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WRITING SCHOOL AND WAEC’S 5 PARAGRAPH ESSAY
As you progress through school, you will be required to write essays. An essay is a written composition in which you express a certain idea and back it up with statements that support the idea. Most frequently, you will be required to write your essay in a five paragraph essay format.
As its name implies, a five paragraph essay consists of five paragraphs. However, the essay itself consists of three parts: an introduction, a body, and a conclusion.
Introduction
The first paragraph of a five paragraph essay is the introduction. You should begin this paragraph with a statement that captures the reader’s interest so that the reader will want to continue to read your entire essay. Make your first sentence as interesting as possible. Follow with several sentences that clarify your opening statement. Conclude the paragraph with a thesis statement in which you present what you believe and intend to prove. A good thesis statement takes a stand and is very specific.
Body
The body of a five paragraph essay consists of three paragraphs. Each paragraph should be limited to one main idea that supports your thesis statement. The first paragraph of the body should contain your strongest argument in support of your thesis. Begin this paragraph by stating your idea. Then follow with two or three sentences containing supporting evidence or examples. Conclude this paragraph with a sentence that sums up what you discussed in the paragraph.
The second paragraph of the body should follow the same format as the first paragraph of the body. This paragraph should contain your second strongest argument in support of your thesis statement. The third paragraph of the body follows the same format and contains your third strongest argument. In addition to summing up what you have discussed in the paragraph, the last sentence should also indicate that the paragraph contains the final argument you are raising.
Conclusion
The fifth and final paragraph of the essay contains the conclusion. This concluding paragraph should repeat your thesis statement in slightly different words than used in your introductory paragraph. It should summarize the three arguments you presented in the body of your essay. Your final sentence should signal that your essay has come to an end. In essence, your concluding paragraph should make it clear to the reader that you believe you have proven what you set out to prove.
http://www.how-to-study.com/study-skills-articles/writing-a-five-paragraph-essay.asp
A SIMPLE GUIDE TO EXPOSITORY WRITING
Expository writing informs or explains. For example, if you are writing to inform about the Empire State Building, you could write about where it is located, when it was built, how tall it is, and what can be seen from its observation deck. If you are writing to explain how to grow flowers, you could tell how to prepare the soil, when to plant the seeds, how often to water the flowers as they grow, and when to add fertilizer. You will need skill in expository writing when you write school reports and research papers.
Here are five steps to follow to produce effective expository writing.
Select a subject or idea about which you want to write.
The subject or idea you select is your topic. Sometimes the topic is assigned by your teacher. If you have to select your own topic, start by thinking about a general theme such as water. Then list some specific topics related to water. For example, you might list such topics as diving, swimming, life saving, scuba diving, or even water polo. Select the topic in which you have the most interest.
Determine your writing objective.
Decide whether you want to inform the reader about your topic or explain something about the topic. For example, for the topic of scuba diving, you might decide to inform the reader about how scuba diving got its name, when and where it began, why people scuba dive, and where some of the best places to scuba dive are located. Or, you might decide to explain how to scuba dive. You could write about the training a person would need, certification or license requirements, equipment needed, and the safety procedures to follow.
Gather the information needed to meet your objective.
Sources of information include: people such as your teachers and parents; newspapers and magazines; reference books such as encyclopedias, almanacs, and atlases; and the Internet. Write notes as you gather the information. Using index cards is a good way to do this.
Organize the information you obtain.
You can organize the information from your notes by creating an outline that shows the major ideas about your topic and the supporting details for each idea. Or, you can visually organize your information by using a graphic organizer.
Write your report.
Be sure to include all the information needed to meet your objective. Provide logical supporting facts, details, and examples as needed. Use your outline or graphic organizer to be certain that your writing follows a logical order. Provide smooth transitions so that the reader can easily follow what you are trying to say. End with a summary or conclusion that clearly meets your objective.
Following these five steps will help you whenever you do expository writing.
http://www.how-to-study.com/study-skills-articles/expository-writing.asp
7 TYPES OF MISSPELLINGS
Most misspellings can be categorized in one of seven groups. Here are some examples for each of those types.
- Incorrectly Repeated Consonants
In some words, consonants are awarded extraneous twins, such as a doubling of the first t in commitment or of the r in harass (the latter perhaps from confusion with embarrass, in which r is doubled. Other common erroneous doublings including the n in inoculate (perhaps because of innovation and other words in which n is doubled), the s in occasion (many words, like expression, do have a double s), and the c in recommend. Note that in many of these words, there’s already a twin double consonant, which may also confuse writers. (One word that does have two twin consonant pairs, accommodate, is often misspelled with only one m.)
- Wrong Vowel
Using an incorrect vowel is a common problem, leading to such misspellings as definately (or the bizarre variant definatly), dependant, privelege, rediculous (a heretofore virtually unknown mistake, prompted by emphatic pronunciation of the first syllable, that has gone viral as more people are exposed to it online), and seperate. The correct spellings are definitely, dependent, privilege, ridiculous, and separate.
- Wrong Consonant
This type of error is less common than those of the vowel variety, but two of the most commonly misspelled words in this category are consensus (in which the first s is replaced with a c) and supersede (in which the second s is replaced with a c).
- Reversed Order of Double Vowels
Many words with two consecutive vowels, especially those with a pairing of e and i, look odd no matter which order the vowels appear in, so for many writers, it’s a toss-up as to which is correct. These words are all spelled correctly: gauge, niece, pharaoh, receive, weird.
- Extra Letters
One word that is often given an extra vowel is mischievous, perhaps because it is often mispronounced as if it were spelled mischievious. Some words ending in -ly, such as publicly, are often erroneously given an -ally ending. Judgment and acknowledgment, spelled in British English (and, well into the twentieth century in the United States) with an e after the g, omit the e in American English.
- Missing Letters
Coolly and woolly are often misspelled with only one l. Incidentally and other words with the -ally ending, in a reversal of the problem commonly seen with misspelling of publicly and the like, are frequently mistakenly spelled with -ly endings. Liaison often lacks its second i, prerogative is sometimes seen without the first r, and rhythm may lack the first h.
- Confusion with a Similar Word
The most common type of misspelling, perhaps, is that in which the wrong word in a homophonic duo or trio is employed, such as forward in place of foreword or site (or, rarely, sight) instead of cite.
By Mark Nichol
A RAISIN IN THE SUN…LANGUAGE, STYLE, SETTING AND APPLICATION OF LITERARY TERMS (2)
8 June 2009- New York, NY- Phylicia Rashad. Apollo Theater 75th Anniversary Gala Concert & Awards Ceremony. Photo Credit: Paul Zimmerman/AdMedia (Newscom TagID: admphotos411051) [Photo via Newscom]
CONTINUED FROM LAST POST
In the black dialect, the word “done” means something completely different from the Standard English past participle of the verb “to do.” Note the following examples:
It’s too late to ask her cause she done gone.
Mrs. Jackson done burned the cabbage again.
I done told you — I didn’t do it!
In the above examples, “done” means “has already” or “have already.” Note the following examples from Raisin:
Ruth: You done spoiled that boy so . . .
Mama: What done got into you, girl? Walter Lee done finally sold you on investing?
Mama: And all that money they pour into these churches when they ought to be helping you people over there drive out them French and Englishmen done taken away your land.
Mama: Much baking powder as she done borrowed from me all these years, she could of done gone into the baking business.
Mama: [The check] . . . you mean it really done come?
Ruth: Girl, you done lost your natural mind?
Another intentional Standard English deviation is the overuse of the negative in order to emphasize that negative, as in the following: “Nobody ain’t never seen no ghost nowhere.”
In Raisin, this construction abounds as in the following examples taken from various scenes:
Mama: Now here come you and Beneatha talking ’bout things we ain’t never even thought about
hardly . . .
Mama: I’m waiting to see you stand up and . . . say we done give up one baby to poverty and that we ain’t going to give up nary another one . . .
Bobo: Willy didn’t never show up . . .
Ruth: Walter, that ain’t none of our money . . .
In addition to the obvious lack of formal education noted in Mama’s speech, her speech is also flavored with “southernisms” which are absent from Walter’s speech. Even though Walter does not have as much education as Beneatha, he is not as unschooled as Mama, nor does he use the southernisms that define Mama. Ruth, however, proves through her speech that she has not had even as much formal education as Walter, for her speech is as flavored with southernisms as Mama’s. Because Ruth makes far more Standard English errors than Walter does, her speech makes her sound as though she is older than her thirty years. Ruth sounds more like Mama than any of the other characters in the play. The neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, proves that her roots are also southern by her speech, and Bobo also reveals his obvious southern upbringing when he speaks to Ruth and is overly polite in deference to her gender:
Bobo: Well, h’you, Miss Ruth.
Mrs. Johnson: I finds I can’t close my eyes right lessen I done had that last cup of coffee . . .
Mama: My children and they tempers . . .
Ruth: If you don’t take this comb and fix [your hair], you better!
Mama: Who that ’round here slamming doors at this hour?
Mama: This all the packing got done since I left out of here this morning — I testify before God . . .
Mama: Tell that youngun to get himself up here . . .
The luxuriousness of Hansberry’s writing is apparent in her scene descriptions prior to Act I. An example of ordinary writing might be “The room was overcrowded with old, outdated furniture.” Note, as a contrast, Hansberry’s more poetic way of saying the same thing: “The Younger living room would be a comfortable and well-ordered room if it were not for a number of indestructible contradictions to this state of being. Its furnishings are typical and undistinguished and their primary feature now is that they have clearly had to accommodate the living of too many people for too many years — and they are tired.”
As another example, ordinary writing might be: “The furnishings of this room used to be beautiful but are now faded, ugly, and even tasteless.” Hansberry, however, says it this way: “Still, we can see that at some time, a time probably no longer remembered by the family (except perhaps for Mama), the furnishings of this room were actually selected with care and love and even hope — and brought to this apartment and arranged with taste and pride. That was a long time ago. Now the once loved pattern of the couch upholstery has to fight to show itself from under acres of crocheted doilies and couch covers which have themselves finally come to be more important than the upholstery.”
An ordinary way of describing the worn out carpet might be to say: “Although they tried, they could not hide the worn out look of the old carpet.” Now, note Hansberry’s description: “And here a table or a chair has been moved to disguise the worn places in the carpet; but the carpet has fought back by showing its weariness, with depressing uniformity, elsewhere on its surface.”
So too, this example: Ordinary: “Everything in this room looks old and unattractive.” In contrast, Hansberry: “Weariness has, in fact, won in this room. Everything has been polished, washed, sat on, used, scrubbed too often. All pretenses but living itself have long since vanished from the very atmosphere of this room.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
http://en.wikipedia.org
http://www.sparknotes.com
http://www.gradesaver.com
http://www.cliffsnotes.com
http://www.shmoop.com
http://www.studyguide.org
http://www.enotes.com
http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw
http://www.vanderbilt.edu
http://neoenglish.wordpress.com
http://cummingsstudyguides.net
http://TheatreHistory.com
http://dramaonlinelibrary.com
https://therealchrisparkle.wordpress.com/
https://www.pinterest.com
Regents English Prep Online
HOW TO STOP EXAM CHEATING… 4 STEPS PLUS!
How to Stop Cheating
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
“The Road Not Taken” written by Robert Frost
Almost everyone wants to achieve good grades in school or pass The Exit Exam to graduate from High School. To accomplish this, some follow the path less traveled by and take the time to actually learn the material and do the work. But others cheat instead of taking the time to study. Whether you cheat all the time, or, like most students, once in a while, you can stop cheating, but only if you’re ready to quit cheating. Cheating counts as lying and stealing.
Steps
1.Decide that you want to stop cheating when you’re ready. No one except you can force you to stop. Need a little motivation? Think about what you will gain by doing your schoolwork.It won’t be easy. But, you can stop cheating when you’re ready to stop.
a.Knowledge- By doing your own work, you are becoming smarter. You are learning the material instead of transcribing it from someone else’s paper. When you are presented with the information again on a midterm or a final, you will have a much easier time remembering it.
b.Time Management skills- Everyone has a busy life. The typical high schooler has after school activities, dinner, then more stuff to do after dinner. Not to mention hanging out with friends, playing video games, talking on the phone, and every other leisurely activity that exists. So who has time for schoolwork? By not setting aside time for studying and homework outside of school, you are crippling yourself for life and you’ll fail the class. If your teachers catch you cheating they’ll wonder if you cheated on your other tests and they won’t trust you. It takes a lot of hard work to regain somebody’s trust and not everyone is willing to trust you again due to having trust issues. Getting into a habit of cheating can cause you to lose you your job. Make good habits now so you will have them as assets later in life. It’ll be much harder to stop cheating later on if you don’t quit now.
c.Respect- You will gain immense respect by not cheating. People will come to you for help instead of you going to them. Why? They will assume that you are smart. While you might not be a genius, you are making a very smart decision by not cheating.
2.So, now that you’ve decided to stop cheating, stop cheating.
a.Study. Study every day for three hours. However, if an emergency comes up, then you can study the next day. How well you know the information will determine how much you need to study. You have to understand fully and insert it in your head. Do not cram right before every test. Get into a study routine and study at the same time every day.
b.Prepare for tests. Get lots of sleep the night before and have a nourishing breakfast in the morning. Also, get extra help if you need it. It’s OK to ask for help.
c.Do your classwork and homework. Every classwork and homework assignment has a purpose. Do all of your classwork and homework to the best of your ability. It is better to guess than to get the right answer by copying.
d.Do your own work. You can still ask others for help. Just make sure you understand everything and that you are the one typing or writing.
3.Keep it up. It is easy to go back to your old habits. But, take the road not taken. A couple of years from now, you will be very happy you did.
4.Every time you get that little urge to cheat, remind yourself of the consequences. Remember the possibilities of getting caught, and remember that your teachers and parents are losing trust in you every time you cheat. Remind yourself that it is not worth it even if you do get away with it.
ADDITIONAL STUDY TIPS
1.Take notes during class, but write neatly so that you can read your own hand writing.
2.Remember the purpose of tests. It is to see how well the students know the information. If everyone in the class copied off the smartest kid, the teacher would think you all learned the information, when in reality, you hadn’t. So, when the teacher moves on and you are even more lost, it is your fault if you cheated.
3.As soon as you get home from school study in a room without distractions ie TVs and Computers. You’ll be able to concentrate on your homework. Don’t forget to turn your cell phone off while you’re studying so that you don’t get a text from your friends.
4.Be prepared for tests, quizzes, pop quizzes, and final exams.
5.If you have ADHD remember to take your medicine or Focus Factor so that you can pay attention during class.
6.Get a tutor. If you can’t afford to get a tutor go online and look for free online tutors. If you’re unable to do that due to not having a computer a lot of schools offer free tutoring after school.
7.If TV interferes with studying record your favorite shows via DVR so that you can watch them later. The TV and the Internet aren’t going anywhere.
8.Try not to let others cheat off you. Yeah, there are cases when you don’t want to get beaten up and you give others your homework. If that happens tell your teacher and the principal. You can ask them not to mention your name when they have a talk with said bully.
9.If you spend too much time on your social network sites and not enough time on your school books make your social networks restricted websites and leave an away message so that everyone won’t worry about you.
10.You can visit your teachers on your way to your next class or after school if you don’t get something. If you wind up late for your next class ask your teacher to write you a Hall Pass or sign your Agenda so that you don’t get in trouble. If you don’t have time to visit your teachers after school visit them before class begins the next morning.
THESE ARE THE BEST NOTES ON THE INTERNET FOR 2016 JAMB’S “LAST DAYS AT FORCADOS HIGH SCHOOL” (AND IT IS NOT A RUNZ PROJECT!)
…Book Cover…
ALL STUDY NOTES AND OTHER DETAILS YOU NEED ARE HERE FOR DOWNLOAD STARTING FROM THE LAST ONE BELOW:
https://lagosbooksclub.wordpress.com/2015/02/12/forcados-high-jamb-revision-notes-characterization/
OUR REVISION NOTES ON “LAST DAYS AT FORCADOS HIGH SCHOOL” ARE THE REASONS WHY 5 STUDENTS BROUGHT WINES SEVERALLY TO OUR OFFICE AFTER THEIR 2015 JAMB EXAMS!
You will still need to pay N1000 for the practice questions and answers however…
SALES OF 2016 JAMB F0RMS BEGIN NEXT MONDAY…CONTACT US FOR STUDY NOTES AND QUESTIONS ON “THE LAST DAYS AT FORCADOS HIGH SCHOOL”
…Book Cover…
JAMB UTME 2016 Sales Of Form Begins August 31st – Read Important Guidelines Here
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has perfected plans to begin the 2016 sales of UTME form by August 31st, 2015.
This was made known by the board’s Head of Information, Dr Fabian Benjamin in statement today in Lagos
It was gathered that the decision of the board to make the form available now is to prepare candidates early for the 2016 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME).
The scratch cards will be made available from August 31st, 2015 and can be purchased from the following banks; Zenith Bank, Sky Bank and First Bank.
”The registration fee for the UTME is N5,000 and candidates are also to pay N500 to obtain the textbook, The Last Days at Forcados High School’.
”Candidates will, however, be issued the book at the point of registration after showing evidence of payment,” the statement stated.
Prospective candidates are advised to ensure they obtained the application forms early as well as fill their personal data correctly to avoid any mix-up.
The deadline for sales of form is January 15, 2016. While the registration website will close January 19th, 2016.
The 2016 UTME examination is expected to begin Feb.29 and end on March 14, 2016.
Note: The UTME will be 100% Computer Based Test (CBT)
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TEL:08033010872 MR ODUMOSU
PASSING ESSAY QUESTIONS IN ALL WAEC/NECO EXAMS (2)
…mason college,festac students on a beach…
CONTINUED FROM PART 1
(2) Examiners will always look for the following.
(a) An introduction which shows the student understood the question before going into detailed reasoning.
(b) A framework or direction by which a student shows how he or she would answer a question without undue influence by the statement in the question.
(c) The key points in the essay.
(C) HOW TO CONSTRUCT ESSAYS
(1) An interesting beginning
(2) A persuasive content
(3) A conclusion
(4) As to the persuasive content, the essay need not contain every fact that the student can remember. It is essential to select 3 to 5 major facts in relation to the question asked. The facts should also support your reasoning, not the other way round.
(5) The conclusion should be in the final paragraph of the essay. But you will be well advised not to start your final paragraph with the words ‘in conclusion” or “finally” as this rigid approach does not find favor with examiners
(D) ESSAY STYLES
(1) Recognizable pattern: Introduction, content and conclusion- such essays are good for analytical rather than descriptive types of questions.
(2) Unrecognizable pattern: this is less rigid and is usually adopted for higher examination than WAEC/NECO levels.
(E) ESSAY PLANS
(1) These consists of the brief notes made on a separate page of the examination paper which reflects the major point and approach you are going to adopt in the essay. This is usually done within 5 minute you allow yourself at the beginning of each essay.
(2) It helps the student see the scope of the question.
(3) It helps the student keep to the points
(4) It helps to improve the speed of the student.
(5) If you do not finish your final essay the examiner can see from your notes what you were going to write. He or she can take note of your rough work at his discretion. But at least it would be there should he choose to be lenient. However if you are definitely going to run out of time it will be easy for you to take the points from your essay planned neatly. Write them in note form so that the examiner can see how you wanted to complete your essay. Do not forget to cross through all your rough work or start each essay itself at the top of a separate page.
(F) NUMERICAL QUESTIONS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
(1) Show or submit all rough workings
(2) Neatness of layout and presentation are vital.
This applies to all diagrams, or graphs which may be included in your diagram.
(3) Diagram and graphs should only be included when they are asked for in a question or when you are sure that they will help to explain the subject written more clearly. If in doubt it is best to leave them out.
(4) When drawing make sure it is large enough and not small. Generously use ½ of a page for the drawing and generally label to the right, Rulers, compasses or coins are useful tools to take to the exam hall. DEFINITELY avoid drawing in ink.
(G) ORALS / AURAL AND PRACTICAL
(1) Oral = Spoken examinations, Aural = Listening examinations
(2) For these exams no need to be nervous. If a tape recorder is used it is to help the examiner to assess you later when you leave the room.
(3) Try to avoid talking too much or too little. Be polite. Don’t use slangs like “cool”, “guy”, etc.
(4) Avoid answering too quickly. Take your time and breathe in and out deeply if you think you need to think a little before replying. Don’t worry whether the tape recorder is on or not.
(5) Study orals in a group to overcome nervousness.
(6) For aural tests try to listen to conversations on the radio often and practice as much as possible through cassette recording or video recording.
(7) Whenever you answer practical questions do the following:
(a) Obtain as much information as you can on the materials and equipment you will be using i.e. the properties of the metal, chemical, and of the procedures or the apparatus involved.
(b) Develop your ability to use the equipment, to make observations. Such as changes in chemicals, or materials used in the last, to record your observations satisfactorily, and to develop procedures or design apparatus to solve a problem.
(c) Also learn to analyze what you or someone else is doing. Check what the emphasis is on in the examination from past question papers.
(H) HOW EXAMINERS MARK ANSWERS
Examiners use marking schemes which are then checked by moderators to ensure that it is fair. The moderators (also called checkers) also ensure random checks on the marked scripts to ensure that they have been marked in accordance with the marking scheme.
(I) COMMON MISTAKES
(1) Written Examinations: –
(a) False assumptions that past questions are not necessary.
(b) That, since the mock exams was okay that the exam itself will be. Do not make any assumption about the way you will perform on the actual day of the exam.
(2) Be original as much as you can. If you try to be clever, the examiners can see through you and may be penalize you if you stray from the point.
(3) Try not to make the examiner angry unnecessarily. Clear handwriting, keeping out of margins and correct numbering of questions and answers are few of the ways you can avoid creating a bad impression.
GOOD LUCK
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ESSAY WRITING EXPLAINED: HOW TO WRITE AN ESSAY BY SARAH TOLAN
It’s tricky isn’t it? Sometimes the words, fall from your fingers, arguments move seamlessly without hesitation, helping to push the essay on. And before you know it, a few thousand words later, it’s time for the conclusion and it’s complete: the perfect essay. Then there’s those times when you write, or type, delete or scrap and repeat without success. So how do you get your essay writing mojo?
Well, there is no exact science behind this; what works from one person may not work for someone else. It’s a case of finding out what works for you. And there are methods, techniques, and more importantly strategies students can adopt to help when it comes to paper, thesis and essay writing. And since it’s an integral part of college and school life, integrating these into your academic challenges, can both ease the stress and push up the mark. And when it comes to writing the perfect essay, having a plan is key. So how, and where do you start?
Essay writing skills begin with looking at your essay question. It might sound obvious, but it’s crucial that you understand exactly what is being asked of you because you don’t get any marks for answering the wrong question. Even if it’s the best essay in the world. Essay questions tend to include a key word which can be the likes of ‘explain’ or ‘discuss’ or ‘illustrate’. These are crucial when it comes to formulating your plan, because it gives you an indication of how to plan and structure your answer. It can be a good idea to use a highlighter to mark out the key points of the question, for instance the key word and other supplementary information or references that are to be included. This can apply, for instance, to quote-based questions, typical of English Literature papers. And be sure that there are no additional parts to the question that, perhaps through question formulation, aren’t clear.
Once the essay question is broken down and understood, it’s time to get cracking on your research. Take a look at your essay question when it’s broken down and from here look for primary sources. It’s useful to find books and quotes which will support your argument, and look at the bibliographies of these books for supplementary and secondary reading. Don’t exclude books or quotes that contradict your argument, because this can provide a contrast and more balanced essay. Plus it shows the depth and range of the research you’ve undertaken. Essay writing services can also offer a useful tool, throwing up previously unthought of sources of research. These businesses are not there to write your essay because that is plagiarism, but rather they offer supplementary support. And no matter what, always avoid plagiarism by using the correct quotation format according to your school. There should be a style guide available to students for this very purpose and if not, just ask a teacher or tutor to demonstrate. Additionally, this applies to essay bibliography, with precise styles for layouts usually required.
Now for the plan and for most people this will begin with an introduction. It’s a good idea here to use this to outline how you intend to answer the essay question. It doesn’t need to be in a great lot of detail; save this for later. But it’s helpful to carving a clear objective and explaining this to the reader. The bulk of the essay will be designated to your answer, and it’s up to you how you structure this. However, try to use a paragraph for each point and stay on the topic, because going outside of the question can lead to loss of marks. Including quotations can be a good way to help the structure, plus it supports your argument. And build these towards your final section: the conclusion. It works as a summing up device; recapping on the points made in the bulk of the essay and any potential areas for the future.
So, to summarise; make sure you read and understand the essay question. Then begin to assemble your research. Planning the content is crucial as it will help structure your essay and keep you on track. And leave yourself plenty of time. Some people find it helpful to write a draft, leave it overnight and go back to it with fresh eyes. This can help spot any irregularities and confusion in your work. Then spell-check and hand-in. Good Luck!
Sarah Tolan is a professional journalist, former student who likes to think over the years, she’s found ways to perfect her essay writing skills from learning and thanks to advice from others.
“SHE MADE ONE FEEL THAT, IN SOME DISTANT TIME PAST, SHE HAD BEEN A QUEEN”…WOLE SOYINKA ABOUT MAYA ANGELOU
Wole Soyinka Mourns Maya Angelou
Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka yesterday expressed regrets over the death of African American literary icon, Maya Angelou.
Soyinka, who in a statement, described one of Angelou’s poems, “AFRICA” as more than a mere literary metaphor and reference point, said: “It went beyond race identification. To obtain a glimmering of what the continent meant to her, one would have to think in terms of a mystic nostalgia.
“That could be because she was so markedly black – regal both in bearing and pronouncements, she made one feel that, in some distant time past, she had been a queen – a philosopher queen – over some part of the black continent.”
Soyinka said if indeed she was a philosopher queen, the late American writer was the down-to-earth kind who felt her subjects keenly, “a philosopher queen without the aloofness”.
He revealed that it took just one lunch meeting with her, “and Queen Angelou tightened her sash like a market mamma, mobilised emergency forces, and personally led the charge to beat down the doors of a lethargic – and/or ambiguous – US administration during the Sanni Abacha murderous dictatorship. She kept her finger on the nation’s pulse throughout a people’s travails”.
Soyinka said long before that meeting, which was a personal memory he cherished, he had learnt a lot at an American university where he had gone to lecture about her mutual admiration for his works and how she had nominated him for a literary prize. Angelou, he said, was later to confirm the details to him after they finally met.
“Publishers of a prestigious literary journal, the college was also sponsor of a bi-annual international literary prize. She had nominated me for that prize but, finally, it was a German writer who carried it off – I think it was Gunther Grass, but I’m no longer sure.
“Well, at the formal event of the announcement, Maya Angelou was so disappointed, she burst into tears. Our sole contact till then was through our writing.
“During reception afterwards, when she was being teased/consoled or whatever, she said something like: ‘No, it’s all right, I know he’ll win a bigger one’. A year later, I was accorded the Nobel Prize.”
Angelou, an African American poet, writer and civil rights activist, passed on last Wednesday at the age of 86.
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MAYA ANGELOU…A PROFESSOR AWARDED OVER 50 HONORARY DEGREES WITHOUT ATTENDING COLLEGE (UNIVERSITY)…A CLOSER LOOK!
…with Oprah Winfrey…both raped by relations while growing up!…
Life and career…Early years
Marguerite Annie Johnson[3] was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928, the second child of Bailey Johnson, a doorman and a navy dietitian, and Vivian (Baxter) Johnson, a nurse and card dealer.[4][note 1] Angelou’s older brother, Bailey Jr., nicknamed Marguerite “Maya”, derived from “My” or “Mya Sister”.[5] When Angelou was three and her brother four, their parents’ “calamitous marriage”[6] ended, and their father sent them to Stamps, Arkansas, alone by train, to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson. In “an astonishing exception”[7] to the harsh economics of African-Americans of the time, Angelou’s grandmother prospered financially during the Great Depression and World War II because the general store she owned sold needed basic commodities and because “she made wise and honest investments”.[4][note 2]
And Angelou’s life has certainly been a full one: from the hardscrabble Depression era South to pimp, prostitute, supper club chanteuse, performer in Porgy and Bess, coordinator for Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, journalist in Egypt and Ghana in the heady days of decolonization, comrade of Malcolm X, and eyewitness to the Watts riots. She knew King and Malcolm, Billie Holiday, and Abbey Lincoln.
Reviewer John McWhorter, The New Republic (McWhorter, p. 36)
To know her life story is to simultaneously wonder what on earth you have been doing with your own life and feel glad that you didn’t have to go through half the things she has.
The Guardian writer Gary Younge, 2009[9]
Four years later, the children’s father “came to Stamps without warning”[10] and returned them to their mother’s care in St. Louis. At the age of eight, while living with her mother, Angelou was sexually abused and raped by her mother’s boyfriend, a man named Freeman. She told her brother, who told the rest of their family. Freeman was found guilty but was jailed for only one day. Four days after his release, he was murdered, probably by Angelou’s uncles.[11] Angelou became mute for almost five years,[12] believing, as she stated, “I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone …”[13] According to Marcia Ann Gillespie and her colleagues, who wrote a biography about Angelou, it was during this period of silence when Angelou developed her extraordinary memory, her love for books and literature, and her ability to listen and observe the world around her.[14]
Shortly after Freeman’s murder, Angelou and her brother were sent back to their grandmother.[15] Angelou credits a teacher and friend of her family, Mrs. Bertha Flowers, with helping her speak again. Flowers introduced her to authors such as Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Douglas Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson, authors who would affect her life and career, as well as black female artists like Frances Harper, Anne Spencer, and Jessie Fauset.[16][17][18] When Angelou was 14, she and her brother moved in with their mother once again, who had since moved to Oakland, California. During World War II, Angelou attended the California Labor School. Before graduating, she worked as the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco.[19] Three weeks after completing school, at the age of 17, she gave birth to her son, Clyde (who later changed his name to Guy Johnson).[20][21]
Angelou’s second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name (1974), recounts her life from age 17 to 19 and “depicts a single mother’s slide down the social ladder into poverty and crime.”[22] Angelou worked as “the front woman/business manager for prostitutes,”[23] restaurant cook, and prostitute. She moved through a series of relationships, occupations, and cities as she attempted to raise her son without job training or advanced education.[24]
Adulthood and early career: 1951–61
Angelou’s first album, Miss Calypso, produced in 1957, was made possible due to the popularity of her nightclub act.
In 1951, Angelou married Greek electrician, former sailor, and aspiring musician Tosh Angelos, despite the condemnation of interracial relationships at the time and the disapproval of her mother.[25][26][note 3] She took modern dance classes during this time, and met dancers and choreographers Alvin Ailey and Ruth Beckford. Angelou and Ailey formed a dance team, calling themselves “Al and Rita”, and performed Modern Dance at fraternal black organizations throughout San Francisco, but never became successful.[28] Angelou, her new husband, and her son moved to New York City so she could study African dance with Trinidadian dancer Pearl Primus, but they returned to San Francisco a year later.[29]
After Angelou’s marriage ended in 1954, she danced professionally in clubs around San Francisco, including the nightclub the Purple Onion, where she sang and danced to calypso music.[30] Up to that point she went by the name of “Marguerite Johnson”, or “Rita”, but at the strong suggestion of her managers and supporters at the Purple Onion she changed her professional name to “Maya Angelou”, a “distinctive name”[31] that set her apart and captured the feel of her calypso dance performances. During 1954 and 1955, Angelou toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess. She began her practice of learning the language of every country she visited, and in a few years she gained proficiency in several languages.[32] In 1957, riding on the popularity of calypso, Angelou recorded her first album, Miss Calypso, which was reissued as a CD in 1996.[28][33][34] She appeared in an off-Broadway review that inspired the film Calypso Heat Wave, in which Angelou sang and performed her own compositions.[33][note 4][note 5]
Angelou met novelist James O. Killens in 1959, and at his urging, moved to New York to concentrate on her writing career. She joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met several major African-American authors, including John Henrik Clarke, Rosa Guy, Paule Marshall, and Julian Mayfield, and was published for the first time.[36] In 1960, after meeting civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and hearing him speak, she and Killens organized “the legendary”[37] Cabaret for Freedom to benefit the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and she was named SCLC’s Northern Coordinator. According to scholar Lyman B. Hagen, her contributions to civil rights as a fundraiser and SCLC organizer were successful and “eminently effective”.[38] Angelou also began her pro-Castro and anti-apartheid activism during this time.[39]
Africa to Caged Bird: 1961–69
In 1961, Angelou performed in Jean Genet’s play The Blacks, along with Abbey Lincoln, Roscoe Lee Brown, James Earl Jones, Louis Gossett, Godfrey Cambridge, and Cicely Tyson.[40] That year she met South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make; they never officially married.[41] She and her son Guy moved with Make to Cairo, where Angelou worked as an associate editor at the weekly English-language newspaper The Arab Observer.[42][43] In 1962, her relationship with Make ended, and she and Guy moved to Accra, Ghana, he to attend college, but he was seriously injured in an automobile accident.[note 6] Angelou remained in Accra for his recovery and ended up staying there until 1965. She became an administrator at the University of Ghana, and was active in the African-American expatriate community.[45] She was a feature editor for The African Review,[46] a freelance writer for the Ghanaian Times, wrote and broadcast for Radio Ghana, and worked and performed for Ghana’s National Theatre. She performed in a revival of The Blacks in Geneva and Berlin.[47]
- …with Malcolm X
In Accra, she became close friends with Malcolm X during his visit in the early 1960s.[note 7] Angelou returned to the U.S. in 1965 to help him build a new civil rights organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity; he was assassinated shortly afterward. Devastated and adrift, she joined her brother in Hawaii, where she resumed her singing career, and then moved back to Los Angeles to focus on her writing career. She worked as a market researcher in Watts and witnessed the riots in the summer of 1965. She acted in and wrote plays, and returned to New York in 1967. She met her lifelong friend Rosa Guy and renewed her friendship with James Baldwin, whom she had met in Paris in the 1950s and called “my brother”, during this time.[49] Her friend Jerry Purcell provided Angelou with a stipend to support her writing.[50]
Angelou’s friend James Baldwin was instrumental in the publication of her first autobiography.
In 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. asked Angelou to organize a march. She agreed, but “postpones again”,[37] and in what Gillespie calls “a macabre twist of fate”,[51] he was assassinated on her 40th birthday (April 4).[note 8] Devastated again, she was encouraged out of her depression by her friend James Baldwin. As Gillespie states, “If 1968 was a year of great pain, loss, and sadness, it was also the year when America first witnessed the breadth and depth of Maya Angelou’s spirit and creative genius”.[51] Despite having almost no experience, she wrote, produced, and narrated Blacks, Blues, Black!, a ten-part series of documentaries about the connection between blues music and black Americans’ African heritage, and what Angelou called the “Africanisms still current in the U.S.”[53] for National Educational Television, the precursor of PBS. Also in 1968, inspired at a dinner party she attended with Baldwin, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and his wife Judy, and challenged by Random House editor Robert Loomis, she wrote her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1969, which brought her international recognition and acclaim.[54]
Later career
Angelou’s Georgia, Georgia, produced by a Swedish film company and filmed in Sweden, the first screenplay written by a black woman,[55] was released in 1972. She also wrote the film’s soundtrack, despite having very little additional input in the filming of the movie.[56][note 9] Angelou married Welsh carpenter and ex-husband of Germaine Greer, Paul du Feu, in San Francisco in 1973.[note 10] In the next ten years, as Gillespie has stated, “She had accomplished more than many artists hope to achieve in a lifetime”.[58] She worked as a composer, writing for singer Roberta Flack, and composing movie scores. She wrote articles, short stories, TV scripts, documentaries, autobiographies, and poetry, produced plays, and was named visiting professor at several colleges and universities. She was “a reluctant actor”,[59] and was nominated for a Tony Award in 1973 for her role in Look Away. In 1977, Angelou appeared in a supporting role in the television mini-series Roots. She was given a multitude of awards during this period, including over thirty honorary degrees from colleges and universities from all over the world.[60]
In the late 1970s, Angelou met Oprah Winfrey when Winfrey was a TV anchor in Baltimore, Maryland; Angelou would later become Winfrey’s close friend and mentor.[61][note 11] In 1981, Angelou and du Feu divorced. She returned to the southern United States in 1981, where she accepted the lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.[63] From that point on, she considered herself “a teacher who writes”.[64] Angelou taught a variety of subjects that reflected her interests, including philosophy, ethics, theology, science, theater, and writing.[65]
In 1993, Angelou recited her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton, becoming the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961.[66] Her recitation resulted in more fame and recognition for her previous works, and broadened her appeal “across racial, economic, and educational boundaries”.[67] The recording of the poem was awarded a Grammy Award.[68] In June 1995, she delivered what Richard Long called her “second ‘public’ poem”,[69] entitled “A Brave and Startling Truth”, which commemorated the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. Angelou achieved her goal of directing a feature film in 1996, Down in the Delta, which featured actors such as Alfre Woodard and Wesley Snipes.[70] Beginning in the 1990s, Angelou actively participated in the lecture circuit[66] in a customized tour bus, something she continued into her eighties.[71][72] In 2000, she created a successful collection of products for Hallmark, including greeting cards and decorative household items.[73][74] Over thirty years after Angelou began writing her life story, she completed her sixth autobiography A Song Flung Up to Heaven, in 2002.[75] In 2013, at the age of 85, she published the seventh autobiography in her series, Mom & Me & Mom, which focused on her relationship with her mother.[76]
Angelou campaigned for the Democratic Party in the 2008 presidential primaries, giving her public support to Senator Hillary Clinton.[52] In the run up to the January Democratic primary in South Carolina, the Clinton campaign ran ads featuring Angelou’s endorsement.[77] The ads were part of the campaign’s efforts to rally support in the Black community; [78] but Obama won the South Carolina primary; finishing 29 points ahead of Clinton and taking 80% of the Black vote.[79] When Clinton’s campaign ended, Angelou put her support behind Senator Barack Obama,[52] who went on to win the election and become the first African American president of the United States. She stated, “We are growing up beyond the idiocies of racism and sexism”.[80] In late 2010, Angelou donated her personal papers and career memorabilia to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.[81] They consisted of over 340 boxes of documents that featured her handwritten notes on yellow legal pads for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a 1982 telegram from Coretta Scott King, fan mail, and personal and professional correspondence from colleagues such as her editor Robert Loomis.[82]
Personal life
Evidence suggests that Angelou was partially descended from the Mende people of West Africa.[86][note 12] A 2008 PBS documentary found that Angelou’s maternal great-grandmother Mary Lee, who had been emancipated after the Civil War, became pregnant by her former white owner, John Savin. Savin forced Lee to sign a false statement accusing another man of being the father of her child. After indicting Savin for forcing Lee to commit perjury, and despite discovering that Savin was the father, a jury found him not guilty. Lee was sent to the Clinton County poorhouse in Missouri with her daughter, Marguerite Baxter, who became Angelou’s grandmother. Angelou described Lee as “that poor little Black girl, physically and mentally bruised.”[88]
The details of Angelou’s life described in her seven autobiographies and in numerous interviews, speeches, and articles tended to be inconsistent. Critic Mary Jane Lupton has explained that when Angelou spoke about her life, she did so eloquently but informally and “with no time chart in front of her”.[89] For example, she was married at least twice, but never clarified the number of times she has been married, “for fear of sounding frivolous”;[71] according to her autobiographies and to Gillespie, she married Tosh Angelos in 1951 and Paul du Feu in 1973, and began her relationship with Vusumzi Make in 1961, but never formally married him. Angelou had one son Guy, whose birth was described in her first autobiography, one grandson, and two great-grandchildren,[90] and according to Gillespie, a large group of friends and extended family.[note 13] Angelou’s mother Vivian Baxter and brother Bailey Johnson, Jr., both of whom were important figures in her life and her books, have died; her mother in 1991 and her brother in 2000 after a series of strokes.[91][note 14] In 1981, the mother of her son Guy’s child disappeared with Angelou’s grandson; it took eight years to find him.[92][note 15] In 2009, the gossip website TMZ erroneously reported that Angelou had been hospitalized in Los Angeles when she was alive and well in St. Louis, which resulted in rumors of her death and according to Angelou, concern with her friends and family worldwide.[9]
She did not earn a university degree, but according to Gillespie it was Angelou’s preference that she be called “Dr. Angelou” by people outside of her family and close friends. As of 2008, she owned two homes in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a “lordly brownstone”[9] in Harlem, full of her “growing library”[94] of books she collected throughout her life, artwork collected over the span of many decades, and well-stocked kitchens. Younge has reported that in her Harlem home resides several African wall hangings and Angelou’s collection of paintings, including ones of several jazz trumpeters, a watercolor of Rosa Parks, and a Faith Ringgold work entitled “Maya’s Quilt Of Life”.[9] According to Gillespie, she hosted several celebrations per year at her main residence in Winston-Salem, including Thanksgiving;[95] “her skill in the kitchen is the stuff of legend—from haute cuisine to down-home comfort food”.[72] She combined her cooking and writing skills in her 2004 book Hallelujah! The Welcome Table, which featured 73 recipes, many of which she learned from her grandmother and mother, accompanied by 28 vignettes.[96] She followed up with her second cookbook, Great Food, All Day Long: Cook Splendidly, Eat Smart in 2010, which focused on weight loss and portion control.[97]
Beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou used the same “writing ritual”[18] for many years. She would wake early in the morning and check into a hotel room, where the staff was instructed to remove any pictures from the walls. She would write on legal pads while lying on the bed, with only a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards to play solitaire, Roget’s Thesaurus, and the Bible, and would leave by the early afternoon. She would average 10–12 pages of written material a day, which she edited down to three or four pages in the evening.[98][note 16] Angelou went through this process to “enchant” herself, and as she said in a 1989 interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, “relive the agony, the anguish, the Sturm und Drang.”[100] She placed herself back in the time she wrote about, even traumatic experiences like her rape in Caged Bird, in order to “tell the human truth”[100] about her life. Angelou stated that she played cards in order to get to that place of enchantment and in order to access her memories more effectively. She stated, “It may take an hour to get into it, but once I’m in it—ha! It’s so delicious!”[100] She did not find the process cathartic; rather, she found relief in “telling the truth”.[100]
Death
Angelou died on the morning of May 28, 2014, according to a family statement.[101] She was found by her nurse. Although Angelou had reportedly been in poor health and had canceled recent scheduled appearances, she was working on another book, an autobiography about her experiences with national and world leaders.[102][103]
Tributes to Angelou and condolences were paid by artists, entertainers, and world leaders, including Barack Obama, whose sister had been named after Angelou, and Bill Clinton.[103][104] Harold Augenbraum, from the National Book Foundation, said that Angelou’s “legacy is one that all writers and readers across the world can admire and aspire to.”[105]
On May 29, 2014, Mount Zion Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, of which Angelou was a member for 30 years, held a public memorial service to honor Angelou.[106]
Works
Main article: List of Maya Angelou works
Angelou wrote a total of seven autobiographies. According to scholar Mary Jane Lupton, Angelou’s third autobiography Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas marked the first time a well-known African American autobiographer had written a third volume about her life.[107] Her books “stretch over time and place”, from Arkansas to Africa and back to the U.S., and take place from the beginnings of World War II to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.[108] She published her seventh autobiography Mom & Me & Mom in 2013, at the age of 85.[109] Critics have tended to judge Angelou’s subsequent autobiographies “in light of the first”,[110] with Caged Bird receiving the highest praise. Angelou wrote five collections of essays, which writer Hilton Als called her “wisdom books” and “homilies strung together with autobiographical texts”.[37] Angelou used the same editor throughout her writing career, Robert Loomis, an executive editor at Random House; he retired in 2011[111] and has been called “one of publishing’s hall of fame editors.”[112] Angelou said regarding Loomis: “We have a relationship that’s kind of famous among publishers”.[113]
All my work, my life, everything I do is about survival, not just bare, awful, plodding survival, but survival with grace and faith. While one may encounter many defeats, one must not be defeated.
Maya Angelou[114]
Angelou’s long and extensive career also includes poetry, plays, screenplays for television and film, directing, acting, and public speaking. She was a prolific writer of poetry; her volume Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie (1971) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and she was chosen by President Bill Clinton to recite her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” during his inauguration in 1993.[66][115]
Angelou’s successful acting career included roles in numerous plays, films, and television programs, including her appearance in the television mini-series Roots in 1977. Her screenplay, Georgia, Georgia (1972), was the first original script by a black woman to be produced and she was the first African American woman to direct a major motion picture, Down in the Delta, in 1998.[70]
Chronology of autobiographies
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969): Up to 1944 (age 17)
Gather Together in My Name (1974): 1944–1948
Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976): 1949–1955
The Heart of a Woman (1981): 1957–1962
All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986): 1962–1965
A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002): 1965–1968
Mom & Me & Mom (2013): overview
Reception and legacy
Influence
When I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published in 1969, Angelou was hailed as a new kind of memoirist, one of the first African American women who were able to publicly discuss their personal lives. According to scholar Hilton Als, up to that point, black female writers were marginalized to the point that they were unable to present themselves as central characters in the literature they wrote.[37] Scholar John McWhorter agreed, seeing Angelou’s works, which he called “tracts”, as “apologetic writing”. He placed Angelou in the tradition of African-American literature as a defense of black culture, which he called “a literary manifestation of the imperative that reigned in the black scholarship of the period”.[116] Writer Julian Mayfield, who called Caged Bird “a work of art that eludes description”,[37] argued that Angelou’s autobiographies set a precedent for not only other black women writers, but also African American autobiography as a whole. Als said that Caged Bird marked one of the first times that a black autobiographer could, as he put it, “write about blackness from the inside, without apology or defense”.[37] Through the writing of her autobiography, Angelou became recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for blacks and women.[117] It made her “without a doubt, … America’s most visible black woman autobiographer”,[117] and “a major autobiographical voice of the time”.[118] As writer Gary Younge said, “Probably more than almost any other writer alive, Angelou’s life literally is her work”.[71]
Author Hilton Als said that Caged Bird helped increase black feminist writings in the 1970s, less through its originality than “its resonance in the prevailing Zeitgeist”,[37] or the time in which it was written, at the end of the American Civil Rights movement. Als also claimed that Angelou’s writings, more interested in self-revelation than in politics or feminism, have freed other female writers to “open themselves up without shame to the eyes of the world”.[37] Angelou critic Joanne M. Braxton stated that Caged Bird was “perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing” autobiography written by an African-American woman in its era.[117]
Critical reception
Reviewer Elsie B. Washington, most likely due to President Clinton’s choice of Angelou to recite her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at his 1993 inauguration, has called Angelou “the black woman’s poet laureate”.[119] Sales of the paperback version of her books and poetry rose by 300–600% the week after Angelou’s recitation. Random House, which published the poem later that year, had to reprint 400,000 copies of all her books to keep up with the demand. They sold more of her books in January 1993 than they did in all of 1992, accounting for a 1200% increase.[120] Angelou famously said, in response to criticism regarding using the details of her life in her work, “I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, ‘I write for money'”.[71] Younge, speaking after the publication of Angelou’s third book of essays, Letter to My Daughter (2008), has said, “For the last couple of decades she has merged her various talents into a kind of performance art—issuing a message of personal and social uplift by blending poetry, song and conversation”.[9]
Angelou’s books, especially I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, have been criticized by many parents, causing their removal from school curricula and library shelves. According to the National Coalition Against Censorship, parents and schools have objected to Caged Bird’s depictions of lesbianism, premarital cohabitation, pornography, and violence.[121] Some have been critical of the book’s sexually explicit scenes, use of language, and irreverent religious depictions.[122] Caged Bird appeared third on the American Library Association (ALA) list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000 and sixth on the ALA’s 2000–2009 list.[123][124]
Awards and honors
Main article: List of honors received by Maya Angelou
Angelou was honored by universities, literary organizations, government agencies, and special interest groups. Her honors included a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her book of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie,[115] a Tony Award nomination for her role in the 1973 play Look Away, and three Grammys for her spoken word albums.[125][126] She served on two presidential committees,[110][127] and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2000,[128] the Lincoln Medal in 2008,[129] and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.[130] Angelou was awarded over fifty honorary degrees.[131]
Uses in education
Angelou’s autobiographies have been used in narrative and multicultural approaches in teacher education. Jocelyn A. Glazier, a professor at George Washington University, has trained teachers how to “talk about race” in their classrooms with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Gather Together in My Name. According to Glazier, Angelou’s use of understatement, self-mockery, humor, and irony have left readers of Angelou’s autobiographies unsure of what she left out and how they should respond to the events she described. Angelou’s depictions of her experiences of racism have forced white readers to explore their feelings about race and their own “privileged status”. Glazier found that critics have focused on where Angelou fits within the genre of African-American autobiography and on her literary techniques, but readers have tended to react to her storytelling with “surprise, particularly when [they] enter the text with certain expectations about the genre of autobiography”.[132]
Educator Daniel Challener, in his 1997 book Stories of Resilience in Childhood, analyzed the events in Caged Bird to illustrate resiliency in children. Challener argued that Angelou’s book has provided a “useful framework” for exploring the obstacles many children like Maya have faced and how communities have helped them succeed.[133] Psychologist Chris Boyatzis has reported using Caged Bird to supplement scientific theory and research in the instruction of child development topics such as the development of self-concept and self-esteem, ego resilience, industry versus inferiority, effects of abuse, parenting styles, sibling and friendship relations, gender issues, cognitive development, puberty, and identity formation in adolescence. He found the book a “highly effective” tool for providing real-life examples of these psychological concepts.[134]
Poetry
Main article: Poetry of Maya Angelou
Angelou is best known for her seven autobiographies, but she was also a prolific and successful poet. She was called “the black woman’s poet laureate”, and her poems have been called the anthems of African Americans.[119] Angelou studied and began writing poetry at a young age, and used poetry and other great literature to cope with her rape as a young girl, as described in Caged Bird.[16] According to scholar Yasmin Y. DeGout, literature also affected Angelou’s sensibilities as the poet and writer she became, especially the “liberating discourse that would evolve in her own poetic canon”.[135]
Many critics consider Angelou’s autobiographies more important than her poetry.[136] Although her books have been best-sellers, her poetry has not been perceived to be as serious as her prose and has been understudied.[4] Her poems were more interesting when she recited and performed them, and many critics emphasized the public aspect of her poetry.[137] Angelou’s lack of critical acclaim has been attributed to both the public nature of many of her poems and to Angelou’s popular success, and to critics’ preferences for poetry as a written form rather than a verbal, performed one.[138] Burr has countered Angelou’s critics by condemning them for not taking into account Angelou’s larger purposes in her writing: “to be representative rather than individual, authoritative rather than confessional”.[139]
Style and genre in autobiographies
Main article: Themes in Maya Angelou’s autobiographies
Angelou’s use of fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and development of theme, setting, plot, and language has often resulted in the placement of her books into the genre of autobiographical fiction.[140] Angelou made a deliberate attempt in her books to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre.[141] Scholar Mary Jane Lupton argues that all of Angelou’s autobiographies conform to the genre’s standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme.[142] Angelou recognizes that there are fictional aspects to her books; Lupton agrees, stating that Angelou tended to “diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth”,[143] which parallels the conventions of much of African-American autobiography written during the abolitionist period of U.S. history, when as both Lupton and African-American scholar Crispin Sartwell put it, the truth was censored out of the need for self-protection.[143][144] Scholar Lyman B. Hagen places Angelou in the long tradition of African-American autobiography, but claims that Angelou created a unique interpretation of the autobiographical form.[145]
According to African American literature scholar Pierre A. Walker, the challenge for much of the history of African-American literature was that its authors have had to confirm its status as literature before they could accomplish their political goals, which was why Angelou’s editor Robert Loomis was able to dare her into writing Caged Bird by challenging her to write an autobiography that could be considered “high art”.[146] Angelou acknowledged that she followed the slave narrative tradition of “speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning ‘we'”.[110] Scholar John McWhorter calls Angelou’s books “tracts”[116] that defend African-American culture and fight negative stereotypes. According to McWhorter, Angelou structured her books, which to him seem to be written more for children than for adults, to support her defense of black culture. McWhorter sees Angelou as she depicts herself in her autobiographies “as a kind of stand-in figure for the black American in Troubled Times”.[116] McWhorter views Angelou’s works as dated, but recognizes that “she has helped to pave the way for contemporary black writers who are able to enjoy the luxury of being merely individuals, no longer representatives of the race, only themselves.[147] Scholar Lynn Z. Bloom compares Angelou’s works to the writings of Frederick Douglass, stating that both fulfilled the same purpose: to describe black culture and to interpret it for their wider, white audiences.[148]
According to scholar Sondra O’Neale, Angelou’s poetry can be placed within the African-American oral tradition, and her prose “follows classic technique in nonpoetic Western forms”.[149] O’Neale states that Angelou avoided using a “monolithic black language”,[150] and accomplished, through direct dialogue, what O’Neale calls a “more expected ghetto expressiveness”.[150] McWhorter finds both the language Angelou used in her autobiographies and the people she depicted unrealistic, resulting in a separation between her and her audience. As McWhorter states, “I have never read autobiographical writing where I had such a hard time summoning a sense of how the subject talks, or a sense of who the subject really is”.[151] McWhorter asserts, for example, that key figures in Angelou’s books, like herself, her son Guy, and mother Vivian do not speak as one would expect, and that their speech is “cleaned up” for her readers.[152] Guy, for example, represents the young black male, while Vivian represents the idealized mother figure, and the stiff language they use, as well as the language in Angelou’s text, is intended to prove that blacks can competently use standard English.[153]
McWhorter recognizes that much of the reason for Angelou’s style was the “apologetic” nature of her writing.[116] When Angelou wrote Caged Bird at the end of the 1960s, one of the necessary and accepted features of literature at the time was “organic unity”, and one of her goals was to create a book that satisfied that criteria.[146] The events in her books were episodic and crafted like a series of short stories, but their arrangements did not follow a strict chronology. Instead, they were placed to emphasize the themes of her books, which include racism, identity, family, and travel. English literature scholar Valerie Sayers has asserted that “Angelou’s poetry and prose are similar”. They both rely on her “direct voice”, which alternates steady rhythms with syncopated patterns and uses similes and metaphors (e.g., the caged bird).[154] According to Hagen, Angelou’s works were influenced by both conventional literary and the oral traditions of the African-American community. For example, she referenced over 100 literary characters throughout her books and poetry.[155] In addition, she used the elements of blues music, including the act of testimony when speaking of one’s life and struggles, ironic understatement, and the use of natural metaphors, rhythms, and intonations.[156] Angelou, instead of depending upon plot, used personal and historical events to shape her books.[157]
WIKIPEDIA
OBITUARY…MAYA ANGELOU WHOSE CHRONICLE OF HER DIRT-POOR UPBRINGING BECAME A LITERARY SENSATION!
…at Clinton’s inauguration…
Maya Angelou, who has died aged 86, was a poet, playwright, film-maker, journalist, editor, lyricist, teacher, singer, dancer, black activist, professor and holder of some 50 honorary degrees; she was principally famous, however, for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a memoir of her dirt-poor upbringing in Arkansas.
When the book was published in 1969 it was a revelation. Narrated in the pulpit-influenced cadences of the black American South, it described a world completely alien to its mainly white, metropolitan readership.
It told how, after her parents divorced, Maya’s father sent her and her elder brother, Bailey, from their home in St Louis to live with their paternal grandmother in the small town of Stamps, Arkansas. Aged three and four, the two children arrived at the station wearing wrist tags reading: “To Whom It May Concern”.
During a brief return to St Louis to live with their mother, at the age of seven Maya was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. Soon after she had identified him as the rapist in court, he was murdered — kicked to death — by some of her uncles. For the next five years the young Maya became a voluntary mute, believing that her voice had killed him and that if she spoke again she might kill someone else.
Coaxed out of silence by a teacher who encouraged her love of reading with Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Dickens, Poe and the Brontes, as well as black writers such as Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Langston Hughes, she eventually joined her mother in California, won a scholarship to study drama and dance, and at the age of 17 became an unmarried mother.
Freshly and vividly written, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings became the first non-fiction work by a black woman to make the US national bestseller lists. Other volumes of autobiography followed, charting Maya Angelou’s career as a waitress, brothel madam, prostitute, singer, bus conductress, actress and black activist; as a dancer in Paris; an editor in Egypt; and a journalist and university administrator in Ghana.
As a woman and as a black American who had surmounted oppression to live the American Dream, Maya Angelou became a symbol for the post-segregation era, and a celebrity on the lecture circuit who drew huge crowds wherever she went. Her name appeared on everything from bookends to pillows and mugs, and her rhymes on Hallmark greetings cards. In 1993 she was chosen by President Clinton to recite her poem On the Pulse of the Morning at his inauguration.
Maya Angelou reading a poem at Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration
Yet nothing ever equalled her first book. As she became more and more famous, her memoirs became increasingly self-congratulatory in tone; and critics noted that she had adopted all the clichés of her friend Oprah Winfrey’s aspirational narrative of “healing” and “empowerment”. The “diva”, one reviewer observed, had “come to believe her own hype”.
She was born Marguerite Ann Johnson (Maya was her brother Bailey’s diminutive) in St Louis, Missouri, on April 4 1928. Her father was a doorman and US Navy dietitian, her mother a nurse and card dealer.
After living with their grandmother in Arkansas, Maya and her brother returned to live, in Oakland, California, with their mother, a tiny, forthright woman with a colourful turn of phrase (“I’d rather be bitten on the rear by a snaggle-toothed mule than take that shit” was one of her sayings). During the Second World War, Maya attended George Washington High School in Oakland and studied dance and drama at the California Labor School. Before leaving school, she worked as the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco.
Her son Guy, born in California when she was 17, was the result of her first sexual experiment, prompted by a desire to clarify her sexuality after she had convinced herself, from reading The Well of Loneliness, that she was becoming a lesbian. Her second book of memoirs, Gather Together in My Name (1974), described her life as an unemployed single mother in California, embarking on brief affairs and transient jobs, before she descended into poverty and the fringes of crime and prostitution.
In Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976) she described her brief marriage to “Tosh” (Enistasious Angelos), a jazz-loving white man of Greek descent. After the marriage ended in 1954 she continued to dance and sing calypso professionally, touring in Porgy and Bess and changing her stage name from Marguerite Johnson to Maya Angelou. In 1957 she recorded an album, Miss Calypso, and appeared in an off-Broadway revue that inspired the film Calypso Heat Wave (1957), in which she sang and performed her own compositions.
Maya Angelou in a 1957 portrait taken for the Caribbean Calypso Festival
In 1959 Maya Angelou met the novelist James Killens, who suggested she move to New York to concentrate on her writing career. In The Heart of a Woman (1981) she described her immersion in the Harlem world of black writers and artists, and her work with Martin Luther King (she and Killens organised the Cabaret for Freedom in aid of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference). She also described her relationship with the South African rights activist Vusumzi Make — a man, by her account, of unlimited sex appeal who tried, but failed, to possess her, body and soul, and with whom she moved to Cairo, where she became the associate editor of the English-language Arab Observer.
All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986) charted her three-year stay in Accra, Ghana, after the break-up of her relationship with Make. She was an administrator at the University of Ghana, and was active in the African-American expatriate community, becoming a features editor for The African Review and a freelance writer, broadcaster and actress.
In A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002), the sixth episode of the Angelou saga, she recounted her return to America; her attempts to help Malcolm X build a new civil rights organisation, the Organisation of Afro-American Unity ; her devastation after his assassination; her return to life as a nightclub chanteuse in Hawaii; and her decision to write her first memoir.
Maya Angelou’s account of her time in Hawaii contains a passage which, to one reviewer, seemed to epitomise all that had gone wrong between the publication of her first and last books.
Worried about dwindling audiences at the nightclub, she decides, for her swansong performance, not to sing, but to dance: “I asked for the music, then invited it to enter my body and find the broken and sore places and restore them. That it would blow through my mind and dispel the fogs… I danced for the African I had loved and lost in Africa. I danced for bad judgments and good fortune. For moonlight lying like rich white silk on the sand before the great pyramids in Egypt and for the sound on ceremonial fontonfrom drums waking the morning air in Takoradi…. The dance was over, and the audience was standing and applauding.”
“With relief, perhaps?” suggested the reviewer.
But by this time Maya Angelou had become such an institution she could afford not to be bothered by jibes, often quoting a Ghanaian saying: “An elephant is rarely seriously bothered by a flea” .
She also wrote five books of essays and several collections of poetry, one of which — Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’Fore I Diiie — was nominated for a Pulitzer. Like her prose, her poetry ranged from the vivid and original to a sort of black American version of Pam Ayres .
Maya Angelou’s 1972 screenplay, Georgia, Georgia, was the first original script by a black woman to be produced, and she also published two cookery books. In 1977 she appeared in a supporting role as Kunta Kinte’s grandmother in the television miniseries of Alex Haley’s Roots.
Maya Angelou embraced some unpredictable political standpoints over the years. There was surprise when, in 1995 she spoke at the “Million Man March”, supporting Louis Farrakhan, whom she had previously branded as “dangerous”. In 2008 she backed Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama — who in 2010 presented Maya Angelou with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
From 1991 she taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she held the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. Until she was well into her eighties she made around 80 appearances a year on the lecture circuit. Mom & Me & Mom, an overview of her life, was published last year.
Maya Angelou never clarified the number of times she had been married, “for fear of sounding frivolous”, although it was at least twice. One of her essays told of the end of her marriage, in 1973, to Paul du Feu, “a builder from London, a graduate of the London School of Economics, the first near-nude centrefold for Cosmopolitan magazine, formerly husband of Germaine Greer”.
Maya Angelou is survived by her son
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10860545/Maya-Angelou-obituary.html
REST IN PEACE MAYA ANGELOU (4 APRIL 1928 – 28 MAY 2014)…A BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Maya Angelou was a poet, writer, playwright, social activist, and teacher. She grew up in rural Arkansas in the heart of the Jim Crow South, and much of her writing reflects her experiences as an African American woman in the United States.
(Born Marguerite Ann Johnson on April 4, 1928) was an author and poet who has been called “America’s most visible black female autobiographer” by scholar Joanne M. Braxton. She is best known for her series of six autobiographical volumes, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first and most highly acclaimed, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her first seventeen years. It brought her international recognition, and was nominated for a National Book Award. She has been awarded over 30 honorary degrees and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her 1971 volume of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie.
Angelou was a member of the Harlem Writers Guild in the late 1950s, was active in the Civil Rights movement, and served as Northern Coordinator of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Since 1991, she has taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem,
North Carolina where she holds the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. Since the 1990s she has made around eighty appearances a year on the lecture circuit. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. In 1995, she was recognized for having the longest-running record (two years) on The New York Times Paperback Nonfiction Bestseller List.
With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou was heralded as a new kind of memoirist, one of the first African American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. She is highly respected as a spokesperson for Black people and women. Angelou’s work is often characterized as autobiographical fiction. She has, however, made a deliberate attempt to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre.
Her books, centered on themes such as identity, family, and racism, are often used as set texts in schools and universities internationally. Some of her more controversial work has been challenged or banned in US schools and libraries.
Wikipedia
Books/Works of Maya ANGELOU
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou
The Heart of a Woman
Maya Angelou
Letter to My Daughter
Maya Angelou
Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem
Maya Angelou
Mother
Maya Angelou
Making Magic in the World
Maya Angelou
Quartet of Poems
Alice Walker, Grace Nichols, Lorna Goodison
Phenomenal woman
Maya Angelou
Wouldn’t Take Nothing For My Journey Now
Maya Angelou
Quartet of Stories
Alice Walker, Lorna Goodison, Olive Senior
Penguin Readers Level 6
Maya Angelou
Black Pearls
Maya Angelou
Just give me a cool drink of water ‘fore I diiie
Maya Angelou
Poems
Maya Angelou
Still I rise
Maya Angelou
Yo Se Por Que Canta el Pajaro Enjaulado
Maya Angelou
Conversations with Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou
Lessons in Living
Maya Angelou
Mary Ellen Mark
Maya Angelou
Mother
Amy Tan, Mary Higgins Clark, Maya Angelou
Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well
Maya Angelou
Ich weiß, warum der gefangene Vogel singt
Maya Angelou
Even the Stars Look Lonesome
Maya Angelou
Elder grace
Maya Angelou
Complete Collected Poems
Maya Angelou
On the pulse of morning
Maya Angelou
Hallelujah! The Welcome Table
Maya Angelou
Kofi and His Magic
Maya Angelou
Encontraos En Mi Nombre
Maya Angelou
A brave and startling truth
Maya Angelou
Renʹee Marie of France
Maya Angelou
Celebrations
Maya Angelou
Shaker, why don’t you sing?
Maya Angelou
My painted house, my friendly chicken, and me
Maya Angelou
Cedric Of Jamaica
Maya Angelou
Kofi & His Magic
Maya Angelou
Mikale of Hawaii
Maya Angelou
Angelina of Italy
Maya Angelou
Mrs. Flowers
Maya Angelou
I Shall Not Be Moved
Maya Angelou
Life doesn’t frighten me
Maya Angelou
Van Gogh’s Ear
Carolyn Cassady, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen
And Still I Rise
Maya Angelou
Izak of Lapland
Maya Angelou
Now Sheba sings the song
Maya Angelou
Stranger Than Fiction
Dave Barry, Maya Angelou, Norman Mailer
All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes
Maya Angelou
A Song Flung Up To Heaven
Maya Angelou
Gather Together in My Name
Maya Angelou
Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas
Maya Angelou
The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou
And Still I Rise
Maya Angelou
Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas
Maya Angelou
Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie
Maya Angelou
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
Maya Angelou
All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes
Maya Angelou
Poems of Maya Angelou
1. A Brave and Startling Truth 1/23/2012
2. A Conceit 1/3/2003
3. A Plagued Journey 1/23/2012
4. Alone 1/3/2003
5. Awaking in New York 1/23/2012
6. California Prodigal 1/23/2012
7. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings 1/3/2003
8. Insomniac 1/3/2003
9. Kin 1/23/2012
10. Men 1/3/2003
11. Million Man March Poem 1/3/2003
12. Momma Welfare Roll 1/3/2003
13. On the Pulse of Morning 1/23/2012
14. Passing Time 1/3/2003
15. Phenomenal Woman 1/3/2003
16. Refusal 1/3/2003
17. Remembrance 1/3/2003
18. Still I Rise 1/3/2003
19. The Detached 6/18/2005
20. The Lesson 1/3/2003
21. The Mothering Blackness 1/23/2012
22. The Rock Cries Out to Us Today 1/3/2003
23. They Went Home 6/18/2005
24. Touched by an Angel 1/3/2003
25. We Had Him 1/13/2014
26. Weekend Glory 1/3/2003
27. When You Come 1/3/2003
28. Woman Work 1/3/2003
BASIC STAFF OPERATIONAL NOTES FOR REMEDIAL WORK IN NIGERIAN SECONDARY SCHOOLS
INTRODUCTION
The Oxford Dictionary says that Remedial Studies is finding medicine or treatment or means of counteracting or removing, redressing or rectifying things that are undesirable in education or studies.
I define remedial studies as a solution which is given to pupils who are slower at learning or have fallen behind the others in academic performance.
There are various reasons for remedial studies which are as follows:
1. Many students feel too lazy to study or engage in academic pursuits.
2. Many parents also complain that students hardly ever read at home.
3. Many students will rather engage in non-academic activities most of the time than keep to the private time table they drew up.
4. Many students are in Mason College with different needs seeking for answers to various problems.
5. It is also important to understand or realize that Remedial Studies can be used to broaden the scope of understanding of students involved.
Remedial work should be carried out knowing very well that there are varied needs amongst students. This means that tutors must recognize that each lesson has to be logically structured to cover the class and to give those individuals requiring more attention enough detail to make them more positive without feeling that unnecessary attention is being paid to them.
Remedial Tutors must ask themselves the following questions:
1. How can I make this subject / topic interesting?
2. Have I a good sense of humour for working with students?
3. Am I patient with slow learners?
All these and many more should be the questions a remedial tutor must keep asking himself.
Tutors should also read handouts on the following training topics that are available in the school.
1. Counseling the exceptional student.
2. Counseling juvenile delinquents (see additional notes below).
3. Counseling for improved study skills
4. Counseling for handicapped students.
5. General guidance and counseling techniques (see additional notes below).
6. Changing students’ inappropriate attitudes to foster academic excellence.
7. The philosophy of Mr. O. O. Odumosu about remedial work in a school.
COUNSELING JUVENILE DELINQUENTS
Juvenile delinquency is as old as the human memory can recall. There are many views concerning delinquency. Akinboye (1987) explained this to apply to all behavior patterns that break certain rules or laws enacted by constituted authority. Osarenren (1996) contended that any behavior that does not conform to the rules, regulations, norms and values of a given time is viewed and termed as delinquency.
Reasons for juvenile delinquency:
1. The change in the structure of the society i.e. rural to urban.
2. Disruption of sense of community solidarity and of the integrity of the extended family.
3. Increase in deteriorated neighbourhoods.
Delinquency of juvenile can be classified into three categories.
1. Unsocialized: They are malicious, violent, lacking in remorse.
2. Over-inhibited neurotics: These ones are seclusive, sensitive, worrying types.
3. Socialized: They keep bad company a lot, less co-operative and outgoing.
Conversant factors when handling delinquents as a counselor:
– Trust and acceptance.
– Commitment to change.
– Self disclosure.
COUNSELING THE HANDICAPPED STUDENT
Counseling the handicapped children is also an important technique a counselor should learn. Handicap may be defined as any deficiency, mental or physical, which makes it difficult for an individual to compete with others of his age.
Approaches & Focus of counseling
1. Self acceptance.
2. Modeling / mentoring.
3. Self disclosure.
4. Social exposure.
5. RET approach.
6. Self-esteem building.
7. Assertiveness training
8. Transactional analysis.
GUIDANCE AND COUNSELING SKILLS
Guidance can be defined as a process by which an individual is assisted to understand, accept and utilize his abilities, attitudes, interest and attitudinal patterns in relation to his aspiration.
A guidance counselor is an educated individual who is skilled in selecting, administering, scoring and interpreting the various psychological tests available to improve the lots of his clients to make them effective and productive in their life journey.
OBJECTIVES
We have established that guidance and counseling help individuals to be well-integrated into the society and to become self disciplined, competent, happy, effective and productive in life.
– To assist students in understanding their own needs and problems to improve educational objectives, programme and planning generally.
– It is also to guard individual’s mental health and to build human effectiveness.
– To assist students in acquiring a positive image of self through understanding of the needs and problems of each person.
Remedial studies must aim at helping students build a favorable attitude toward Maths Clinic, English Clinic, Study and Exam Techniques, Motivational Techniques.
Remedial Studies can also be simply said as a set up to help students make the best use of what they have been taught and about what they have left the classroom with.
TO BE CONTINUED
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BY POPULAR DEMAND…WOLE SOYINKA’S KEYNOTE ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE CODESRIA-GUILD OF AFRICAN FILMMAKERS
CODESRIA AT FESPACO
A NAME IS MORE THAN THE TYRANNY OF TASTE By Wole Soyinka
wole soyinka
Text of a Keynote Address Delivered at the CODESRIA-Guild of African Filmmakers
FESPACO workshop on:
Pan-Africanism: Adapting African Stories/Histories from Text to Screen
25 – 26 February 2013 Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
First, permit me to unburden myself. A little bit of carping is essential to mental balance
and, the Arts are no exception to this principle ofpsychological release. Indeed, that is an
understatement. I should have said: the Arts especially are the supreme example of that
truism. You and I know that there is no other humanpreoccupation that so readily provokes
either suppressed or exploding feelings than this singular expression of the human
imagination and inventiveness that we call the Arts. Within the prolific field on which we
are gathered here today – the cinema – there is a word that has become current, one that I
still find difficult to utter. It sets my teeth on edge, this hideous child of lackluster
imagination. And yet it appears to be a source of pride to the practitioners it implicates.
What one would have regarded as a singular aberration, a regrettable moment of a verbal
infelicity, has developed into a child of competitive adoption, sustained by a number of
would-be surrogate parents. One shudders to imagine how many other variations can be
squeezed out of the original banality, as each nation evolves a cinema industry and strains
to force the original horror into the tube of its own nominal identity – again, with pride!
Do I speak objectively? Of course not. I readily confess my subjectivity in these
matters. Acknowledging this in advance makes it easier to for me to wear the badge of
verbal fundamentalism without the slightest embarrassment. Having conceded that much, I
also have to state, on my own behalf, that it has not been for want of trying that I have
failed to reconcile my tongue to each new offspring of a nomenclatural misalliance. My
main trading commodity, as you all know, is largelyin words, so it is not surprising there are
some sounds that I find difficult to mouth – not simply in their own being, but on account of
their histories, their association and their limitless capacity to proliferate and people the
world of words with new infant monstrosities. This is said matter-of-factly. In addition
however, I do propose that words are allied to images.
Now, I wouldn’t go as far as Richard Ford, the American writer who, in declaring
himself a dyslexic, adds that he actually sees words as images. No, I wouldn’t make such a
far-out claim. However, I do subscribe to the view that words have shapes, which are in turn
evocative of more than the mere sound of them or their literal meaning. Indeed, one can
claim that some images become eventually attached to words with such intimacy that they
can no longer be prised apart – hm, I appear to be getting closer and closer to Richard Ford.
All right, let us simply try and sum it up thus: the power of suggestion goes beyond mere
suggestion. A word can distort the palpable reality that your own senses have already
determined. Where such a word is deployed as values and summation, as a category of
phenomena, even as a loose umbrella for a family ofproducts, it can distort other entities
under that umbrella completely, influencing their apprehension in our minds. Where we are
concerned with creative activity, the word can contract the scope, or reduce the quality
within the overall undertaking. In short, a word can inhibit or expand imagination. It can
prove a curse or a blessing.
Regarding the creative process, let it be understood that I am not necessarily
speaking of originality. I have read critiques of artistic works that appear to make originality
the benchmark of creativity, blithely dismissing such a work on the grounds that it is not
‘original’. Some masterful works – in all genres – have been produced that are based on
deliberate imitativeness. Or plagiarism. There are different kinds of plagiarism, some can
actually emerge as a new product of its kind, a kind of creative provocation, or a
commentary on the original, sometimes a sleight of expectations or attribution – what is
sometimes called signification – especially in American literary discourse. So, we are not
speaking here of originality.
We all share – with variations – a basic culture, and that culture places a heavy
premium on – for instance – child naming. ‘The child is father of the man’, as the poet
William Wordsworth reminds us. We can add, however that, for African societies, ‘the name
is father to the child’ – such careful thought, sense of history, hopes and expectations ride
on the name we decide to give a new human entity wehave brought into the world. Child
naming, on this continent, is itself a creative act. Only this last Friday, February 22, the
following observation appeared in the Nigerian journal, The NATION, on the back page
weekly column, Comment and Debate, an impeccably timed contribution to this address:
“Naming in Africa, especially in Yorubaland, is special gift that the ancestors as
progenitors of the nation bestowed on the elders. Names have meaning, and – as
they would have us believe, names push their bearers to actualize their encoded
meanings. (Oruko a maa ro omo) – literally – The name may mould the child. So you
don’t find any Yoruba parent giving to their babies names that embed evil
meanings”
Let it be admitted however that all we do is play variations on existing naming
templates, not that we strain to be fully original.The same process applies, as stated earlier,
applies to the creative process – styles, themes and even – very often – content. Actually,
this merely provides me an excuse to veer off and comment on a recent cinema controversy
– the subject and directorial approach – but one that does concern us here most intimately.
I am sure you have all heard of this film; it seems destined to become what is
sometimes known as a ‘cult film’, and largely because it so successfully plays variations on
established genres. I am speaking of DJANGO UNCHAINED, starring the actor Jamie Foxx,
with a superlative, though underrated performance in the role of the revolting, Uncle
Toming race traitor by Samuel Jackson. Its theme is Slavery, a subject that touches the
historic sensibilities of virtually all of us assembled here. Now, just as an aside – one cannot
ignore certain other aspects of the controversy it has stirred up. Slavery is a very serious,
even solemn subject. Such a weight of history, of race recollection rests upon it that one
cannot think of any aspect of that traumatic passage that lends itself to humour. AMISTAD,
even The Birth of a Nation with its open derogation of black slaves etc etc. – these films
conform to the expected treatment of that subject -heroic, tragic, indicting, inciting, racist
etc – certainly not mock-heroic. One’s instinctiveresponse to the subject is that it would be
indecent and insensitive to extract any shred of humour from Slavery, except perhaps what
is known as gallows humour. Long before DJANGO, there was the stage play Purlie
Victorious, later made into a film, starring Ossie Davies andRuby Dee. The same complaints
made about Purlie Victoriousare what I have read during the past few months – that is, at
least four decades later – by some black critics, among them, Spike Lee, a leading black
American cineaste. This is a trivialization of my history, complained Spike Lee.
That commentary leads us conveniently back to the thread of our main theme – that
criticism was based on a misconception – the director of that film was in fact doing what we
have identified as ‘signifying’. He was signifying on a number of cinematic genres, familiar
clichés, not least of which was the Western, the Cowboy film. Beneath the spoof, there was
serious thematic business. Even the sinister Ku Klux Klan was spoofed, and everyone knows
that there was never anything remotely amusing about those Knight Templars of the trilogy
of Lynch, Castrate, and Dehumanize.
By my reckoning, the film is most intelligently crafted, very much in the manner of
Mel Brooks’ BLAZING SADDLES, only, this time, our film is set in a slave plantation with
opulent trimmings, generous close-up helpings of blood and gore, and flying flesh. The ‘N’
word, that contempt ridden version of the neutral word ‘negro’, was also in over-abundant
usage, a feature that also offended some sensibilities. I found this complaint rather strange,
since it indicated a refusal to take into account, not only the fact that the word was
historically accurate, but that its proliferation in the film was deliberate, tripping glibly off
the tongues of the blacks themselves than off the white masters’. If excessive application
has ever been claimed to take the sting out of the offensive, DJANGO was definite proof of
this.
So, we are speaking of an original work of art that is anything but original, filled with
borrowings from so many genres. My complaint therefore is not against borrowings and
adaptations as a principle, but against the lack of originality that translates as plain,
unmediated imitation, or a tawdry, unenhanced borrowing that is conceived and delivered
on the very edge of the pit of banality, and out ofwhich it has no wish to clamber, once it
has fallen in. It indicates a pre-set mind, a basically unadventurous mind dressed up in castoff clothing, of which nothing can be expected except as a breeding ground, a reproductive
automatism of its own kind – especially in taste. We move closer to the substance of my
complaint – that of another unspeakable ‘n’ word that has taken such a hold on our homebred imagination. This ‘N’ word constitutes a mutative explosion that I consider most unfair
to others in the same creative field – the cinematic – more especially as there have been
predecessors who impacted on our cinema world without burdening themselves with such
a verbal albatross. Again, I must hold you in suspense for just a little longer while I skirt
around the subject, although I know that a number of you have guessed by now where I am
headed.
I still recall the first Negro Arts Festival in Dakar, which marked the formal outing of
contemporary African cinema even as a rudimentary exploration of the genre. Yes, some of
the products were amateurish, but they already bore the stamp of genuine exploratory
minds at work, interrogating the new medium. Even the clumsiest was refreshing, and of
course the more skilled were inspiring. If my memory were not so clotted, I would reel off
new names. I recall the young Djibril Diop however, and – I think – Oumar Sissoko from
Mali. What remain fresh in my minds are snippets ofscenes – such as the satiric use of the
tro-tro, the passenger lorry, to ridicule the pretensions of a figure of the Europeanized black
sophisticate – that species that is known in Nigeria as Johnny Just Come, or Ajebota.
(Weaned on butter.) This figure of fun considered himself unfortunate to be compelled to
ride in the same conveyance as peasants, workers and other ‘uneducated’ beings. It was a
simple but hilarious film, I recall, that introduced the viewer to the makeshift existence of
semi-urbanised life, a picaresque work filled with incidents along a journey that covered the
gamut of daily survival and challenges, inducing the passengers of the tro-tro transportation
into a transient community. Our principal, played by the young Diop himself, was reduced,
coat-tails and all in that suffocating Sahelian heat, to push the tro-tro when it broke down.
Don’t ask me why I recall that scene so vividly after so many decades, but I wish that
the young aspirants to the cinema trade would have the opportunity to watch such films, if
only as a basic lesson of extracting a film nearly out of nothing, on what must have been a
shoe-string budget, bringing reality to life without the ponderous injection of excess
craftiness. Beginnings can be very instructive, especially beginnings that are deceptively
artless. They strike at recognizable truths without the cluttering of over-laboured
techniques. Perhaps, at the back of my mind was recollection of one of my all-time
favourites – Fellini’s La Strada, with the unforgettable performance of Giulietta Massina in
the archetypal role of the tragic clown. I am not making the same claims of accomplishment
for both – by no means. They are both variations onthe same theme – the many faces of
The Road, my own favourite foraging ground, admittedly – and there the comparison ends.
That touch of creative innocence however – perhaps that is what sticks so charmingly to the
mind.
And then of course, there was the already socially dedicated hand of Ousmane
Sembene who grew in self-assurance as he tackled increasingly demanding historical, and
contemporary social themes – one and all were gathered in Dakar, brimming with
confidence in multiple disciplines, a churning magma of artistic forces of a postindependence generation. It is evidently too late now, to appeal to those who have
embraced – yes, we come close to the ‘n’ word, I am gearing myself to utter it – yes, those
nationals who have fallen for the hackneyed short cut to their own naming ceremonies.
Even more thankless than preaching to the convertedis preaching againstthe converted.
When so much time has passed and a habit become deeply engrained, what forces of
persuasion can one muster to undo that mind? As we say in Yoruba – t’ewe ba pe l’ara ose,
oun na a d’ose. If the leaf wrapping of soap sticks too long stays too long to the soap, that
leaf also turns to soap. So, peace unto all upon whose sensibilities I have certainly intruded.
This drawn out exposition is not really addressed to them; rather it is a simple entreaty to
those who have not yet succumbed to the lure of thesoap and leaf. To you, I plead: Imagine
if the then putative film venture that made its organized debut in Dakar 1966 had been
lumbered with the name – Dollywood? Every ensuing product is already doomed in the
mind with its associated baggage of infantilism, even before its exposure. Just imagine the
annunciation of – A Dollywood film festival. Or perhaps ‘Sellywood’ for Senegal? Nothing
could be sillier.
If only it stopped at subjective revulsion? However, there are more provocative
questions, such as: Does the branding influence the product? If you give a product a
deleterious name, does it affect, in advance, the consciousness of future producers? If, on
the other hand, a propulsive, challenging name, one that even intimates more than it
presently is, would that provoke in the artiste a tendency towards adventurousness,
experimentation and originality? Or are we merely indulging in self-flagellation? If the
pioneers of 1966 had grouped itself around the formulation – Dollywood – would we have
produced today’s Suleyman Cisse, Ola Balogun, Kola Olaniyan, Bello, and the rising
generation of cineastes? Consider this, following the mentality at the base of this,
FESPACO, because based in Burkina, would be Bullywood. Or perhaps, since that is so close
to Bollywood – Bellywood. Try and think – just one more!- of anything more ghastly, more
ghoulish than the contribution from Ghana – Ghollywood! Well, you know where it all
started. However, do the emerging Nigerian new breed still deserve to be associated with
that commencing second-hand clothes market tag , or with an evolving designer cut
production, catering, not for the lowest common denominator in taste but for more
discerning audiences, and/or raising – and surprising – expectations in their limited scope.
Even a casual study of current film making indicates that the Nigerian film occupation is
rapidly by-passing the stage of such retarded infantilism. So why should the films of such
artistes continue to be classified under that unprepossessing monstrosity of a verbal shroud
known as – here it comes at last! – Nollywood?
How do we extricate – both for internal and external references, including potential
markets and consumers – the grain from the chaff, the silkworm from the congealment of
the pupae? See what the Indian film industry has churned out so prodigiously since it
succumbed to the perverse name of Bollywood. Thousands of films emerged, mired in that
same bollywood mush. It took a Satiyajit Ray to plot a truly original path through the morass
with his masterful Pather Panchali, the first of a trilogy of ordinary lives that opened the
eyes of viewers to the vast world of mundane rhythems, East and West Africa. See what toll
this has taken in the conditioning of audience tastes, expanding to southern, and West
Africa. We must point out however that there may be a correlation between the product
and the environment that brought it to life in the first place. Each phenomenon of naming
is not unrelated to the social space of that namingceremony. The social, political, business,
religious….indeed the entire interactive environment of Nigeria, birthland of Nollywood –
unpredictable, raucous, egotistical, callous, sentimental, irrational and pugnacious all at the
same time – the manifestations that make up Nigerian reality are so grossly improbable that
it sometimes appears to me that all you have to do is set up a camera in an office, in a
market, in the motor garage or indeed any street corner, go away for lunch, and return
several hours later and – voila! – a film has already been shot, ready for only a little editing
here and there, but virtually ready for release as a truthful reflection of Nigerian life. This,
by the way, is not entirely speculative. Some Nollywood products have been made that way.
Indeed the very material raunchiness of Nigerian life does create a tendency to
reach out towards improbabilities. Nigerian social actualities are of such a nature that the
film-maker’s creative mind feels a compulsion to top it with excess in order satisfy the
demands of novelty. In other words, life around thecontemporary film maker, where the
grossest excesses take place every day but are treated as the norm, forces imagination to
reach outside and beyond reality to convince itself that it is at work, that it is not merely
imitating reality. Everything is oversize in the birthplace of Nollywood – oversize
consumption, oversize class distinctions, oversize exhibitionism, oversize egos, oversize
superstition, oversize dehumanization, oversize corruption, oversize inflation – both human
and economic – oversize national real estate, oversize pugnacity, oversize garbage heaps,
oversize decay, oversize media, oversize foreign investments, oversize churches and
oversize mosques, oversize consumerism by an oversize elite, even oversize First Ladies
with oversize vulgarity, oversize rapacity, avariciousness and overreeachiousness. You will
not find that last word in the dictionary, but I happen to come from the land of Nollywood,
where, if an expression is outside your non-existent vocabulary, you have the licence to
make up your own.
As a dramatist, I think I can sympathize with the artistic representation that goes
after the grossest aspects of the environment with a sheer oversize productivity at the
expense of quality. After all, when I wanted to capture the sheer brutishness of existence
under one of our most notorious dictators, did I not reach for the Theatre of the Absurd – in
Alfred Jarry’s UBU ROI? I proceeded, quite deliberately, to try and top the already grosteque
excesses of Jarry’s adaptation in my creation of King Baabu. Reality could no longer suffice.
The same creative process probably affected those early video lords. The Nigerian creative
mind opens his newspaper day after day and what lurid headlines confront him? with the
headlines: RITUALIST CAUGHT WITH FRESH HUMAN HEADS, BODY OF ONE MONTH OLD
BABY WITH MISSING VITAL ORGANS – MOTHER IN CUSTODY, KIDNAPPERS INVADE
CHURCH, ABDUCT OFFICIATING PRIEST ; BOKO HARAM KILLS SEVEN HEALTH AIDF
WORKERS; BOKO HARAM ABDUCTS SEVEN CONSTRUCTION WORKERS; TWENTY-SEVEN
BODIES WASHED ASHORE ON THE BANKS OF RIVER BENUE; PROPHET ARRESTED WITH FIVE
HUMAN SKULLS AND A BABY FEOTUS…. and so on and on. These are not made up
headlines. Is it any wonder that the film-maker goes for the horror genre where the staple
news is that the local chief is cooking up his subjects piecemeal, order to make millions or
win a local government election.
An inclination towards accommodating foreign models of the sensational then
follows, faced with such gargantuan proportions of societal reality begging for expression –
and where is this to be found but in the ready-made formulae of cheap Hollywood?
Cheapness calls to cheapness. Where what are generally valued as social assets – and that
includes human life itself – are held so cheaply, the artiste may consider it beneath him or
her to expend more than the cheapest representational responses. The precedence is not
lacking. The early contemporary African- American black directors rode to cinematic
prominence on the shoulders – in case we have all forgotten – of what came to be known
and early described as BLAXPLOITATION Movies, filmsthat exploited Blackness, albeit in a
stereotypical and imitative genre, substituting black actors for Grade B white actors, black
environment for white, but catering equally to what was considered low taste – Richard
Rowntree in the SHAFT movies, and even, BLACKULA instead of that classic horror genre of
limitless exploitative potential – DRACULA, all blood and gore, only black blood this time,
albeit red. What is the difference between Blackula’s fangs fastened on the jugular of a
prostrate black victim and, the fangs of the insensate ruler fastened on the life-blood of a
prostrate generation?
All that conceded, the objective of art does not exclude transformation, and by that I
do not mean simply – societal transformation. Indeed, you may have observed that I do not
say – the objective of art is to transform society.No, I deplore that familiar, ideological but
dictatorial demand of art. The objective of art is also – among other purposes – Revelation.
Whether Revelation leads to transformation or not, is a different issue. The primary
objective of Art is to constantly transform itself, its own modes of expression and
representation. The objective of Art is also to be chameleonic and protean – that is, to
change shape and colour at will, to supersede both reality and expectations. Yes indeed,
the goal of transformation is not only desirable, it is an integrated element of what art does.
We do not want us to get bogged down with that ancient, ragged discourse based on a onetrack,
reductionist relationship of art to society, what the artiste’s obligation is etc. etc.
Writers have put themselves through this wringer, especially during the phase of ideological
self-bashings that all societies undergo, and in particular societies that have been victims of
imperialism and colonization – including cultural degradation from external forces. Film
makers should please understand that that discourseis daily overtaken by events, and we
should now primarily interest ourselves in how the cineaste, as artist, transforms the
material at his or her disposal. What applies to the writer, painter, musician, sculptor, even
architect is just as pertinent to the film-maker.
Nonetheless we must acknowledge that there is a kind of imagic immediacy that is
more applicable to the cinema than to other forms of expression, including even theatre.
Cinema is a powerful tool for transformation, no question about that. However, just as in
literature, the cinema can easily become a medium of crude propaganda that is totally
devoid of artistic solace, blaring out an ideological line as a substitute for creative rigour.
Art is is own rigorous master; it makes demands, and the primary responsibility of the artist
is to fulfill those demands. This, for instance is what makes Sembene Ousmane a cineaste of
great versatility, one of the most consistent that the continent has produced – his ability to
embed a social message in a work without sacrificing its artistic vision. I have singled out
Sembene Ousmane because the same kind of artistic integrity is apparent in his writings –
God’s Bits of Wood – for instance, as in his films – CEDDO or XALA.
Must films carry a message? My answer to that is: does Harry Potter carry a
message? All we know is that those films – like the book itself – carry a wallop and
generates envy in the minds of most film makers. Nothing wrong with envy, by the way.
Indeed envy can actually be a good motivator. Eventhe Vatican is not free from it. About
four or five years ago, the Vatican issued a condemnation of the film series as a dangerous
endorsement of Satanism. Well, my reaction was – oh-oh, here comes the green-eyed
monster eyeing the greenbacks flowing into the box office. After all, has the Church, ever
since its mammoth success with the bible, ever come up with another literary success
story? To rub pepper in the wound, each time some lavish, money-spinning production
from the scriptures takes place – like The Ten Commandments, with the over-muscled
Charleston Heston in command – the Church gets no royalties whatsoever. I think we
should simply dismiss the Church’s demonizing encyclicals. Fantasy is a different matter.
Each time I see news coverage of mile-long queues winding round a cinema theatre where a
new Harry Potter book is being launched, and the same endless queues when the next
Potter film is due to open – grandparents, parents,children of all ages – I fantasize about
meeting Madame Multi-billionaire Rowlings in a dark alley where there are no witnesses.
As that opportunity became less and less likely, I began to think seriously of matching skills
against hers, but based on our own African mythological resources. Needless to say, the
very first step of the creative idea is always the easiest part – which is to think to oneself –
hn-hn, that seems to be an interesting idea. Then the second step forward is – hn-hjn-hn,
that is a very good idea. Then the third, which is of course – wait a minute, that really is a
brilliant, creative idea. After that, other distractions intervene, and a dead-end looms in
view. I know I shall never even succeed in setting down even the mere film treatment of a
Harry Potter success. Others can, however, and should. Why should a Bambara equivalent
of the Potter series not also take the world by storm? If anyone here has a new idea on the
subject – but without the Nollywood stamp – let me announce right here that I am open to
propositions. But don’t even bother to get any ideas on the subject unless you have the
preliminary, capital idea – which is how to raise the capital.
Motivation is a question that any serious artiste must face – and do note that I use
that expression deliberately – ‘serious artiste’. Artistic seriousness is not a contradiction of
material success – all it requires is honesty, the courage to come to terms with the question
– why am I in this occupation? Why did I choose togo into it? If it is to make money, then
you must study the consumerist trends, and apply yourself to them. But then, if you are also
a serious artist, you decide whether you wish to indulge that taste by remaining on that
same level or – take it to a higher state, however slight, even though your starting blocks are
set firmly on that track known as popular appeal. Creativity lies in advancing the level of
one’s artistic choices. Yes, the practical questionof even ‘breaking even’ is not to be pushed
aside – whether we like it or not, no serious film artist can blithely ignore the economics of
taste – and there lies the tyranny. Taste in itselfis a very ambiguous, indeed vexatious issue.
Taste, one has to acknowledge, can be a snob affectation, or elitist consciousness. How
does one define good and bad taste? Is minority taste necessarily the most refined, while
the majority is despised as the fodder of the masses? Taste? The pulp video producer would
probably sneer. Taste? The only taste I know is the taste of food and anything that puts
food in my mouth – that’s good taste!
Yes, taste. The often intolerable weightiness, yetlightness of taste! Even censorship,
ever opportunistic, cashes in on Taste – this or that is in bad taste because it goes against
African – or increasingly, religious – culture, as if culture is static, not dynamic and evolving.
This is what many advocates of culture fail to understand. The extreme policy choice of
outright and extreme censorship in the name of cultural purity – most notable in societies
that are infected by the virus of religious fundamentalism – banning or controlling the
means of reception – such as video cassettes, satellite dishes and even – books. are of
course, futile and retrogressive. The incursion of the negative or dubious alien cultures,
values and tendencies, is best countered by the strengthening and exposure of indigenous
cultures, ideally in innovative ways, not by creating a hermetic society, closed to all external
development. Even BIG BROTHER AFRICA, a series I thoroughly detest – suitably overhauled
– is not, as format, without cultural and transformative possibilities. To be able to watch, for
instance, a group of young people – christian, moslem, buddhist, traditional believers such
as the aborisa – interacting as normal beings, worshipping in their own way day in day out,
indifferent to the frenzy of religious extremists, within an intimate environment – now that
may speak meaningfully to viewers regarding one of the most devastating crises of
cohabitation that currently confronts us – the crisis of the aggression of faith, now ravaging
swathes of our continent.
Images are the most powerful ambassadors of the cultural exchange, and thus, the
cinema and video can affect modes of thinking, perception and – most pertinently – human
regard. The temptation for the African film-maker is to attempt to be a Stephen Spielberg
when it is possible to make a small classic of memorable dimensions. Such gems exist,
manifestations of the claim: Small is beautiful. Having served on quite a handful of film
juries since the sixties – African, Asian, Latin American, Eastern European and others, I do
confidently assert this. It should not suffice to display only new films on occasions such as
this. There are some modest but inspired works thatrequire to be made more accessible,
films that were made when Africa had greater leisure, when internecine wars had not worn
out the creative resources of the younger generation, driven into exile, lodged in dungeons
for expressing dissident views through their art, turned into child soldiers or driven
underground by the rampaging virus of bigotry, and vulgar, murderous religious
fundamentalism. Courage is constantly on call.
Try and recall the number of film makers – in company of writers, painters and other
creative individuals – whose lives have been snuffed out for attempting to actualize their
vision of humanity, and I am not simply speaking of cases that made international
headlines, such as the Dutch film maker, Van Gogh, who was gunned down in the streets of
Holland for a film that denounced the oppression of women under narrow, twisted,
chauvinistic interpretations of scriptural texts. Before van Gogh, film-makers had been
routinely cut down in their prime during the fundamentalist upsurge of Algeria – in some
cases, sent into exile. I recall the case of one film-maker who resisted all efforts to by
concerned friends and colleagues to make him relocate to Europe for his own safety. He
however made a habit of spending at least two months a year away from the Algeria of
that time, as a therapeutic regimen, simply to decompress, to ease off the tension of daily
survival in his homeland. These are themes that youwill confront sooner or later. You will
be confronted with life-impacting choices. The video cassettes – DVD, CD-Rom etc – are our
allies. They are handy weapons in the battle for creative freedom – let us not hesitate to
use them. It is only a matter of time – if it is not happening already – when we shall be able
to download entire films via satellite onto hand-held phones, escape into a transformed
vista of humanistic possibilities, uncensored, snatching hours of refuge from the agents of
mind-closure, from criminal minds masquerading under religious fervour.
Let us not mealy-mouth about, or underestimate theenemies of creative life – they
are in reality no more than brutal, unconscionable replacements for the old order of
political repression by alien imperators, from which our nationalist pioneers have laboured
and sacrificed to extricate our humanity. If you made a film today about paedophilia in
Nigeria, and the plight of girl children who, victims of so-called religious permissiveness, end
up as pathological wrecks of vestico-vaginal fistula, be sure that you will incur the ire of
those perverts who, exposed as confirmed, serial paedophiliacs, actually sit at the apex of
your law-making structures – as in my own Nigeria. They will team up with the homicidal
deviants of the religious mandate and attempt to snuff out your existence, be they called
Boko Haram or whatever else.
We are all living on the edge or daily survival – if you are still in the exemption zone,
if you think you are immune, take it from me, you soon will discover different. It is a virulent
contagion. And so you must make up your mind but – make your choice. In the early days of
this now notorious insurgency, a television newscaster was deliberately shot and killed by
one such group. Deliberately, I said, with murder aforethought, since the killers sent a
message afterwards that this was a collective punishment for journalists who – in their view
– had distorted accounts of their activities – as if it was possible to distort a pattern of
activities already more bestial than anything the Nigerian people had encountered in
postcolonial times. So just think what the risks are when you confront such retrograde interests
with stark, realistic moving images of their anti-humanist mission. The creative founts are
being shut off everyday, and the mere business of survival is driving potential talent off the
abundant terrain for the flowering of their genius. Reminders of what was produced in
African film immediately before, and during the continent’s early energized burst of
creativity, that inspirational surge from the flushof independence, should always be made
available as yardsticks of the possible, and the relevant. This is what guarantees continuity,
and continuity in the Arts is as essential as the DNA spiral is to human evolution.
Themes change, as does fashion, but art is constant. If you asked me what is the
pressing theme of this moment for us on the African continent – for those who feel
compelled to be socially relevant, who do not feel artistically comfortable or fulfilled unless
their lenses are directed inwards into the anomalies of society – permit me to isolate that
perennial theme that weighs us down on this continent. It is an answer you should have
discerned from the foregoing, but let me spell it out even more succinctly by calling your
attention to events that are undoubtedly very freshin your minds.
The literary treasures of Timbuktoo are invaluable. As a writer, I experienced days,
weeks of anguish when the neo-barbarians of our times invaded Mali, with the avowed
mission, already brutally executed in other places – such as Somalia and Northern Nigeria –
of resuming an age of censorship that one thought the world had repudiated at least a full
millennium before. Valuable as these manuscripts are however, perhaps filled with hitherto
unheard-of narratives for the jaded film-maker seeking to break new grounds – but never
mind even if they are devoid of such – they mainly serve as a solid, prideful foundation, as
heritage. They are monuments to the past, the measure of a people’s creative, and
potentially transformative signposts of the future.That tangible future however, is what we
read in the products of the contemporary artistes, and most especially those artists who
employ the most contemporary medium of expression –the cinema.
Then, ask this question: what is the social condition of such artistes? What would
have been their fate if the zealots had been permitted to retain and consolidate their
asphyxiation of culture in Mali. There is no need to speculate. Simply demand of the
Suleyman Cisses, the Oumar Sissokos of that nation, ask them from which direction they
encountered the greatest obstacles in the practice of their trade – directly or indirectly –
over the past decades of cinematic engagement? I am speaking of those entrenched
censors constantly spreading their shadows over creativity. Enquire what themes, so
pertinent to the present and the cause of full artistic expression, have raised the hackles of
the religious irredentists of society, to the extent that governments have often been obliged
to ban the screening of such films, in order to appease such atavists.
Yes, indeed, if you seek the iconic images of our time, you will find them in the plight
of women who are being lashed publicly for showing off an inch or two of bare flesh above
their ankles. They are to be found in the disfigurement of individuals whose hands have
been amputated, equally on account of stealing a loaf of bread as for shaking hands with a
human being of the opposite sex. You will find them in those blood-drenched pits where
women have been buried to the neck and stoned to death by a public for the crime of giving
their bodies to whomsoever they please. They proliferate in images of men awaiting
execution for yielding to the impulses of that biological make-up that responds only to
others of the same sex and result in homosexual relationship. You will find them in the ruins
of the heritage of the past as well as the rubble of the centres of leisure and enlightenment
– the theatres, the artiste clubs, and the cinema houses. We cannot all, and for much
longer, evade the call of re-constructed images of nine female health workers, shot in cold
blood for the incredible ‘crime’ of inoculating ouryouth against the polio scourge that fills
our streets with human millipedes crawling in between vehicle wheels in traffic, eternal
beggars from the leftovers of our indifferent elite. Yes, you, our front-line film makers from
West to Southern Africa, who have used these very images of the cripple, the blind, the
amputees, the stunted, the twisted and mangled from birth to press your message of
responsibility on society, or even simply – as in Ghollywood, Nollywood, Bellywood etc. – to
pander to the thrill of the grotesque in voyeuristic audiences , maybe it is time to delineate
a cause-and-effect between the prevalence of those unfortunates on our streets, and the
brain infection that leads to the deaths of nine health workers, women who are dedicated
to preventing the very ailments that produce such malformed humanity. Or the three
foreign doctors from North Korea whose throats wereslit for no other crime than that of
ministering to the ailments that must beset a people with a grossly deficient proportion of
medical practitioners per populace.
Yes, these are impositions from the hands of the latest in the line of internal neocolonialists,
and their backers, the external imperators. And such pressing issues of our
post-colonial times, alas, are obscuring the battle against corruption, camouflaged
dictatorship, social marginalization, hunger, lack of shelter, and the brutal alienation of
political practice – that urgent issue is easily summed up as bigotry, intolerance, the
degradation our own very humanity in the name of antique interpretations of sectional
scriptures. The prime issue of our time however remains painfully the same, the ultimate
battleground, as ancient as it is eternal: that battle is one between Power and Freedom.
Power as exerted, not this time by the state but byquasi-states, without boundaries, and
without the responsibilities of governance. History demonstrates however that Power is
transient, while Freedom is eternal. Let our film practitioners engage in this battle – but
only if battle is in their blood. If not, do not despair or burden yourself with guilt: simply,
make – films.
But films need capital. They require subsidy. For the younger generation, a fraction
of what governments waste, what politicians steal, what civil servants divert, the total value
of the holdings of two or three indicted or fugitive governors from Nigeria or elsewhere on
the continent, stored in offshore businesses with their mattresses stuffed with cash in place
of cotton or kapok, the sum of off-shore properties, of which more and more are being
confiscated – thanks to a slowly evolving conscience of some European nations – and
occasionally restored to national ownership…..a fraction of all this is more than enough to
turn the African continent into – do excuse yet another neologism – the Fespascene – or
perhaps the Fespacity of the world. Or whatever. A veritable film Valhalla, if you prefer,
only anything but, absolutely not yet another exocentric, dumbing down, brain-dead cliché
such as – Africa’s – Allywood!
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