At Home, Away from Home

A Memoir

by Tanure Ojaide

Nobody wants to be a stranger at home, even if one wants to feel
at home in an alien country. Celebrated Nigerian author Tanure Ojaide in
this memoir recounts his experiences as a Nigerian living and working
in the United States. Feeling at home in the United States, but not all
the time is coupled with a longing to visit his natal home, as if
possessed by the god of nativity, to his home country he goes. Drawn
both ways, in a tough tug of war, depending upon where he finds
himself—he is caught up in an unending oscillation; now at home and
wishing to leave, and soon outside and wishing to be back at home. Often
feeling like a stranger no matter how long he has lived and worked in
the United States. Not feeling like a stranger he has also refused to
blend, wearing materials that make him stand out as an outsider, an
African, a Nigerian, a foreigner. There are other differences of beliefs
and ideas which do not follow the mainstream, he seems to see things
often from different perspective, as a postcolonial fellow, and the
others from their metropolitan position of power. He feels he was
already formed as a man before his relocation, maybe he is what he is by
choice or remain so instinctively.

£22.00

About the author

Tanure Ojaide

A renowned poet, Tanure Ojaide has won major national and international poetry awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region (1987), the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award (1988), twice the All-Africa Okigbo Prize for Poetry (1988 and 1997), and thrice the Association of Nigerian Authors’ Poetry Prize (1988, 1994 and 2004. In 2016 Ojaide was awarded the the prestigious Fonlon-Nichols Award at the 42nd annual African Literature Association (ALA) conference in Atlanta.

For Tanure Ojaide, “the creative writer is never an airplant, but someone who is grounded in some specific place. It is difficult to talk of many writers without their identification with place. Every writer’s roots are very important in understanding his or her work.” He has read from his poetry in different fora in Africa, Britain, Canada, Israel, Mexico, The Netherlands, and the United States. Some of his poems have been translated into Chinese, Dutch, Spanish and French. He is currently the Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Visit Tanure Ojaide’s website here: http://www.tanureojaide.com/

Related books

Zeb Silhouette

£22.00

Some Memories of California

£39.00

Beads of Memory

£16.00