The Best of Toyin Falola; Mapping a Polymathic Author from Essays to Books

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

These selections represent my understanding of the peaks of conceptualization, analytical and narrative power and expressive force reached in Falola "s writing so far, as assessed from my admittedly small but possibly representative reading of his work.

Essay and Book Chapters 

 "Ritual Archives"

Visionary,incantatory, magical, itself a ritual archive, the phenomenon it describes.

"Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi: Our Foundation, Our Mainframe and Our Roof'

Profoundly celebratory, lyrically expressive at the intersection of poetry and scholarly writing

"Yorùbá Hair Art and the Agency of Women in  Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies

 

An amazing rendition, in terms of high scholarly discourse, of the esthetics of women's hairstyles in Yoruba culture.

 Poetry

"Remembrance: Clara Adeyemi"

Movingly, tenderly0elegaic, sweeping nature into a participant in the mourning and celebration of a departed friend.

An earlier summation of the poem by myself:

An absolutely magnificent piece dramatising nature's seeming mirroring of human pain, yet experienced as an outside world oblivious to the turmoils of the heart. 

Falola's characteristic simplicity of expression is in action, yet evoking elemental, primal, human and natural realities in subtle but potent force

"AYO OLUKOTUN: MO GBỌ́ OHÙN RẸ NÍNÚ AFẸ́FẸ́'

"Ayo Olukotun: I Heard Your Voice in the Wind" translated by Akin Solanke

A wonderful evocation of the luminosity of memory through imaginative mapping of nature, from animals to the elements.

 Books

    Autobiographies

A Mouth Sweeter than Salt 

Counting the Tiger's Teeth 

Narrative masterpieces in every sense- descriptive power, scenic evocation, characterization, linguistic potency,imagistic vividness.

     Scholarship 

Global Yoruba : Regional and Diasporic Networks 

Unusually ambitious, encyclopedic, expressive purity and power combined. enlivened by rich images commissioned from artists.