A Gecko's Farewell

A Gecko’s Farewell centres on three Africans from different parts of the continent who meet “in the spirit” (online) and plan to found a School of Stories. Etiaba is a village schoolteacher. When he loses his job, he moves to the capital city—and its world of prayer contractors and hope merchants. Mzilikazi’s is the story of “the homeless specter, the boy soldier, the fugitive, the exile”—the story of a black South African dislocated under the Apartheid regime. Nadia is a radical student of photography at the American University in Cairo. She becomes a photojournalist and takes the picture of an Islamist terrorist, an act that endangers her. These three characters eventually ‘escape’ from Africa, but Africa is in a sense inescapable. They ‘meet’ at an online forum and forge a therapeutic friendship, but their coming together also embeds the seeds of their eventual separation.

About the Author

Maik Nwosu is an associate professor of English at the University of Denver, Colorado. He worked as a journalist (and received the Nigeria Media Merit Award for Journalist of the Year) before moving to Syracuse University, New York for a Ph.D in English and Textual Studies. Nwosu’s poetry collection, Suns of Kush, was awarded the Association of Nigerian Authors/Cadbury Poetry Prize in 1995. His novels, Invisible Chapters and Alpha Song, received the Association of Nigerian Authors Prose Prize and the Association of Nigerian Authors/Spectrum Prose Prize in 1999 and 2002 respectively. He has also published a short story collection Return to Algadez. His poems and stories have appeared in Okike, Drumvoices Revue, New Writing 14, Dublin Quarterly, El Ghibli, Fiction International, and Agni Online. Nwosu is a fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany and the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbertide, Italy, as well as a member of the Phi Beta Delta Honor Society for International Scholars. He has also published two critical texts, Markets of Memories: Between the Postcolonial and the Transnational (Africa World Press, 2011) and The Comic Imagination in Modern African Literature and Cinema: A Poetics of Laughter (Routledge, 2016)