CANR

• Farad Parrésia Publishers (Lagos, Nigeria), 2012
• A Stranger's Pose Cassava Republic Press (London, England), 2018
• Labour of Many: 13 February-11 August 2019 Norval Foundation (Capetown, South Africa), 2019
• People of the City New York Review Books (New York, NY), 2020
• I Am Still With You: A Reckoning with Silence, Inheritance, and History ( memoir) Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC), 2023

1. I am still with you : a reckoning with silence, inheritance, and history LCCN 2022040938 Type of material Book Personal name Iduma, Emmanuel, author. Main title I am still with you : a reckoning with silence, inheritance, and history / Emmanuel Iduma. Edition First edition. Published/Produced Chapel Hill : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2023. Projected pub date 2302 Description pages cm ISBN 9781643751016 (hardcover) (ebook) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. People of the city LCCN 2019039517 Type of material Book Personal name Ekwensi, Cyprian, author. Main title People of the city / Cyprian Ekwensi ; introduction by Emmanuel Iduma. Published/Produced New York : New York Review Books, [2020] Description 1 online resource ISBN 9781681374307 (ebook) (paperback) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 3. Labour of many : 13 February-11 August 2019 LCCN 2019448268 Type of material Book Personal name Mahama, Ibrahim, 1987- artist. Main title Labour of many : 13 February-11 August 2019 / Ibrahim Mahama : [foreword: Elana Brundyn & Owen Martin ; text: Emmanuel Iduma ; edited by Robin Kirsten.] Published/Produced Cape Town : Norval Foundation, [2019] Cape Town : ABC Press, [2019] Description 86 pages : color illustrations ; 25 cm. ISBN 9780639967318 0639967310 CALL NUMBER N7399.G53 M32 2019 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in c.1 Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 4. A stranger's pose LCCN 2018411431 Type of material Book Personal name Iduma, Emmanuel, author. Main title A stranger's pose / Emmanuel Iduma ; with a foreword by Teju Cole. Published/Produced Abuja ; London : Cassava Republic Press, 2018. Description 208 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm ISBN 9781911115496 1911115499 CALL NUMBER DT12.25 .I38 2018 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 5. Farad : a novel LCCN 2014507181 Type of material Book Personal name Iduma, Emmanuel, author. Main title Farad : a novel / by Emmanuel Iduma. Published/Produced Lagos, Nigeria : Parrésia Publishers 2012. Description 207 pages ; 21 cm ISBN 9789789220502 9789220502 Shelf Location FLS2015 058828 CALL NUMBER PR9387.9.I38 F27 2012 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS2)

• The Sound of Things to Come - 2016 The Mantle, New York, NY

• Emmanuel Iduma website - https://www.mriduma.com/

  Emmanuel Iduma was born and raised in Nigeria, where he trained as a lawyer. He is the author of the travelogue A Stranger’s Pose (Cassava Republic Press, 2018), which was longlisted for 2019 Ondaatje Prize. He has contributed nonfiction and criticism to Granta, the New York Review of Books, Aperture, n+1, Artforum, Best American Travel Writing 2020, Art in America, among other places.

  His art writing has been honored with the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant, the inaugural Irving Sandler Award for New Voices in Art Criticism from AICA-USA, and the C/O Berlin Talent Prize for Theory. In 2020, he was listed in Apollo International Art Magazine’s 40 under 40 Africa for the broad social impact of his work.

  I Am Still With You, his memoir on the aftermath of the Nigerian civil war, was awarded a Silvers Grant for Work in Progress, and is forthcoming from Algonquin (US), and William Collins (UK) in March 2023.

  He received a Windham-Campbell Prize for Literature in 2022.

• From Publisher -

  Emmanuel Iduma​ was born and raised in Nigeria. Emmanuel is the author of The Sound of Things to Come. He received an MFA in art criticism and writing from the School of Visual Arts, New York. He is a co-founder of Saraba Magazine and co-editor of Gambit: Newer African Writing. Follow him on Twitter @emmaiduma.

• Yale Center for British Art website - https://britishart.yale.edu/exhibitions-programs/home-conversation-ainehi-edoro-and-emmanuel-iduma-hilton-als-series-njideka

  About Emmanuel Iduma
  Born in Nigeria in 1989, Iduma is a writer and art critic. He studied law at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and received his MFA in art criticism and writing from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Iduma is the author of the travelogue A Stranger’s Pose (2018), which was longlisted for the 2019 Ondaatje Prize. His nonfiction and criticism have appeared in Aperture, Art in America, Artforum, Granta, n+1, the New York Review of Books, and other publications. He was the inaugural recipient of the AICA-USA Irving Sandler Award for New Voices in Art Criticism and has received the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and the C/O Berlin Talent Prize for Theory. In 2020, Iduma was recognized in Apollo International Art Magazine’s “40 under 40 Africa” for the broad social impact of his work. I Am Still With You, his memoir on the aftermath of the Nigerian civil war, received a Silvers Grant for Work in Progress and will be published in March 2023 by Algonquin (US) and William Collins (UK). In 2022 Iduma was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction.

• Windham Campbell Prizes website - https://windhamcampbell.org/festival/2022/recipients/iduma-emmanuel

  Emmanuel Iduma
  In elegant, meditative vignettes that integrate art criticism, canny observation, and lyrical dispatches, Emmanuel Iduma invites readers to physically and spiritually observe the expansiveness of the world and its people.
  Play

  00:00
  02:20
  Mute

  Enable captions
  Settings
  Enter fullscreen

  Play
  Emmanuel Iduma is a Nigerian writer, editor, and photographer. The co-founder of Saraba (2009-2019), a non-profit literary magazine dedicated to publishing emerging writers in Nigeria and other parts of Africa, Iduma is also the author of two books, the novel The Sound of Things to Come (2016) and the nonfiction work A Stranger’s Pose (2018). A Stranger’s Pose blends several genres—memoir, photo essay, and travelogue—to evoke the rhythm of Iduma’s wanderings around the African continent. We follow him from Rabat to Yaoundé to Addis Ababa and back again. With each section, the book provokes and resists expectations of linearity, moving forward only to loop back, leaping ahead only to pause and linger. Again and again, Iduma draws our attention to what is absent, or odd, or unfamiliar. He considers photographs of dead relatives, drafts of unsent emails; he observes, with great care, how people walk, what they wear, and how they talk. Like Emerson’s “transparent eye-ball,” Iduma achieves a kind of unselving; nothing, he discovers, is too small or too strange for his notice. “The gift I received,” he writes, “was the freedom to come to terms with my own estrangement.” His essays and art criticism have been published in Granta, the New York Review of Books, Aperture, n+1, and Artforum, among other places. I Am Still With You, his memoir on the aftermath of the Nigerian civil war, is forthcoming from Algonquin (US), and William Collins (UK) in March 2023.

  It was a stunner, and still is, to be informed of the award of a prize of such magnitude and preeminence, to be listed alongside many writers I look up to. I am filled with gratitude to the Beinecke Library and remain keen with hope for the paths now made possible for me to tread.
  EMMANUEL IDUMA

• The Yale Review - https://yalereview.org/article/emmanuel-iduma-tender-light

  Tender Light
  The bond between photography and narrative
  Emmanuel Iduma

  Malick Sidibé Lancina Sanogo, l'ami de Mody vu de dos, 2002, gelatin silver print, 50 x 60 cm. Credit: © Malick Sidibe. Courtesy MAGNIN-A Gallery, Paris

  One evening, a mild-mannered pastor returns home from a photography exhibition. He is unsure of what to say to his wife. He goes into their bedroom and finds her asleep. So he decides to take a walk, as far as he can manage in the course of a half hour, at which point he imagines his wife might wake, anxious about his absence. He tries to think of nothing, to empty his mind of what he has seen and where he has been, but this proves impossible.

  He keeps straight on the road abutting his house. He is grateful for the fragmented chattering of strangers. I’m playing mind games, he thinks, and heads back after covering a mere dozen yards. The pastor is unsure of how to say to his wife: When I saw the photograph, I stopped believing in God.

  EIGHT YEARS AGO in New York, during my first year of studying for a graduate degree in art criticism, I wrote the preceding passage as the opening to a short story. My idea had been to tell a story in which a photograph served as the immediate catalyst of an irrevers­ible change in my protagonist’s life, a kind of parable on the power of images. Although I managed to complete it, I set the story aside.

  I had grown up in half a dozen Nigerian cities as the son of an itinerant Presbyterian clergyman and then completed an under­graduate degree in law—a course of study I’d pursued mainly out of curiosity and perhaps a desire to seem respectable, but without any real intention of making a living as a lawyer. After university, I published the novel-in-stories I’d written in the final year of my undergraduate degree. I also embarked on two road trips with pho­tographers—from Lagos to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and then from Lagos to Libreville, Gabon—arranged by Invisible Borders, the Nigerian-based arts organization for which I had agreed to blog about the minutiae of our journeys. My record of our time on the road began to veer into reflections on the photographs I saw being taken and recollections of the encounters that had precipitated them. In the process, I found myself drawn to the narrative poten­tial of photography: the hidden linkages I sensed between stories and snapshots. A few months later, after I had settled into my aca­demic life in New York, I became even more obsessed by the idea.

  The program I enrolled in at the School of Visual Arts in New York entailed an eclectic reading list and immersed me in an array of schools of thought—deconstructionism, poststructuralism, phenomenology—none of which had been familiar to me as an undergraduate studying the Nigerian legal system. I found myself desperate to counterbalance all that theory with narrative. In ret­rospect, I think this came from an anxiety over how to categorize myself, over the fact that I’d spent my adolescence and early twen­ties imagining myself as a novelist, yet had somehow ended up with a degree that wouldn’t guarantee a realization of my ambitions.

  I wanted to grow my faith in the beauty photography could deliver, and I hoped to do so through daily contemplative practice.

  When I began writing the story about the pastor, I thought, per­haps naively, that a story could simply be a vehicle for an idea. The idea in this instance was that a photograph could unsettle a viewer to such a degree that they would be led to question everything they’d known, particularly in relation to Christianity. I thought of anecdotes I’d heard of people who wept in front of paintings, or the despair that had led Kevin Carter—the South African photogra­pher who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of a starving child in Sudan—to commit suicide. I wanted to know the extent to which photography could trouble the waters of lifelong conviction.

  He reenters the bedroom and sees that his wife is awake. “Are you okay?” she asks, and he hates that she can see through him like that. His mouth is full with the words, yet he is barely able to utter them; language seems too narrow for his state of mind.

  He sees himself as he was in the National Museum. The gallery was spare, and each picture had stood on a makeshift column by itself. He recalls approaching the photograph and the exact rush of devastation he’d felt when he came to it. But his memory has erased the order of thoughts that had led him to doubt, and, ultimately, to refusal.

  “What did you say?”

  He speaks a little louder while his eyes follow a track of light across the room. He is ashamed to feel certain of what but not why. And even though he’s turned away, he can hear her rise. Perhaps she intends to ask him to say the words a third time while looking her in the eye.

  AFTER THE FICTIONAL PASTOR finally manages to inform his wife about his sudden crisis of faith, he writes a letter of resignation to the board of his church. In both cases, he cannot clearly artic­ulate how looking at a photograph has led him to arrive at such an instantaneous, momentous decision. Reading the story many times over, I, too, found myself unable to account for the pastor’s transformation. What was the connection between a photograph and a crisis of belief? And how had it forced a man to turn away from his God?

  When I returned to the story a few months after completing it, I thought it lacked exactitude. I felt that in order to describe the moment of deconversion with greater clarity, I needed to identify the specific photograph the pastor saw. Later in the story, the pas­tor describes the subject in the photograph as “having such eyes.” But because I had no specific image in mind, I was merely making up what I felt a photograph with such transformative power should look like: a portrait in which the subject’s eyes fixed an unsettling gaze on the viewer. Perhaps it would even be a photograph of suf­fering, like Carter’s: of a child’s body with features so dehumanized they sparked a new and seismic emotion in the pastor and caused him to doubt the existence of a benevolent God. But neither image seemed fitting or powerful enough to account for an instantaneous change to a pastor’s lifelong convictions. I abandoned the story.

  ONE DAY, BACK IN LAGOS eight years later, I recalled a portrait by the photographer Malick Sidibé, known for his studio por­traits of young, zestful countrypeople in Mali’s immediate post-independence years.

  I had returned from New York with an unusual educational background, or at least this was the unspoken feedback I got when I introduced myself in social settings. But I was grateful for my training in art criticism, which had instilled in me a new appreci­ation for the ways photographs could be taken, viewed, and writ­ten about. I spent my first year back in Nigeria assembling a list of works by African photographers that moved me: images that counterbalanced a sense of the mysterious with a tender depiction of human features. I included a few photographs by Sidibé—who had died a few years earlier, in 2016—in my list.

  Early in the new millennium, in a late phase of his career, Sidibé had begun inviting family members, friends, and neighbors into his studio to pose for portraits with their backs to the camera. One of those photographs—part of a series collectively named Vues de Dos (or “back views”)—is titled “Lancina Sanogo l’ami de Mody vu de dos [Lancina Sanogo, the friend of Mody seen from the rear].” That is as far as Sidibé goes in depicting the man’s identity, resulting in a specific kind of anonymity, a mystery not of name but of face.

  In his portrait, Lancina Sanogo, seen from the waist up, wears a wide-brimmed hat and what appears to be a khaki buttondown shirt and faces a blank background. The image draws the view­er’s attention to the man’s outline rather than his personality. It is concerned with composition, not documentation, and certainly not visibility. According to scholar Candace M. Keller, Sidibé’s Vues de Dos is a photographic take on what is known in Mande visual culture as dibí, defined in varying contexts as obscurity, restraint, opacity, or intrigue. In the photograph, what is seen is what is withheld from view.

  It was while I compiled my list of “tender photographs,” as I thought of them, that I realized that Sidibé’s portrait of Lancina Sanogo was hypothetically the kind of image that might have prompted the fictional pastor’s loss of faith in the short story I had written several years earlier. Seeing this photo at an exhibition, per­haps the pastor considers it a portrait of an everyman, which meant he would have seen it as a kind of self-portrait. Since the photo depicts a man with his back turned, it might also have seemed to the pastor a symbol of the rejection of faith. Both possibilities arise from the assumption that the pastor saw the image as a literal evocation of the inner turmoil already underway within himself. It struck me, then, that what was missing from my story was the context that could help the reader understand how one encounter—seeing a photograph as bare in composition as Sidibé’s—might become the flashpoint of a series of related, tumultuous events in someone’s life. When I wrote the story, I hadn’t given much thought to the pastor’s past, nor had I fully contextualized him as a character. Perhaps the photo of Sanogo’s back equally evoked, for me, how little I knew of my protagonist.

  Several months later, I bought a copy of In His Own Image, the English translation of Jérôme Ferrari’s 2018 À son image, a novel whose protagonist is a photographer. At the time, I was staying with my family in Norwich, England, and one afternoon went to the local Waterstones bookshop, where I first saw Ferrari’s book. Though I was not convinced that I needed it then, I recalled the novella days later and went to seek it out. It was no longer there, and neither could I recall its title or author. Disappointed yet unde­terred, I soon hunted it down in Book Hive, a smaller bookstore nearby.

  “When she’s fourteen, her uncle, a priest, gives her a camera,” notes the jacket description about the main character, a photogra­pher named Antonia. As I flipped through the book—and reflected on my compulsion, over the foregoing days, to rediscover and pur­chase it—I recalled again my own unpublished short story from seven years before. Could this be another link in an intuitive chain connecting my obsessions with photography and writing?

  So I thought I would read In His Own Image as a lesson in rec­onciling the practices of photography and religious faith through narrative storytelling. But I soon found myself swept up by the story itself. I read it in two charmed days. The novel announces Antonia’s death in the first chapter; the remaining eleven offer a series of flashbacks and overlapping backstories. In other words, the novel explores its ideas about photography and death through a sequence of combustible events and not, as in my story, through one mystifying instant. The narrative comprises a response to a photographic series rather than a single decontextualized photo.

  There is also skepticism in Ferrari’s novel—not toward God but toward photography. Antonia has a crisis of faith in the capacity of photography to deliver truth or meaning. She begins her career as a journalist assigned to cover local events for a small newspaper in Corsica. Bored by that, she takes an unpaid leave to cover the Yugoslav wars in the mid-1990s. Yet that, too, fails to bring her a sense of accomplishment. Antonia chooses not to develop the rolls of film she brings back from the war: “She doesn’t believe in sin, nor does she believe in the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world. But at least, as long as it is in her power, she, Antonia V., will add nothing to what that world already is.” At the moment of her untimely death, she is a wedding photographer who constantly snaps pictures of newlyweds. Her life’s story has indeed reconciled photography and faith, if from a slightly atheistic perspective. In Ferrari’s characterization, there was simply no way Antonia would believe that a photograph had the transformative power I seemed to think it did.

  AROUND THE TIME I finished reading the novel, I made the decision to consider myself a photographer in the same way I felt I was a writer. That is, to find through regimen a devotion akin to medi­tative prayer.

  I had always liked taking pictures but had never, until then, attempted to focus my enthusiasm. A couple of years back, my wife gave me a camera as a birthday gift. A Leica “bridge camera,” half­way between a point-and-shoot and a DSLR, it is bulky enough to give me a sense of professionalism when I carry it around. The gift—which could take photographs at a sufficient resolution—made me want to go beyond my dilettanteish interest. I wanted to grow my faith in the beauty photography could deliver, and I hoped to do so through daily contemplative practice.

  Photography has become a more or less welcome interruption in my writing life, almost complemen­tary to it.

  During my time in Norwich, I began to feel nostalgic about my study in my home in Lagos, a room on the second floor of a terraced building. The desk I usually worked at was black with a sheen like the glint of the moon. When searching for the next word to write, I’d often make a 180-degree turn to consider the clutter of buildings—the rows of roofs that made the sky a cramped surface—through the window behind me. The compound shared a fence with a tarpaulin-walled church, which often filled my view when I sat with my back to the desk. One day, after months of looking at it, I noticed that the church was being taken apart. Three men were standing on its roof, unscrewing bolts. I spent half an hour taking photographs of the paraphernalia of worship soon to be discarded. The sedate glamor of those once-precious items caught and held my eye for close to forty minutes. Thinking of it later, I realized that, just as in my abandoned story, the fact of my upbringing—as the son of a clergyman raised in manses—had made me attentive to evocations of faith.

  I shouldn’t be taking photographs of the church, I thought; I should be writing. I felt like Annie Dillard, who, in her memoir The Writing Life, recalls sitting at her desk and making a pen drawing of her window and the landscape it framed. “I drew the window’s aluminum frame and steel hardware,” she writes. “I outlined the parking lot and its tall row of mercury-vapor lights; I drew the cars, and the graveled rooftop foreground.” Then, in her recount­ing, she shuts the blind and tapes her drawing to the closed slats: “If I wanted a sense of the world, I could look at the stylized outline drawing.”

  Here, Dillard is urging herself to shift focus from an outer image and reckon instead with an inner one. In her view, time spent looking at the field outside the window—or the church below, in my case—will ultimately lead to unproductivity, a distraction from the writer’s primary vocation: the construction of narrative. I agree with her in theory. But, for me, photography has become a more or less welcome interruption in my writing life, almost complemen­tary to it.

  And so, when I returned to Lagos, I photographed the objects on my desk every day for several weeks. I stood with my back to the window, the only source of light to the room. The photographs I took—zooming in on piles of books, my computer keyboard, a cluster of open notebooks—were low-contrast. Yet it was the tender light from outside that kept me interested in angling my lens in all possible directions, seeking the various configurations of the objects I was surrounded by, and devoted to, while writing. Unlike Antonia, I was glad to add these images of my workaday objects to the world. And their obscure framing recalls Sidibé’s concept of dibí: of things or bodies or ideas that cannot ever be known in full.

  HERE’S HOW MY short story ends: the photograph the pastor has seen goes missing from the exhibition venue, and he is arrested, wrongfully, for having stolen it. As soon as he’s out on bail, it occurs to him that his wife is the culprit; she had hoped to bring about his reconversion by showing him the photograph again.

  My story was an exercise in testing whether or not an encounter with secular art could fracture Christian conviction or repair it, as the pastor’s wife had imagined. Wondering about this after I read Ferrari’s novel, I arrived at an answer more complex than a yes or no. I had found Antonia’s skepticism in In His Own Image liberat­ing: the sense that a photograph is contiguous with the worldview of the photographer who took it—the viewer is as responsive to what is outside the frame as to what is within it—is what makes Antonia ultimately abandon photojournalism. Yet this notion had also made me realize that I’d been mistaken to assume that the pastor’s deconversion would occur in an instant. The photograph could surely serve to trigger a chain of events for him, but the story I was trying to tell was of an encounter whose significance could only be worked out through a story with a much greater scope. There were far too many questions to constrain the pastor’s life to a few thousand words.

  The lesson was ultimately one of method. The story’s problem was twofold; I had made the formal frame too narrow to hold the pastor’s life, just as I had naively expected a single photo to capture an experience best explored through narrative. The cliché is true: writing a novel is like running a marathon. Or to use a more fitting analogy: the photographer with a 35mm camera can shoot rolls of film for weeks or months with the same blind, headlong motion as a novelist, making pictures whose narrative heart cannot be uncov­ered in a mere instant.

  EMMANUEL IDUMA is the author of I Am Still With You, a memoir on the Nigerian Civil War, and A Stranger’s Pose, a travelogue. Iduma was born and raised in Nigeria, and his nonfiction and criticism have received many honors, including the Windham-Campbell Prize in 2022.

Emmanuel Iduma. The Sound of Things to Come. Astoria, New York. The Mantle. 2016. 221 pages.

The Sound of Things to Come, a novel in eight apparently unlinked stories, portrays educated urban Nigerians. Its context external realities during and after Sani Abacha, its content the existential despair of characters shadowed by death, this demanding novel evokes the mystery of being.

Subtle threads connect disparate narratives wherein perspectives shift from third to first person, time shuttles back and forth, and ostensibly unrelated characters appear, vanish, and sometimes reappear elsewhere, often tangentially. But a central plot emerges that links the politics of church and state: the life of lie's academic community and the election for director of its interdenominational choir. Despite small stakes, the applicants scheme and the maddened loser seeks revenge. Church hierarchy thus mirrors the nation's, inviting corruption while promising influence to those whose narrow vision equates self-worth with control.

Style and thematic matrix create a sense of the uncanny. Terse but lyrical prose and often-cryptic dialogue suggest hidden depths. Woven throughout are fragments of a shared postmodern culture that brackets Dostoyevsky and Kate Chopin, Eliot and Mia Couto, Hollywood and Hollywood, Europop and hip-hop, email and Twitter, elliptical quotes, as from Tóibín's The Story of the Night and Mercier's Night Train to Lisbon, and bits of songs that sign both angst and "a new dawn," like Michael Bublé's cover of "Feeling Good" and Colbie Caillais "The Little Things." Together they convey alienation and the thirst for connection and meaning.

These characters confront the enigma of living within universal binaries--for example, time/eternity, finitude/infinity, life/ death, motion/stasis, freedom/prison. No easy task, as one suggests: "I could not calculate a simple formula for existence." Some, "trained not to see," adopt a willed blindness, a "fence in the head" that perpetuates cultural, religious, and ethnic stereotypes. Thus, when a young girl dies, having left home to create the music that "fills her" and heals another "wanderer," her parents cling to their belief that she is "not one of us." And two fathers come to understand that their refusal to transcend "inexhaustible boundaries" alienated their sons.

But narrative empowers others to brave the unknown and seek themselves. The inherent structures of psychiatry, philosophy, and art (especially literature, music, and photography) nurture memory and develop a vision that can detect "patterns in a patternless life" and engage with "the unknown parameters of existence." Pursuing clues in "the narrative of the subconscious," these characters learn to locate the spark (the novel's first edition was entitled farad--electrical charge) that "moves a man to go ashore." As the prescient Debbie counsels Frank and Goody early on, "We are all psychiatrists." Her words internalized, these two evolve from the first to the final story. Goody, Frank's "memory," leaves her soldier husband, choosing life above security, while Frank prepares to help the would-be choir director regain his vision.

Rejecting power as meaningful goal, this intricate puzzle novel, its medium the message, hauntingly bares the psyches of its characters, like all of us "travelers whose trip is ending," for whom "The story is a tragedy / But it's a story nonetheless."

Michele Levy
North Carolina A&T University

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Levy, Michele. "Emmanuel Iduma. The Sound of Things to Come." World Literature Today, vol. 91, no. 2, Mar.-Apr. 2017, pp. 76+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A647625017/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1fe6594e. Accessed 10 Jan. 2023.

I Am Still with You: A Reckoning with Silence, Inheritance, and History

Emmanuel Iduma. Algonquin, $27 (240p) ISBN 978-1-64375-101-6

Art critic and journalist Iduma (A Stranger's Pose) delivers an immersive memoir about his uncle and namesake, who disappeared during the Nigerian civil war in the 1960s. Iduma, an Igbo who was born and raised in Nigeria, wades through murky family history following his father's death in 2018, drawing on family interviews, visits to war sites, and academic research to piece together his uncle's last days and reveal the connection between his death and the political upheaval in Nigeria at the time. Iduma's uncle, who enlisted in the Biafran Army just before the war started, was killed after providing cover for his comrades. As Iduma grapples with his own grief, mirrored by his father's losses, including the death of Iduma's mother when he was a child, he wonders "how to transfer a man's consciousness to those he leaves behind." Throughout, Iduma reflects on the power of family to both unite and divide, and as he weaves his background into Nigeria's historical tapestry, he acknowledges how his heritage is reflected in his uncle's story ("To be Igbo in Nigeria is to be a victim," he concludes), eventually finding peace in his uncle's choice to sacrifice himself for others. Iduma's unraveling of the past is bound to leave readers eager to uncover their own family secrets. Agent: Alison Lewis, Frances Goldin. (Feb.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"I Am Still with You: A Reckoning with Silence, Inheritance, and History." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 51, 5 Dec. 2022, pp. 116+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A731123975/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4d2a2b1b. Accessed 10 Jan. 2023.

Iduma, Emmanuel I AM STILL WITH YOU Algonquin (NonFiction None) $27.00 2, 21 ISBN: 9781643751016

A pensive quest for the truths of a civil war in the author's homeland of Nigeria.

On July 6, 1967, "after a year and a half of cataclysms," Nigeria collapsed in a civil war based on ethnic divisions among the Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo peoples that had long simmered under decades of British colonialism. The Igbo, Iduma's people, occupied the region called Biafra, which calved off as a self-styled independent republic, causing the central government to declare war--which it called a "police action"--in order to keep Nigeria whole. After a genocidal conflict that lasted more than two years, Biafra was reassimilated into Nigeria. Born in 1989, Iduma grew up in a country where memories of the conflict were silenced. As he writes of his cohort, "we are a generation that has to lift itself from the hushes and gaps of the history of the war." After living in New York for years, he returned to Nigeria to seek answers to his many questions, not least the fate of an uncle who disappeared during the war. How did the other young men of his family survive? The author concludes that they must have been protected by warlordlike military officers who threw some soldiers into battle as cannon fodder while keeping themselves far from the fighting. One refrain that Iduma's father often voiced of his brother, he learns, was a simple question: "What if one day he returned from nowhere?" The chances of that remain slender, but, after all, other Biafrans lived in exile for years in places such as the nearby Ivory Coast before returning. In all events, Iduma is scarcely alone: A third of Biafran families, he reckons, "could speak of someone who did not return." Though his own findings are far from definitive, the author delivers a poignant story rescued from those silences and lacunae.

A powerful contribution to modern Nigerian history, particularly significant in an age of ethnic conflict around the world.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Iduma, Emmanuel: I AM STILL WITH YOU." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A731562248/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=06937df7. Accessed 10 Jan. 2023.

Levy, Michele. "Emmanuel Iduma. The Sound of Things to Come." World Literature Today, vol. 91, no. 2, Mar.-Apr. 2017, pp. 76+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A647625017/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1fe6594e. Accessed 10 Jan. 2023. "I Am Still with You: A Reckoning with Silence, Inheritance, and History." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 51, 5 Dec. 2022, pp. 116+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A731123975/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4d2a2b1b. Accessed 10 Jan. 2023. "Iduma, Emmanuel: I AM STILL WITH YOU." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A731562248/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=06937df7. Accessed 10 Jan. 2023.

• Media Diversified
  https://mediadiversified.org/2018/11/11/a-strangers-pose-by-emmanuel-iduma-cardyn-brooks-reviews/
  Word count: 625

  A Stranger’s Pose by Emmanuel Iduma | Cardyn Brooks Reviews
  AuthorMedia DiversifiedPosted onNovember 11, 2018CategoriesCultureTagsBook review, books, cardyn brooks, Emmanuel Iduma, writers of colour
  Cardyn Brooks reviews A Stranger’s Pose by Emmanuel Iduma
  by Emmanuel Iduma and Abraham Oghobase, et al.

  Cassava Republic Press November 20, 2018

  non-fiction travelogue memoir with photographs

  “I was making this trip because I chose to

  write a book about the Senegal River and

  its tributaries, and the lives of the people

  who lived along its banks.” [pg. 121]

  It might seem odd to start a discussion of A Stranger’s Pose by quoting a passage that’s located near the center of this travelogue as personal memoir, but doing so echoes the simultaneous awareness of being present in this present moment while also examining past moments and considering future possibilities. Emmanuel Iduma writes about the cultural flow between privilege, access to resources, and agency within the context of the geopolitical axis of the African continent, the European Union, and the United States. The trajectory and speed of this flow has been, and continues to be, shaped by colonial imperialist mechanisms that have morphed as they endure. With a sense of lyrical whimsy, seventy-seven numbered entries assembled from notes about dreams, encounters with other artists, letters to family and friends, poems, and contemplative essays caption black and white photos that confront readers in their stark contrasts of supple movement against desolate terrain and sharp geometric forms.

  Moving from the middle of A Stranger’s Pose back to the beginning of it in Teju Cole’s foreword, readers are asked to “Imagine a song… of care for those things that are seen by all but noted only by a stranger.” Further suggested in the foreword, music as a universal language of exploration that documents the generational evolution represented by Miles Davis to Ahmad Jamal and Ben Webster also provides a score for our shared human drama.

  If “all rivers are multilingual,” [pg. 13] then so are these questions that the primary author’s father asks his son and other riders on a commuter van: “How does this thing you do benefit humanity? How do you make money from it? How does it give God glory?” [pg. 52]

  In most of the images in which the primary author is the subject his gaze is isolated by the arrangement of his garments and directed at the observer in solemn challenge. To hone the focus of his purpose? To be seen with fresh eyes? Or maybe he seeks to be recognized by others and by himself.

  Emmanuel Iduma’s journey is a 21st-century incarnation of a privileged young man’s continental tour set in Africa rather than in Europe, although European influences abound. Plot points mapped on pages 102 – 103 chart the author’s nomadic course like a constellation of waves across land as he observes and engages his way from Mali, Senegal, Mauritania, Cote d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Nigeria, and other countries. When he states on page 165 that “A life of being away from home only to return tainted by wanderlust, unable to stay,” it reads as a melancholy confession, which leads to this conclusion on page 196, “To leave is to die a little.”

  A Stranger’s Pose works various angles of posing in physical posture, pretense or impersonation, assumed attitudes intended to impress others, asking questions, and embodying challenges. Its subtleties and depths share a narrative artistry with All God’s Children Need Walking Shoes by Maya Angelou and The Same River Twice by Alice Walker. It crisscrosses the African continent in paths reminiscent of Always Another Country by Sisonke Msimang.

• BellaNaija
  https://www.bellanaija.com/2020/03/book-review-a-strangers-pose-by-emmanuel-iduma/
  Word count: 1098

  Book Review: A Stranger’s Pose by Emmanuel Iduma
  I believe the objective of Emmanuel Iduma is beyond fact exposition; it can be viewed as the education on concepts, morals, and religion, likewise existential realities of the African people, tribe and society. It is one of the reasons why the book is a unique blend of travelogue, musing, poetry, and prose that transport the reader into a world of many encounters, preoccupied with the absence of home, estrangement from a lover and then family tragedies.

  Published 3 years ago on March 22, 2020By Ogunniyi Abayomi
  Emmanuel Iduma’s A Stranger’s pose will enlighten you on the culture, morals, and history that have built our identity as Africans. The memoir will captivate your mind, pondering on the images attached to each event and stories in the book; exposing facts that are unheard of among audience of African origin.

  I believe the objective of Emmanuel Iduma is beyond fact exposition; it can be viewed as the education on concepts, morals, and religion, likewise existential realities of the African people, tribe and society. It is one of the reasons why the book is a unique blend of travelogue, musing, poetry, and prose that transport the reader into a world of many encounters, preoccupied with the absence of home, estrangement from a lover and then family tragedies.

  The book began with an encounter the writer had while driving into Mauritania at sunset in a white E350 Ford van. The writer saw a duneland with houses built on it to imitate matchboxes. It was the day Eid-al-Fitr commenced across the globe. Men were walking back home from the mosque while women and children walked behind them happily. The writer observed these men with his nose pressed to the window of his van across the hill. The men wore a long, loose-fitting garment, mostly white and sometimes light blue. He observed them from behind, thinking of the word ‘swashbuckler’ – which is synonymous to the word ‘explorer’.

  He was moved by their self-satisfied bodies, dressed in their finest garment, walking to houses that look only seven feet high. He was jealous by the passion with which they walked, a lack of hurry – as if they possess the earth. The laid back demeanor by these men across the hill prompted the author to be like them. This decision marked the beginning of an adventure in the book.

  A Stranger’s Pose is an interesting collection of events, stories, interviews, and photographs – compiled together to create a travelogue. These compilations are encounters between the writer and the people; their culture, religion, situation, and language in African countries such as Mauritania, Senegal, Ethiopia, Mali, and Morocco. The book, being an exposition into the cultural, historical and religious setting, was adapted into art-evolving photography and artifact that explore concepts that are attached to an event using the element of poetry to create an imagery of the event. But we cannot forget the weird conversation with the ghost and the living, the interaction beyond dream paints an interesting angle to the mystic representation in his quest for adventure.

  This book is a combination of mystery, imagery, and history devised in an artistic form and structure. A curious journey became an adventure, creating an atmosphere of uncertainty by the narrative of each location. Every location in the book tells a story and these stories are embodied in an image or artifact to depict the writer’s thoughts and expression with a well-detailed story.

  The encounter in Mauritania, the aspiration of being like the man he met across the hills, is a clear insight into a quest away from home; it is a wanderer’s journey, seeking the unknown truth about the lifestyle of the people he met, the strange emotion and encounters remembered or imagined across an atlas of a borderless town.

  The narrative across each page of the book poses a challenge such as language barrier, religious and cultural differences, societal menace and cultural differences across each location the writer traveled to. Our question would be on how he managed to overcome these challenges while acquiring information about each event that was captured and narrated.

  It was visible in the third chapter of the book. The writer struggled with language in Lome, yet it was not escalated. The stranger knew he did not understand the French language yet he was not interrogated or queried while he took the pictures of walls, gates, and passageways.

  He realised in Chapter 5, in Bamako, Abidjan, and Casablanca that he was nothing without his interpreter. In the sixth chapter in Rabat, he was seen in the café, saying yes to every statement, irrespective of the tone used or questions asked. They described him as a clueless stranger and queried what he was doing in Morocco. Yet, he remained undeterred by the criticisms thrown at him. That scene illustrated the power a language wields in unlocking certain secrets about a location.

  There was also a personal history of the writer stating where he was coming from, how he had to deal with loneliness when his father traveled to America. He was too young to comprehend it and in the 19th chapter, he spoke extensively on how it shaped the man he turned out to be.

  The power of images and photographs was evident in the book; it is observed in certain pages and there are pictures that tell some stories about the people, places, and religion. Every story had an image attached to it; they created an interpretation of what the narrative represents. The writer had an in-depth interview on photography with Malick Sidibe Malian, the photographer in Chapter 11. In his interview, he described photography as an act of hunting. It is a deliberate and charismatic medium that takes decades to unravel itself. Malick Sidibe said photography was like a doctor – if you don’t touch, you do nothing. His interview was an exposition on the power of photography and what it represents.

  Aside from this concept and few summaries, the book talks about resilience as part of being African. Africa is a beautiful continent; it is blessed with beautiful landscapes, mountains, forest and springs across its society. The weather is warm and temperate. The ecological terrain is admired by tourists, compared to the intense ecological terrain in Europe and America. But are we living up to the potential, following what is being stated in the book?

• Headstuff
  https://headstuff.org/culture/literature/book-review-a-strangers-pose-emmanuel-iduma/
  Word count: 883

  Book Review | A Stranger’s Pose By Emmanuel Iduma
  By Eoin Madigan Last updated Nov 28, 2018
  Share
  A Stranger’s Pose, written by Nigerian author Emmanuel Iduma and published just a few weeks ago by Cassava Republic Press, is a somewhat strained blend of travel writing, memoir, poetry, and photography. It is essentially a collection of seventy-seven vignettes or snapshots – sometimes accompanied by actual photos – of the author’s travels in Africa, from Casablanca in the northwest, down the coast to Cameroon, then inland and eastwards all the way to Addis Ababa.

  The book’s layout and floating sense of time go a long way to reflecting the fragmentary nature of travel, with its attendant ups and downs. In one passage we join the author as a checkpoint guard hassles him for a bribe: “An important-looking man like you, he said, see how I have made you nothing!” In another, Iduma muses how a traveller is always “tainted by wanderlust,” a person “for whom all restless cities appear similar in size and in labyrinth.”

  There is this wonderful dissonance throughout the book: the tug of home and the allure of the distant horizon. There is the bittersweet meeting of old friends who, after eleven years apart, have become “the men who recognise in each other the culmination of teenage traits.” As well as old friends, there are dozens of fleeting acquaintances, often strained by language barriers, which nevertheless add lovely splashes of colour to the tales.

  Iduma does a wonderful job of exploring the traveller’s mindset, but he also manages to elicit the political from the personal with some mastery throughout.

  The spectre of colonialism is omnipresent and we can see today the choices of imperial administrators past. A fellow Nigerian tells the author: “A white man came here. He put us together over a hundred years ago. […] When he left, did we sit down to say, Okay, this white man joined us together despite our irreconcilable cultural differences? No, we didn’t.” As with many former British colonies, Nigeria is intimately familiar with the legacy of arbitrary borders.

  Advertisement

  The shadow of Europe’s colonial excesses in Africa is everywhere, woefully impossible to escape. It reaches back centuries, to the transatlantic slave trade, through Leopold II of Belgium’s nightmarishly genocidal exploitation of the Congo, and infects the present day as tens of thousands of refugees flee sub-Saharan Africa for the Mediterranean coast where “they risk deportation and the harshness of the sea, and immigration officials armed by the European Union.”

  Indeed – at the risk of perpetuating a Eurocentric reading of African literature – it is difficult not to think of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness while delving into Iduma’s travels. A Stranger’s Pose is an infinitely more nuanced portrayal of Africa than Conrad’s, of course, as it highlights the continent’s heady mixture of ethnicities, languages, and beliefs. Beyond this sometimes intoxicating kaleidoscope, a simple truth forms throughout the work: everyone he encounters are simply humans trying to make the best of their lives.

  Some of the descriptive passages are more vivid than the photos scattered throughout the book. In Abidjan, the author visited “an old sculptor who lived with the debris of the dead: installed as dolls and skulls, propped by decaying wood,” and possessing “the diaphanous quality I associate with the netherworld.”

  Given that this is a travelogue interspersed with black and white photos, there are many interesting instances of ekphrasis, which is the verbal representation of visual representation e.g. a poem about a statue. The most famous example of this textual interplay is likely Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats. In A Stranger’s Pose we are given the rare ekphrastic treat of the photographer and the author often being one and the same person. Speculation thus gives way to certainty and reality. One photo of a woman in the desert is preceded by the commentary that, “Mauritania was referred to as le vide, the vacuum, by early French administrators…” Iduma then asks us, of the woman “surrounded by nothing but sand and sky. Is she pictured in a vacuum?”

  More interesting still, or so I thought, were the descriptions of some photos that were absent from the book: ekphrasis without the visual. A corollary of Iduma’s gift as a photographer is his magnificent facility in describing photographs. Some of the images he conjures of photos he has seen but we have not, are somewhere near magical for their vivacity and immediacy. The book is worth picking up for this alone.

  Towards the end, we are allowed to feast on some meatier prose in the form of letters both sent and unsent to friends and acquaintances, and these are a sweet way of leading us to the fragmented tale’s end. This lovely book will almost certainly awaken the wanderlust in you, but not without a healthy appreciation for what you’ll inevitably be leaving behind. After all, “Partir est mourir un peu. To leave is to die a little.”

  A Strangers Pose Is Available here

  Featured Image found here

• Paperback Social
  http://paperbacksocial.com/2019/10/08/book-review-a-strangers-pose-emmanuel-iduma/
  Word count: 531

  Book Review: A Stranger’s Pose, Emmanuel Iduma
  OCTOBER 8, 2019
  A Stranger's Pose Emmanuel Iduma book review www.paperbacksocial.com cassava republic
  By chance (or maybe not) Emmanuel Iduma sums up this book perfectly himself in a couple of sentences about halfway through the book:

  ‘But faces aren’t mirrors. Suppose we look long enough at others to discover their secret impulses, could we understand our own in the process?’

  A Stranger’s Pose seems to be a series of introspections Iduma puts together by learning about himself through interacting with people he meets on his travels. His memories of lovers, his shared grieving. What do his thoughts and interpretations of other people’s actions or words say about him, his history, his outlook? I’m aware that this sounds incredibly narcissistic but it’s not!

  The book is made up of 77 brief vignettes (some just a paragraph of thoughts) and accompanying monochrome photographs put together during his travels across a number of major African cities. It’s non linear as Iduma moves from Addis Ababa, Lagos, Casablanca etc – so gives the effect of a random access to thoughts. The photographs are beautifully executed by acclaimed African photographers including Malick Sidibie, who tells him that ‘Photography is a charismatic medium’. It definitely is here.

  pages and pages of thought in some sort of dream state

  Unpretentiously lyrical, sometimes poetic, sometimes even funny, this travelogue/ memoir is a beautiful piece of work. Iduma mentioned in an interview I read somewhere that he was trying to connect his memory and imagination. I think he succeeds in doing exactly that, the result being pages and pages of thought in some sort of dream state. The idea of closing that gap between memory and imagination is fascinating to me because I think that’s what nostalgia really is- a romanticised , hazy version of what we remember.

  Absolutely loved the photographs, found myself looking a few times at each one. Sometimes Iduma included a simple, brief description of the photo, prompting you to look for things you might have missed in moments that seemed to be almost meaningless in their simplicity. One of my favourites was reminiscent of Jamal Shabbazz’s work but with the subjects in African attire- I’m a massive fan of combining the African aesthetic with 70s-80s-90s-2000s cars, buildings- anything really! Probably the effect of being a Ghanaian who grew up in London.

  There are alot of ‘but why did you tell me that?’ moments to be had while reading this. Probably due to mundanity of descriptions if every day life while Iduma allows the reader to follow his thoughts.

  I have absolutely no idea why but from the first page, this book made me think of Frank Ocean’s song White Ferrari. Maybe because it manages to be a little profound while staying minimalistic.

  Although very simple, there’s definitely something special about A Stranger’s Pose that is difficult to pin point

  A Stranger’s Pose was published by Cassava Republic in October 2018

• Bookshy
  http://www.bookshybooks.com/2018/10/emmanuel-idumas-strangers-pose-my.html
  Word count: 1311

  EMMANUEL IDUMA'S A STRANGER'S POSE: MY THOUGHTS
  BY BOOKSHY - 18:57

  Between August 30, 2017 and December 13, 2017, writer and art critic Emmanuel Iduma shared a series of vignettes and images on his Instagram page - with the hashtag #astrangerspose. In that period around 23 of these photos and vignettes were shared. Less than one year later, some of these images appear in Emmanuel Iduma's soon-to-be released book, A Stranger's Pose.

  What appears to be the first image in Emmanuel Iduma's #astrangerspose series on Instagram

  Published by Cassava Republic, and out in Nigeria and the UK October 16, 2018 and in the US November 17, 2018, A Stranger's Pose has been described as "an evocative and mesmerising account of travels across different African cities". The blurb further describes it as "a unique blend of travelogue, musings and poetry".

  A Stranger's Pose begins in Mauritania. Emmanuel Iduma is "in a white E350 Ford van ... driv[ing] into a Mauritanian sunset"

  Today Eid ul-Fitr begins. Men are walking back from mosques, women and children trailing them, sure-footed celebratory. I see all this with my nose pressed to the window. The men wear long, loose-fitting garments, mostly white, sometimes light blue. I watch them from behind, and think of the word 'swashbuckle'. I am moved by these swaggering bodies, dressed in their finest, walking to houses that look only seven feet high. I envy the ardour in their gait, a lack of hurry, as if by walking they possess a piece of earth.
  I want to be these men.

  This first chapter is half a page. Half a page is enough to clearly inform you of what you are getting into when you decide to read A Stranger's Pose. By Chapter 2 - which is probably around three-quarters of a page long - we meet "a relative who requested anonymity". A relative who after Iduma recounted stories of his travels asked him to "take me with you on your journeys". Simply put - this is exactly what Emmanuel Iduma does with A Stranger's Pose. Through poetic writing, Iduma takes you along on the journey. You feel like you are there - on these different journeys - every step of the way.

  Through Iduma's travels, we go to Mauritania, Lome (as part of a West African book tour), Kouserri (twenty-five kilometres from N'djamena), as well as N'djamena, Dakar, Rabat, Nouakchott, Bamako, Abidjan, Addis Ababa, Douala, Yaounde, Nouadhibou, Khartoum, Goree Island. In Nigeria, we go to Lagos, Benin City, Abuja, Asaba, Umuahia, Enugu. I haven't captured all the places we encounter. A map in the middle of the book helps us place the different African countries and cities Emmanuel Iduma visits during his travels.

  Iduma meets many people along the way. People whose stories are as much a part of A Stranger's Pose as Iduma's own stories. Khadija who worked in the building he was residing while in Rabat, Serge the caretaker of the motel he stayed at in Abidjan, Salih in Mauritania who lives alone, and will not get married as "women are too complicated". These are some of the people we meet.

  The story - the journey - isn't linear. Then again, neither are our memories, and the ways in which we remember things and tell our stories. We may start off in Mauritania, then head off to Lome, and many pages later we are back in Mauritania. This is what also makes it feel like Iduma is telling only you a story - as he remembers it, or should I say recounts it. That is, his travels - be it difficult experiences, such as obtaining visas or something unique/beautiful about that city he visited, or the period at which he visited the place, or the person(s) he encountered on this trips.

  Iduma is very observant. The things he notices and captures in the book make you aware of just how. Iduma is able to capture not only the sense of a place, but also the sense of people in those places he visits and even their moods and their feelings. A Stranger's Pose also gives a sense of be/longing. How do you get to and from a place? Especially if you are an African (a Nigerian) visiting other countries in Africa? What is it really like to be in a place where you don't understand the language? How do you navigate these spaces?

  At the same time, this book is more than observations of a young Nigerian man travelling within Nigeria, and across a number of African cities. In some parts, it also feels like a book about searching - especially in the chapters focused on "home" (by home, I am referring to Nigeria). A Stranger's Pose doesn't end far away, but closer to home - in Iduma's ancestral hometown. I won't give away too much, but Iduma is searching for something and towards the end writes a passage that made me think not only of a stranger's pose but a stranger's glance.

  I am yet to mention the photographs that accompany this book - around 40 if I counted correctly. Photographs taken by Siaka Traore, Tom Saater, Dawit L. Petros, Abraham Oghobase, Jide Odukoya, Emeka Okereke, Stephen F. Sprague, Adeola Olagunju, Eric Gottesman, Paul Marty, Michael Tsegaye, and Emmanuel Iduma himself. Forty photographs that also stay with you long after you finish the book.

  One of the photographs that feature in A Stranger's Pose. Source: Slideshare

  Emmanuel Iduma is an art critic, and if you have read his photo essays, such as The Colonizer's Archive is a Crooked Finger, it makes sense that photographs would feature in this book. For me the photographs also made me remember the stories even more. I am struggling to find the right words to describe it. For now I will say, it humanised an already very human story. Still, I want to know how, and why, the photographs were selected? Did the vignettes/stories come first, and photos come after? Or did the photographs jog a specific memory that Emmanuel Iduma was then compelled to write?

  I also haven't touched on the books mentioned in this book - including Yvonne Owuor's Dust, Ben Okri's Famished Road, Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, John Berger's Photocopies, Breyten Breytenbach's Intimate Strangers. There are also a few films mentioned in this book.

  Pin on Pinterest

  Travel writing - particularly in the African context - tends to be dominated by a Western perspective. Indeed, back in 2013, Fatimah Kelleher wrote about travel writing and Africa in the 21st century
  Over the last 400 years however, travel literature has been dominated by western colonial and post-colonial viewpoints (which in turn have been dominated by the upper and middle classes) that have contributed to the larger lens through which places like Africa are viewed globally.
  Kelleher followed this up in 2014 with a reading list of ten African and African Diaspora travel writing - some of which were included in a 2014 list on African travel writing for this blog. It is extremely refreshing to read writing about travels on the African continent by an African - in this case a Nigerian. With Emmanuel Iduma's book adding to a canon of travel memoirs/books that are slowly moving the genre - when it comes to writing about 'Africa' - away from the Western gaze.

  I don't tend to quote myself, but I end with something I tweeted after I finished A Stranger's Pose:
  I savoured every word, every sentence, every paragraph, every image. As I got to the last line of the last page ... the only word I have in my vocabulary to describe this book is 'beautiful'.

• 7venhillsmedia
  https://7venhillsmedia.wordpress.com/2012/07/13/and-there-was-a-current-they-called-it-farad-a-review/
  Word count: 668

  …and there was a current. They called it Farad! A review
  Posted on July 13, 2012 by 7venhillsmedia
  Book Title: Farad

  Author: Emmanuel Iduma

  Publisher: Parresia

  Pages: 207

  Immediately I finished reading Emmanuel Iduma’s novel “Farad, I felt the need to tell others about it. Not as a professional reviewer, which I am not, but as a reader pleased with a book bought with hard-earned Naira. I write with a thought gnawing at the back of my mind that Farad should be left for the reader to discover; as such, I will try not to give too much away.

  Advertisements

  REPORT THIS AD

  You know how you at times stand on a balcony, watching strangers go by; wondering where they are from, where they are going and what lives they lead? Or how you enter a church, a classroom, an office, and wonder about the people there; what they are thinking, what’s responsible for those sad eyes, secretive smiles and angry faces? Well that is Farad, a painting of random people linked by a current–in this instance a university campus church.

  You know how u start a novel with preconceived notions of what you’d see inside. You might not necessarily know the story beforehand, but you take for granted that the story’s structure would be usual, with a beginning, middle and an end—not necessarily in that order. Farad is not one of those novels. Yes, it does have a beginning, and an end, however there is nothing like your conventional middle and even the end is not defined by the journey there.

  Farad is Emmanuel Iduma’s first novel and it shows the signs of great things to come. I am sure the book will generate a buzz. It is autobiographical enough to give the discerning an insight about the author (a certain friend of his that we know got honourable mention), and fictionalised enough to create the sort of balance talented writers have a penchant for.

  I started reading as I do most other novels, without recourse to the blurb and statements from reckoned-with writers that appears on the cover and first pages. However, by the time I was done with part one, I had to take a pause to read what the aforementioned known writers had to say about the writer and his craft and found myself agreeing with every one of them. Emmanuel Iduma is a master storyteller whose natural intelligence shines through without effort.

  Emmanuel Iduma’s voice is his own and his style original. He did away with those unsightly italics that we gifted to our native words when writing them in English, then he went further to create his own words where conventional English words failed to convey the feeling sought. Don’t seek for a dictionary to find the meaning of eneminize and eneminization—we know what they mean. Also, he wrote in American English, the language of a greater number of the literature books we read here.

  Farad suffers, not from the author’s lack of skill, but from its editor’s inability to detect small-small sequencing issues. Clear examples of these are on page 13 and 37.

  You’ll shake off these little misses, that’s if you see them, and should drink off the well of Iduma’s wide reading as names of books, authors and quotes finds resting places across the length of Farad. I found Farad pleasurable reading and happily recommend it for anyone willing to sink his/her teeth into the work of a talent that the world should be on the lookout for.

  Advertisements

  REPORT THIS AD

  Before I forget, Mazi Iduma, it’s Igbo, not Ibo. It’s a new age, let’s also stop using oyibo misspellings of our indigenous names.

  Mazi Nwonwu

• The Silk Route
  http://bookandfilm.blogspot.com/2012/08/farad-ising-nigerian-storytelling.html
  Word count: 624

  Thursday, August 16, 2012
  Farad-ising Nigerian storytelling
  Nigerian writing is best known for its intensely beautiful storytelling, wrapped on personal journeys and narcissistic tales. It has so many challenges, from generation to generation. Now, a new generation of writers is making its mark, from poetry to fiction.

  Much has changed since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote Purple Hibiscus. Helen Oyeyemi captured the world with Icarus Girl and made lots of money. A number of ambitious young Nigerian writers began to appear on the scene keen enough to experiment with new storytelling techniques – and practically reach as wide an audience as possible. They started writing beautiful prose and spinning words to recreate, to imagine a new world.

  Emmanuel Iduma is one of the most challenging voices in Nigerian literary scene, writing a book that is convoluted, but looks very slim. He has written the novel to engage and enrage audiences. His novel, Farad is about the world: it tells stories about people. It is completely peopled with mad men, lovers, politicians, teachers, musicians and people that Iduma loved. His arrival onto the scene is at once, charming and intimidating. His voice is solid, but what he lacks, however, is the power to keep the reader awake. Sometimes, when I read Iduma’s prose, I sense a show-off, a degree of arrogance from the writer’s part, trying very hard to convince the reader that he is very intelligent. I slept once, reading Farad. Or even twice, but I continued, because the prose charmed me from the beginning. What works for him is his total control over his language and diction.

  There are dozens of novels published in Nigeria all the time. Many of them don’t get read. Many of them are trapped in a dozy world, where the writers are completely focused on filling up pages with words and not completely concentrated on telling stories. For the most part, a novel is practically a journey of tales. What makes Farad more beautiful is the voice, the tension and the tenacity with which the words are spun. Just like Jose Saramago, whose beautiful prose could be found in Iduma’s voice, Iduma tries very hard to make people laugh, but he completely lacks a sense of humour. If his job is to be a comedian, he totally fails. This does not mean that he has not written a magnificent tale about the world. It amazes me how he could, at such a young age, be able to capture the world the way he does in this novel. It appeared to me that an artist was painting on a canvas; scattered but beautifully scattered.

  I had a tough time trying to keep track of the characters, although it justifies the fact that fiction is life. It is like a train journey. You don’t get to end your journey with everyone. There are stations and people get off and others join. This is just the way Farad reads. Just like notes in music, it goes up, up and down and down and then up. You miss the characters, as they jump into different characters and you find more characters emerging. If there is nothing good about Farad, it is the musicality in the voice. It reads like something from the heavens, yet, there are many issues with the book. In totality, the author needs to understand that storytelling is a different game; that experimentation is very hard. Whatever way, there is joy in his voice, which is appealing. Yet, the book lacks that solid appeal that will readily stage the writer as a storyteller, which is the most important thing.
  Posted by Onyeka Nwelue at 10:51 AM

• Seeking Radical Revelation
  https://oluseunonigbinde.wordpress.com/2012/08/16/farad-a-review/
  Word count: 561

  Farad – A Review
  Prancing between plots of a troubled Northern region and a university whose chapel’s choirmaster is facing revolt from the clergy and the choir, Iduma’s prose Farad reeks of exciting characters. With well-cut language, subtly revealing its writer’s knowledge about classic books and topical texts, Farad takes the reader on a journey across the minds of converging characters living by on a cliff; they needed help. Help to the wayward lady whose memory sank after meeting Abacha in bed or to a confused life of young man whose sister was run over by a bus while listening to her short songs. For those who sought help from the thugs of an election violence, Reverend father Muna was a harbinger of hope in a polarised Jos community. Little could a Reverend father do to redeem souls of a violent clan as he also sought salvation after handing over his mother to death.

  The novel assembles people who tried to affirm themselves of their true calling but fate hanged them by the balls. Being contrite after seeing their loved ones who seemingly pursued happiness gone, a brother suffers a career crisis after losing his music-drunk sister to a running truck; another one longs to preserve the museum collections of a sister-in-law run over by a bus; an overbearing father goes weary after his son left on a journey never to be seen or heard.

  Farad comes with superb narratives quickening the pulse of a reader to find knots of characters in the loosely connected chapters. It reminds of one Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel which combined fine prose with sweet scent of poems. Farad disrupts a love story usually found between the sheets or trysts under an apple tree. Rather, it outlines an uncompleted love anecdotes in Frank, Goody and Ella or Chika and Mosunmola. In a stream of thoughts, it could bring despair when you think erotic love story has just begun – of a Reverend father Muna and Taibat in an hazy night of flying emotions or of Chika and Mosunmola, denied another kiss by cancer.

  Center to the prose is a university chapel and its worshippers reliving thier past lives and how it connects the struggle of veteran choirmaster in his silver jubilee of stewardship. After caught filling his seed into a female chorister, Dr Addo led a plot to save his friend, the choirmaster, from the weight of Okon’s pen. A mirror of the society as after spent energy of the youth to replace a veteran choir leader, another old Professor takes up the mantle again.

  Farad ends with the beginning, leaving its middle as a shuffled jigsaw. It blurs the lines between insanity of Lekan at the end, extreme irrationality of Moyosore at the middle and memory gaps of Ella in the opening pages. Born 1989, Emmanuel Iduma proves to be of the Generation Y as he polished his lively tenses with a stream of tweets.

  Wake up in the morning. Bear your silence. Do some face washing. Find Farad that gleams with fine printing. In the end after reading this swift and gorgeous piece remember the referenced words of Colm Toblin ‘We saw nothing, not because there was nothing but because we had trained ourselves not to see’.

• Critical Literature Review
  http://criticalliteraturereview.blogspot.com/2012/08/farad-by-emmanuel-iduma.html
  Word count: 1373

  FRIDAY, 31 AUGUST 2012
  "Farad" by Emmanuel Iduma

  ©Joseph Omotayo
  @omotayome

  Perhaps my want of descriptive words is due to the unusual nature of this book. Imaginably, I must just admit Farad is innovative and avoid any struggle with confusing adjectives. In truth, I earnestly searched for words to deconstruct Farad with. It is a novel as labelled; a collection of stories in passing; and a melting mixes of consensual resolutions. However, Farad is never to be grouped. Iduma’s writing proficiency surges with a new kind of independence roaming freely. Farad allows its characters to reel out personal concerns, albeit in a confident way. The reader is beforehand dazzled with beautiful expressions and later sponged into the characters’ travails and yearnings.

  This book is an experimental fulfilment of the uncommonly common. It is broken into eight different stories with unrelated plots. This is surprising. This style will definitely make you angry. The stories are disjointed but united in denouement. After everything, you will also grieve over your taste for normalcy. Everything about this book is resplendently different. Iduma is a daring writer; and this debut does not portray otherwise. Farad is a collage; a delicate calligraphy; a head with multiple faces. Though its resolution is single, the divergent parts are necessary.

  D.H. Lawrence thus described a good novel in this manner; “…it can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness and can lead our sympathy from things that are dead.” That balances well with what Farad is. Farad thoroughly searches through the complexity of human existences and the differences of religion discoloured by deceitful ethnicity. It goes on to attune them with the simple yet delicate issues of everyday worries – the daily worries that easily connect with our feelings. Farad is authoritative in its distinctness, it despises the dead way of novel writing.

  This book is that which you call it and what you think it is not. Both meanings are in the contradiction of your thinking. Iduma writes with such poetry that he makes us parts of everything in the book.

  “To enter her room would have been to stay in water while drowning, to hit my head on the wall when already bleeding” (pg. 103) “I begin to think that mirrors should be like Photoshop, that I should be able to look into them and see my face in greyscale and sepia” (pg. 94) “The vicarage had been built forty years earlier. Sometimes, living there, I felt I was part of an archaeological narrative.” (Pg. 63)

  Farad: Reading 5/8

  Memory Band >-> Ella is stuck in memories of horrible scenes and personal encounters. Frank becomes her only passage from incoherent mutterings. In seeking Frank’s help, emotions will be toyed with, for there will be flooding questions of the hurriedly flung affair between Frank and Goody; Goody’s mother’s disapproval of Frank; Chris’ marital lifestyle and the cause of Abacha’s death. But since all these will be unravelled only if Frank attends to Ella’s sickly state, Frank will, in trying to heal Ella’s memories, make discoveries about his life, his relationships and the psychology of the human mind. The memory band is elastic and when stretched, will also reveal the harsh beauty of the Lekes. Everything is a Memory Band of dreams collectively shattered and quickly salvaged in chips. This is what a memory is; a collection of fragmented pasts gummed into relevance and worthlessness. The story sets in Ife.

  One Man >-> Iduma is creatively good. He intelligently leeches off the Jos crisis to create the displacement of beliefs in the grand scheme of things. One Man tells what one is used to with a touch of colour. Munachimso is the One Man. He is the one who crosses the ethno-religious boundary. Even when he sees death, he dares it. Muna is an unusual bred of a priest and a man of disdainful history. This story tapers his setting in Ife.

  Helper >-> There is a gifted side to separateness. Ugo may not be understood, yet her life bears great influence on those who must have encountered her. Her family thinks she is the crazy one and later considers hers a worthy destiny. For the love of Ugo, her brother becomes lost. Music finds him; for that is what Ugo stands for. This also sets in Ife

  A Father’s Son >-> This reads more of Iduma’s life. There is an inclusion of his recent lives in this story. Iduma is a current participant of Trans-African Photography Project and so is the son in this story who follows his photography passion to Mali. Iduma studied Law at Ife, the father’s son does too. I only hope Iduma is not as frustrated as this father’s son is.

  The Sound of Things to Come >-> Mo’s dreams presage many happenings. Above all, it bodes Beams’ disenchantment from her routine cycle and Edwin’s lonliness.

  The eight different stories are pieces of a central whole. They fit together as you progress in the reading. They all are interlocking experiences of the presented characters.

  Spotting the Slips

  I am familiar with Iduma’s writings. I have read many of his essays. It is just so unfortunate that Iduma can’t prevent his essayistic language from smearing his narrative. This is so unfortunate indeed. As one reads on, one almost cannot separate the voice of the author from the characters and one character from the other. They all seem to speak with the forceful tone that comes with Iduma’s uniformed style of writing essays. Although the dictions are crafty, they carry a rigid tone that leaves no room for individuality of voice. That might have worked if the book is majorly mono-characterised. But with a novel that seeks to unify various characters in their complexities; it really pulls it down.

  There are some contradictions and inconsistencies too, though minor and could possibly escape passive reading. On page 81;

  “I didn’t have my brother’s email address, and I didn’t want to guess.”
  This statement sounds outright lame. Can an email address ever be guessed? It does not fit and shouldn’t have been included. If the trait of the character that says this suggests a low-intelligent personality, that might have been permitted. You don’t guess an email, you know it.

  There is another one on page 42;

  “In those moments, he saw or imagined how Leke was shot. His memory painted a picture of Leke stepping out of his car; he must have been confused at all the noise around him, all the people with green branches, all the parked cars – which had made him park his car in the first place. He imagined how, when the first shot rang, Frank must have tried to enter his car but failed, given the number of people who had gathered around him, begging to be let into his car.”
  I really can’t understand how Leke turns Frank here. The mistake may be slight but it is misleading and confusing all the same.

  Expressions on page 2 and 75 were almost identical.

  “Do you want anything?’…he began to think anything could mean a drink or a purpose for coming.” (Pg 2)
  And then on page 75;

  “You want anything?” I asked. After I asked this question, I felt foolish. I realized it sounded as though I was asking if she wanted to drink..
  If the same hospitality discomfort between Frank and Goody also plays out between Muna and Taibat, there are other totally different expressions that can achieve that. Using those similar expressions do not show the uniformity in the common mistake made in hospitality, it only hints on dearth of creative expressions.

  Iduma can’t be wholly blamed for these loopholes, the editor should be.

  Into your reading list I commend Farad.

Word Count