The African Literature Association (ALA) Annual Conference ended last Saturday with an award ceremony in Tennessee, USA. Nigerian writer and scholar, Nduka Otiono, won the association’s Best Book of the Year Award 2023, for his book, DisPlace, a collection of poems on the weight of exile on the poet in the western world.
The ALA said that DisPlace clinched the prize “for an outstanding book of literature by an African writer published last year.”
In his acceptance speech, Otiono said: “DisPlace is a testament of these tributaries of the self, as well as a verbal collage of the flow of the river from my hometown Ogwashi-Uku in the Anioma area of Delta State, Nigeria, to the wide expanse of Obodo Oyibo.
“Obodo oyibo is the Igbo word for the western world. It was first meant for Europe before the western hemisphere of Europe and Canada was added to it.
“DisPlace is a witness to the acclamation that poetry, in the words of the prolific American-Canadian poet, A. F. Moritz, can become the world we actually live in, not just in verse, but on both sides of our front door.
“Both sides of our front door’ is a metaphor for what has been termed ‘The Dualities of Nduka Otiono.’ These dualities extend to my identity as an African Canadian and the various lives that I have lived and continue to live. As I affirm elsewhere, the elements of my dualities are ‘the branches of a river, flowing into one mainstream,’ which ‘reflect the work that I do as a creative writer, as a scholar, as an educator’.”
Otiono expressed his gratitude to the African Literature Association (ALA) for the award; his publisher, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, publishers of Canada’s foremost poetry series and Carleton University, his employer, for providing him with the platform to thrive as an instructor, interdisciplinary scholar and creative artist.
He noted that the book was completed against the storm of the COVID -19 pandemic that snuffed out millions of lives across the globe.
The former General Secretary of the Association of Nigerian Authors added: “It is a testimony to the human capacity for resilience and a creative and robust response to tragedies embodied in the triumph over the pandemic, that life has returned to its pre-pandemic socialisation status. Such, too, is the power of poetry as a healing balm that uses words and sounds.”
