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Wetin Dey? Nigerian Pidgin and Its Many Pikin

‘Better soup na money kill am’ | Good things don’t come easy

‘E don tey wey nyash dey for back’ | There is nothing new under the sun

‘Cunny man die, cunny man bury am’ | It takes a thief to catch a thief

‘Na condition make crayfish bend’ | Hard times encourage adaptation

Over 500 languages are spoken in Nigeria today, according to most accounts, although many of them are dying, endangered, or extinct. Three major languages spoken more widely than others are Hausa in the north (with about 70 million speakers), Igbo in the east (with about 24 million), and Yorùbá in the west (with about 40 million speakers). Other languages include Edo, Fulfude, Berom, Efik, Ibibio, Isoko, etc. Because of the multiplicity of languages in the country and the need to communicate among different ethnic groups, English, or Nigerian English, has served as a connecting tissue, but only in formal circles: schools, government, courts, etc. In the informal sector, however, where most Nigerians function every day, in the markets, on the streets, at restaurants, Nigerian Pidgin (NP) has emerged as a crucial and important feature.

Nigerian Pidgin doesn’t have its roots in English, but in Portuguese. In about 1456, when the first Portuguese ship reached Senegal via the Gambia river, to Sierra Leone about four years later, and other parts of the region in due time, they made contacts with famous kingdoms like Benin, Ghana, Mali, Songhai, etc. Benin at the time, now in present day Nigeria, was said to be one of the oldest and most highly developed states in the coastal hinterland.

To trade with these kingdoms and establish a cordial relationship beneficial to both parties, a mutually intelligible language had to be employed. It is unclear what kind of Portuguese these sailors spoke, but it is possible (and even likely) that they spoke a crooked and unrefined one, also befitting of that societal class of illiterate seamen. The contact of that pirate-type ship-lingo Portuguese with the language of the coastal Africans resulted in what eventually became Pidgin, and later Nigerian Pidgin.

At the time, however, it was a mere contact language, retaining elements of both cultures, enough to facilitate communication along with hand gestures and other universal signs. But it got the job done and helped cement the relationship between the seafaring Portuguese and the West African kingdoms. So that when the British showed up hundreds of years later, they found it easier to communicate with the indigenes, through a later variation of this language which, likely, had undergone sufficient evolution. This later contact with the British, via the slave trade, missionary invasion and colonialism further improved the intelligibility of the language, with English words added to supplement the earlier Portuguese ones.

The use of the word ‘pidgin’ in identifying the language as it exists in Nigeria today has added some confusion to understanding its current state. To linguists, a language is a pidgin only in the initial state of its creation, when it serves as the lubricating vessel of communication between two strange peoples (in this case, between the early Europeans and Africans). After a generation of contact, the language begins to evolve, with words and phrases from either language and others, introduced to flesh out the skeletons and give the language a unique character. At this stage it stops being just a ‘contact language’ and becomes a living one. We call this stage ‘creolisation’.

The creolisation of Nigerian Pidgin happened gradually, with the adoption of the language not just as a contact lingo with Europeans but as a native language of contact and of trade with other ethnic groups in Nigeria. This is the characteristics of the language that helped it become the most used language in the country by the time it got independence from the British in 1960. By then, coastal communities, though with other native languages of their own, had adopted NP as a full native language and spoken it among themselves and to their children.

The syntax of Nigerian Pidgin is similar to the local West African languages than the European ones. That probably explains why it used to be called ‘Broken English’, or ‘Broken’ for short, when it was perceived to be a language of the unschooled, unsophisticated people, a language spoken by those unable to grasp the complexity of English. To say ‘I am leaving’ in NP, one would say ‘I dey go’, which is a lean and simple rendering of that basic action. ‘I will be right back’ is rendered as ‘I dey come’. This simple syntax, covered with the fleshing of English, makes it easy to use by Nigerians who eventually adopted it as a local language.

However, Portguese still has some influence. Words like sabi and pikin, which came from Portuguese ‘saber/sabir’ and ‘pequeno/pequenino’, words for ‘know’ and ‘little child’ respectively, have remained in NP, to mark the true origin of the language. So, for example, ‘You sabi dat pikin?’ means ‘Do you know that child?’ As you’ll notice, the pronunciation has also evolved as well, so that a ‘th’ is pronounced instead as a ‘d’.

There are also many different dialects of Nigerian Pidgin today, depending on where it is spoken. Because words are borrowed from each of the languages that have influenced NP – words like àbí (a question marker) and ṣé are more common in the west, while words like nna and unu come from Igbo in the east. The Niger Delta has the highest concentration of NP speakers and here the version spoken is widely regarded as the most authentic form, sometimes as a first language. Places like Sapele and Benin are regarded as norm-producing communities, where the language has the most root and influence.

And of course, because of the diasporic migration of Nigerians to other parts of the world, there are more refined NPs spoken today across the world, from Peckham to Chicago, Houston to Baltimore. They are not markedly different from the Nigerian versions, except in accent, influenced by their new environments and company.

It is estimated that NP is the most spoken language across the Nigeria today, spoken as a first language by over 30 million people, and as a second language by the rest of the country (about 140 million). However, the language has never enjoyed the respect of the country’s elites. It currently has no official status and is neither used in education, or governance. But in the early 60s, through the efforts of early Nigerian writers in English like Wọlé Ṣóyínká, Chinua Achebe, JP Clark, Ken Saro Wiwa, and Cyprian Ekwensi, fully formed Pidgin-speaking characters were introduced to Nigerian literature. This helped elevate the language a bit more into the mainstream.

In Nigeria today, NP functions in informal capacity, lubricating contact and communication between people of all classes, gender, ethnic groups, and educational status. It is the language of the streets, and of uneducated market women in cosmopolitan cities. The flavour infused in each expression from the speaker’s original ethnic background continues to enrich the character of each individual output.

Where NP has dominated, however, is in the informal sphere of television and radio entertainment, in Nollywood and the Nigerian music industry, which reaches not just all Nigerians, but also most Africans. Fẹlá Kútì, the inventor of Afrobeat, played no small role in mainstreaming Nigerian Pidgin through many of his hits like Follow Follow, Trouble Sleep Yanga Go Wake Am, Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense, etc. On the streets of Nairobi, Johannesburg or Accra today, one is likely to hear ‘Wetin dey?’, ‘Wetin dey happen?’ or ‘How far?’, or any one of NP’s common greetings (meaning: ‘What’s up?’, ‘What’s going on?’, ‘How’re you doing?’) even in the mouths of non-Nigerians. This has happened through the influence of Nigeria’s entertainment industry.

In 2009, a ‘Conference on Nigerian Pidgin’ at the University of Ìbàdàn proposed to drop the name ‘pidgin’ altogether, and call the language ‘Naija’, a nickname once reserved for referring to the country in an endearing way. This has not caught on beyond those academic circles, and it likely never will because of the tension between what the academic intervention represents (stiffness) and what NP truly is (dynamism). It is the jolly playfulness, accessibility and musicality of NP that continues to help convey the convivial spirit of Africa’s most populous country, along with colours and sound, to the rest of the continent.

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First published by the National Theatre, London, as companion to the play Barber Shop Chronicles by Innua Ellams, showing from May 30, 2017. The reference to Ken Saro-Wiwa and Fẹlá Kútì, added later, regretfully did not make it into the original text.

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References

Wetin Dey? Nigerian Pidgin and Its Many Pikin was published on June 2nd, 2017, with the tags , , , , under the Academic, Drama, Linguistics, Literature, Theatre category. There are currently 4 comments on this article so far.

Art at the Guggenheim

Abu Dhabi, from distant (and ignorant) estimation, didn’t seem like the most natural place to find a Guggenheim Museum. It’s in an Arab country appearing, at least from preconception, to be necessarily hostile or at best reticent. True I’ve heard great things about Dubai and the progressive nature of that society. But like most things not encountered in the flesh, they remained in the realm of hearsay, hovering around the globally pervasive perceptions of all Arab countries as just one thing: conservative.

But all misconceptions eventually meet reality and knowledge happens. It must be what Mark Twain meant by travel being “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” And so, on my week-long visit to the country to participate in the inaugural Culture Summit, I found myself in the embrace of a Guggenheim Museum. This museum project, and the other involving the Louvre Abu Dhabi, is a collaboration with the government of the United Arab Emirates and prominent culture centres around the world to make Abu Dhabi a cultural centre in the Middle East.

I am not a visual artist. Not since primary school anyway. My contact with and appreciation of the visual arts have stayed consistently close to the familiar activity of gawking, collecting, and critiquing – the latter only in my head and among like-minded friends. I have found solace, many times, in the warm presence of a well-stocked museum or well-curated art exhibition. The environment for meditation that they provide and the visual stimulation guaranteed in a well-lit studio space while observing mounted artworks are unquantifiable pleasures of middle-class life, at least for those to whom that is a worthwhile activity.

And so, when I got a chance to spend some time at the exhibition space holding the temporary collections of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi at Manarat Al Saadiyat, I needed no convincing. This location, on the famous cultural district of Saadiyat Island which hopes to also host other venues of cultural significance like the Louvre previously mentioned, is where much of the activities for the Culture Summit was taking place. One open door away and we were face-to-face with timeless pieces of art as Jacques Villegié’s Quai des Célestins (1965) or Tanaka Atsuko’s Painting (1960).

On the first wall to the entrance was Chiinsei Botaichui (Female Tiger Incarnated from Earthly Shady Star), oil on canvas, by Shiraga Kazuo, a work created with “bold swathes of sombre colours with tactile density”. The work, we were told, was created with the artist’s feet, seeking “to liberate his work from the constraints of academic-style painting” and “in order to re-conceive the process of painting as an experimental encounter with materiality and surface.” What appears on the board at times resembles a flying bat, and at others an angel of death. But an amateur art critic – me – projecting his impressionistic sentiments on a modern experimental work offers no new value to what the work already presents. The artist was born in 1924 and died in 2008.

Through the museum space, there are other exhibits, like work by Motonaga Sadamasa, another Japanese artist (1922-2011) whose work used poured paint, depending on gravity to “replace the paintbrush and foregoing the precise and deliberate meditation of the artist’s hand.” The third and final Japanese artist exhibited was Tanaka Atsuko (1932-2005) whose work of Vinyl paint on canvas “evokes the incandescence of the dress (and) intricate network of wires and bulbs reflect (an) interest in (the) technology of wiring systems and lights.”

At the centre of the opening space are two kinetic works by two German artists. Gunther Uecker’s New York Dancer evokes the African egúngún without acknowledgment. It is a work “consisting of a piece of cloth draped over steel rods and covered with long outwards-facing nails.” The other, by Jean Tinguely (1925-1991) is called Baluba, a dancing piece of scrap metal “meant to portray a certain craziness and rush in this technological civilization”. Both of them, though not activated at the time but shown through a small television in their kinetic elements, felt familiar in a visceral way that most of the others didn’t. A walk through the Polytechnic Ibadan, or the Yaba College of Technology, will bring the traveller in contact with many similar kinetic and scrap metal artworks of like impression.

New York Dancer

Other artists whose work were on display included Niki de Saint Phalle, Jacques Villeglé, Julio Le Parc and Rasheed Araeen. For a temporary exhibition space, it was an impressive introduction. Outside of the museum space, at the reception area where participants in the Summit gathered, there were other artists, from Adéjọkẹ́ Túgbiyèlé (Nigeria/New York) to Jalal Luqman (Dubai) and Cristina del Middel, among others. Here at the Guggenheim, however, very little (except the age of the displayed collection, and a small reception desk) tells the visitor that s/he has crossed over into a new art space.

The most surprising, and most breathtaking work in that museum, however, was Anish Kapoor’s My Red Homeland, an installation that filled a whole room. It was a wax “sculpture” simulating a mound of red garbage stirred continually by a centralized mechanical arm. The description situates the concept of the piece in both the image of blood as well as the colour of saffron, an iconic symbol in India, from where the artist hails. For art enthusiasts to whom Kapoor’s most famous work is The Bean in Chicago, My Red Homeland was a welcome reprise, more impressive at close range, and equally awe-inspiring to the breadth of the artist’s vision and ambition.

My Red Homeland by Anish Kapoor

I purchased a few fridge magnets on my way out. Something to impress friends and family with. Something not necessarily representative of the scope of the ambition and inspiration of the exhibition just witnessed. Merely representative. The New York Dancer on a fridge magnet is certainly less bewildering as a work unconsciously derivative of ancient African masquerade experiences. But like others, it will mark my refrigerator as a symbol of another place I’ve been, another mind-enlarging artistic experience, not less, not more, than previous others in other parts of the world. But having experienced it in Abu Dhabi, an emerging cultural capital of the world, adds a new dimension not experienced anywhere else.

Art at the Guggenheim was published on April 22nd, 2017, with the tags , , , , , , , , , , , , under the Art, Observations, Travelling category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Travel as Life: A Review of Route 234

I haven’t read many books about travelling around Nigeria written by Nigerians. No doubt they exist (and readers should please recommend some for me in the comment section). I have however read many about traveling in other parts of the world. Tẹ́jú Cole’s (2016) essay collection comes to mind as well as Wọlé Ṣóyínká’s memoir You Must Set Forth At Dawn (2006). There is also America Their America (1964), an “autotravography” by J.P. Clark which caused controversy for what critics thought was a narrow and judgmental view of American values. Recently, there is Okey Ndibe’s Never Look An American In the Eye (2016), an autobiography, and many more.

There are however many more narratives written about the country, and about the continent, by visiting (foreign) journalists, writers, novelists over the years. Karen Blixen‘s Out of Africa (1937), JMG Le Clezio’s Onitsha (1991) and VS Naipaul’s The Masque of Africa (2010) come to mind easily. But so does this one. The overall impression of such books has always been the worry that they rarely depict reality as is, but only as perceived by the visiting foreigner, which – to be fair – is the whole purpose of the subjective narrative. I expect that the impression of America I’ll get from reading travel notes from an African visiting the US in the 1960s will give me an idea of America through that writer’s perspective of events as they unfold to him/her.

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At the Des Moines Capitol, Iowa (2015)

Even in the online space, one might easily find blogs written by foreigners about travel around the continent than one might of blogs by Africans of travel experiences in their own continent. (This is changing, of course. You’re reading this on a travel blog managed by an African, after all). But why is this the case? Human civilization itself is an experiment in travel, documentation and adventure conditioned by necessity, curiosity and sometimes nationalism. We have always left our comfort zones for new experiences. And, as archaeology and anthropology tell us, we have always documented those movements, even unconsciously, in hieroglyphics, and oral poetry, tribal marks, and lately in writing. In the 21st century Africa, the prevailing narrative is that travel for leisure and travel writing is a Western chore, done by the privileged few, and those conditioned to it by their profession in journalism.

Reality, unfortunately, seems to bear it out for the most part except in some rare cases. Olábísí Àjàlá was a Nigerian student who found himself in the United States at age 18 in the late 1940s. Having failed to succeed as a medical student at DePaul University, Chicago, he decided to travel through the country to Los Angeles, on a bicycle and document his experiences along the way. Through deportations, skirmishes with authorities, short Hollywood career (including meeting then actor Ronald Reagan), many short-lived marriages, children, and global fame, through the fifties, sixties, and seventies, he became the patron saint of all adventurers, and an icon in popular culture for African travel. Being called Ajàlá Travels in Nigeria today is a homage to his larger-than-life reputation. He also wrote a book An African Abroad.* 

So why is it that unless in rare cases Africans are not known globally to document our adventures in writing, or is it that we are just generally averse to travelling for its own sake? My friend and scholar Rebecca Jones has been asking this question for a while. In a conference she facilitated in Birmingham earlier in the year, the Call observed:

“For a long time study of African travel writing in the West has focused on Western-authored travel writing about Africa. But this has ignored both the long heritage of the genre amongst African and diaspora authors. African travel writers have traversed both the African continent and the rest of the world, writing about encounters and differences they meet in their own societies and others. They have engaged with colonialism and the post-colonial world, have produced ethnographic description, reportage, poetry, humour and more. They have traversed genres and forms, from the Swahili habari written at the turn of the twentieth century to Yoruba newspaper travel narratives of the 1920s, from accounts of students and soldiers abroad, to newspapers and today’s online travel writing.”

Aside from this blog, there are quite a few other ones online with focus on travel as an African hobby, done especially without the express purpose of becoming a travel “journalist” working for a media house, but for its own sake. Why are there not more. Africans, after all, travel as much as everyone else. Is it that we don’t care about documenting our experiences the way that others do? I have just finished reading Route 234 (2016), an anthology of global travel writing by Nigerian arts and culture journalists, compiled and edited by Pẹ̀lú Awófẹ̀sọ, an award-winning culture journalist. It is a delightful read of many fun, scary, heartwarming, and diverse experience of Nigerians in many different local and international situations. The contributors are however many of the continent’s known arts and culture journalists. This fact will not help our subject matter, but it shouldn’t remove from the value of the book as a necessary work and a delightful read.

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Route 234(2016), edited by Pẹ̀lú Awófẹ̀sọ̀

According to the editor, the idea for the book came from a private listserve conversation among these culture/travel writers earlier in the decade about documenting some of their travel experiences. It took many years before the idea finally became concrete.  The 211-paged book lists Kọ́lé Adé-Odùtọ́la, Olúmìdé Ìyàndá, Ọláyínká Oyègbilé, Èyítáyọ̀ Alọ́h, Mọlará Wood, Steve Ayọ̀rìndé, Pẹ̀lú Awófẹ̀sọ̀, Jahman Aníkúlápó, Túndé Àrẹ̀mú, Nseobong Okon-Ekong, Akíntáyọ̀ Abọ́dúnrìn, Ayẹni Adékúnlé, Fúnkẹ́ Osae-Brown, Sọlá Balógun and Ozolua Uhakheme as contributors. The scope of the travel experiences documented therein covers Los Angeles, Atlanta, Bahia, Juffureh, Accra, Plateau, Nairobi, Durban, Pilanesberg, India, London, France, Frankfurt, Nice, and Holland.

One of my favourite narrative in the work is Mọlará Wood’s “Farewell Juffureh” (page 35), covering a visit to Alex Haley’s ancestral hometown in the heart of Gambia as well as Nseobong Okon-Ekon’s “Trekking the Mambilla Plateau” (page 93). In both, the reader is vividly guided through experiences that must have been much more intense and affecting than words could capture. Some of the others detail culture shocks at visiting a new place for the first time and re-setting their opinions and expectations preconceived from a distance (“Accra Mystic” by Jahman Anikulapo, page 79) while some focus on their immediate task; covering a film festival, for instance (“Film, FESPACO, Ezra” by Steve Ayọ̀rìndé, page 61). A heartwarming one by Ṣọlá Balógun (“The Good Samaritans of Nice”, page 181) describe an experience common to many frequent travellers: being stranded in a strange city after a missed flight.

What the book represents overall is an intervention in a space where much more effort of this nature is needed. But travel isn’t, and shouldn’t be, the preserve of just culture writers and journalists. Writing about it shouldn’t be either. Tourism isn’t a big deal in Nigeria today because of lack of government (and private sector) care, yes, but also because of a seeming lack of interest in the populace itself. As I argued in this recent piece on a visit to historical locations in Ìbàdàn, commercial attention will come when governmental and private sector intervention takes the first step:

“I think back to a recent experience, in Italy, where tourism has built a thriving industry of restaurants, malls, and gift shops around notable structures that tell the country’s history, real and fictional, and how much value that attention (and tourist dollars) has brought to the country. Old churches and abbeys, ancient arenas in Verona and the Colosseum in Rome, among others, are all just ruins of a certain past. But they have been preserved and well branded in order to attract foreigners and their resources. Even a fictional character, Juliet, from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, has a touristy structure built in her honour, called Casa di Giulietta.”

Travel is fun. And even when it is not, it is always an enlightening exercise. As Mark Twain said in The Innocents Abroad (1869), “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” That same perhaps can be said about travel writing, if not as a way to reflect on one’s adventures, as a way to keep said experiences in the memory of the world.

The book is a delightful read, but much more is needed.

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* There are many other stories like this, no doubt. Ravi on twitter has pointed me out to “Sol Plaatje’s sea travel piece” (by which I assume he means this book, Mhudi, an epic of South African native life a hundred years ago), and Rebecca, in the comment section, to a few more published narratives, also of a few years back. Their input also reminded me of Olaudah Equiano’s  equally notable memoir. There are many more like these, I agree. My point is that there are not many more, and certainly not as many notable ones as there should be).

For more reading

Travel as Life: A Review of Route 234 was published on September 16th, 2016, with the tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , under the adventures, Literature, Observations, Opinion, Review, Travelling category. There are currently 8 comments on this article so far.

Caine Comes Home

On Monday July 2, my friend and writer, Rotimi Babatunde, was declared the winner of this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing – the highest prize for short fiction from Africa. The prize comes with 10,000 British Pounds, and the bragging rights that come with being singularly crowned out of a list of diverse nominees.

“The shortlist with Baroness Nicholson in Oxford yesterday: Stanley, Melissa, Jenna, Emma, Billy and Rotimi.”

His short story titled “Bombay’s Republic” (downloadable here) explores the almost forgotten story of Nigerian soldiers in Burma during the Second World War. In the citation, Babatunde’s work was described as “ambitious, darkly humorous and in soaring, scorching prose exposes the exploitative nature of the colonial project and the psychology of Independence.”

Rotimi Babatunde’s fiction and poems have been published in Africa, Europe and America in journals which include Die Aussenseite des Elementes and Fiction on the Web and in anthologies including Little Drops and A Volcano of Voices. He is a winner of the Meridian Tragic Love Story Competition organised by the BBC World Service and his plays have been staged and presented by institutions which include the Halcyon Theatre, Chicago and the Institute for Contemporary Arts. He is currently taking part in a collaboratively produced piece at the Royal Court and the Young Vic as part of World Stages for a World City. Rotimi lives in Ibadan, Nigeria.

More on the Caine Prize website.

Caine Comes Home was published on July 4th, 2012, with the tags , , , under the Literature, News category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Words with Jason

Jason Braun, a spoken word poet operates out of Edwardsville. He’s a friend and a Hemingway aficionado. I spoke with him a few days ago about his influences and his opinion on spoken word poetry. His spoken word mixtape is entitled  “Made This For You: The Mix Tape as Literature” given away yesterday at Jasonandthebeast.com. This mixtape was a product of the Association of Writers Programs & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference, Chicago. 

Tell me about the source of your fascination with rap and poetry.

I started writing poetry in high school after reading Shakespeare. I was listening to the Wu Tang Clan at the same time. Eventually I realized that these two things were more similar than they were different. Then for a long time I was influenced by the Poetry Slam, the Beats and the Black Arts Movement. I was lucky to get to study with Eugene B. Redmond at siue and his jazz backed album was a big influence on me.

Later I started a band called Jupiter Jazz with Jerry Hill (DJ Uptown) and it was Hip Hop, Jazz, and Poetry. We had some big breaks and played some great shows including Riverfest in Little Rock, Arkansas with people like B.B. King and The Wallflowers. I then started the “Jason and The Beast” project to make sonnets into a Hip Hop album.

“Made This For You: The Mix Tape as Literature” is about pushing the boundaries of what music, poetry, can do and where they can do it.

“What direction do you see for spoken word poetry in today’s world, especially because of the influence of social media?”

I see it moving in at least two directions. On the one hand you have spoken word and slam as new place that publishing poets can come from. I don’t want to call them academic poets but they’re poets that want to publish books. Two of my favorite poets that started in Slam and have left it behind are Patricia Smith and Tyehimba Jess. On the other hand spoken word poetry is being put to good use in the global community by people like my friend Michael Rothenberg and his”100 Thousand Poets for Change.”

These two directions won’t diminish the great thing that Marc Kelly Smith started when he created the Poetry Slam. He’ll still be drawing a crowd at the Green Mill in Chicago.

Do you see spoken word poetry as complementing publishing or standing alone from it. Do spoken word poets have to publish poems or does it just suffice to participate in the trade as oral griots.

I like to make stuff. Books, CD’s, downloads, apps, backpacks that prepare people for the coming mayan apocalypse–I’ve got all of those things in the works. Really. And I like to put on shows, sing, rap, and teach. The griots and Homer might be closer to my heart. I think about this a lot.

Are there any other shows that you’ve participated in that you can highlight? Where and when?

I’ve co-directed a multi media show for Adrian Matejka’s National Poetry Series winning book, Mixology. Me and DJ Uptown played a short set there. It great to rap for my professors and former professors and help try to bring Matejka’s amazing book into 3D.

Beside the jasonandthebeast website, where else can we find you (online and elsewhere)?

If you’re in Chicago from Feb 29th-March 3rd you can find me and some of my collaborators at the AWP Book fair by going to the Sou’wester table G5. If you don’t have tickets to AWP you can probably find me during the evening at the main bar at the Hilton Chicago (720 South Michigan Ave) or hanging out at The Green Mill (4802 N. Broadway), where Marc Smith once put me on as a featured guest of his Poetry Slam.

In the St. Louis area:
On Tuesday, March 27 from 12:30 – 2pm in the Maple/Dogwood Rooms of the MUC, Jason Braun will be presenting at SIUE’s College of Arts and Sciences Colloquium during the creative writing panel on “Thinking about Space.”

On Thursday, March 29th at 7pm Jason Braun will be featured at the SIUE bookstore as part of the Graduate Writers Read Series.

On Saturday, March the 31st from 7pm Jason Braun will be featured by the St. Louis Writers Guild for a night of poetry and music, which will be at Kirkwood Train Station. Raven Wolf will be doing jazz back-ups. Other poets include Treasure Shields Redmond, Nicky Rainey, Erin Chapman, Gerry Mandel.

And on 88.1 KDHX Monday Nights from 9-10pm hosting “Literature for the Halibut.” You can listen from anywhere in the world at kdhx.org

You can find more about Jason’s mixtape here.

Words with Jason was published on February 29th, 2012, with the tags , , , , under the Art, Observations category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.