Reviewer: Professor Olu Obafemi
Professor Iyorwuese Hagher’s A Portrait of Paradise arrives like a furious wind from the postcolonial tropics — prophetic, theatrical, grotesque, and morally wounded. It is the kind of African political novel that rejects the polite discipline of realism. Instead, it opts for excess, allegory, satire, lamentation, and visionary rage.
In its architecture and rhetorical ambition, the novel stands somewhere between Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Wole Soyinka’s tragic-political dramaturgy, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s satirical nationalism, and the apocalyptic moral universe of Ben Okri. Yet Hagher’s voice remains unmistakably his own: steeped in the oral cadence of Tiv storytelling, sharpened by the sensibility of a dramatist, and burdened by the historical consciousness of a statesman who has seen power from the inside.
The fictional republic of Sofalia is, of course, not fictional at all. It is Africa’s wounded republic, the postcolonial state as
This post was originally published on this site.
