over the bed
i shared with my husband

it slides beneath us now

'i hold you fierce
against my shriveled breasts
you, grey wind-swept
man I do not know'

* This stanza is a quote from (Robert Fagles, 1996, Viking Press translation of The Odyssey 19.630-640) The Odyssey (Penguin Classics Deluxe Editio)