Syl Cheney-Coker

Last updated

Syl Cheney-Coker (born 28 June 1945) [1] is a poet, novelist, and journalist from Freetown, Sierra Leone. Educated in the United States, he has a global sense of literary history, and has introduced styles and techniques from French and Latin American literatures to Sierra Leone. He has spent much of his life in exile from his native country, and has written extensively (in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction) about the condition of exile and the view of Africa from an African abroad.

Contents

Early life and education

Cheney-Coker was born a Creole in Freetown, Sierra Leone, with the name Syl Cheney Coker, and changed his name to its current spelling in 1970. [2] He went to the United States in 1966, where he attended the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Oregon, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. After his schooling he returned briefly to Sierra Leone, but accepted a position at the University of the Philippines in 1975; he later married a Filipino woman. [3] He moved to Nigeria in 1977 to teach at the University of Maiduguri, and returned to the United States in 1988 to be Writer-in-Residence at the University of Iowa.

Poetry

Cheney-Coker's poetry is tinged with the anxiety of his perennially uncertain status, dealing both with exile (he has spent the majority of his adult life outside of his country) and with the precariousness of living as an intellectual in Sierra Leone. At the same time, he is concerned always with how he will be read; his poems are radical and ardent, but also erudite and allusive, which can distract a reader from Cheney-Coker's ideological project. He has been called one of the more western-influenced African poets. [4] In his "On Being a Poet in Sierra Leone" (from his The Graveyard Also Has Teeth, 1980) he writes:

at the university the professors talk about the poetry
of Syl Cheney-Coker condemning students
to read me in the English honours class
my country I do not want that!
do not want to be cloistered in books alone [5]

The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar

After three collections of poetry, all well received in the west, Cheney-Coker wrote a novel, The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, which was published in 1990. The novel, extremely ambitious in scale and scope, describes the entire history of a fictional country, Malagueta, with roots in the Atlantic slave trade (similar to Sierra Leone or Liberia, both populated partly by former slaves). The novel is intended as a break with the tradition of the African novel and its dominant writers, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Chinua Achebe. [6] To achieve this independence, it draws both on the peculiar histories of the post-slavery nations of northwest Africa and on literatures from outside of the continent. Cheney-Coker's interest in Gabriel García Márquez, in particular, has led some critics to consider the novel to belong to the genre of magical realism—the title character demonstrates mysterious powers similar to those of some of García Márquez's characters—though others have questioned that assumption. [7] The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Africa Region) in 1991. [1] [8]

Journalism and exile

In the early 1990s, Cheney-Coker returned to Freetown to become editor of a progressive newspaper, the Vanguard. After the military coup of 1997, Cheney-Coker was targeted as a dissident, and barely escaped with his life. [9] In part through the efforts of Wole Soyinka, an exiled Nigerian poet teaching at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Cheney-Coker was invited to be the first writer in the City of Asylum program in Las Vegas, Nevada. He decided to return to a somewhat more stable Sierra Leone in 2003, saying, "After a while, exile is neither justifiable nor tolerable." [10]

Documentary

In 2016, Cheney-Coker, along with his lifelong friend, the Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare, was the subject of a documentary called The Poets, by director Chivas DeVinck. [11] The film follows Cheney-Coker and Osundare on a road-trip through Sierra Leone and Nigeria as they discuss their friendship and how their life experiences have shaped their art.

Books

Related Research Articles

The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry is a 1984 poetry anthology edited by Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier. It consists mainly of poems written in English and English translations of French or Portuguese poetry; poems written in African languages were included only in the authors' translations. The poems are arranged by the country of the poet, then by their date of birth. The following sections list the poets included in the collection.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lenrie Peters</span> Gambian surgeon and writer (1932–2009)

Lenrie Leopold Wilfred Peters was a Gambian surgeon, novelist, poet and educationist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Niyi Osundare</span> Nigerian writer

Niyi Osundare is a Nigerian poet, dramatist, linguist, and literary critic. Born on March 12, 1947, in Ikere-Ekiti, Nigeria, his poetry is influenced by the oral poetry of his Yoruba culture, which he hybridizes with other poetic traditions of the world, including African-American, Latin American, Asian, and European.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fourah Bay College</span> University in Freetown, Sierra-Leone

Fourah Bay College is a public university in the neighbourhood of Mount Aureol in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Founded on 18 February 1827, it is the first western-style university built in Sub-Saharan Africa and, furthermore, the first university-level institution in Africa. It is a constituent college of the University of Sierra Leone (USL) and was formerly affiliated with Durham University (1876–1967).

Tanure Ojaide is a Nigerian poet and academic. As a writer, he is noted for his unique stylistic vision and for his intense criticism of imperialism, religion, and other issues. He is regarded as a socio-political and an ecocentric poet. He won the 2018 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa with his collection Songs of Myself: A Quartet (2017).

Coker is a surname shared by several notable people, including:

Oscar Ronald Dathorne was a Guyanese educator, novelist, poet and critic. He was the founder of the Association of Caribbean Studies and the Journal of Caribbean Studies.

Professor Eldred Durosimi Jones was a Sierra Leonean academic and literary critic, known for his book Othello's Countrymen: A Study of Africa in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. He was a principal of Fourah Bay College. Jones died in Freetown, Sierra Leone, on Saturday, 21 March 2020.

Frank Kobina Parkes was a Ghanaian journalist, broadcaster and poet. He was the author of one book, Songs from the Wilderness, but is widely anthologised and is perhaps best known for his poem "African Heaven", which echoes the title of Carl Van Vechten's controversial 1926 novel Nigger Heaven, and was selected by Langston Hughes for inclusion in the groundbreaking anthology of African writing An African Treasury (1960). Parkes' poetic style, an intelligent, rhythmic free verse brimming with confidence and undercut with humour, is believed to owe much to the Senegalese poet David Diop, one of the pioneers of the négritude movement. Reviewing Songs from the Wilderness, Mbella Sonne Dipoko said: "Mr Parkes is one of the fine poets writing today about Africa and the world." The book was hailed as "...a landmark not only in Ghanaian poetry but in African poetry as a whole".

William Farquhar Conton was a Sierra Leone Creole educator, historian and acclaimed novelist.

Yulisa Amadu Pat Maddy was a Sierra Leonean writer, poet, actor, dancer, director and playwright. Known by his friends and colleagues as Pat Maddy or simply Prof, he had an "immense impact" on theatre in Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Zambia.

Alusine Kamara is a Sierra Leonean retired footballer who played two matches as a midfielder for Syrianska FC in the Swedish Allsvenskan, as well as once for the Sierra Leonea national team.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gladys Casely-Hayford</span> Gold Coast-born Sierra Leonean writer (1904–1950)

Gladys May Casely-HayfordaliasAquah Laluah was a Gold Coast-born Sierra Leonean writer. She is credited as the first author to write in the Krio language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women in Sierra Leone</span> Overview of the status of women in Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone, officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a Constitutional Republic in West Africa. Since it was founded in 1792, the women in Sierra Leone have been a major influence in the political and economic development of the nation.

Literature of Sierra Leone is the collection of written and spoken work, mostly fictional, from Sierra Leone. The coastal west-African country suffered a civil war from 1991 until 2002. Before the civil war, Sierra Leone had many writers contributing to its literature and since the end of the war the country has been in the process of rebuilding this literature. This is an overview of some important aspects of the literature of Sierra Leone before, during, and after the war.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kojo Laing</span> Ghanaian novelist and poet (1946–2017)

B. Kojo Laing or Bernard Kojo Laing was a Ghanaian novelist and poet, whose writing is characterised by its hybridity, whereby he uses Ghanaian Pidgin English and vernacular languages alongside standard English. His first two novels in particular – Search Sweet Country (1986) and Woman of the Aeroplanes (1988) – were praised for their linguistic originality, both books including glossaries that feature the author's neologisms as well as Ghanaian words.

The last harmattan of Alusine Dunbar is a novel by Syl Cheney-Coker. It won the Africa region of the 1991 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

References

  1. 1 2 R. Victoria Arana, "Cheney-Coker, Syl", in Encyclopedia of World Poetry, Infobase Learning, 2015.
  2. ↑ Clarke, George Elliot, Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 128.
  3. ↑ Hallowell, Gbanabom, "The Claustrophobia of Exile: African Poets Writing in the 'Wasteland'" (Sea Breeze: Journal of Contemporary Liberian Writings Vol. 3, No. 1 [2006]).
  4. ↑ Riemenschneider, Dieter, African Literatures in the Eighties (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 82.
  5. ↑ Moore, Gerald, and Ulli Beier, The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry, 4th edition (London: Penguin, 1998), 339.
  6. ↑ Bertinetti, Paolo, "Reality in Magic in Syl Cheney-Coker's The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar," in Linguanti, Elsa et al., ed., Coterminous Worlds: Magical Realism and Contemporary Post-colonial Literature in English (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 199.
  7. ↑ Olatubosun Ogunsanwo, for example, challenges that interpretation in his review of Brenda Cooper's Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye (Research in African Literatures Vol. 31 No. 2 [2000], 226–228). Bertinetti quotes some ambivalent statements by Cheney-Coker himself, and argues for a middle view (199–200).
  8. ↑ Biography at World Poetry Database.
  9. ↑ Schaeffer, Glen, "Battling Censorship, One Writer at a Time" (International Institute of Modern Letters, Rainmaker Report Winter 2003/2004), 1.
  10. ↑ Morrison, Jane Ann, "Symbol of Freedom: Exiled Writer: Time is Right to Go Home", Las Vegas Review Journal, 17 January 2003.
  11. ↑ The Poets Documentary at Icarus Films.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.