Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: My Novel

Gracias el Rabbi,

I appreciate your interest in my made up story, The Word Bank. Indeed, no one was born with a dictionary sticking in the mouth. It is indubitable that in the beginning there was no word. Verbalism came later, then quickly followed by forbidden words, censorship, and sedition trials. Stolen words are also contested in court as intellectual property, but Castro told doubting journalis that no one has a copyright over the alphabets, and so he has every right to copy medical textbooks to train doctors for free without paying royalties that are so paltry they should be called peasantries.  

Realismo is stranger than fictionaliusmo. It was Prophet Edward Said who revealed to us in Orientalismo that when Philology concluded that all human languages, just like all human beings earlier, evolved from a single mother tongue in Africa about 150,000 years ago, the French empire banned the teaching of philology in 1850. The ban was only broken by Noam Chomsky in 1950 with his general theory of linguistics, showing that it is ridiculous to believe that there is a language with no connection to the original word.

Rabbi, you are growing lazy o. It is only a novella. You should read the short thing before critiquing it. I hope that you will read before you complain, it no cost muchas denario.

Thanks for the flattery of comparing my imagination to those of great writers like Kafka.

Biko

On Wednesday, 23 September 2026 at 10:51:24 GMT-4, Cornelius Hamelberg <corneliushamelberg@gmail.com> wrote:

Don Agozino

( I almost wrote Don Ago-zion)

Freedom , freedom O freedom 

( including freedom of speech) yes, 

about the beginningless beginning, yes, 

therefore, please permit me this little 

pedantic extravaganza

Enjoy , yes, 

but this is very elementary, 

dear Watson: 

and exactly what do you mean by

 “In the beginning there was no word” ?  -  

(“ until Africans invented language and shared it with the rest of the world.”)  ?

Perish the thought ! 

Is that kind of ahistorical & fictional Afrocentric thinking 

not sheer blasphemy and heresy?

Is it not written in the New Testament - so called , in John 1.1, 

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” ?

 So exactly where are you coming from with the preposterous idea , quite a tall claim, that “In the beginning there was no word until Africans invented language and shared it with the rest of the world.” ?

And exactly where was the Tower of Babel? 

Do you not risk being charged by the ecclesiastical powers that be, with “impiety and corrupting the youth”? 

Sticking to the historical narrative, as Sis Gloria would gladly like to attest, the Ancient Egyptians developed papyrus, and according to AI (higher intelligence Trump’s SI) when it comes to the first alphabet “Semetic-speaking turquoise miners in the Sinai Peninsula (around Serabit el-Khadim) created the earliest known alphabetic script, known as Proto-Sinaitic, around 1800 BC. “

Anyway,

Kudos ! Mazel Tov ! Turu ugo !

Once upon a time there was 

Oliver Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

then Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose

followed by Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

followed by  Philip Roth waxing erotic with The Breast

followed by Onwubiko Agozino’s The Word Bank 

As far as I can remember, I have always wanted to recommend this book to Chidi ( Opara) : Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry by W. N. Herbert and Matthew Hollis

Since The Word Bank is all of 116 pages , it’s still too early to imagine the full trajectory of whatever given intentions are at its foundations, after having only read the opening pages generously available in the free sample , but since it’s ostensibly about Nigeria a veritable complex microcosm of the post-colonial English Language Empire and its politics, I suppose that in the final analysis, the moral of that latest novel "The World Bank” is likely to be“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men stay silent”

On Wednesday, 23 September 2026 at 13:34:29 UTC+2 Biko Agozino wrote:

In the beginning there was no word until Africans invented language and shared it with the rest of the world. But if it was up to some, words would be owned only by the rich and the rest of us will need copyright permissions to use the alphabets that have already been patented. Years to come children will be laughing at us and wondering how we  were made to buy words, save words, invest words, and struggle over words. It is a dystopian Sankofa Futurism. Enjoy.

A new novel published is not always the first written. There is more where that came from.

Biko

On Tuesday, 22 September 2026 at 21:17:27 GMT-4, Cornelius Hamelberg <cornelius...@gmail.com> wrote:

Don Agozino:

Great Big & Mighty Congratulations !

It’s entirely wonderful news

 “My new fiction” implied two things to Yours Truly:

1. It’s not some lousy old fiction ( like some uniquely 21st century born-again Africans  writing as if Ralph Elllison had never existed) on the contrary, it’s an entirely new direction

2. You have an earlier publication - an earlier novel - perhaps less revolutionary and therefore merely (old fiction) - in tune with “ What good can come out of Galilee?”

At first my eyes deceived me, because, perhaps out of anticipation, the title that I read was

“THE WORLD BANK” which - spontaneous combustion - got me to react OMG  - well, I’ll be darned - - daggers drawn, what to expect but some dire revolutionary brimstone & fire polemic in the name of Nnamdi Azikiwe, Biafra, Walter Rodeny, REPARATIONS, and all the passionate advocates for reparations ( “reparative justice” ) Biko has certainly taken aloof us by surprise, is now going all the way, has now taken off his gloves and with cudgel in hand is going directly for the jugular : THE WORLD BANK (for the reparations & reparative justice cheques) 

The sample read is certainly encouraging even if somewhat didactic ( I have never read anything quite like that before) and let this truth be said : The first novel from a professor of sociology and criminology, should always be something to look forward to  -

 if it’s your very first novel , can we safely assume that there are certain elements of a fictional autobiography in the telling of your story? 

BTW  - Back then ,  I hanged my pan after reading Wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood…

 

On Monday, 21 September 2026 at 13:28:42 UTC+2 Biko Agozino wrote:

My new fiction, The Word Bank

Biko

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