A poem collection by Tanure Ojaide, Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies, has been published. African Heritage Press published the collection, titled “Love Gifts.”
“Love Gifts” is a love sequence: the poetic rendering of the relationship between the minstrel and his muse over a long period. Ojaide uses the relationship of the two personages to investigate the human condition. The poems deal with dreams, desires, frustrations, hopes, contentment, and seeking meaning in life.
The poetic canvas links the two figures to other relationships and happenings of their time in an all-embracing manner. In a way, minstrel and muse, lovers, are in these “songs” sharing a unique relationship with readers as they affirm their humanity and tell the complicated passage they navigate hourly and daily as members of a particular society. The relationship develops from the inexperience of neophytes, unsteady in their ways, to the stage of adepts who are sure of themselves and their “rites.” The poems are thus a sort of courtship sequence.
Ojaide’s grandmother raised him in a rural, riverine part of the Niger Delta that was oil-rich yet still impoverished. He attended Catholic and government schools before earning a bachelor’s degree at the University of Ibadan. He completed a Master of Arts in Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English at Syracuse University, and he has grown to be a writer, a poet, a folk artist, a scholar, an environmentalist, a teacher and a voice for Nigeria.
At UNC Charlotte, Ojaide specializes in Pan-Africana/black, Caribbean and non-Western and post-colonial literatures; folklore and oral literatures of Africa and the African Diaspora; and creative writing (poetry). He has published books of poetry, memoirs, collections of short stories, novels and books of literary criticism. In 2011, Ojaide received the Cadbury Prize for Poetry awarded by the Association of Nigerian Authors for “The Beauty I Have Seen.”
