Sovereign Body

by Tanure Ojaide

Sovereign Body relates an educated African woman’s effort
to break free from patriarchal oppression and prejudices. Anna, bright
poet and academic, faces crushing marriage problems when her doctor
husband abandons his practice and waits for a political appointment
which does not come. As Anna finds home more oppressive, she turns to a
professor, a former lover with whom she had severed a relationship upon
her marriage. The doctor’s mental breakdown and Anna’s duty to him make
her future uncertain. Set in Nigeria of the military regime era, Anna’s
struggle against patriarchy parallels and highlights the people’s
contention against military dictatorship for freedom.

£18.00

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/

Review

“I
find Sovereign Body strong, passionate, humanly insightful, and of
course poetic. To me, Annie and Jo seem the most compelling characters,
and the plot is at its most coercive in putting the case for the new
woman, despite the turmoil that newness brings to a society. I felt I
learned all the time about the micro-texture of Nigerian culture.”

Frederick Will, writer and scholar, Mount Vernon, Iowa

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