Date: 24 September 2011
The budding poet, Gimba Kakanda, takes his turn at the highly-acclaimed Guest Writer Session on September 24, 2011. An initiative of the Abuja Writers Forum (AWF), now in its third year, the event holds at the Pen and Pages Bookstore, White House Plaza, Plot 79, Adetokunbo Ademola Crescent, Wuse 2, Abuja and has featured an exciting array of emerging and established writers.
Kakanda who is is in his mid-twenties, and hails from the Kakandas who inhabit the banks of the River Niger especially the stretch that runs through Niger State, had his primary and secondary education at Minna and Suleja before enrolling in the University of Jos to study geology and aspires to delve into Planetary Science out of passion for the mysteries of creation.
But it is his other passion, creative writing, which has thrust his name in the limelight via his recent maiden poetry collection, Safari Pants. The poet Obemata in a review of the collection, states that “the complexity of his (Kakanda’s) poetry sure makes him one of the must read poets of his generation…. Divided into five parts: ‘Whistles of aches’, ‘The pain-beats sag into nothingness’, ‘We stitch the drum skin with the muscles of hunger’, ‘Taken away in the dance-past for rhythmic silence, we dancestep on one another,’ and ‘We plant furs on the sore of our depression’, “Safari Pants”, as songs to ‘appease the rage and love of those of those repelled and embraced by the magnetism of [this] writing life’, represents a significant offering to Nigeria’s contemporary poetry .”
The literary journalist, Henry Akubuiro, also observes that “Kakanda has a way with words. Here is an emerging wordsmith whose forge of semantics takes you unawares… His fine turns of expressions, the felicity of his symbols and his constancy of artistic purpose readily sells him as a poet for the sublime zone. This is a poet you read with a strudel by your side.” Kakanda says “Safari Pants, (was) born in ambiguity; I realized that when I was collecting the poems into a volume. The first concept of safari used in the book is created in thought of the usual safari expedition, used with the respiratory ‘pants’; so, safari pants are the hard breaths, nay struggles we take on our expedition through life. The second face of the title comes from the safari dress; here the safari pant which some of us wear is used to portray a dress that, accidentally, symbolizes troubled life by a particular experience of mine or simply, safari pant is metaphor of drudgery. Actually, the second side of the title came to me during a demonstration in which a lad dressed in safari pant was chased by a dog and had his pant torn by the beast. This quite pricked a poem in me because the safari pants I was used to weren’t a fashion that goes with haughtiness. Nonetheless, interchangeable images of Safari the expedition and Safari the dress is used in this collection; by this I have to say both sides of the meaning fits in, ambiguously, on occasions that the readers conjure their meanings.”
Kakanda who is currently putting finishing touches to a novel tentatively titled Night Book, hass had essays on literary criticism, review of books and trends, travelogues, poems and reactions to topical issues have published in variousnewspapers, local and international anthologies, andjournals and literary and social websites, including: Leadership, New Nigerian, The Guardian, People’s Daily, Sunday Trust, Tribune, Vanguard, Weekly Trust (Newspapers); Fireflies (2009), Voices from the Sun (2010) (poetry anthologies); Sentinel Nigeria, Prosopisia: An International Journal of Poetry and Creative Writing (Journals); gamji.com, switchedonnaija.com, halftribe.com (websites).
He is the literary/book analyst of Books & Hills Consultancy, a new literary agency that focuses on linking emerged and emerging writers up with internationally recognised publishers, and, the founding editor of Nupewood, a forthcoming magazine of the Nupe movie industry.
He was a panelist at the first Bayelsa Book & Craft fair (March, 2011), and won a slot to the 2011 edition of the annual Farafina Creative Writing Workshop facilitated by the novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
The September 24 Guest Writer Session will include the usual side attractions of poetry performance, mini art exhibition, and a raffle-draw as well as live music. The Abuja Writer’s Forum meets three Sundays each month and hosts a reading on every last Saturday at the International Institute of Journalism and Pen and Pages respectively.
Abdullahi Abubakar
Contact Information:
For inquiries: abujawriters@fastermail.com
Website: http://www.abujawritersforum.com/