The Muse 44 | 1 THE MUSE A Journal of English and Literary Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka NO. 44 July 2016 The Muse 44 | 2 EDITORIAL CONSULTANTS Rev. Fr Prof A.N. Akwanya Prof N.F. Inyama EDITORIAL ADVISER Mr F.U. Okoro EDITOR Arinze Ifeakandu ASSISTANT EDITOR Hope Eze ASSOCIATE EDITOR (PROSE) Chukwujekwu Nweke ASSOCIATE EDITORS (POETRY) Ginikachi C. Uzoma Richard Nnamani ASSOCIATE EDITOR (DRAMA) Kingsley Ukwungwu ASSOCIATE EDITOR (CRITICAL WRITING) Ogochukwu Ukwueze BLOG EDITORS Ebenezer Agu Johnson Urama BUSINESS MANAGER Victoria Ozor SECRETARY Ifiokabasi Okop PUBLICITY SECRETARY Nneoma Onwuegbuchi The Muse 44 | 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS THE EDITOR In Other Words, In Other Worlds 6 FLASH FICTION CHIDINMA NNAMANI Memorabilia 8 NONSO ANYANWU Lost 9 CHI-CHI AYALOGU Lovemaking 10 KIPROP KIMUTAI Earth Woman 11 POETRY VINCENT NWILO The One that Comes and Goes 14 Daughter of my Father’s Friend 15 D.E. BENSON Monalisa 16 KELECHI EZEIGWE Uganda Shore 17 You and I in America 18 CONFIDENCE JIDEOFOR If God is a Pimp 19 AJISE VINCENT I am Me II 20 STANLEY PRINCEWILL MCDANIELS Poem xxv 21 Understanding Displacement 22 ADAEZE MICHAEL Lost Birds 23 First Love 24 EBENEZER AGU Quizzing God 25 Once Upon a Memory 26 CHISOM OKAFOR Chains 27 My Sister Draws Circles 29 CHIDIEBERE EKERE Sorrow 30 The Muse 44 | 4 A Spill from Time 31 GINIKACHI C. UZOMA From the Stars III 32 NZUBE IFECHUKWU Burden of Memory 33 Moonstruck 34 FICTION SOTONYE DAN A Radio Story 36 TJ BENSON The Apparition of Priya Sethi 40 OTOSIRIEZE OBI-YOUNG The Love Laws, Or the Smell of Guava Leaves in the Rainy Season 45 GBOLAHAN ADEOLA Like a Thief on a Stormy Night 54 NONFICTION KELECHI NJOKU False Memory 67 DRAMA KINGSLEY O. UKWUNGWU Conflict of Schools 72 KENNETH CHUKWUEMEKA ALI Hands of the Gods 77 VINCENT NWILO Destination Africana 81 CRITICAL WRITING OGOCHUKWU UKWUEZE Humour of Mechanical Inelasticity: The Comic Formative of Gabriel Okara’s The Voice 89 EJIOFOR UDU NWOGWU Visions of Terror and Hope in Akwanya’s “Easter I (Of God and His Works)” 99 The Muse 44 | 5 GEORGE ARINZE Literature, Jaundiced Criticism, and the Vulgarizing of the Art 109 SOSTHENES N. EKEH Tragedy and the Dynamics of Class Structure: A Reading of Hardy’s Tess of the D’urbervilles 115 ART OSINACHI Three Pieces 131 INTERVIEW ARINZE IFEAKANDU “You Have to Care”: An Interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 135 READERS’ RESPONSE OTOSIRIEZE OBI-YOUNG Is this Why Readers Love Half of a Yellow Sun? 142 CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES 147 PAST EDITORS 151 The Muse 44 | 6 IN OTHER WORDS, IN OTHER WORLDS The American novelist and short story writer, Jhumpa Lahiri fell in love with Italian, and some years ago moved to Italy with her husband and children where she mastered the language and wrote her memoir, In Other Words, in it. When I read about what Lahiri had done, I wondered why a writer successful in a language would abandon it for another. It is not a question that I can answer. But I cannot stop thinking about how creative writing resembles this action of Lahiri’s: an abandoning of a language whose idioms we are familiar with, whose premises we are comfortable in, for another. Perhaps we suspect that this familiar language, fraught as it is with redundancy, corrupted as it is by cliché, and blinded as it is by convention, has failed to capture clearly and truly our fears and passions and ideas. Perhaps we have seen the limits of convention, witnessed the truth that common sense is no sense at all. Perhaps by seeking a new language, a literary one, we are trying to reclaim our feelings and experiences from the tedium and banality of the familiar language. Martin Amis, in his preface to The War Against Cliché, writes that “all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.” The writers in this issue of The Muse are aware of this war. They are mostly interested in the mundane—love, death and dying, childhood memories—which accounts for the overall nostalgic tone of the works. But where they deal with the mundane, they do so with such freshness of sight. When they write about childhood—She is that girl / That stole under the bed / with you / When you were six / Yet came out undefiled—one is struck by how keenly their eyes for detail and sense of nostalgia are; and when they write about love—perhaps it was merely what love did, making its slaves define and re-define their beloved in the light of strengths—we are humbled by the gentle wisdom that they exude. With every poem, every story, every play, we are transported to another world, this transportation made possible by the power of Other Words. In celebrating ten years of Half of a Yellow Sun, readers testify to the power of Other Words; and in her interview in this issue, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie attests to the way it can create whole new worlds, make people invested in the world that they create—I get this silly kick of excitement each time somebody tells me they want to visit Nsukka because of my fiction. You will be invested in the various worlds that our writers create in this issue. —Arinze Ifeakandu The Muse 44 | 7 Flash fiction The Muse 44 | 8 CHIDINMA NNAMANI MEMORABILIA It was not the burial that broke her—she survived the burial. That day, she had stood beside Aunty Bene, feeling nothing, watching the sweaty men as they lined up the four coffins. The screams from the mourners around her came from faraway and in her head she tried to fix a memory, any memory to replace the emptiness. But her mind was a dull haze. When the priest asked her to read, she peered at the page and saw the sky. There were no words, only clouds. When she tried to tell the priest, she found that her tongue was glued. At home, in Aunty Bene’s house, she stayed in the room that had a balcony, the one that overlooked the streets. Sympathizers came during the day, making loud exclamations and filling the sitting-room with their sobbing. In the evening, Dr Nnadi came, his chubby face gentle, his eyes searching her face for signs. He held her hands and asked how she felt, if she had eaten, if she wanted to go out. But she could only think of the velvety feel of Dr Nnadi’s palms, soft like Amara’s cherubic hands. The day the truck brought the things from Enugu, she stayed in bed and covered herself with the bedsheet and listened to the shuffling of feet. That was the day she saw the thing that broke her: the label of the new shoe that Mummy had bought for Kene, the one Mummy bought because he got a scholarship, the one he was to wear to the airport, the one on whose label Kene had scribbled his name in cursive black. The sight of the label peeking out from the waste bin sent her staggering against the door and the image of the accident found its way to her head. She watched their car stop at Ninth Mile, watched her mother haggle with the woman with bananas, heard her father tell Amara to stop crying and then she saw the petrol tanker. She felt hands lifting her, heard someone murmur “This one is still alive”, felt the haze clear from her eyes and then she saw their car squeezed like a can of Coke, the blood seeping out like a drink. She did not realize she was screaming until she heard Aunty Bene shouting: “Ifenna, ozugo!” She did not realize she was struggling until she felt someone pinning her down. In the days that followed, she learned to mourn gently, to bury her head in a pillow and cry. And on the bleakest days, she clung fiercely to pleasant fantasies, hopeful images of the future and she repeated Aunty Bene’s words: “Ifenna, you will heal.” The Muse 44 | 9 NONSO FRANKLYN ANYANWU LOST You were in the compound the morning Aunty Gloria brought Ifunanya from the village, and you refused to see her as the small girl who called you Brother Rufus—who rushed to grab your briefcase when you returned from work, who you sent to Mallam Aliyu's provision store, who sat on the carpeted floor of your room on Saturdays, legs folded, watching African Magic—but as a beauty. How old are you? you asked her the day you were watching a comedy show. She was laughing uncontrollably as she always did. She leaned on you. You held her shoulders and kissed her ears. It tickles! she said in laughter. I'm sorry, you said, your eyes locked in hers. She looked away playfully, and said she was thirteen. * You thought it was just a stomach ache. You should have rushed her to the hospital, saved her from dying before her time, instead of the sorry you kept saying when she coughed out blood this way and that way, when she fell, writhing, her eyes rolling, bulging out, as if threatening to pop out from their sockets. You were soaked in sweat, your legs shaky. You felt light when her legs finally straightened, when she sighed and became still. * Neighbours gathered round, murmuring and hissing: How could this beautiful girl go just like that? Aunty Gloria cried and cursed you, swearing never to let you go free.