My article in The Georgia Straight about the wrong-headed austerity measures.

I finished reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Purple Hibiscus last night. It's really a great story. It's almost like a follow up to a couple of Chinua Achebe's novels. Achebe told the story - in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God - of how colonialism shaped the experiences of the people we now call Nigeria. In his stories, we saw the first generation that learned the West's ways - their religion, their language, their forms of social organization. In Adichie's novel, we read about the children of a Nigerian man who extols the virtues of Westerners and maintains an almost fanatical adherence to Christianity. His children follow his lead - at least until they visit their aunt and learn, for the first time, about their ancestors. The novel never explicitly discusses colonialism, but it's there, in the background. It does a wonderful job of showing the ebb and flow of attitudes towards one's traditions. One generation has it forcibly wiped away, the next accepts this act of cultural genocide, and the one after that attempts a re-integration with the past.

I'm looking forward to reading her latest novel, Half of a Yellow Sun.

Walter Mosley on redemption and other things: