“Na Dem Dey Hunt Whales”: Onyinye Uwolloh’s New “Moby-Dick” in Nigerian Pidgin
Katsushika Hokusai, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Last year, Nigerian poet Onyinye Miriam Uwolloh published Ishmael Na My Name, a long poem in Nigerian Pidgin that retells the story of Moby-Dick
(an audio recording of Uwolloh reading from the poem at the Strand Bookstore is available here). Today on WWB Daily, Jesse Amar considers how Ishmael Na My Name updates and challenges Melville s original text.
Onyinye Miriam Uwolloh’s poem Ishmael Na My Name is a sequence of 136 haiku, all written in Nigerian Pidgin English, each summarizing a chapter of Herman Melville’s