Voice Over Words

During a pandemic, we are learning to rely on each other while being asked to stay indoors. There is a race to find a vaccine which is not something we are sure when will be ready. The Super Powers, Developed Countries, as well as Developing Countries, are eager to have one and get it to their people. However, do we have a patent problem?

One of Duncan Hamilton's favourite writers on cricket, Edmund Blunden, wrote how he felt going to watch a game: 'You arrive early, earlier even than you meant . . . and you feel a little guilty at the thought of the day you propose to give up to sheer luxury'.

In 2019, Hamilton became convinced that the therapeutic “slow trot” of cricket’s sparsely attended but charmingly nuanced county championship was at the point of unwelcome change, with the new white-ball competition the Hundred about to trample all over it. So to capture the quirky, kind and stoic people who characterise this receding community, he spent last season luxuriating in cricket at Sookholme in Nottinghamshire, Clifton Park in Yorkshire and Hove’s county ground in Sussex. Hamilton admits to “nostalgically summoning ghosts”, but with no cricket at all at the moment, his work makes for a welcome substitute, for all those nostalgic.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s second novel, Half of a Yellow (published in 2006), is one in a long line of works by Nigerian authors to portray the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967–70). While Adichie has stated that she wanted to make modern Nigeria aware of its history by writing the novel, the writer has also revealed that she drew from past literary portrayals to construct her narrative. In order to untangle the complex construction of Half of a Yellow Sun, the attempt is to explores the way the novel negotiates the literary legacy of Biafra through material fashion.

In 2019, Chimamanda Adichie gave the inaugural Gabriel García Márquez lecture and spoke about truth and storytelling. “To start a story, a true story, thinking of balance is already to place an obstacle in the path of that story,” she said. “Because what one must focus on is not balance, but truth.”

Today, skin colour, race and ethnicity are more than ever topics of conversation. The Black Lives Matter Movement is at its peak, gaining media coverage, Black Lives Matter being a popular hashtag. Before we enter into a historical fiction account of Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria, a small inside of what goes into the head of its writer as she talks about love, race and hair. 

Please do pay attention to the interviewer, which for the sake of arguments I have to point out is a White, British Man.

While a series of events could be viewed as misfortunes to silence her voice for a while, our protagonist does not lose the desire to achieve what her dreams, all in a society she shall discover are way more unequal than she thought it would be.

Released in June 2019 by Penguin Press, the first book of Ocean Vuong may be considered a poetic narrative. It is intimate and universal about the emotions it projects. A letter from a struggling son to understand his fragmented family to his uneducated mother...

Episode 1. Le Deuxieme Sex (The Second Sex) germinated with Jean-Paul Satre. It was changed by the experience of love Nelson Agren and Simone de Beauvoir lived. What we eventually hold is that - One is not born but rather become a woman.

Episode 2. When Beauvoir met Nelson Agren, she was in love with him, in Chicago. However, it was Paris, her home. Was it Jean-Paul Satre or the idea of Satre or the inhibitions which changes breed in humans which stopped her from leaping from France to the United States? Or, one of the many choices, she took because it felt right to her at that point in time.

Episode 3. Beauvoir lived as per her choices, at times with consequences she didn't like. But for all the freedom she fought for, did she live a free life? And our perception of her is because of incidents or who we are?