By Khalifa Hemed
Published February 5, 2019
It has almost been impossible to put together a piece of glass that broke in 1991.
Now, almost 28 years later, a Somali-born poet and essayist is releasing a poetry book on the plight of the people who were spewed across the borders when the Horn of Africa glass known as Somalia was shattered to pieces with the fall of President Siad Barre.
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Using the Judeo-Christian and Islamic account of the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Ladan Osman has written a book called Exiles of Eden that is due for release on May 7, 2019.
Through poetry that is described as being steeped in Somali narrative tradition, Osman’s Exiles of Eden looks at what it means for one to be a refugee.
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“Osman gives voice to the experiences and traumas of displaced people over multiple generations,” Copper Canyon, the publishers of the 96-page Exiles of Eden, says in a statement. “The characters in these poems encounter exile’s strangeness while processing the profoundly isolating experience of knowing that once you are sent out of Eden, you can’t go back.”
Exiles of Eden, that ‘gives voice to the experiences and traumas of generations of displaced people’, is going to be Ladan Osman’s second poetry anthology after The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony that won the African Poetry Book Fund’s 2014 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry.
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Meanwhile, Kenya’s Ministry of Information, Communications and Technology (ICT) has announced a film scripting competition with the aim of growing Kenya’s film sector ‘by taking advantage of the China and SMART Africa market through co-production with China’.
Interested parties have till February 26, 2019 to send their scripts to Kenya Film Commission that is coordinating the competition.
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Only Kenyan citizens of all ages may participate in the Sh2 000 000-prize contest whose winners shall be announced on April 25, 2019.
The winners, who shall be determined by ‘a curatorial selection panel consisting of both Kenyan and Chinese film industry professionals … based on artistic and thematic criteria’, shall receive the following prizes:
- Best Script – Sh1 000 000
- 1st Runner up – Sh500 000
- 2nd Runner up – Sh300 000
- Best student writer – under 25 years of age – Sh100 000
- Best young writer – 18 years old and below – Sh100 000.
