Sovereign Body by Tanure Ojaide Sovereign Body, a novel written primarily in a female voice, details an educated African woman’s struggle to free herself from patriarchal oppression and prejudices so as to achieve self-realization. Anna, a bright poet and academic, faces crushing marriage problems. Her husband, a medical doctor, abandons his practice and waits for a political appointment which does not come and leads to his depression and strange behavior. As Anna finds home more oppressive, she turns to a professor, a former lover with whom she had severed a relationship upon her marriage. The two eventually decide to leave their respective spouses, but the doctor’s major mental breakdown and Anna’s duty to him make Anna’s future uncertain. Set in Nigeria of the military regime era, Anna’s struggle against patriarchy parallels and highlights the people’s struggle against military dictatorship for freedom.

About the author: A Fellow in Writing of the University of Iowa, Tanure Ojaide was educated at the University of Ibadan, where he received a bachelor’s degree in English, and at Syracuse University, where he received both M.A. in Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English. He has published over a dozen collections of poetry, a book of short stories, a memoir, and scholarly work. His literary awards include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the African Region (1987), the All-Africa-Okigbo Prize for Poetry (1988, 1997), the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award (1988), and the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Award (1988, 1994, and 2003). Ojaide taught for many years at The University of Maiduguri (Nigeria), and is currently Professor of African-American and African Studies at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 1999 and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award that took him to Nigeria in 2002/2003. Sovereign Body is his first published novel. click here to learn more about the author ISBN 00-9747839-7-8 Fiction / $17.95