Masculinity, a configuration of gender practices negotiated over time, ideology, and culture, is dynamic. This highlights the evolution of what is accepted as masculinity within a specified society across different periods. Nigerian children’s literature, with its rich repertoire of cultural gender practices, depicts these changes. However, existing studies on masculinity in Nigerian children’s fiction have focused on its exhibition in specific periods, neglecting a mapping of changes across different periods in the nation’s socio-cultural milieu. This study, therefore, examines transmutations in the representation of masculinity across periods in Nigerian children’s fiction through the analysis of male characters in Cyprian Ekwensi’s The Passport of Mallam Ilia, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Tambari, and Chigbo Ugwuoke’s Ogadimma: The Diary of a Housemaid. The texts are chosen based on their date of publication and representation of masculinity. R. W. Connell’s masculinity theory is deployed as a framework in the textual analysis of male characters in the selected texts. The juxtaposition of the depiction of identified male characters in the texts shows that the parameters defining acceptable masculine attributes progressively changed across identified periods, from the exhibition of surplus violence and aggression to the exhibition of kindness and academic brilliance and, more recently, financial success

The Efik people of south-eastern Nigeria, as a means of socialisation and internalisation of cultural values, use proverbs, a folkloric art, to teach children in their daily interactions, particularly in the indigenous setting. However, despite the rich cultural resources of the practice among the Efik, it has not attracted the attention of scholars and critics. This study examined how proverbs are deployed as conversational tools by parents and elders in a way that helps children to develop oral proficiency, sociolinguistic competence, and cognition. An ethnopragmatic interpretation of children-related proverbs was undertaken with a view to determining, among other things, their pedagogical implications among the Efik. An ethnographic research approach using participant observation and semi-structured interviews was used with 20 purposively sampled participants. The findings revealed that Efik parents in indigenous communities exploit the rich resources and usage of proverbs to engender cognitive development and character moulding in children in their formative years. The study further reveals that proverbs constitute an essential aspect of the Efik traditional epistemology that enables children to acquire knowledge and demonstrable proficiency in oral communication especially through moonlight performances, including storytelling, songs, and oral poetry. We conclude that proverbs are knowledge transmission and performance genre, a veritable linguistic tool for the socialisation, internalisation, and general education of children in the Efik indigenous society.

This article argues that South African literature is abundant with examples of translingual writing, which is writing that is carried out in more than one language, or writing in which aesthetic creativity derives from an author’s ability to move between languages. “Ventriloquism” is proposed as a subspecies of translingualism in which a challenging, often oracular voice is evoked, in which the reader is required to imagine that the discourse is given in a language other than the dominant language of the text. I argue that the “ventriloquial” voice is often associated with ethical recovery. The examples are drawn from well-known texts in order to show that ventriloquial writing occurs in plain sight and is not much discussed, other than with reference to disparaging or weak forms of mimicry. The essay draws South African readers’ attention to an invitation by the publisher Brill for proposals on the subject of translingual literature.

Awareness of the planetary climate crisis impacts our sense of being and time. It undermines the significance of our experience and our actions, posing questions about our agency. The drama of our response to moments when the possibility of a life-destroying catastrophe manifests itself is the focus of much of the American poet Jorie Graham’s (1950–) poetry. The intensity of her oeuvre creates difficulties for the uninitiated reader, partly because of the bleakness of its subject matter, partly because of her stylistic innovations. These include a distinctive use of format, deliberate disorientations, and shifts of focus. At the heart of the article is a close reading of the title poem of Jorie Graham’s 2008 volume, Sea Change (New York: Ecco Press). The aim here is to show the complex profundity of her unfolding of moments of experience and reflection. The article then looks more briefly at Jorie Graham’s most recent poetry in which she has gone beyond “inclining [her] heart towards the end”, to imagining a world after the end. The moving power of Jorie Graham’s writing is cathartic, sometimes curiously consoling, as she turns for a moment to showing how we can value what is still here. The article closes with a brief look at some poetry on comparable themes. Above all, the article aims to show how her poetry deepens our consciousness of consciousness, finding beauty in the tragic necessities of our human condition.