Nyambi Nyambi takes listeners on a rollicking outsized adventure as he narrates Killens’s posthumously published novel. Hoping to connect to “the Motherland,” Jimmy Jay Leander Johnson travels to the People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya, a tiny African country whose natural resources have attracted international interest. When a plot to assassinate the prime minister is discovered, Jimmy—a dead ringer for said prime minister—is strong-armed into traveling to the United States in his place. In tones that perfectly match Killens’s outrageous and acerbic rhetoric, Nyambi gives voice to the buffoonish politicians, simpering celebrities, and despicable racists whom Jimmy meets on his journey. Although this is a lengthy audio, listeners will be captivated by Nyambi’s nimble pacing and spot-on interpretation of Killens’s satirical wit. S.A.H. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
The Minister Primarily: A Novel
Narrated by Nyambi Nyambi
John Oliver KillensUnabridged — 17 hours, 20 minutes
The Minister Primarily: A Novel
Narrated by Nyambi Nyambi
John Oliver KillensUnabridged — 17 hours, 20 minutes
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Overview
A major literary event-the eagerly anticipated publication of a long-lost novel from legendary writer and three-time Pulitzer Prize nominee John Oliver Killens, hailed as the founding father of the Black Arts Movement and mentor to celebrated writers, including Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Arthur Flowers, and Terry McMillan.
Wanderlust has taken Jimmy Jay Leander Johnson on numerous adventures, from Mississippi to Washington D.C., Vietnam, London and eventually to Africa, to the fictitious Independent People's Democratic Republic of Guanaya, where the young musician hopes to “find himself.”
But this small sliver of a country in West Africa, recently freed from British colonial rule, is thrown into turmoil with the discovery of cobanium-a radioactive mineral 500 times more powerful than uranium, making it irresistible for greedy speculators, grifters, and charlatans. Overnight, outsiders descend upon the sleepy capital city looking for “a piece of the action.”
When a plot to assassinate Guanaya's leader is discovered, Jimmy Jay-a dead ringer for the Prime Minister-is enlisted in a counter scheme to foil the would-be coup. He will travel to America with half of Guanaya's cabinet ministers to meet with the President of the United States and address the UN General Assembly, while the rest of the cabinet will remain in Guanaya with the real Prime Minister.
What could go wrong?
*Everything.
Set in the 1980s, this smart, funny, dazzlingly brilliant novel is a literary delight-and the final gift from an American literary legend.
Editorial Reviews
05/03/2021
Killens (1916–1987), a member of the Black Arts movement and author of And Then We Heard the Thunder, cleverly satirizes 1960s American politics in this sharp thriller. Jaja Okwu Olivamaki, prime minister of the Independent People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya, sees his country lifted from obscurity after a great quantity of the radioactive metallic element cobanium is found there, making it the newest front in the Cold War. African-American musician James Jay Leander Johnson travels to Guanaya to learn “the folk songs of his people,” only to become a suspect in a plot to murder Olivamaki. Johnson’s life takes an even stranger detour after his resemblance to his supposed target leads to his being asked to impersonate the nation’s leader, a pretense he must maintain on a state visit to the U.S. Killens is pointed in his barbs; when the imposter is asked his opinion of Malcolm X, he declares he believes in the same kind of nonviolence the U.S. does: “I believe we should keep everybody nonviolent, even if we have to blow them off the face of the earth, in the American tradition.” Throughout, Killens maximizes the potential of his plot with outrageous humor. Readers will be glad to find this gem unearthed. (July)
"Killens has read his Shakespeare. With the surprises in its plot and its quadrilles of mistaken identities, ‘The Minister Primarily’ is right up there with ‘The Tempest’ and ‘The Comedy of Errors.’ The choreography of his set pieces has an effulgent warmth that is as passionately expressed as it is disarming, creeping up on the reader with such skill you hardly realize you’re being stalked by a master." — The New York Times Book Review
"Killens casts a broad net, skewering everything from the heady early days of African independence to the pan-Africanism of the period among Black Americans, and, most sharply, race relations in the United States. This is a brilliantly scathing, outrageous satire as important today as when it was written." — Library Journal (starred review)
“The Minister Primarily is not only a brilliantly imagined work of fiction, it is also a side-splittingly funny tale. In this newly discovered last novel, Killens’ puts on his literary fabulist hat and hands us a rich, unforgettable tale packed with ribald, humorous scenes, and wacky characters. Read this book, you will never forget it!” — Quincy Troupe, author of andMiles and Me
“John O. Killens inspired many writers, myself included. Killens is a genius at his craft. He taught it, he perfected it. And Killens' mastery of satire, (please read The Cotillion as well) is on full display in his last novel. His dialogue is as clever and sly as ever.” — Tina McElroy Ansa, The Hand I Fan With and Taking After Mudear
“John Oliver Killens’ The Minister Primarily highlights his exceptional skills in the use of dialogue, irony and satire. The novel is ultimately a parody of American, African and European presidents and political leaders and an exposé of the hypocrisy and exploitation generated by colonialism in Africa. His use of humor and adaptation of the trope of the trickster for his protagonist are reminiscent of Ishmael Reed, Charles W. Chestnutt, and Ralph Ellison.” — Dr. Brenda M. Greene, Founder & Executive Director, Center for Black Literature, Medgar Evers College, CUNY
“It is good to see another work by Baba John Killens, a master of voice illuminating everything that stumbles within range of his biting irony and expansive literary heart. The Minister Primarily reminds us why John Killens occupies such a unique place in literature. Read The Minister Primarily and you too will understand the joy of ‘found work’ by Baba John Killens, the Great Griot Master of Brooklyn at the top of his satiric game.” — Arthur Flowers, author of The Hoodoo Book of Flowers: The Great Black Book of Generations
“The absurd situation gives Killens a perfect vantage from which to satirize international race relations.” — The New Yorker
“Vividly and skillfully written, this vibrant, long-missing novel, published 34 years after the death of this Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer, civil rights activist, and key figure in the Black Arts Movement, is certain to be a timeless classic of satirical fiction.” — Booklist (starred review)
"An audacious final testament of an underappreciated craftsman." — Kirkus Reviews
John O. Killens inspired many writers, myself included. Killens is a genius at his craft. He taught it, he perfected it. And Killens' mastery of satire, (please read The Cotillion as well) is on full display in his last novel. His dialogue is as clever and sly as ever.
John Oliver Killens’ The Minister Primarily highlights his exceptional skills in the use of dialogue, irony and satire. The novel is ultimately a parody of American, African and European presidents and political leaders and an exposé of the hypocrisy and exploitation generated by colonialism in Africa. His use of humor and adaptation of the trope of the trickster for his protagonist are reminiscent of Ishmael Reed, Charles W. Chestnutt, and Ralph Ellison.
"Killens has read his Shakespeare. With the surprises in its plot and its quadrilles of mistaken identities, ‘The Minister Primarily’ is right up there with ‘The Tempest’ and ‘The Comedy of Errors.’ The choreography of his set pieces has an effulgent warmth that is as passionately expressed as it is disarming, creeping up on the reader with such skill you hardly realize you’re being stalked by a master."
Vividly and skillfully written, this vibrant, long-missing novel, published 34 years after the death of this Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer, civil rights activist, and key figure in the Black Arts Movement, is certain to be a timeless classic of satirical fiction.”
The Minister Primarily is not only a brilliantly imagined work of fiction, it is also a side-splittingly funny tale. In this newly discovered last novel, Killens’ puts on his literary fabulist hat and hands us a rich, unforgettable tale packed with ribald, humorous scenes, and wacky characters. Read this book, you will never forget it!
The absurd situation gives Killens a perfect vantage from which to satirize international race relations.”
It is good to see another work by Baba John Killens, a master of voice illuminating everything that stumbles within range of his biting irony and expansive literary heart. The Minister Primarily reminds us why John Killens occupies such a unique place in literature. Read The Minister Primarily and you too will understand the joy of ‘found work’ by Baba John Killens, the Great Griot Master of Brooklyn at the top of his satiric game.”
The absurd situation gives Killens a perfect vantage from which to satirize international race relations.”
John O. Killens inspired many writers, myself included. Killens is a genius at his craft. He taught it, he perfected it. And Killens' mastery of satire, (please read The Cotillion as well) is on full display in his last novel. His dialogue is as clever and sly as ever.
★ 07/23/2021
This posthumously published novel by Killens (1916–87), a founder of the Black Arts Movement, is a major addition to his oeuvre. Set in the 1980s, it centers on James Jay Leander Johnson, a Black folk singer from Mississippi who journeys to Africa to find himself. He mistakenly deplanes in the fictitious People's Democratic Republic of Guanaya, a newly independent backwater suddenly being wooed by the Cold War powers after vast deposits of cobanium, a valuable radioactive mineral, are discovered. The country is facing a dilemma; word of an assassination plot against the prime minister reaches the government just as he is to visit the United States. While performing at a local club, Johnson is discovered by a government minister who believes him to be a look-alike for the prime minister, and after being given a crash course on Guanaya by the beautiful culture minister Marie Efwa, he is sent to the United States to masquerade as the prime minister. VERDICT Killens casts a broad net, skewering everything from the heady early days of African independence to the pan-Africanism of the period among Black Americans, and, most sharply, race relations in the United States. This is a brilliantly scathing, outrageous satire as important today as when it was written.—Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA
Nyambi Nyambi takes listeners on a rollicking outsized adventure as he narrates Killens’s posthumously published novel. Hoping to connect to “the Motherland,” Jimmy Jay Leander Johnson travels to the People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya, a tiny African country whose natural resources have attracted international interest. When a plot to assassinate the prime minister is discovered, Jimmy—a dead ringer for said prime minister—is strong-armed into traveling to the United States in his place. In tones that perfectly match Killens’s outrageous and acerbic rhetoric, Nyambi gives voice to the buffoonish politicians, simpering celebrities, and despicable racists whom Jimmy meets on his journey. Although this is a lengthy audio, listeners will be captivated by Nyambi’s nimble pacing and spot-on interpretation of Killens’s satirical wit. S.A.H. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
2021-06-16
This previously unpublished novel by a late, venerated Black novelist is a free-wheeling satire of late-20th-century racial politics in both post-colonial Africa and post–civil rights America.
Killens (1916-1987) was in his crowded lifetime a World War II soldier, activist, mentor, teacher, screenwriter, polemicist, and novelist. One of his most notorious works was The Cotillion(1971), which trenchantly lampooned the upper reaches of the African American middle class, and that side of Killens comes through even more boisterously in this posthumous novel. Its protagonist is James Jay Leander Johnson, an itinerant musician from the Deep South whose restless wanderings have led him to the mythical African country of Guanaya, where he seeks cultural communion with “the Motherland.” Meanwhile, Guanaya’s stature as “the most insignificant of nations” is stunningly transformed by its discovery of cobanium, “a radioactive metallic element five hundred times more powerful and effective than uranium.” The country’s charismatic prime minister, Jaja Olivamaki, is being supplicated by the American government to negotiate an alliance over this earth-shaking discovery. But neither he nor his cabinet trust the U.S. to have their country’s best interests at heart. Which is where Jimmy Jay Johnson, performing folk music throughout Guanaya, comes in. Tall-and-handsome Jimmy Jay looks so much like the tall-and-handsome P.M. that he is recruited to put on a false beard and pretend to be Olivamaki on a high-profile diplomatic visit to America. Though set sometime in the 1980s, Killens’ novel comes across as a compendium of social and political phenomena in American race relations, whether it’s Pan-Africanism, the Ku Klux Klan, or, of course, the Black upper middle class. Most if not all are treated with scathing irreverence and acerbic wit. At times, the shakiest element in Killens’ situation comedy is the extent to which Johnson’s masquerade holds up as his iteration of the African leader becomes something of a folk hero among Black Americans and a target for White racists. And there are times when the plot gallops ahead of Killens’ ability to control it. But even at its most unruly, the go-for-broke narrative style grows on you, and the author himself occasionally materializes in a walk-on role, lending the book a metafictional feel.
An audacious final testament of an underappreciated craftsman.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940176288049 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Publication date: | 07/27/2021 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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