Jude Dibia's Blackbird is an engaging book - and an important narrative. This book gracefully charts Dibia's upward trajectory as the writer of Walking with Shadows and Unbridled. With Blackbird, Dibia has firmly established himself as a Nigerian writer of stature Let me just say that Blackbird is one of the very few truly credible looks at contemporary Nigeria since the end of military rule. Dibia does this by allowing the story to showcase the seething resentments of an impotent people being suffocated by the mean currents of freewheeling capitalism and insensitive thieves posing as leaders. In Nigeria, as Dibia shows so eloquently, no laws protect the newly free. Dibia gently powers the novel with convincing prose that unfortunately would have sizzled even more in the hands of a practiced editor, "The ocean refused to be still; it took more, claimed more, and retreated less but paradoxically the hungry sea left behind more of its unwanted children, its vomit littering Scorpion's little patch of beach-front: a seagull's skull, uncapped beer bottles, horse scat, empty packets of cigarettes, the left foot of a size twelve shoe, a dead army of used condoms, and an old deflated football."here
- Ikhide
No comments:
Post a Comment