Letter to Aisha and Other Stories

by Dike Okoro

These stories portray life as instances of change under a canopy of love, avarice, determination, redemption, and triumph. They are all vignettes of life in certain realistic and ephemeral ways. [Okoro] portrays realism and illusion as two sides of a coin which inevitably propel us into fantasy, and awareness. The stories have a certain speed. They seem to move and confront us with certain vagaries of life. We enjoy these vagaries even when they occur unexpectedly as in "The Cross Bearer", where we find out that the person falsely accused of impregnating a girl was finally released when the real culprit was discovered. In "Boma's Wedding" the plight of someone unknowingly falling in love and wanting to marry her own father becomes a kind of puzzle, a certain tragedy of errors, so to speak. The fact that in most of the stories the environment is Port Harcourt Nigeria makes it homely for Nigerian readership.The reader of these short stories will also enjoy the candor, the humor and the wit inherent in them, particularly when the story stops to delve into a dream sequence and finally back into the actual story mode. The metaphorical intention of the author agrees with the literary symbolism of each short story. This is a delight. - Oladipo Kalejaiye, PhD Head of Department, Theater Art & Culture, Lead City University, Ibadan, Nigeria.

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