Kicking Tongues

Karen King-Aribisala brilliantly transposes Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to modern-day Nigeria in this magnificent tale of forty very different travellers thrown together on a bus journey from Lagos to the new capital, Abuja.Carefully selected by their hostess – an enigmatic figure who calls herself, ‘The Black Lady The’ – the passengers on this journey range from a wealthy tribal chief to a humble petrol pump attendant, from a rain-maker to a reserved woman observing purdah.They are united only by their dissatisfaction with Nigeria’s chaotic and corrupt regime, a concern which is reflected in the widely differing stories they tell on their journey – bawdy tales, sharp satires, poignant narratives and moral fables.Blending poetry and prose, rich visual images, and witty puns, Karen King-Aribisala succeeds in transforming a fourteenth-century English classic into an exuberant and distinctively African work.

Karen Ann King-Aribisala was born in 1953 in Georgetown, Guyana. She is a poet, novelist, and short story writer.King-Aribisala grew up in Nigeria, attending the Ibadan International School and studying abroad in Barbados, Italy and London.Her collection of stories, Our Wife and Other Stories, and her novel, The Hangman's Game, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prizes, Best First Book Africa (1991) and Best Book Africa (2008), respectively.She currently lives in Nigeria and is Associate Professor of English at the University of Lagos.