Ikhide ikheloa biography templates
Ikhide Ikheloa
Nigerian writer and critic (born 1959)
Ikhide Roland Ikheloa is a Nigerian writer and literary critic who has worked in the American civil service since 1984. He is widely read and known in Anglophone Africa for his strong opinions on literature and politics which has won him many admirers and also made him very controversial. While he is seen as a writer and critic by his admirers, this position has often been debated by his critics. But Ikheloa simply refers to himself as a reader who writes and is highly opinionated.
Early life and education
Ikhide Ikheloa was born in Ikeja Barracks, Lagos on February 14, 1959. His father was an itinerant policeman and his mother was a typist at the Lagos immigration office. As a result of his father's occupation, he was often transferred to different places across Southern Nigeria. Ikheloa earned a BSc in Biochemistry from the University of Benin in 1979.
He moved to the United States in 1982 to pursue a Masters in Business Administration degree (MBA) at the University of Mississippi, from where he graduated in 1984.
Career
Ikheloa is a writer, widely known as a literary and social critic. He describes himself more as a writer who reads. But the common perception of him is of a writer who is a critic. His nonfiction pieces have been published in world renowned magazines like Guernica and Ecclectica; his political opinion pieces have been published in Independent UK, and the defunct NEXT newspaper which he claims to have written 150 pieces for in 3 years. He has also written extensively for African Writer, Brittle Paper and other important African literary magazines.
Ikheloa is one of the most influential literary and social critics in Anglophone Africa. His essays on novels by African writers are widely read, and his opinions on books have often caused a stir in the literary world, including brief face-offs between him and the authors. In 2017, Ikheloa's essay on Fiston Mwanza Mujila's Tram Chielozona Eze has written a book of poems that connect the wars of his childhood with the wars of his exile. He goes home to his ancestral land in Nigeria where the Nigerian civil war, his first conventional war began, and in verse he looks at his world inside out. It is a fascinating look, this little book with the enigmatic title, Prayersto Survive Wars that Last. These poems remind us that there are many types of wars, but people mostly think of conventional wars where guns are the bayonets to the heart. Similarly exile is more than a trip to Babylon, once you leave your hearth, the heart knows and grieves for the warm comfort of home, familiar surroundings tastes and smells. Well, most times. Sometimes, you just walk away, never look back, grit your teeth and bite hard into the peaches of Babylon. Life, as war goes on. Born in 1962, Eze was a child during the Nigerian civil war, a terrified witness to a daily hell. The war remains one of the most written about – and most unexamined of Nigeria’s traumas. That war that raged from 1967 to 1970 consumed over a million lives, mostly Igbo citizens, a genocide that destroyed lives and trust among the major ethnic groups. The timing of the release of the poetry collection is interesting, coming at a time when there is a renewed clamor for, if not an independent Biafran nation for the Igbo, a restructured Nigeria with power devolving away from the center to regions, designed perhaps along ethnic lines. Eze’s volume of poetry has about 47 poems in it, anchored by an interesting essay- preface by the writer Chris Abani. Abani’s essay, by the way. is remarkable more for its claims and assertions than for its substance. When Abani charges, for instance, that “most Nigerian poets focus on the rallying call of protest, politics, and nation,” one senses that he has not been reading a whole lot of contemporary Nigerian poets. Indeed, it is the case that this is one area where African literature is veering away from the In the Nigerian literary circle particularly, you have become a literary authority. How did that happen? How did you come to love and think and write about literary things? Many mistake my strong views and my eagerness to share them as proof that I am a literary authority. Nothing could be further from the truth. I read and write voraciously; not sure how and why I find the time, since I live a very busy professional and personal life. The truth is that I have been writing on the Internet since the early nineties when I joined Naijanet, the first ever social media by Nigerians. The Internet has exposed me to several watering holes where African writers hang out and so my relationship with many writers goes back a long way, thanks to long hours spent debating and fighting over virtually every anxiety that occupies the African writer’s mind. I was also lucky to have my writings exposed to the world by the likes of Sola Osofisan of nigeriansinamerica.com, Muhtar Bakare of Farafina Books and Molara Wood, and Dele Olojede of Next Newspapers. Growing up I was surrounded by books, my generation of youths had no choice but to read books, there was not much else to do. My parents did not have television for a very long time and so I read. My friends and I loved to sit on empty beer cartons and fight over essays in newspapers and magazines and exchange notes on books we were reading. As for writing, I have been drawn to writing since childhood by a mysterious force; I can only say I am genetically wired to express myself, to have strong opinions, etc. NEXT was such a wonderful media project, and we are sad that it didn’t work out. Tell us about your time at NEXT. Did it play a part in securing your current place in the literary community? Besides Osofisan and Bakare, Olojede and Molara Wood of NEXT are the most important reasons for whatever stature I might have in the literary community. I have my This summer has been interesting for me; in the dying days of the summer, I can boldly say I did not read a single book. I did read nonstop. I was on social media and the Internet, reading like a scavenger. On balance, African literature is witnessing a renaissance; I would say again however that African literature suffers the crushing burden of alienation – from what gets lost in the translation. We are steeped in the oral tradition of storytelling where I am from. Writing in standard English is one thing, but having to squeeze our way of life into the words and the idioms, etc. that the other understands has come at a steep price. Some of the fiction I’ve read have filled me with despair, what is the point of this writing? Much of it is Eurocentric mimicry, ideas squeezed into alien genres. But then, until the advent of the Internet, the African writer could not afford to be insular like his/her Western counterpart. Sure there was Onitsha Market literature but it ended up being treated as second or third class to the works of the Achebes and the Ngugis. Because the works of the Achebes and the Ngugis were more acceptable abroad. The Internet is changing that. I have been reading the works of many young writers who simply write. They simply write and entertain and educate us. They are so many, from Hymar Idibie David to Temidayo Ahanmisi to Akintunde Aiki, and in between, a generation entertains with awesome stuff – for free. They probably will never get that contract from Random House or Faber and Faber because the white man will never understand these sentences. But they are our sentences, that is the tragedy of it all. We need our own publishing houses, robust ones. Or better yet, we need a new business model, let’s call it the Linda Ikeji model. Yes. Hear me out. I imagine an eclectic site like Ainehi Edoro‘s B
The Irreverent Critic: Interview with Ikhide Ikheloa
Ikhide R. Ikheloa: “The White Man Will Never Understand These Sentences, But They Are Our Sentences”