Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- EDITORIAL ARTICLE: The African Novel in the 21st Century: Sustaining the Gains of the 20th Century
- ARTICLES
- Resurgent Spirits, Catholic Echoes of Igbo & Petals of Purple: The Syncretised World of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus
- Ambivalent Inscriptions: Women, Youth & Diasporic Identity in Buchi Emecheta's Later Fiction
- The Interrupted Dance: Racial Memory in Isidore Okpewho's Call Me By My Rightful Name
- The Ivorian Crisis & Ahmadou Kourouma's Posthumous Political Novel Quand on Refuse on dit non
- Ngũgĩ's Wizard of the Crow: Women as the “Voice of the People” & the Western Audience
- The Ankh & Maat: Symbols of Successful Revolution in Ayi Kwei Armah's Osiris Rising
- A New African Youth Novel in the Era of HIV/AIDS: An Analysis of Unity Dow's Far & Beyon'
- The Prison of Nigerian Woman: Female Complicity in Sefi Atta's Everything Good Will Come
- Manufacturing Skin for Somalia's History: Nuruddin Farah's Deep Hurt in Links
- A Zimbabwean Ethic of Humanity: Tsitsi Dangarembga's The Book of Not & the Unhu Philosophy of Personhood
- ‘Coming to America’: Ike Oguine's A Squatter's Tale & the Nigerian/African Immigrant's Narrative
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun
- REVIEW
- Index
‘Coming to America’: Ike Oguine's A Squatter's Tale & the Nigerian/African Immigrant's Narrative
from ARTICLES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- EDITORIAL ARTICLE: The African Novel in the 21st Century: Sustaining the Gains of the 20th Century
- ARTICLES
- Resurgent Spirits, Catholic Echoes of Igbo & Petals of Purple: The Syncretised World of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus
- Ambivalent Inscriptions: Women, Youth & Diasporic Identity in Buchi Emecheta's Later Fiction
- The Interrupted Dance: Racial Memory in Isidore Okpewho's Call Me By My Rightful Name
- The Ivorian Crisis & Ahmadou Kourouma's Posthumous Political Novel Quand on Refuse on dit non
- Ngũgĩ's Wizard of the Crow: Women as the “Voice of the People” & the Western Audience
- The Ankh & Maat: Symbols of Successful Revolution in Ayi Kwei Armah's Osiris Rising
- A New African Youth Novel in the Era of HIV/AIDS: An Analysis of Unity Dow's Far & Beyon'
- The Prison of Nigerian Woman: Female Complicity in Sefi Atta's Everything Good Will Come
- Manufacturing Skin for Somalia's History: Nuruddin Farah's Deep Hurt in Links
- A Zimbabwean Ethic of Humanity: Tsitsi Dangarembga's The Book of Not & the Unhu Philosophy of Personhood
- ‘Coming to America’: Ike Oguine's A Squatter's Tale & the Nigerian/African Immigrant's Narrative
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun
- REVIEW
- Index
Summary
For many of the Nigerian immigrants of my generation that I knew, coming to America was not so positively transformative. Many of these immigrants were people with middle class backgrounds and sensibilities – lawyers, doctors, university teachers, or the children of these – who were forced to lead a working class and marginal existence upon arrival in America. Immigration was therefore for them, at least initially, a fall in status and the experience was to some extent embittering. And many of them carried, at least initially, [a] sense of injury.
– Ike Oguine, private interviewBeneath its satiric humour, intermittent narrative levity, and its delusively uncomplicated plot, Ike Oguine's novelistic debut A Squatter's Tale (2000) emerges as a serious, deftly conceived project that has only recently begun to elicit a welcome, rigorous critical inquiry. The hitherto scarcity of scholarly attention to the work was rather unfortunate, given the currency of its ancillary thesis of globalization, as well as our perennial, transcontinental and often charged conversations on the interlocked subjects of immigration, nation, nationality, religion, class, gender, identity, subjectivity, race and power. Most momentous, however, is that the novel does not just emphasize the important but largely under-fictionalized topic of a first-generation, postcolonial African immigrant's experience in the United States.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- New Novels in African Literature Today , pp. 130 - 144Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009