Nii Ayikwei Parkes Tail of the Blue Bird

A review of Nii Ayikwei Parkes Tail of the Blue Bird

Book: Tail of the Blue Bird

Author: Nii Ayikwei Parkes

Publisher: Flipped Eye Publishing

Year of publication: 2009

Number of pages: 197

Buy your own copy of Tail of the Blue Bird

Tail of the Blue Bird published by Flipped Eye Publishing is the debut novel from Ghanaian poet and writer Nii Ayikwei Parkes. It is the story of an incident that starts when a woman notices a stunning blue bird outside the edge of Sonokrom, a Ghanaian village outside of Accra town, and what happens after the fact. Her involvement in the case sees the people, read cops in droves, from the big city come to try and find out what happened.

This is where forensic pathologist Kwadwo who is known throughout the book by his version of the name Kayo was trained in the UK and relocated back home to try and find out what happened. What happens, I’m not telling, is beyond the scientific training of Kayo and comes out to be more myth driven than you would expect from a scientific thinker.

I love this book. Really. This book has so much going for it. Some people are more partial to urban tales and I count myself in that group as I love to see books that deal with the environment that I am familiar with. Then others are more partial to the rural tale as it shows the way people were in the golden days that we love to imagine and that folks like Ngugi Wa Thiongo have made their names on. This book has both scenarios involved. Kayo lives in a major African metropolis and we see the typical drive to work you will see in many African cities with the many hawkers selling stuff. You will also see the man at play as he drinks with his friends in the professional community in Ghana’s capital city.

Then there is the rural. The lives people in Sonkorom live in that have changed very little in generations; a life where people are still living on the land. These are folks who live the simple life without having to worry about Ben 10, mad traffic, and forced IOS upgrades ever so often. Then the writer throws in an extra with a few scenes from an African immigrant in the UK as he starts learning on his craft as a forensic scientist in Birmingham. After he is done he returns home to find the can only find a job in a lab and not with the police force as he was hoping for. This is something that many returnees have to go through when they return with their new skills.

The character development in this book is on another level with the people in the book standing out with the fullness. The main character is of course Kayo. However, I loved the old hunter Opanyin Poku who is the one who drives a large part of the narrative with his interactions with Kayo. Then there is Kwaku Ananse who as we read further in the book we realize to be a horrible father to his daughter as he causes her so much pain after her mother passes on as a child and into her adulthood. We all know people like this and the writer shows the whole character not just his obsessed part.

There is an angle for me as a Kenyan. One of the characters was said to have fled Kenya in the 1950s as the colonial government castrated its citizens. He settles into the community and his children integrate smoothly into the Sokorom community. It shows just how close the people in this continent are than we imagine.

The prose is written with great humour. The drinking scenes of the Accra-based professionals are as hilarious as the ones we are involved in this town. Then there is the police boss Joseph Donkor who hires Kayo and instructs him to give him a report on the crime scene “like in CSI.”That dude made me laugh.

This is one of the better-written books to come out of this continent in English in a while and for his efforts, Parkes was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Best First Book prize in 2010. This is the one that was won by Cynthia Jele for Happiness is a four letter word and in all honesty, I fail to understand how this epic book was looked over for the winner. I guess there is a reason I am not on these types of panel. Lucky for us the writer has gone on developing his craft and found himself on the list of Africa39 hottest (prosewise not looks as far as I can tell) writers under 40 announced yesterday.

Buy your own copy of Tail of the Blue Bird


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2 responses to “A review of Nii Ayikwei Parkes Tail of the Blue Bird”

  1. […] this year’s award are Nii Ayikwei Parkes for his book Tail of the Blue Bird (Notre Quelque Part) (our review here) and his translator Sika […]

  2. […] poet, writer, publisher and sociocultural commentator. He is the writer of Tail of the Blue Bird (which we loved) and several poetry […]

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