The novelist @tejucole tweeted: — Teju Cole (@tejucole) March 22, 2013 "Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it". Chinua Achebe.
Or, as he later put it, "Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English for we intend to do unheard of things with it".
Then, unheard-of things happen here.
"You're going to hear unheard-of things that nobody should ever hear".
Yet it is the darkness where the thrills occur, and the lurid pictures, and the base thoughts, and the strange words to describe them, and you giddily are lost among unseen and unheard-of things.
He was certainly pursuing his involvement with Frenchness: from 1935, he was a popular teacher of Latin and Greek in the Lycée of Tours - an almost unheard of thing for an African to do then.
Their store cupboard was full of then unheard-of things like capers and anchovies, and Daphne was very particular about, for example, 'heating the pan properly before you threw in the calves liver.
"When I went back to Zim I became really attuned to the way people talk, in a mixture of languages and slang," she said in a recent session at the Edinburgh international book festival, quoting Nigeria's Chinua Achebe: "Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard-of things with it".
They had as their highest values sex, fellowship and the life of the mind; they achieved that unusual – unheard of – thing of not having to put those in ascending order of importance, but instead allowing them to coexist and sometimes conflict.
Sweetest of sounds now to be heard is the jingle-bells of the peepers from the marsh: their phantom sleighs ride by at dusk laden with unremembered and unheard-of things, the effect on the imagination like that of sleighbells in snowtime.
