LITERATORS' CORNER

Finding Odysseus's Palace: Jane Cochrane's Odysseus' Island                 --Ubaji Isiaka Abubakar Eazy Once upon a time, a young student of literature sat in class listening to his formalist professor trying to blur the line between literature and human existence or reality. The professor said that whatever you have in a narrative has no connection with the outer world of that book. But this young student had trained himself to see art as 'a mirror of society' and the idea that it should be considered an entity on its own outside the society, author, or epoch that fashioned that art failed to sit well with him. That was probably his first contact with a pure formalist and he felt he just had to say something. This young student got up and told the professor that he could not be right. Understanding literature often demands understanding the circumstances surrounding such literature and that literature is as much life as life is literature. He re...

The Epic of Attah Ameh Oboni; The Great *Note: Attah Ameh Oboni remains; perhaps; the greatest king of the Igala people because of his magical prowess. Legend has it that the power of this king lies on the tip of his tongue which has so much efficacy so that whatever he decrees become so. How he came by such a magical power no one knows and no one may be able to tell till the end of time. They say he could look at a flowering green tree and command it to go dry and it would do so immediately, he had once poured sand over a river and commanded that a bridge appear and so it happened. Attah Ameh Oboni had enormous metaphysical powers and many of his followers became afraid of him. As the story goes, he was reported to the then colonial master who wanted to usurp him but could not as Ameh Oboni was not also ready to reliquish his authority to the colonial masters. In the wisdom of the people, no man however great should aspire to be greater than the society that created it, but Attah...