The Un-Lonely Voice of A. Igoni Barrett

THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / LITERATURE DEPT.

We travel a great deal in A. Igoni Barrett’s fiction. Poteko, the fictional landscape of his second short story collection, Love Is Power, Or Something Like That, combines bits of major Nigerian cities: Port Harcourt, Lagos, Kano and Warri. Though it is an attempt to bring into view the multiplicity of the Nigerian experience, it is the peculiar achievement of Barrett’s language that places him among the most important contemporary Nigerian writers. The tools of his imagination reveal an interesting angle into the poetics of societal imagery, especially coming from Nigeria’s cultural background that infamously holds a burning torch to the grandest of fictions.

I came to Barrett’s work through the aforementioned short story collection, during the early 2010s when literature in the continent was blooming. On popular sites of networking, both online and offline, one was conversant with the works of leading contemporary writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Helon Habila, Sefi Atta and Okey Ndibe. This reading was paired with the consumption of the lesser-skilled but hearty writing being published on social media, arguably more connected to the grain of everyday life. ‘The Shape of a Full Circle’, the Barrett story I encountered during this period, combined the rawness of those young writers with controlled flair, a sensibility coloured by Barrett’s openness to digital writing, as he was one of the champions of online publishing in the 2000s.