▪ Says heart with people who bore the pangs of painful deaths of relatives
Award winning Nigerian Canadian author, Prof. Nduka Otiono of Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada has dedicated his latest literary award to the millions of people who died from the dreaded COVID-19 pandemic from all over the world.
For his master piece, “DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono”, Prof. Otiono from Ogwashi Uku, Aniocha North Local Government Area of Delta State was recently awarded The African Literature Association (ALA) Book of the Year Award- Creative Writing (2023) For an Outstanding Book of African Literature by an African published in 2022.
The poems in the selection are drawn from his two published collections, “Voices in the Rainbow”, and “Love in a Time of Nightmares”. The volume includes previously unpublished new poems and straddles multiple poetic traditions and places African intellectual history at the forefront of an engagement with Western poetics.
In an emotional speech at the award night in Canada, he said that his heart goes out to people who bore the pangs of the painful deaths of loved ones from the virus.
Prof. Otiono remarked: “As we sit through the awards dinner tonight, some people in the house bear the pangs of the painful deaths of loved ones from the virus. It is to those who died in the time of Coronavirus that I dedicate this award.”
Continuing, the poet laureate lamented that the book, “Dis Place”a collection of poems was completed against the soundtracks of the pandemic and the dirges that punctuated life as millions died from the stings of a marauding virus bearing spiky crowns.
However sounding upbeat, he declared: “It is a testimony to the human capacity for resilience and a creative and robust response to tragedies embodied in the triumph over the pandemic, that life has returned to its pre-pandemic socialization status.”
Echoing the words of the prolific American-Canadian poet, A. F. Moritz, Prof. Otiono, who took a degree in English from the University of Ibadan said that he stoutly stand to bear witness to the exclamation that poetry “can become the world we actually live in, not just in verse, but on both sides of our front door.”
He explained that “both sides of our front door” is a metaphor for what has been termed “The Dualities of Nduka Otiono” which extended to his identity as an African Canadian and the various lives that he has lived and continue to live.
He declared: “As I affirm elsewhere, the elements of my dualities are “the branches of a river, flowing into one main stream,” which “reflect the work that I do as a creative writer, as a scholar, as an educator.” DisPlace is a testament of these tributaries of the self as well as a verbal collage of the flow of the river from my hometown Ogwashi-Uku in the Anioma area of Delta State, Nigeria, to the wide expanse of Obodo Oyibo.”
While acknowledging delectable daughter Kika, his home editorial assistant and wife, Onyi, for being the “unseen condiments that spice my muse and everyday life”, Prof. Otiono, the Director, Institute of African Studies, Carleton University singled out some professional colleagues and friends who contributed to the overall quality of the book and, also, the editors, Peter Midgley and Chris Dunton, for their confidence in the work.
He paid glowing tributes to ALA for the award; the publisher, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, publishers of Canada’s foremost poetry series under which imprint DisPlace was published; and also to his employer, Carleton University, for providing him the platform to thrive as an instructor, interdisciplinary scholar and creative artist, adding:
“It is one thing for a creative artist to conceive a work. It is another for the work to find the right midwives to deliver the precious baby.”
Ironically, not even the redemptive power of poetry which is supposed to use words and sounds as a healing balm can erase the memories of the exit of the journalist’s hero, his dad, a real father figure and elder sister, Phil who died suddenly in an auto crash. Years after they were gone to the other side, he still lives with the scars as their deaths echo on the pages of the book as “life becomes a flying shuttle on my loom.”
Prof. Otiono, the ex-national secretary of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) was the founding editor of The Post Express Literary Supplement (PELS), which won the Literary Column of the Year 1997 and the first ANA Merit Award in 1998. His short stories, “The Night Hides with a Knife” won the ANA/Spectrum Prize while “Voices in the Rainbow” (poems) was a finalist for the ANA/Cadbury Poetry Prize just as “Love in a Time of Nightmares” (poems), received the James Patrick Folinsbee Memorial Scholarship in Creative Writing. (concordmail.blogspot.com)
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