Favourite Five: Femi Morgan

Femi Morgan is a writer, publicist and content manager. He is a curator at WriteHouse Collective, a social enterprise which organises Artmosphere, one of the country’s leading reading, culture and music events. The former journalist eats books, recommends books, chats up with book people. He tells us about his favourite five books. It is a long list interwoven with other books but an enjoyable read. 

Ake by Wole Soyinka 

Everyone who dines in the corridors of literature has an opinion of the white haired wizard of words, Wole Soyinka. I am still glued to his narration of his years of childhood, Ake, a quintessential memoir that tells of the formative bricks and the simplistic ideological foundations-the childhood mischief too.  His other works, Death and the King's Horseman, Lion and the Jewel and his socio-political writings give the impression that perhaps Soyinka never played pranks, never saw the world through the nature of a young boy in the dusty near-cosmopolitan Egba town. Ake is Soyinka’s work with a sense of humour.

Soyinka’s Ake also reveals Nigerian values before military conquistadors turned them to shit holes, dump sites and grave yards. You can only understand the value given to teachers, preachers, and other simple career people in Nigeria of our past. In present times, it boils down to a monopoly of money for respect, given to yahoo hustlers, political conspirators and gunmen. You can wish for the paradisal ambience and respect for religious multiplicity which has unfortunately morphed into hatred and unhealthy sentimentality. 

Only two non-fiction works have tried to usurp Ake from my heart, they are Victor Ehikhamenor’s Excuse Me, a beautiful masterpiece of writings and Pius Adesanmi’s Africa You’re Not a Country, a collection of articles, and a collection of essays respectively. How they have failed to trounce the childhood book in my heart, I can’t tell.  First love is the deepest.   

Tender Moments (Love Poems) by Niyi Osundare 

In my progress as a poet, I think I have read a lot of collections and it was a difficult task to choose from my hoard of great minstrels. From the great Odia Ofiemun, to journalist-poet, Sam Omatseye. Is it Tanure Ojaide’s works or Tutoba’s or Jumoke Verissimo's. Recently Emmanuel Uweru Okoh’s debut Garden and Caves and Tade Ipadeola’s Sahara Testament also got a nod on my shelves. But Niyi Osundare stands out like a sun on a hot Ojuelegba “waka-waka” afternoon. 

Osundare’s Tender Moments is his first major collection after his experience with wild lady Katrina. But he takes in this tragedy  basking in the euphoria of loving life, in the elements of happy memories and in the romantic concern for his home country.  Osundare is a poet with the depths of tradition, the imagery of modern nuances and the unique personality of an uncensored muse. Osundare is never complex but always beautiful. In this love collection, he shares the same sense of maturity that Ojaide’s The Beauty I Have Seen displays.  If you think that Osundare is “old school”, have a rethink because you will be caught pants down after reading this collection. Some lines: 

How can I forget

The day you blessed

Me with fire

Blanketed me in the con

Flagration of your sigh

Your fervent rainbow.

The Pornographer of Vienna by Lewis Crofts 

I stumbled on the book on the streets in Ibadan, while I was criss-crossing Lagos, Ibadan and Ile-Ife for books and at that time, I was asking myself fundamental questions about my art. It brought me delight and directions.     This is one of my “out-of-the box-books” of all time. The Pornographer of Vienna tells a developing story of a renowned Viennese visual artist, Egon Schiele without mincing words on the vulgarity, sexual preferences and psychological traumas.   What draws me to Lewis Crofts' portrayal of Egon Schiele is the ever “running away” nature of Egon, his discovery of sexual artistry and the understanding of the mind of radical, avant artists. Sex is worshipped in this book, as hot as hell is. 

The book was written in what I could call the “dark Austrian years of censorship and patronising patrons” but Egon Schiele didn’t have all the opportunities flung at his feet, in fact he was like a criminal likened only to French vagabond poet, Francios Villon.  

Only one book comes close to The Pornographer of Vienna, it is the novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, because of it’s clarity of narration. These two books are “open books” that you can find yourself looking straight into the eyes of the characters, feeling their skin, fondling with friendship, and crying for their creepiness.  

Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene 

When I finished this delectable dish in 2009, I wrote “Greene will make you grin with wit and green with creativity…little drops of water makes the grasses greene.”

I love satires, it is what I call a language of laughter for only the initiated. Graham Greene in Monsignor Quixote takes a sweep on the church with rippling comical satire. The author takes a looking glass on the life, the disillusionment and the so-called privileges of Father Quixote, a catholic priest who is constantly faced with internal church politics and plebeian human natures. Greene is a captivating storyteller who makes the Father  ask questions in the mood swing way of philosopher, religious father and ordinary human. 

The core of Greene’s book is understanding humanity and the over-exaggeration of holiness placed as a burden on people just as ordinary as ourselves.  One can liken it to Anthony Trollope’s Barchester’s Towers in a certain way, except that Trollope is purely vindictive on the church; Greene on the other hand seems to be catching fun and making the reader catch fun too. The book is super funny. One new book that I have read that has quixotic characters is Chuma Nwokolo’s Diaries of a Dead African, a book in which I am well pleased.

Inheritance by Indira Ganesan 

I have read The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy: it confuses me.  However, Indira Ganesan’s novella Inheritance stands out as a book that truly opened my eyes to Indian culture in postmodern times. 

The book revolves around Sonil, a child with a disjointed family background (an unknown American father and a Indian mother, Laksmi, who abandons her for her relatives). Sonil begins her life as a listener of family history and grand misfortunes. She takes in all the tales from her absent-minded uncle. As time and age comes upon her, she falls in love with an American and begins to consider forgiving her mother. The book is a young woman’s search for life's meaning. It highlights the changing times of modern India, where there is rebellion against Indian customs. It also talks about early marriages, organised marriages and the ambivalent western cultures that has prospered families through hardwork on one hand, and has turned other hands into lazy logs on the other. Through the senses of a developing child, Sonil develops a notion of history from mere hearsay and diluted Indian mythology. 

Indira Ganessan is one who loves life and feels that people are still deluded with old traditions, superstitions even amidst modernism. With the fine tapestry of narration and a spree of characters, the rich, the poor and the disturbing she entices the reader to a book with no exact ending.