Synchrony: From New York to Nigeria

This is a rather special evening for the second edition of NYUAD’s The City and the Writer series, featuring an extraordinary lineup of writers, directors, actors, and musicians and centred around Awam Amkpa’s 2024 film The Man Died (above). That is based on Wole Soyinka’s harrowing prison memoir of the same name, chronicling 27 months of Soyinka’s incarceration without trial by the Nigerian government during the Biafran civil war in 1967.

The book and the film are both intensely personal. Soyinka found refuge from the brutality inflicted upon him by retreating into himself, sometimes drifting on the frontiers of madness, hanging on to his identity by a thread. But he also listened, watched, pondered, and record “his journey of ‘motionlessness'” with scrounged paper and pencil.

This gathering is curated by Nathalie Handal, global citizen, prize-winning poet, author of 10 award-winning books, and Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at NYUAD. It features Wole Soyinka himself – Nobel Prize laureate, artist-dramatist, poet, essayist, musician, philosopher, academic, teacher, human rights activist, global artist, and scholar; the film’s director Awam Amkpa (USA/Nigeria) who is also a playwright, actor, theatre scholar, curator of visual and performing arts and film festivals around the world, and NYUAD’s Vice Provost for the Arts, and Dean of Arts and Humanities; and Wale Ojo, the Nigerian-British actor who took the lead role in The Man Died.

The evening also features the much-awarded US poet, playwright and essayist Claudia Rankine; John Akomfrah, the Ghanaian-born British artist, writer, film director, screenwriter, theorist and curator, known as “one of the UK’s most pioneering film-makers [whose] poetic works have grappled with race, identity and post-colonial attitudes for over three decades”; Yolanda Castaño from Spain, TV presenter, poet, essayist, editor, literary critic, painter and poet (winner of the Spanish National Award for Poetry); and Andrea Cote (Colombia), writer, poet and translator (and currently a Professor of Creative Writing for the Bilingual MFA at University of Texas El Paso).

There’s music, too. Anthony Joseph, British-based Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician is alsways good value – he cites his main influences as calypso, surrealism, jazz, the Baptist church of his grandparents, and the rhythms of Caribbean speech. Abínibí Groovy Band is a vibrant group led by Abbey Trombone (aka Afowoslide) and given to energetic Afrocentric performances that blend indigenous and contemporary sounds for a fusion of Afrobeat, Highlife, and jazz (great sax player, too). Herve Samb is a visionary Senegalese guitarist, composer, and arranger who has performed with an enviable playlist of artists from Jimmy Cliff to Pharoah Sanders, Meshell Ndegeocello to Oumou Sangare, Amadou & Mariam to the World Saxophone Quartet … He has pioneered the Jazz Sabar style, a fusion of jazz and Senegalese rhythms Grammy-nominated drummer and bandleader Otis Brown III has also recorded and toured widely, with the likes of Herbie Hancock, Esperanza Spalding, Terence Blanchard, Robert Glasper, and many others; most recently he collaborated with the Alvin Ailey American Dance theater for the premiere of a new work, Finding Free. Somi (Somi Kakoma) is one of those who has worked with Otis Brown, as it happens; she’s an American-born vocalist, composer, actor and playwright of Rwandan/Ugandan descent; as well as her active recording and performing career she is the founder of Salon Africana, a boutique cultural agency and record label.