Uche Peter Umez

UcheChukwu Peter Umerzurike, also known as Uche Peter Umez, is a Nigerian author and academic currently working as an assistant professor of English at the University of Calgary. In addition to publishing several works of children’s fiction, short fiction, and poetry, his academic research draws from gender studies and critical race theory to analyze African, African diaspora, postcolonial, and global literatures as well as film. Quotes Any writing (creative or critical) is hard work, and I doubt if it ever comes effortlessly to anyone, or if it gets any easier with each work created. Lazy me, I have no particular structure for creating a poem. Though I wish I did, that’d take away from the beautiful spontaneity of creativity, wouldn’t it? Sometimes the poem unfurls itself to me as an image, other times as a luminous phrase. There are times, rarely though, it might appear as a vignette, pressing impressing to be kneaded into poetry. I figure poets as the medium through which a poem is distilled and voiced. In an interview Thus, to speak of identity is to enable narratives or ideologies readily mobilised by certain persons, groups, institutions, and authorities to facilitate structures of power and privilege, as well as hegemony, domination, exclusion, oppression, and possibly annihilation. he talks about sense of identity Africa, land of the romantic, land of the realist! Africa of Dennis Brutus, Africa of David Diop, that stubborn, resilient, undying baobab, that kindler of dreams that is quick to provoke the dreamer at times to bouts of pessimism. Africa, despite her quilt of ethnicities and histories, has great potential to become a sanctuary for all, but – alas! – the deficit of leadership, co-engineered by local and global hegemonies, staggers her, assailing her in every direction, grafting her to everyday realities of dea(r)th. he talks about what Africa means to him. The sky looms a different blue thoughts oscillate between mangos and olives then coalesce a consolation We call home anywhere we find something to love home is no more than concrete and earth. He talks about one of his poems he is fascinated by They say Lagos is crowded choking on industrial fumes What if they can see the flares smothering the air in my land oiling the Corporation. A poem On fumes and Flares External links