I have been thinking about fatherhood. About what makes a father, and who gets to become one. The thought has lingered long enough that I have begun to question what first set me on this path. Is it because I have lost my own father? Or because I have arrived at the age when fatherhood no longer belongs to some distant future but waits just beyond the horizon? Over the past few years, I have watched many of my friends step into fatherhood. They seem determined to resist the familiar script, refusing the inheritance of absence that shaped so many of our lives. They are fighting, in their own ways, not to repeat the failures of their fathers. It has been remarkable to witness. More remarkable still is watching these men fuss over their children with a tenderness we rarely saw growing up.

Perhaps I should qualify that. My own father was present. He was there. And yet, as I think about fatherhood now, I find myself wondering whether presence and fatherhood have ever been quite the same thing. I don’t know what makes a father. I have some theories, most of them assembled from watching men I know become fathers themselves. There is the obvious stuff: provision, protection, instruction, the long accumulation of small responsibilities that eventually become a life. There is the less obvious stuff: knowing when to hold on and when to let go. Knowing how much fear to transmit and how much to keep for yourself. Knowing that a child will eventually become a person you cannot entirely protect from the world, and that your job is not to prevent every fall but, somehow, to prepare them for getting back up.

I have been thinking about this because my first book will be published next March. This is a strange sentence to write. For years, the book existed mostly as a collection of possibilities. Then it became a manuscript, and then a book under contract, and then something with a publication date. Now the US, Canada, and UK editions have a cover. The copy editing is almost finished. There are fewer and fewer decisions left for me to make. Soon there will be a physical object with my name on it that I cannot revise anymore. I have spent enough time writing about the difficulty of bringing the book into the world that I don’t want to do that again. The difficulty has already been documented. What interests me now is what happens when you have made something and can no longer keep it to yourself.

A few years ago, before I had a book, before I knew exactly what kind of writer I wanted to become, I wrote a very small essay called “Bicycle Lessons.” I had almost forgotten about it. In it, I wrote about learning to ride a bicycle as an adult. I began with a comparison to a toddler learning to walk. The child is unsteady, uncertain, almost comically close to catastrophe, except that there is usually a parent nearby, arms spread wide, ready to catch them. The adult learner has no such luxury. You have to trust your instincts, even when you have never trusted them before. You have to trust the wind. You have to trust your body to do what your mind is telling it to do. I wrote that the strange thing about learning to ride a bicycle as an adult was that my legs no longer seemed to understand my brain. Every time I put my feet on the pedals, the handlebars swerved left, and I would be swallowed by a panic so complete that another part of my brain would wonder why I didn’t simply get a car. This was, apparently, my theory of adulthood.

I wrote about Edison, too, because apparently no essay about failing repeatedly can resist the temptation to summon Thomas Edison from the dead. I imagined him in his workshop, surrounded by darkness and candles, waiting for the light that would eventually arrive. I wrote about hope, which I described as deceptive, and about growing up as the process of learning to distrust it. Reading the essay now, I am struck by how much I was trying to say without knowing what I was saying. The bicycle was never really the subject. The subject was fear. The subject was trust. The subject was the peculiar humiliation of being an adult beginner. There is something particularly frightening about learning a simple thing late. Children are permitted their incompetence. We expect them to fall. We celebrate their first steps precisely because the steps are so uncertain. An adult falling from a bicycle is different. The body has already learned too many things about gravity, embarrassment, injury, and dignity. The adult knows what can happen.

Maybe that is one of the differences between childhood and adulthood. A child learns by believing the world will catch them. An adult learns by discovering that sometimes it won’t. At the end of the essay, I wrote about my instructor urging me to let go.

“Trust the bike,” she said. “Remember, you are in control. You ride the bike. It doesn’t ride you.”

After days of falling and failing, I finally completed my first ride. I imagined myself gliding through an alleyway, my body cutting through the wind. I called it my thousandth trial. I compared myself to Edison. This is the story of our lives, I wrote. I don’t remember whether I believed that when I wrote it. I believe it a little more now. Perhaps this is what I have been trying to understand about fatherhood. A father, at least in one sense, is someone who eventually has to teach you how to move without him. There is a moment when the hands that have been holding the bicycle must disappear from the handlebars. The parent remains close enough to intervene, perhaps, but the child cannot know that. From the child’s perspective, there is only the sudden realization that the thing keeping them upright has vanished. Maybe fatherhood is partly the art of preparing someone for your absence. That sounds cruel when I write it down. Maybe because absence is the thing I have been trying to understand since my own father died.

I think about my friends now, their children growing quickly. The little bodies that once needed to be carried everywhere are becoming bodies that run away from them. Soon they will ride bicycles. Soon they will want privacy. Soon they will discover the embarrassment of having parents who are suddenly everywhere. One day, their fathers will stand several feet away while their children attempt something they cannot do for them. There is a tenderness in that distance. Perhaps that is what I am seeing when I watch my friends become fathers. Not simply men taking responsibility for children, but men learning the difficult choreography of attachment and release. And now I am learning something about release too.

My book will come out in March. My father will never hold this book. That fact has been true from the day I signed the contract with the press I chose, though I have only recently allowed myself to think about it. There will be photographs of the book. There will be readings and conversations. There may be strangers who know its sentences better than I do. There may be people who hate it. There may be people who love it. There may be people who read it years from now when I have forgotten what I was thinking when I wrote it. My father will not see any of that. And yet I am beginning to understand that inheritance does not always move in a straight line. Sometimes it moves sideways. Sometimes it skips a generation. Sometimes what we inherit is not an object but a question.

In my years in the Ogun State civil service back in Nigeria, I thought I understood what having an inheritance meant; I thought I understood what it meant to live in my father’s shadows, because he worked there as well – with his big personality and unforgettable charisma. But these days, I am beset with other questions. What does it mean to be a father? What does it mean to leave something behind? What does it mean to make something knowing that one day you will have to let it go? I don’t have answers to these questions. I am not yet a father. I am only beginning to understand what it means to be a son after the person who made you one is gone. And I am only now beginning to understand what it means to become the maker of something that will eventually exist without me.

Perhaps that is why I keep returning to the bicycle. The adult body trembling over a machine designed for children. The instructor walking beside me. My hands gripping the handlebars too tightly. The fear of falling. The embarrassment of beginning late. The strange faith required to put one foot on a pedal and then the other. Then the voice beside me saying: Trust the bike. I think about that now and say to myself: Trust the book. Trust the child. Trust the life that continues after you have stopped trying to control it. There is no guarantee that any of this works. The bicycle can still tip. The child can still fall. The book can still disappoint you. Hope can still deceive you. But eventually, you have to move. You put your foot on the pedal. You push.

For a moment, someone is holding on. Then they let go. And you are moving before you realize you are moving, your body cutting through the wind, carrying you somewhere you have not yet learned how to name.

Subscribe now

June was strangely calm. By calm, I mean all I really had to do was stay on business, as the kids say these days. I turned a year older. I started putting together plans for the release of my debut essay collection. I taught a masterclass. Got called “lazy” on Twitter for floating a thought experiment, all in a day’s work. I read a little, wrote a little, and tried not to get distracted by the hundred little anxieties that accompany waiting for the next thing to happen. There was another kind of anticipation too. I knew this summer would feel different. Academic life trains you to think of friendships seasonally. Every May and June, someone graduates, someone moves away, someone returns home, someone begins another fellowship in another city. Before long, you realize that the people who made a place feel like home for you have quietly disappeared one after another. I knew this was coming, so perhaps the loneliness has not surprised me as much as I imagined it would. There is something oddly peaceful about learning to keep yourself company.

The FIFA Club World Cup has also been on. It is the biggest edition yet and is being hosted across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Watching it, I have found myself thinking more about the ways politics influences football. Politics has remarkably long legs. It walks into everything we do, even the things we imagine exist outside it. This is perhaps why I am still shocked at the State of the Humanities Report that was published some weeks ago where these claims were erroneously repeated. The politics in this year’s World Cup reared its head in everything. From the organization and arrival of teams at their individual venues and the uneven treatment of teams, in the different expectations placed upon players depending on where they come from. Maybe I notice these things more because Nigeria is not playing. It is easier to watch without the emotional investment of supporting your own country.

Still, I cannot stop thinking about passports. What an international passport can buy you. The ease with which some people cross borders while others remain trapped inside bureaucracies that seem designed to remind them where they belong. Even at the highest levels of sport, after all the trophies, the fame, and the money, there are players who still have to negotiate a racism that is not particularly interested in hiding itself. Achievement, it turns out, does not always purchase dignity. I think immediately of Breel Embolo, the Switzerland international who was stopped upon arriving in the US for what I can only assume to be questions surrounding whether his claims to be an actual Switz international were real because of his Cameroonian heritage.

I have also been thinking again about the xenophobic attacks in South Africa. I wrote about them briefly in my last newsletter, but I have found my thinking shifting, however slightly. One of the responses that often emerges from Nigerians and Ghanaians is to remind South Africans of the solidarity offered during apartheid. We remember the scholarships, the financial contributions, the diplomatic pressure, the refuge offered to exiles, the support for liberation movements. These histories matter. They should not be forgotten. But I wonder if that rhetoric misses something. The people leading these current attacks are often not the political elites who inherited the benefits of international solidarity. They are frequently people failed by post-apartheid South Africa itself. People living with unemployment, inequality, and abandoned promises. Their response is tragic and indefensible, but perhaps our appeals to history fail because they are addressed to people whose lives were never transformed by the histories we invoke.

Their own rhetoric is revealing. They tell other Africans to go back and fix their own countries. It is an ugly sentiment, but it insists relentlessly on the present. It refuses historical debts altogether. It is almost as if the liberation histories preserved by our governments belong to one class of people, while the frustrations animating these attacks belong to another. I have found myself returning to Fanon and Sylvia Wynter, particularly their suspicion of the Black bourgeoisie and the ethnoclass. Both ask us to pay attention to the distance that often opens between political liberation and the people in whose name liberation was supposedly achieved. Perhaps that distance is where some of these contradictions now live. I don’t know that this is the right way to think about it. It is simply where my thoughts have wandered these past few weeks.

This month some of my work appeared on both The Common Reader & Transition Magazine. I was also in conversation with the incredible Akal Mohan for Ubwali Literary Magazine where we talked about writing essays, African Literature and a few other things. I hope you find the conversation as generative as it was for me.

I also received emails from scholars and readers who were very generous with their praises. It felt odd to read some of these emails, but it also made me happy to think about the bigger picture of how I am not writing to the void. It is very fulfilling I have to say.

Because I keep getting requests for the books I am reading, I will try to keep a list here for anyone who cares. This month, my favourite read by every means was Tolani Akinola’s Leave Your Mess at Home. It left me stunned in ways I didn’t expect and I might do a review if I can get to it. The other books on my to-be-read pile include The Husbands by Holly Gramazio.

Meanwhile, summer has finally arrived in St. Louis. It feels as though it began only yesterday. The sun has been relentless these last few days and promises to remain so for a while. I intend to stay indoors as much as I can. There is reading to do, outlines to sketch, and a handful of projects waiting patiently for me to begin.

Until next time.

Share

This summer I am taking a Mellon Foundation funded seminar on anthropology titled Making Race. In one of the texts, I encountered an unlikely old foe. The infamous Frederick Lugard who according to the myth of his personhood that I grew up learning in the Nigerian educational system, amalgamated the northern and southern protectorates of what would become Nigeria. Much of the madness that Nigeria has become can easily be traced to some of the decisions he made. But who he was, and what he thought of us (Nigerians), had always been a thing of fascination for me. In the essay, The White Man’s Task, which reminds me of the Kipling poem The White Man’s Burden, he explains empire to itself with the calm confidence of a man who believed history had already chosen its hierarchy. There were many fascinating and unsettling things in the text, but the one that caught my attention first was the language. A very colonial language that seems borrowed from the abolitionist language of the time.

Colonial language is rarely shocking anymore. We have inherited too much of it. What unsettled me was recognition. I realized, slowly and then all at once, that much of my education as a Nigerian was shaped inside the afterlife of these ideas. The arrangement of the world beneath the curriculum. The invisible assumptions. Europe as arrival. Africa as lack. English as intelligence. Proximity to Western institutions as legitimacy. Development as imitation. Civilization as distance from ourselves. Reading Lugard felt less like discovering history than discovering a blueprint. It struck me that I was encountering Lugard inside one of the disciplines empires once used to classify, narrate, and administer the colonized world. And perhaps that is the most enduring success of empire: its ability to make its worldview appear natural to the conquered. To make its hierarchy feel like common sense. To teach generations of colonized subjects how to participate in the maintenance of a world arranged against them, sometimes consciously, often unconsciously.

I have been thinking about this because in many ways my forthcoming essay collection, Exodus, is preoccupied with similar questions. Across the essays, I keep circling the same anxieties: why does the world feel bent on undoing itself? Why does the future seem at once catastrophic and hopeful? Why do so many of us continue to sustain systems that diminish us, even after recognizing their violence, because survival itself has become entangled with those systems? The blurbs for the book have started arriving over the last few weeks, and for the first time in a long while, some of my anxiety about the project has begun to loosen. There is something strangely reassuring about realizing that your readers can see the shape you were trying to make, even when you feared you had only produced fragments.

This weekend, I will be presenting a paper at the annual African Literature Association conference titled “Ephemeral Prestige: The Nigerian Prize for Literature and the Technoscapes of Attention,” in Knoxville, Tennessee. The paper extends many of the questions I have been wrestling with here and across my scholarship and essays about how African writing circulates, how recognition functions, how literary ecosystems celebrate books without always sustaining them. I remain fascinated by the strange economy of visibility around African literature. A book appears. It trends briefly online. It wins a prize. It becomes discourse. Then the machinery moves on, often before the work has fully entered public memory. And yet, despite everything, African literature continues to insist on itself.

Over the last few weeks, I have been reading Eloghosa Osunde’s Necessary Fiction, Pemi Aguda’s One Leg on Earth, Mubanga Kalimamukwento’s The Shipiska’s Club alongside several other recent works by African writers. What strikes me so far as been what I can only describe as a kind of refusal. Their refusal of inherited narrative expectations. Their refusal to explain themselves into acceptability. Their refusal of the old colonial demand that African writing must always justify Africa to the world. For all the recurring declarations about the decline of literature, or the exhaustion of African writing, the reality feels entirely different from where I stand. There are conversations happening everywhere now, online and offline, across essays, podcasts, festivals, newsletters, classrooms. Many of them orbit questions that have animated this newsletter for months: migration, memory, infrastructure, power, identity, language, belonging. Perhaps this is what resilience actually looks like.

And then, because history occasionally develops a sense of humor. My favorite football club, Arsenal FC finally won the English Premier League. This victory arrives after two decades of near misses, public embarrassment, annual optimism collapsing by March, and sustained psychological warfare from rival fans. Entire generations of younger fans have never witnessed this before. Some people genuinely believed it would never happen. Even I did. Reluctantly I found faith and belief. It is difficult not to read even this through the lens of narrative and inheritance. Sports fandom often resembles historical memory: communities organized around longing, repetition, ritual disappointment, and the stubborn belief that the future can still arrive differently. For once, it did.

Share

Happy May, and my apologies for skipping April. A lot has happened and more continues to take shape. I have just finished my PhD coursework and my forthcoming collection of essays is finally in production. Looking back at that sentence, it feels too clean for what it holds. It suggests a kind of completion that flattens the experience itself. Instead, it has been a long and arduous period. A long season of reading that seemed, at times, to outpace comprehension. Weeks where thinking itself felt like a muscle pushed past fatigue into something closer to strain. Conversations that lingered long after the seminar ended.

And beneath all of this, a steady accumulation of quiet pressures. Deadlines, certainly: to locate oneself within a field. To speak with clarity before one feels ready. To produce coherence out of materials that resist it. And then there are the deadlines that follow the production of a text. Things you find out about the process of publishing a book that nobody has told you before. The reaching out to mentors and friends for blurbs. The posing for an author photograph. And having to think about how the essays will do in a world outside of my control. To imagine them now moving outward, toward publication, is to confront a different order of vulnerability. The work will no longer belong only to the conditions under which it was written. It will meet readers I cannot anticipate, enter conversations I cannot control. In the coming months, I will share my progress, milestones and more importantly, communicate on how you can support and be a part of what will be an exciting period of my life.

Anyway, it has been an emotionally draining semester. I find myself relieved to see it behind me. But what follows it is the fact of how the body loosens its grip. The mind, tentatively, beginning to wander again. Yet what complicates this moment is that it does not arrive alone. It opens, almost immediately, into another set of beginnings. The qualifying exams just ahead. There is a particular anxiety that attends this stage of doctoral work. It is not simply the anxiety of performance. It is something more interior. The sense that one is being asked to gather everything one has encountered so far, to arrange it into a structure that can hold, that can speak. To return to texts not simply as a reader, but as someone who must account for them, position them, draw out the lines that connect them. It is a careful kind of labour. There are no shortcuts here, only the work of thinking one’s way into articulation.

In the midst of all this, something else has been pressing itself into my attention, refusing to remain peripheral. Videos have been circulating on social media. Scenes of xenophobic attacks in South Africa. The events of these videos are new but the sentiments that mobilize them remain the same. In the videos, black foreign nationals are chased, beaten, and their shops are looted. The images are unsteady, often filmed in haste, but the force of them is difficult to look away from. I have found myself returning to them more often than I would like to admit. As if this return might yield clarity. As if somewhere in the fragments of speech, in the arguments offered in passing, there might be a structure that can be named. What begins to surface, slowly, is not coherence in the sense of justification, but a pattern of reasoning that feels familiar. For the perpetuators of these violent acts are now very comfortable with the camera. There is an intentionality to the endeavour of recording and sharing the messaging with the rest of the world.

Much of the language used to frame these attacks turns on a claim about displacement. That African foreign nationals arrive and take up space that properly belongs to black South Africans. That they learn how to navigate the informal economies more efficiently, benefit from their irregularities, and in doing so become a kind of internal competitor, even a threat. There are moments within this narrative that gesture toward material realities. Economic precarity is not imagined. Competition over limited resources is not invented. But the narrative does something else as it takes shape. It begins to sort people into categories that feel eerily reminiscent of another logic. The idea that there are those who belong and those who do not. Those whose presence is naturalized and those whose presence must be explained, justified, or resisted. Those who are cast as properly rooted, and those who are rendered opportunistic, excessive, and out of place. This is where the frame begins to echo something larger than the immediate context. The language of displacement, of being overtaken, of losing ground to an encroaching other, has a long history within white supremacist thought. It is the grammar of replacement, the insistence that proximity is a form of threat, that the presence of the other diminishes the self. What is unsettling here is not simply that similar language appears, but that it can be mobilized within a context that imagines itself as outside of that history.

To name this is not to collapse distinct histories into one another, or to ignore the specificities of South Africa’s economic and political landscape. It is, rather, to pay attention to the ways certain ways of thinking about belonging and threat become available, even intuitive, across different contexts. What concerns me is how easily a narrative that begins in partial truth can harden into something else entirely. The claim that some migrants are able to navigate systems in ways that others cannot, can, under pressure, become a claim about intrinsic difference. About character. About deservingness. It can slide, almost imperceptibly, into a moral hierarchy that justifies exclusion, and eventually, violence. The shift is subtle at first, then suddenly not subtle at all. I find myself thinking again about the relative quiet that surrounds these moments. African intellectual communities that are often quick to denounce injustice elsewhere seem slower here, and more hesitant. I wonder if part of that hesitation has to do with how difficult it is to name what is happening without also implicating ourselves in the logics that sustain it.

In the midst of all this, I find it impossible to keep my attention fixed elsewhere for too long. News filters through from Nigeria. A young man killed by police officers in Delta State, another instance of extrajudicial violence that feels at once immediate and familiar. It is difficult not to think back to 2020, to the scale of mobilization that moment demanded, and to how much it took from those of us who lived through it. There is a sense, now, of something circling back, since the conditions that made that rupture possible were never fully addressed.

I remember, with an uneasy clarity, the circulation of propaganda videos in the years that followed, many of which appeared aligned with efforts to recast the narrative of those protests. Current and former police officers, appearing to paint themselves as victims of a bloodthirsty mob of young people. Many young people who remember those protests, are hardly able to speak against or denounce these videos, because finally we too have arrived at that position that we once thought the generation of our parents were in. That position of acceptance. Of the inability to offer any strand of resistance. It is difficult to explain what seeing a fellow young person hunted and killed by men in uniform, men who have been supposedly sworn to serve and protect, does to one’s sense of self. In a recent conversation with a very dear friend who left Nigeria around that same period, I had to accept the fact of how those events broke the best of us.

And then there are other images, no less difficult to sit with. A young undergraduate student killed, the circumstances of his death shaped by a hostility toward his perceived effeminacy. The details are uneven, as they often are, but the pattern they gesture toward is not unfamiliar. The ease with which difference becomes justification. The speed with which a life can be reduced to a reason. It reminds me again of the conversations during those protests of 2020, where queer people joined everyone else in demanding better from the Nigerian government and many people from the Nigerian middle class, especially those who appointed themselves leaders of the protests, started dolling advice about patience. About it not being time. Yet, our oppressions, while different, are not as distant from one another as we sometimes insist.

To call out violence elsewhere is, inevitably, to encounter it again within one’s own field of vision. The distance collapses. What does it mean that these forms of violence remain available to us, across different contexts, different scales? What does it mean to ask for accountability in one place while learning, repeatedly, how difficult it is to sustain it in another?

I do not have a clean way of resolving this. Only the growing sense that whatever ethical clarity I want to claim must be held across these spaces at once. That the work of naming injustice cannot depend on proximity alone. And that the more difficult task, perhaps, is not only to ask why we are capable of these things, but to begin, however tentatively, to imagine what it would require for us to become otherwise. What does it mean to recognize a familiar structure in an unfamiliar place? The question unsettles because it resists easy positioning. It does not allow for a simple division between those who enact and those who condemn. It suggests, instead, that the conditions under which such logics take hold are more widely shared than we might prefer to admit. I am wary, too, of my own role in this moment.

It is one thing to trace these patterns, to call attention to them, to insist on their danger. It is another to account for the ways in which my own attention is uneven, and selectively distributed. My engagement with these videos has been elective. I return to them when I choose. I turn away when I can no longer bear it. There is a kind of democracy to that, one that reveals as much about my limits as it does about my concerns. And so this, too, becomes part of the moment I am trying to hold. An ending, a beginning, and a set of questions that refuse to settle. It would be easy to let all of this pass without remark. To move quickly from one demand to the next, to treat this as merely transitional. Academic life encourages this kind of forward motion. There is always another milestone, another deadline, another horizon that demands attention. But I am increasingly convinced that these in-between spaces matter precisely because they gather more than we expect them to.

I think, too, about the course I will be teaching in the fall. There is something quietly exhilarating about this shift. To move from being primarily a recipient of knowledge to someone tasked with structuring, framing and inviting others into its complexities. The questions I find myself drawn to are the ones that have been circling my own work: How is the history of the world shaped and narrated? Whose perspectives are centered, whose are deferred, whose are erased? And what would it mean to imagine those histories otherwise? I suspect these questions will feel different in the classroom now. There is a responsibility in this, one that I am still learning how to address. Perhaps that is what I want to mark here. What feels most urgent is the recognition that I am, in this moment, positioned at a set of thresholds that do not often announce themselves as such. Thresholds that are intellectual, certainly, but also ethical. They ask not only what I will produce, but how I will attend to the world as it unfolds around me. To write this is to resist the quiet erasure that often follows periods of intense labor. To insist that this passage deserves acknowledgment, in all its complication.

There will be time, soon enough, for what comes next. The reading lists will need to be worked through. The essays will need to be released into the world. The course will need to be designed, structured, and taught. But for now, I want to remain here, if only briefly. At the edge of what has been completed, and at the beginning of what is about to unfold. And with the uneasy recognition that what we imagine as distant does not stay there. It returns, asks to be recognized, and refuses to let us remain unchanged.

Dear Reader,

I entered the highway this month, which is to say I allowed myself to be folded into a system that had no interest in my hesitation. There is something indecorous about how it happens. No threshold you can linger at, no speaker to announce your arrival. Just a ramp that narrows your options until the only available act is commitment. You look, you measure distance badly, you move anyway. The cars do not welcome you, but neither do they refuse you. They adjust, sometimes reluctantly, and in that adjustment, you are granted a narrow, provisional belonging. I had imagined fear as something louder. Something that accompanies the zooming sound of cars, the rhythm of tires in conversation with asphalt. What I encountered instead was a quieter disorientation, the sense that my body was being instructed in a language my mind had not yet agreed to learn. My hands held the wheel with the stiffness of someone trying not to betray himself. My eyes performed their duties too earnestly. But then, somewhere between one exit and another, something shifted. It wasn’t mastery, not even confidence, but a thinning of resistance. I stopped asking, at every second, if I was allowed to be there. The road did not answer. It did not need to. It simply continued, and in continuing, it required that I do the same.

I have been thinking about that requirement, about the way certain systems compel participation before they offer comprehension. You enter first. Understanding is permitted later, if at all. It is an arrangement that feels, at once, practical and faintly coercive. You survive by imitation. You remain by repetition. Eventually, what felt imposed begins to feel chosen, though the distinction between the two is never entirely stable. This is not so far, I think, from the way we enter other kinds of infrastructures, less visible but no less demanding. I have in mind, as you might expect, the ongoing quarrel about books in Nigeria, which returns with such regularity that one begins to suspect it is less a debate than a ritual. Someone assembles an illicit and efficient digital archive. It travels quickly, as things do when they answer a need that has long been rehearsing itself. Then comes the familiar chorus. This is theft. This is survival. This is an injury to the writer. This is the only way the reader can read. Each position declared with the certainty of those who have said it before.

But certainty, in this case, performs a kind of concealment. It allows us to avoid describing the terrain in which these claims are made. We speak as though there exists a functioning marketplace whose rules are being violated, when what exists, more often, is a set of gestures toward a marketplace. The book is announced. It is launched into discourse. It acquires the aura of presence. But try to find it, to hold it, to purchase it without acrobatics, and you begin to understand that what has been produced is not circulation but suggestion. I do not mean that books are never available. I mean that their availability is erratic, untrustworthy, and dependent on a chain of contingencies that would be comical if they were not so decisive. A shipment that does not arrive. A bookstore that cannot restock. A price that has quietly doubled between intention and transaction. The reader learns, over time, that desire must be flexible, that access is something to be negotiated rather than assumed. In such a climate, the pirated file does not appear as an aberration. It appears as a correction but responsive in a way the official system has not managed to be.

This is the part of the conversation that is often treated as impolite, because it shifts the burden of explanation. It asks us to consider not only what readers are doing, but what they have been given to work with. It asks what it means to produce a cultural object and then fail to accompany it into the spaces where it might be lived with. There is, in some quarters, a curious lethargy, a confidence that the act of publication completes the task. As though the book, once printed, will find its own way. As though distribution were a secondary concern, a logistical afterthought rather than the very condition of readership. I find myself less interested in condemning this than in naming it precisely. A book that cannot be found occupies a strange category. It exists enough to be cited, to be taught, to be celebrated. It does not exist enough to be encountered by those who are presumed to constitute its primary community. And in that gap, a parallel system proliferates, answering questions that the official one has declined to address.

None of this absolves the ethical complication. There are writers whose already precarious earnings are further diminished by these circulations. There are economies, fragile as they are, that depend on transactions that never occur. But I do not know what is achieved by insisting on moral clarity in the absence of material viability. One cannot demand fidelity to a structure that does not sustain the people it calls upon to be faithful. And yet, to leave it there would be to miss something that has been quietly gathering. I hesitate to call it a renaissance. The word carries too much triumph, too much suggestion of completion. What I sense instead is a series of small refusals. Publishers who are no longer content with symbolic reach, who are thinking, perhaps for the first time in a sustained way, about how books move within the continent, not just out of it. Writers who are asking more pointed questions about where their work lives, and who it is allowed to reach. Readers who have grown impatient with scarcity, who are building their own circuits of exchange, sometimes legal, sometimes not, but always indicative of a desire that has outlived the structures meant to contain it.

It is not yet coherence. It is not even coordination. But it has the texture of something alive, which is to say, something capable of change. Outside of these considerations, or perhaps entangled with them in ways I am only beginning to recognize, the season has turned. Spring has arrived with a kind of abrupt generosity that feels almost suspicious, as though it might retract itself if observed too closely. The trees have begun again, and I find that I do not grow accustomed to this, no matter how many times it happens. There is something indecipherable in the speed with which the bare becomes abundant. It suggests a patience that is not visible to us, a preparation that takes place out of sight and then declares itself all at once. With this arrival comes another, less welcome, though no less predictable. The slow dispersal of a world you have come to inhabit without fully acknowledging its contingency. The academic year is ending, which sounds administrative until you begin to account for what it actually entails. People leaving. Apartments emptied. Conversations that shift, almost imperceptibly, into the past tense. You begin to notice that the future is being planned in rooms you will not enter.

It is tempting to narrate this as loss, to give it the dignity of a single emotion. But that would be inaccurate. What I experience instead is a kind of temporal doubling. Even as things are ending, they are being archived within me, acquiring a density they did not have while they were ongoing. Moments that felt incidental begin to insist on their significance. A walk, a shared meal, a conversation that wandered without destination. They return, not as nostalgia, but as evidence. This happened. This mattered. You were, for a time, part of something that required your presence. I do not know what to do with that knowledge, except to carry it, which is both a privilege and a burden. Because to carry is also to recognize that one cannot keep. That proximity is, by design, temporary. That the lives we intersect with will continue, necessarily, beyond the coordinates in which we have known them. Perhaps this is why the memory of the highway has remained with me in a way that exceeds the event itself. There is something in that act of merging that feels instructive beyond its immediate context. You enter a flow that precedes you and will outlast you. You adjust, you are adjusted to. For a time, your presence is accounted for in the calculations of others. And then, at some point, you exit, often without ceremony, the system closing around the space you have vacated as though you had never been there.

This is not, I think, a cause for despair. If anything, it suggests a different way of understanding participation. Not as possession, but as passage. You are in things. You move through them. They shape you, and you leave, carrying traces that are not always legible, even to yourself. I am wary of making a lesson out of this, of arranging these observations into something too neat, too easily transferable. Life resists that kind of tidiness, and I have learned, perhaps belatedly, to distrust conclusions that arrive without residue. And so I write to you from within that movement, uncertain, adjusting, occasionally finding a rhythm that feels like my own, though I know it is assembled from borrowed gestures, from watching others, from trying and failing and trying again. I wonder what you have entered recently without permission. I wonder what has begun, despite you, to make room for you.

Yours,

T.

Subscribe now

When I first began writing about leaving Nigeria, I thought I was narrating ambition. I had seen it with many others who left like me. Their stories of their new geographical positions set as an opportunity to think about what they left. I believed that distance would resolve something fundamental in me, that geography itself could function as a kind of solvent. Instead, distance became an archive. Half a decade away from home has taught me that departure is not singular. It multiplies. Splinters and reintroduces you to yourself in fragments. You lose the obvious things first. The streets that knew your gait. The languages that did not require translation. The shorthand of childhood. But then the subtler losses begin. You lose versions of yourself that could only have existed there. You lose relationships that might have deepened if you had stayed. You lose friendships not through conflict but through blur. Through time zone lag. Through the gradual embarrassment of not knowing how to explain your new life without sounding either triumphant or ungrateful. There are relationships I left suspended in mid-sentence. People I thought I would circle back to. There were affections that felt durable until they were forced to survive only on memory and sporadic WhatsApp check-ins. Some dissolved quietly. Others snapped under the strain of distance. And some, perhaps the most painful, revealed themselves to have been contingent all along.

It is a peculiar thing to watch friendships evaporate when your life becomes indistinct to others. When you are no longer legible in the ways you once were. Fuzziness is intolerable to certain bonds. They require a fixed outline. A stable narrative. When you begin to change too quickly, or in ways that cannot be easily summarized, some people retreat. For a long time, I interpreted those disappearances as failure. As evidence that I had misjudged intimacy. But now, I am not so sure. Some relationships were sustained less by depth than by convenience. Others could not survive my becoming. I do not say this bitterly. Gratitude has entered the story in strange ways. I am grateful for the friendships that thinned, because they revealed the ones that did not. I am grateful for the relationships that never fully materialized, because they freed me from futures I might have clung to out of habit. I am even grateful for the misunderstandings, for the periods when I felt misread or flattened, because they forced me to articulate myself with greater precision. Loss, I am learning, is not always theft. Sometimes it is editing and that itself, I am finding generative.

In the span of three years, loss has ceased being metaphorical and has taken a devastatingly literal shape. My father died. Two friends died – one of whom was my teacher. Grief is rearranging my sense of chronology. Events no longer line up neatly. Everything has become before or after. Before my father’s death, I still believed in a certain linearity. That effort leads to reward. That suffering, if endured correctly, could yield clarity. After his death, time buckled. I began to understand that endurance does not guarantee meaning. It only guarantees continuation. Around that same period, other relationships faltered. A romantic relationship that had once felt stabilizing ended. I remember thinking, almost clinically, that perhaps this was simply what adulthood required. A shedding. A ruthless paring down. Yet the cumulative effect has been disorienting. I have felt as though I were standing in a room whose walls were being quietly removed, one by one.

I became close to Kathleen around this time of unsteadiness. She was one of those whose quiet presence steadied me when everything else felt provisional. By the time I entered her workshop, my life was already fraying at the edges, though I would not have admitted that then. I still believed that competence could contain collapse. That if my sentences held, I would too. Her workshop unsettled that illusion. It was the second semester of the first year of my MFA. Having been through other graduate workshops in the past years, I thought I had seen it all, done it all. What distinguished Kathleen’s classroom was not severity, though it could feel severe. It was accountability. You could not gesture vaguely at intention. You had to name it. If you broke chronology, you had to answer why? If you withheld information, you had to explain to what effect? If you chose lyricism over clarity, what were you asking the reader to surrender? I often felt as though I were being cross-examined. And perhaps I needed to be. But I was also carrying a private volatility that made every question feel amplified. There was a classmate who seemed to take particular interest in dismantling my work. Not critiquing, dismantling. This classmate would summarize my essays in ways that felt reductive, stripping them of complexity, reframing them as simpler, more naive than I intended. Each time, I felt a tightening in my chest. I would interrupt. Clarify. Insist that what she had described was not what I had written. In retrospect, I can see that part of my reaction was fear. Fear of being misunderstood in a room that functioned, in many ways, as a gatekeeping mechanism. Workshop is not neutral. It is an audition for legitimacy. To be misread repeatedly felt dangerous. It didn’t always help that I was the only Black student most of the time and occasionally a minority within the gender spectrum as well.

At the time, however, I experienced all of it as combat. So I spoke too quickly. Defended too forcefully. Allowed irritation to sharpen my tone. I could sense the atmosphere shifting around me, the subtle discomfort of peers who preferred critique to remain impersonal. My anxiety, already heightened by the uncertainty surrounding my father’s health back home, made regulation difficult. I was living in anticipatory grief, though I did not yet have that language. When Kathleen emailed to say I was being disruptive, I received it with shame. Shame being an old companion. It arrived efficiently. So, I apologized because I did not want to be the difficult student or the volatile one or the foreign student who could not acclimate to the etiquette of an American academic space. What I did not know then was that grief makes the skin thinner. That when you are already bracing for catastrophic news, you have less tolerance for perceived diminishment.

On the day of my final workshop in the program, having spent the early hours with a psychiatrist who undid me and left me uncovered, another exchange in class left me unsettled. The psychiatrist asked me questions about my relationship with my father, about my choice to leave home, and why it seemed to her, I wasn’t willing to confront the fact of the grief. She asked me about guilt, my guilt. Why it seemed like I was unwilling to let it go. So I arrived workshop feeling bruised and struggling to put all of it behind me. But workshop that day exacted the same energy as it usually did. I found myself constantly on edge, and received a quiet rebuke for my antics. So I wrote to Kathleen, not in defiance but in exhaustion. I asked if my behavior had worsened. I wanted confirmation that I was not unraveling publicly. Her reply, with its quiet apology, destabilized my understanding of hierarchy. She acknowledged that the dynamics in the room were complicated that afternoon. That perhaps she could have handled certain moments differently.

It was not a dramatic gesture. In that moment, she modeled something I had rarely seen from authority figures. The willingness to reconsider. To revise oneself. The same standard she applied to sentences, she applied to her own conduct. It is difficult to overstate what that did for me. Months before, my father had died. The news had caught me mid-sentence in another classroom accompanied by my brother’s broken and shaken voice. We were discussing early American literature, particularly the work of Phyllis Wheatley, and I was responding to one of the accompanying texts we had read that afternoon that did a deep dive into the psychology of Wheatley when the call arrived. I excused myself from the class and took the call in the hallway. I don’t remember much about the phone call except for the unusual calmness of my brother’s voice as he steadied himself in resignation to deliver the news. After, I returned to the class to pretend as if my life hadn’t just shattered. It was in the summer, and although I got leave to go home after the fact of the news, I remained in the classroom till it ended.

Grief did not arrive theatrically. It came as suspension. As disbelief. As a strange administrative flurry. Calls to make. Flights to consider. Financial calculations. Diaspora grief is bureaucratic. It demands logistics even as your insides are dissolving. When I returned to school later that fall, I was altered. Not visibly, perhaps. I still contributed. Still submitted work. But something had shifted in my relationship to language. I no longer wanted cleverness. I wanted accuracy. I wanted to know if prose could bear the weight of the unsayable without collapsing into cliché. It was in that state that I wrote the memoir about my father. Until then, I had avoided writing him directly. The essay form offered camouflage. But grief erodes patience for disguise. I wrote the memoir almost feverishly, uncertain whether it was good, only certain that it was necessary. Kathleen’s email, two days before workshop, landed gently. She told me the essay was strong. She told me it mattered. She did not sentimentalize it. She did not reduce it to therapeutic exercise. She treated it as work. That distinction steadied me. She did not say, I am sorry for your loss and leave it at that. She said, in effect, this is art. Continue.

There is a particular dignity in being taken seriously while you are grieving. It suggests that sorrow has not disqualified you from rigor. Months later, I started my PhD and took a class with her. As the semester was rounding up, I scheduled a meeting with her as she was always so generously famous for. When she asked how I was doing and I delivered my well-rehearsed lie, I suspect she did not believe me. Or perhaps she recognized the script because she had once performed her own version of it. I told her how I needed to return to Nigeria and explained some of the complications around that decision, which would involve a huge financial commitment and some letters of recommendation. She offered both and that gesture cut through the persona I had been maintaining. I had grown accustomed to navigating institutions transactionally. You produce excellence; you receive opportunity. Care was rarely part of the equation. Her offer violated that economy, and I burst in tears that until then had felt impossible.

In crying in her office, I was not only responding to generosity. I was grieving the fact that I had not known how much I needed it. Looking back now, I see that what she offered me across those years was not softness. It was steadiness. A steadiness that did not flinch from critique, that did not collapse into indulgence, that did not confuse authority with distance. She was exacting about sentences. She was equally exacting about ethics. And slowly, almost without my noticing, she recalibrated my understanding of what mentorship could be.

I used to think an archive was a place where things went to rest. Where what was finished could be filed away. But departure has taught me otherwise. An archive is restless. It insists. It reopens. My father’s absence does not settle. The friendships that dissolved still flicker at odd hours. And Kathleen’s voice, asking me to justify a paragraph, returns when I am tempted to take the easier route. Nothing in this archive is static. It breathes. If I am honest, I do not know whether distance was worth the cost. I do not know whether ambition compensates for absence. What I know is this: the people I have lost did not vanish cleanly. They remain embedded in the grammar of my life. Departure did not free me from where I began. It made me responsible for what I carry. And so I write now, not to escape the archive, but to tend it.

Subscribe now

The year has just started, and already I am tired in a way that feels out of season. I have been struggling to focus. I sit in classes I am usually excited by and notice how often my attention wanders. I listen, I take notes, but something slips. It feels less like a distraction and more like a weight. I have returned to therapy. That decision arrived with the burden of possibility, possibility in resolution, but I am also old enough to understand what process means and how to trust it.

Earlier this week, while I was dealing with a situation of my own, my mother shared the news of the passing of an old family friend. The news, as she shared it, bore with it the weight of resignation. The woman who died was her friend, had been her friend for several decades. Had accompanied her from spinsterhood through marriage, and the birth of her four children and grandchildren. I don’t recall ever liking this woman necessarily, because she had a habit of comparing my siblings with her own children. Comparison that always grated my nerves and made me uncomfortable with the attention it brought my way since her kids were notably high-flying overachievers.

But one time, around the time I was about to leave Nigeria, I encountered her at a pharmacy in Omida, Abeokuta. It had been long since I last saw her, since I had moved on from home to live on my own, and so the fog of recognition took its time before it faded. There was an incident with the cashier that flustered her as she was about to pay for her medicine. She had forgotten her purse at home, so she stood in front of the cashier resigned to the inevitable trip she had to make home and return to the store again. I was on the line too, having come there to get meds for my now late dad. I stepped in and made the payment on her behalf. It took me several moments of explaining who I was, before she allowed me to do this. I write this now for no other reason but to highlight the dissonance of time. Once upon a time, I felt too seen by this woman, and then later, it seemed as though I didn’t exist at all in her world.

As I dropped the phone that morning, while driving home from the gym, a rare first snow of the year plunging down from the St Louis sky, I found myself thinking about my mother more than about the person who died. About how she is carrying the news. About what it means to mourn a friend who is ever present. I think about how she might move through the house I grew up in, with all the memories of those who once moved through it—my father, that woman, Ben— and are no more. Or the fact of how almost all of her children are now so far away.

Like some of my siblings, I am not home. I cannot sit beside her. I cannot do anything that feels like comfort. All I have to offer, are words that sound too empty for it to mean anything useful. Memory too, has not been useful. I can summon images, moments, fragments of conversation, but they arrive without force, without any conviction. They do not soften anything. They do not feel like relief. They feel like proof that remembering is not the same as being present. I am learning that memory is not a substitute for proximity. In moments like this, I find myself leaning forward into what has not yet happened. Into what I hope will eventually make sense. There is a strange reliance that forms around the future when the present feels insufficient. I tell myself that this is temporary. That later will be easier. That clarity will come. But living this way carries its own quiet cost. It means existing in anticipation rather than arrival.

I am tired of having to refine my understanding of happiness through loss. There is something exhausting about learning joy only after it has been withheld. About needing heartbreak to sharpen your sense of what matters. I wish happiness did not have to be disciplined this way. I wish it could be immediate, undiluted, and allowed to exist without first passing through disappointment.

None of this has stopped me from functioning in the most basic way though. I am going through my own heartbreaks, my own griefs, but I still show up. I still write. I am preparing for the things I am meant to do this week. But effort feels heavier than usual, and enthusiasm, when it appears, feels fragile. I am writing this to stay close to what is happening, not to resolve it. I have lived away from home long enough that absence has begun to feel ordinary. There are whole stretches of life I experience through updates, messages, calls taken at odd hours. I know how to listen carefully to voices traveling through bad connections. I know how to read pauses. I know how to pretend that being informed is the same as being involved. When grief arrives under these conditions, it does not erupt. It thins. It spreads itself across time. There is no single moment to mark it. Instead, it returns in small, persistent ways. In the middle of the day. In the middle of a task. It asks nothing of me except that I notice it and continue.

I think often about how much of my life has been lived in preparation. For later. For stability. For the version of myself that will have earned ease. Aspiration has been my most reliable structure. It has kept me moving when clarity was scarce. It has given shape to days that might otherwise have collapsed into drift. But aspiration also demands patience in ways that are not always kind. To live toward something is to accept a prolonged distance from it. It means tolerating a present that feels provisional. It means telling yourself, repeatedly, that what you want will come later, once the conditions are right. Over time, this habit begins to feel like a moral stance. Endure now. Arrive later. I have been wondering what this posture costs.

I do not want to live only in anticipation. I want happiness to be allowed to exist without becoming evidence of anything. Without having to prove that it was earned or that it will last. I want it to arrive without being diluted by fear or framed as rehearsal. This desire feels simple when I write it down. In practice, it is difficult. Aspiration has shaped my sense of self for so long that releasing its grip feels like risk. Who am I if I am not moving toward something? What anchors me if I allow myself to arrive, even briefly? I do not have answers to these questions. I am not trying to resolve them here. I am only noticing how they accompany me, how they surface alongside grief, alongside distance, alongside the quiet fatigue of this early year. For now, I am practicing a different kind of attention. Letting moments register without immediately assigning them a future. Letting happiness, when it appears, remain unexamined. Letting grief exist without demanding that it instruct me. This feels like a beginning, even if it does not yet feel like relief.

There are ways distance enters relationships without either person intending it. Sometimes it begins as movement. One person leaning forward into what might be. The other staying closer to what already is. At first, this difference feels negotiable, even complementary. Energy meets steadiness. Vision meets caution. Over time, though, the gap widens quietly. Not enough to name as conflict. Enough to be felt. I have been thinking about how desire can become tiring to witness.

Not desire in its raw form, but the sustained act of wanting something more than the present offers. Wanting a life that has not yet taken shape. Wanting room to grow into a self that feels unfinished. To someone else, this can sound like restlessness. Like dissatisfaction. Like refusal to be content with what is already there. No one teaches you how to translate longing. I am learning that what feels like hope from the inside can look like absence from the outside. That aspiration can register as distance even when it is not directed away from a person. Even when love is present. Even when care is genuine. There is a particular kind of heartbreak that does not come from betrayal or loss, but from misalignment. From realizing that what sustains you unsettles someone else. That the future you keep turning toward is not shared in the same way. These moments do not announce themselves with drama. They unfold through tone. Through pauses. Through a growing sense of being slightly out of step.

I wish I could say that understanding this has brought peace. Mostly, it has brought clarity, which is not the same thing. Clarity means seeing how often love asks for a narrowing of possibilities. How easily care becomes conditional on stillness. How quickly ambition is mistaken for refusal. I do not think this is cruelty. I think it is fear. The fear of being left behind by someone who is always moving.

I have been asking myself whether I know how to stay without shrinking. Whether it is possible to remain present without pretending that longing has been resolved. Whether intimacy can survive when one person’s orientation is toward elsewhere, even if that elsewhere is abstract, even if it is only a hope for coherence. These questions do not lead me anywhere. They circulate. They return at inconvenient times. In moments of quiet. In moments of tenderness. In moments when I imagine how things might have unfolded differently if wanting less had been an option. Grief sharpens these reflections. Distance amplifies them. Together, they create a strange double exposure. I am mourning what has passed while also taking stock of what I cannot seem to give up. The future continues to pull at me, even now, even here. And yet, something in me is changing.

I feel less inclined to defend my aspirations. Less interested in justifying the shape of my wanting. Not because I am certain of it, but because I am tired of explaining myself into acceptability. I am learning that some differences are not meant to be resolved. They are meant to be acknowledged and released. This does not make the loss easier. It does make it cleaner. I am beginning to understand that staying does not always mean remaining in place. Sometimes it means staying faithful to the parts of yourself that would otherwise be negotiated away. Sometimes it means allowing disappointment to exist without converting it into lesson or leverage. If there is a tenderness forming in me, it is not the tenderness of reconciliation. It is the tenderness of recognition. Of seeing clearly what cannot be forced into alignment and choosing not to punish myself for it.

I am still here. Still writing. Still listening to what feels unresolved. I do not know yet what this will become. I only know that I am trying to live closer to what feels true, even when it complicates things. Perhaps that is its own kind of staying.

Subscribe now

I have been thinking about how to speak of this year without turning it into a victory lap or a confession booth. Neither feels quite right. Especially because of the ways in which it ebbed and flowed. The year did not ask to be conquered, and I am not interested in narrating survival as spectacle. What it did ask of me, insistently, was attention. Attention to work, to fatigue, to my body, and to the slow rearranging of my interior life. This was a big writing year for me, but it was also a big year in the quieter, harder-to-name sense. I began my second year in the PhD and, with it, the early, tentative thinking toward a dissertation. Not the dissertation as document, but as a set of questions that started following me around, interrupting my reading, leaning over my shoulder while I wrote other things or when I am speaking with friends. I can feel the shape of a long argument forming, even if I don’t yet have the language for it. There is something unsettling about this stage of scholarly life, when thought begins to outpace articulation. You know what you are circling, but you cannot yet name it without flattening it, without making it banal or even redundant.

Alongside my academic work, this year I wrote insistently about the African literary ecosystem. About prizes and platforms, circulation and neglect, about what is rewarded and what is left to quietly disappear. These essays were not just critical exercises. They felt like ways of situating myself within a tradition that is at once expansive and precarious. For many of the essays, the thoughts I expressed were not in any way new, but larger formation of sentiments held for years seeking language. At the same time, through the Heartland Journalism Fellowship, I wrote essays about what I have come to think of as the fugitive positionalities of migrants. Small, often unrecorded gestures that make life in transit bearable. A shared meal, a ride offered without explanation, the careful way strangers learn how to pronounce your name. Writing these pieces required a different attentiveness. Less distance, more listening. Less theory, more texture.

Moving between these modes of writing was generative, but it was also exhausting. Somewhere in the middle and towards the end of the year, burnout stopped being an abstract concept and became a bodily fact. I felt it in my resistance to the page, in the way sentences that once came easily now demanded negotiation. I felt it in the quiet dread that accompanied opening my laptop. There is a particular shame attached to being burnout in academic spaces, especially for those of us trained to read endurance as virtue. I tried, for a while, to muscle through it. But it did not work. Eventually, I did something that felt both simple and radical. At first, I surrendered to the exhaustion, and after, I asked for extensions. I explained that I was struggling. And I received grace. This is worth naming, if only because it cuts against so many of the stories we tell ourselves about institutions and authority. The semester did not become easier after that, but it became survivable. I kept working, kept showing up, even when it felt like I was moving through mud. By the end, I was depleted, but I was still standing. That felt like its own kind of knowledge.

What surprised me most this year was not the volume of work I produced, but the emotional work that ran quietly beneath it. I became increasingly aware of how much I use labor, especially intellectual labor, as a way of deflecting from the political realities of my positionality. There is a temptation to call this avoidance, but that would be too neat, too self-accusatory. What it felt like instead was shelter. Reading, writing, teaching, thinking. These were ways of staying upright in a world that seemed intent on making certain lives provisional, contingent, endlessly explainable. The realities I am referring to are not static. They shift with policy, with elections, with the slow hardening of public language. They are the realities of being a migrant, of living inside systems that remind you, subtly and often, that your presence is conditional. I did not always want to look at these conditions directly. There were days when it felt safer to bury myself in archives, in drafts, in deadlines. Work became a way of postponing dread, of turning anxiety into something that could at least be scheduled.

This is not a confession offered lightly. I am wary of the ease with which vulnerability can become currency. But it feels important to say that much of what I wrote this year was written against a backdrop of quiet fear. Fear not always named as such, but felt as tension, as vigilance, as the sense that the ground beneath one’s feet could shift without warning. In that sense, productivity was never just ambition. It was a coping mechanism. This year I lived in fear. I moved forward in fear. And yet my resolve to believe in our capacity to love did not diminish. The fear was not abstract. It announced itself in moments when the future felt suddenly fragile. I had a couple of near-death encounters, a few near misses that recalibrated my sense of time. Once, I was bundled into the back of a police jeep for a mistake I knew nothing about. Another time, I was involved in a car accident that totaled the car I was in. In each of those moments, the thought arrived fully formed. This is it. Everything I have known and built, everything I am striving to build and to know, is about to vanish.

What lingered after those moments was not drama but clarity. A sharpened awareness of how thin the membrane is between continuity and rupture. How much of what we call a life depends on the ordinary fact of being allowed to continue. Returning to work after these incidents felt strange, almost audacious. And yet, it was also grounding. Writing became a way of re-entering time, of insisting that thought and care could still be practiced even when certainty had been shaken. Thinking about this emotional state kept returning me to memory, specifically to the Nigeria of the 1990s. I was a child then, old enough to sense that something was wrong, too young to understand its full architecture. What I remember most clearly is not any single event, but an atmosphere. The shaking of heads when adults spoke in low voices. The gnashing of teeth at the radio. The way silence stretched. There were riots, military dictators, an ambient fear that seemed to seep into everyday life. Even if you did not know the names of those in power, you felt their presence in the air.

Living now, elsewhere, under different but related pressures, I recognize that feeling. The sense of waiting without knowing for what. The instinct to keep your head down, to do your work well, to endure. Back then, reprieve eventually arrived for many Nigerians, not all at once, not evenly, but enough to be felt. It did not erase what had been endured, but it loosened the grip of fear. Remembering that history has become, for me, a way of imagining survival beyond the present moment. What the 1990s taught many of us, even as children, was how to live inside extended uncertainty. Silence was not merely the absence of speech; it was a strategy. People learned when not to talk, what not to name, how to communicate through gesture and implication. Fear reorganized daily life, but it did so unevenly, creeping into ordinary routines rather than announcing itself outright. School continued. Markets opened. Jokes were told, even if laughter sometimes felt brittle. Life went on, not because things were well, but because stopping was not an option.

I think often about how formative that kind of endurance can be. How it trains the body and mind to normalize instability, to mistake vigilance for composure. In retrospect, I can see how those early lessons linger. How they resurface now, in the way I respond to contemporary political pressures with an almost reflexive discipline. Keep working. Keep reading. Stay useful. Do not draw unnecessary attention. These are not instructions anyone has given me explicitly, but they feel deeply learned. And yet, the end of that decade also offered a counter-lesson. Reprieve, when it came, was not cinematic. There were no grand reversals, no clean endings. What arrived instead was a gradual loosening. A sense that the future, while still uncertain, was no longer entirely foreclosed. People spoke more freely. Laughter softened. The air itself seemed to change. Looking back, I realize how much hope can reside in such small shifts, how relief often announces itself quietly. Holding that memory alongside the present has helped me resist despair, even as the world seems determined to rehearse its worst instincts. It reminds me that political climates, no matter how entrenched they appear, are not eternal. That fear, too, has a shelf life, even if it feels endless while you are inside it. This is not optimism in the naive sense. It is historical awareness, hard-earned and unsentimental.

If this year taught me anything, it is that endurance is rarely a solitary achievement, even when it feels that way from the inside. The work I was able to do was scaffolded by others, by mentors who offered flexibility, by editors who read with care, by friends who checked in without demanding performance. We lean on one another quietly, sometimes without names for what we are offering. This recognition has reshaped how I think about gratitude. I am grateful, yes, for the opportunity to continue my education, for the time and space to write, for the stubborn curiosity that keeps pulling me back to the page. But I am also grateful for the infrastructures, formal and informal, that made persistence possible. The extension granted. The conversation that steadied me. The shared understanding that productivity cannot always come at the cost of the self.

Looking ahead, I do not imagine the coming year will be gentler. The classes will be demanding. The dissertation will begin to ask for clearer commitments. The political conditions that produce fear and vigilance show no signs of resolving themselves neatly. But I find myself less interested in bracing for impact than in staying in relation. In learning how to endure without hardening, how to remain porous to others even as the world rewards withdrawal. If there is a lesson I carry from both the Nigeria of my childhood and the present moment, it is that reprieve is often prepared for long before it arrives, assembled through ordinary acts of persistence and mutual recognition. So I end this year not with certainty, but with commitment. A commitment to the work, yes, but also to the people and histories that give that work its stakes. I remain grateful for the ability to keep moving forward and learning forward, even when the direction of the world feels misaligned with those pursuits. Notwithstanding the obvious difficulties, both present and forthcoming, I stay with the in-between. And I do so knowing that I am not alone.

Please read my newest installments on Olongo Africa, Isele Magazine and The Common Reader.

Till the next year.

To speak about Nigeria is to speak about violence, not as an aberration but as grammar. Violence is the scaffolding that holds many of our social exchanges together. It is the background hum that shapes how we greet one another, how we negotiate space, how we narrate our histories, how we imagine the future. To be Nigerian is to possess a certain fluency in this language. It is a fluency cultivated without instruction, absorbed through proximity, and perfected over time until it becomes an instinctive way of reading the world. Whenever the world tries to intervene in our affairs, that instinct is what rises to the surface. It is what shapes the national response to difference, dissent, or deviation. It is also what makes Donald Trump’s recent claims about Christian persecution in Northern Nigeria feel both familiar and unsettling. His argument, like many foreign commentaries on Nigeria, flattens a complicated reality. Yet it also exposes what many of us already know. That the dialogic space in which the Nigerian identity has been formed is a space patterned by violence, shaped by it, expressed through it.

The psychologist Frantz Fanon once wrote that colonialism is not a machine run solely through administrative structures. It is maintained through violence and the ever-present threat of it. In The Wretched of the Earth, particularly the chapter Concerning Violence, he argues that violence is the first language the colonised subject comes to understand because it is the one the coloniser insists upon. If we extend Fanon’s argument, the Nigerian state is the product of this history of enforced violence and its internalisation. After decades of military rule, ethnic contestations, and colonial boundary-making, violence settled within our national psyche as a kind of default. It became an idiom for survival. It informed how the state organises itself, how power is expressed, and how the people respond to that power. Fanon was not speaking about Nigeria directly, yet his explanation of how violence becomes the architecture of postcolonial consciousness helps us recognise what is already plain. In Nigeria, violence is not merely an event. It is a habit of thought.

This is why conversations about religious persecution in Northern Nigeria generate more heat than clarity. The violence is real. People have died. People are dying. Communities have been uprooted. The tension between Christians and Muslims in certain regions predates the country itself. Yet even this truth exists inside a broader pattern. Violence in Nigeria rarely sits neatly inside a single category. Religion, ethnicity, and politics merge without clear borders. To isolate religious persecution as the defining factor misses the wider structure within which that persecution unfolds. Nigerians know this. The American president does not. Trump’s intervention ignores the substrate on which these crises grow. It also reopens an anxiety that many Nigerians carry into the diaspora. That anxiety is the simple recognition that violence is always possible. Even when we leave home, even when we cross borders and acquire new accents or passports, that knowledge follows us.

One of the least examined forms of Nigerian violence is the violence we call affection. It is a kind of familiar cruelty, softened by humour, shaped by hierarchy, and rationalised through the claim that “this is how we play.” Many Nigerians grow up in environments where teasing, mockery, and insult are treated as signs of intimacy. What appears confrontational from the outside is coded as belonging from the inside. You insult the people you love because that is the only emotional register that feels honest. You endure insults from peers because it is the cost of community. Yet beneath the laughter is a small fracture. These are the micro-aggressions that shape our friendships and subtly reinforce power.

I learned this when a younger Nigerian writer confronted me months ago. He accused me of always insulting him. I was startled. To me, the insults were a language of softness. They were my way of easing conversation, establishing familiarity, signaling that I saw him closely enough to tease him. But his accusation caught me off guard because it forced me to recognize something I had not interrogated. What I called softness carried a structural message. The message was that I was older and therefore permitted a certain license. My humor reminded him of his place. The intimacy was not as innocent as I imagined. It was an inheritance from a culture in which hierarchy speaks through small violence(s).

Fanon does not dwell on these subtle forms, yet his work helps us understand how they emerge. In Concerning Violence, he writes that decolonisation cannot be accomplished through a “gentleman’s agreement,” because the colonial world is built on force. Even when the explicit violence recedes, the habits remain. In Nigeria, those habits appear as everyday aggressions that do not require weapons. A raised voice. A sharp word. The constant performance of authority. The instinct to dominate in conversation. The ease with which we turn a disagreement into a contest of humiliation. These gestures seem trivial, but they accumulate. They create environments where relational gentleness is rare, where people mistake fear for respect, and where affection must be wrapped in a layer of threat.

Our friendships carry these residues. A Nigerian group chat can read like a battlefield to an outsider because the vocabulary is shaped by postcolonial survival tactics. Mockery replaces vulnerability. Insults replace praise. Threats replace requests. Even our love is aggressive. We tell our friends, “You are mad,” when what we mean is “I missed you.” We shout when we are excited. We drag each other to show closeness. Every Nigerian knows the script, and many of us play along without questioning it. Yet beneath the performance is a basic truth: we learned to speak this way because violence trained our tongues.

This is not to say Nigerians are incapable of tenderness. Rather, the tenderness is often distorted by the structures that shaped us. When I look back at that younger writer’s complaint, I see a moment where a quiet form of emotional harm revealed itself. My intention was affection. The effect was hierarchy. The dynamic mirrored the broader national problem: violence is so deeply woven into our social fabric that even our gentlest impulses carry its grain. This is why Nigerians struggle to separate friendship from dominance, humor from humiliation, authority from intimacy. We replicate the logic of the larger society inside our private circles. The state uses violence to maintain order. Communities use violence to secure belonging. Individuals use violence to negotiate closeness. The scale differs, but the grammar is the same.

If interpersonal violence reveals the micro-scale of Nigerian harm, political violence exposes its large machinery. Nigerian elections are not simply civic events. They are seasons of militarization. Politicians across the country cultivate violent student unions, cult groups, and neighborhood gangs, arming them quietly and deploying them strategically. These groups become temporary political armies, tasked with controlling polling units, intimidating rivals, dispersing dissent, and manufacturing legitimacy. The violence is not random. We even have a name for it. We call it “structure.” It is planned, funded, rehearsed, and then presented as spontaneous eruption. This is why every election cycle feels like the country has entered a martial season. Violence becomes part of the choreography of political expression.

This is also why Nigerians often talk about the state’s failure to maintain a monopoly on violence. The truth is more complicated. The state retains the formal monopoly, but it leases out portions of it when convenient. It lends violence to the highest bidder. Fanon warns that newly independent nations often reproduce colonial patterns in which political authority hinges on force, not legitimacy. Nigeria demonstrates this vividly. Political actors outsource violence while the state looks away, pretending it has no knowledge of the foot-soldiers who secure their victories. Yet the effects of this outsourcing are uneven. Violence in Nigeria is profoundly classed. When violence erupts in poor neighborhoods, it evaporates from the national memory almost immediately. A gang fight in Mushin, a market fire in Onitsha, a clash in Tudun Wada—these incidents flicker through the media cycle and vanish. They are treated as natural occurrences, the weather patterns of the underclass. But when violence touches the elite, the story changes. When the Lekki Toll Gate shootings occurred, the country produced monuments, songs, murals, and hashtags. None of this was inappropriate. The tragedy deserved outrage. The problem is the disparity. The nation mourns selectively.

This selective mourning is another form of soft violence. It tells the poor that their deaths are forgettable. It tells the middle class that their suffering is uniquely significant. It reenacts the colonial structure Fanon describes, where some lives are deemed more grievable than others. Nigerians do not always acknowledge this hierarchy, but it shapes public consciousness. The geography of violence determines the geography of empathy.

This hierarchy reveals itself in the rituals of political commentary as well. In moments of national crisis, a certain class of public intellectual emerges, voices that speak confidently about American intervention, international conspiracies, and global Christian solidarity. Their analyses travel widely online, yet many offer little nuance. They repeat familiar tropes about foreign puppetry or Western hypocrisy while ignoring the intricacies of Nigeria’s internal dynamics. They refuse to name the ways Nigerians harm each other. They dismiss structural critique if it threatens their ideological visions. These public theorists often operate with a kind of performative certainty. They argue that American intervention would violate national sovereignty while forgetting that successive Nigerian governments have already surrendered portions of that sovereignty to internal violence. They claim that Christian persecution is fabricated or exaggerated yet refuse to engage the reality of Muslim persecution in other regions. Their commentary is structured less by intellectual clarity and more by ideological posture. The result is a discourse that mirrors the country’s violent communication patterns: loud, blunt, defensive, and unwilling to engage complexity.

Nigeria has always had political theatre, but the 2015 elections gave us a moment that crystallized this performance of chaos. During the announcement of election results, Elder Godsday Orubebe staged a dramatic disruption on national television. He pounded his fist on the table. He shouted accusations. He attempted to halt the proceedings by performing aggression rather than enacting reason. His outburst entered the Nigerian lexicon instantly. It became a symbol, a shorthand for the theatrics of political desperation. What made Orubebe’s performance memorable was not simply the spectacle. It was the ease with which Nigerians recognized it. We understood instinctively what he was doing because this is a familiar grammar. It is the public version of the private violence we practice daily. It is the state’s echo of the citizen’s impulse. Orubebe’s moment was not an anomaly. It was a revelation. It showed how deeply the logic of violence shapes political behavior. It also showed how the state communicates its anxieties to the citizenry. When politicians panic, they turn to chaos. When institutions feel threatened, they project force. When legitimacy weakens, noise becomes a substitute for authority. These gestures echo the interpersonal aggressions that shape Nigerian friendship. They echo the classed disparities that shape national mourning. They echo the political habit of outsourcing coercion. Violence, even when symbolic, remains the first language.

The diaspora experiences these patterns with a different kind of pressure. Distance makes the violence sharper, not duller. Nigerians abroad often speak about home as if discussing an unpredictable relative—beloved, familiar, but capable of sudden harm. The distance allows reflection, but it also keeps anxiety alive. Whenever Nigeria appears in global news, diasporic Nigerians brace themselves. They expect oversimplification. They expect erasure of context. They expect someone to flatten a complex crisis into a headline. Trump’s comments about Christian persecution triggered that familiar tightening of the chest. Nigerians abroad know that persecution exists. They also know the story is rarely linear. What they fear is not the acknowledgment of violence, but the ease with which foreigners wield it as a moral instrument. This fear reveals something deeper. Most diasporic Nigerians carry an internal conflict. On one hand, we want the world to recognize the harm happening in our country. On the other hand, we do not want outsiders to weaponize that harm. It is a tension that mirrors the internal contradictions of Nigerian life itself. The diaspora knows that the national grammar is violent, yet it also knows how easily that violence can be exaggerated, misread, or transformed into justification for foreign intervention. The people caught in the cross-fire of these narratives are the ordinary citizens, our family members, our friends, whose suffering becomes political currency. This ambivalence is intensified by the rise of public theorists who occupy digital platforms with great confidence but little ethical care. They speak of American intervention as if it were a mere intellectual puzzle. They simplify Nigeria’s internal frictions, reducing multi-layered crises to single causes. They repeat ideological scripts that reinforce their own political visions. They often center themselves rather than the communities affected by the violence. In doing so, they reproduce a soft violence of interpretation: the violence of speaking over rather than speaking with.

This interpretive violence is as significant as the physical. It shapes how Nigerians understand themselves and how the world understands Nigeria. When commentators dismiss the complexity of religious violence, they erase the historical tensions that predate the modern state. When they frame the issue solely as Christian persecution, they erase the lives of Muslims who have also been harmed. When they pretend Nigeria’s violence is purely religious, they ignore the ethnic, economic, and political structures that shape these conflicts. The commentary becomes an instrument of obscuration rather than illumination. The diaspora navigates these erasures daily. In conversations with other Africans, with Americans, with Europeans, Nigerians find themselves correcting narratives, adding nuance, resisting simplifications. Yet even this resistance carries the imprint of Nigeria’s internal violence. Diasporic Nigerians often speak defensively, mirroring the aggression they were raised within. They interrupt preemptively. They argue with intensity. They deploy the same insistence on dominance that shapes their domestic interactions. Violence becomes portable. It travels across borders and appears in our speech, our posture, our instinct to win every argument.

Fanon helps us make sense of this portability. He wrote: “Violence is man re-creating himself.” He also argued that decolonization inevitably involves confrontation with violence. When Nigerians relocate, we do not shed this architecture. we carry it. We transmit it. We teach it unintentionally to our children. We reproduce it in our communities abroad. The violence becomes braided into identity, even when it is no longer tied to immediate danger. This is why it is difficult to imagine a Nigerian identity unshaped by violence. The idea feels almost fantastical because violence has functioned as a social binder. It organizes power. It shapes speech. It structures politics. It determines whose death matters and whose suffering is forgotten. It teaches us how to love through insult and how to fear through silence. It is a grammar learned early and rarely unlearned.

Yet imagining alternatives is necessary. Fanon argues that post-colonial renewal requires not only institutional change but psychic transformation. The violence that produced the nation cannot build its future. If Nigeria is to move beyond its violent grammar, it must confront the structures that sustain it. This confrontation is not only the work of the state. It is the work of communities, friendships, private lives, public discourse, and intellectual honesty. It begins with acknowledging that violence is not an intrinsic cultural trait. It is a product of historical conditions. It is also a habit, reinforced over generations. The same way we learned to insult as a form of affection, we can learn to express care differently. The same way politicians learned to arm student unions, they can learn to build institutions that do not rely on coercion. The same way public theorists learned to speak loudly without precision, they can learn to practice humility and complexity. The same way diasporic Nigerians learned to carry fear as identity, they can learn to release it.

The work is difficult because it requires unlearning forms of communication that feel natural. It requires recognizing the subtle violences we practice daily. It requires naming the hierarchy we carry into friendships and families. It requires mourning the people whose deaths never made headlines. It requires challenging public intellectuals who distort crises for ideological gain. It requires refusing the ease of spectacle, the seduction of noise, and the temptation of dominance.

To confront Nigeria’s violent grammar is to begin the slow work of revision. It is to write new sentences in a different register. It is to imagine a nation where political participation does not require force. It is to build communities where affection is not indistinguishable from insult. It is to refuse the language that tells the poor their lives are forgettable. It is to create systems where dissent is not met with injury.

This work is not yet done. It may take generations. But naming the violence is a beginning. Naming the hierarchy is another beginning. Naming the softness that is not soft at all is another. Each recognition is a small dismantling of the old grammar. And perhaps, if the dismantling continues, a different language may emerge—one that does not require harm as punctuation, one that does not use fear as argument, one that does not define identity through threat. A language where being Nigerian is not synonymous with surviving violence, but with imagining something beyond it.

Additional Reading: I was in conversation with the incredible Solomon Elusoji of Ikeja Records on the Dialogic Violence of Yoruba Nationalists. It is a long conversation, but it is worth a read.

Subscribe now

Every year when the Nigerian Prize for Literature announces its winner, a small storm gathers online. Not a full-blown cultural tempest, more like a dust devil of sarcasm, suspicion, and scattered applause. The announcement arrives, the winner’s name trends briefly, and then the air settles into the familiar rhythm of collective indifference. For a prize that boasts a hundred-thousand-dollar purse, the richest on the continent, it elicits surprisingly little joy. Instead, what it invites is a peculiar fatigue, a sense that we have seen this play before: another winner crowned, another debate about legitimacy, another year of asking what exactly the prize is trying to achieve.

When Ikhide Ikheloa, the critic whose Facebook dispatches often double as Nigeria’s literary conscience and comic relief, wrote that the prize had been “greeted with the fanfare reserved for sullen lead balloons,” it was not just a barb at the organizers. It was a lament for the meaninglessness that now shadows literary celebration. His post about the 2025 edition, where Oyin Olugbile’s Sanya triumphed over Chigozie Obioma’s The Road to the Country, and Nikki May’s The Motherless Land reads like an elegy for seriousness. “No one cares,” he wrote, “we are recovering from Big Brother Naija… Na who book epp?” The provocation was deliberate: a way of saying that books, and the rituals built around them, have become secondary to the entertainment cycles that truly bind the Nigerian imagination.

But beyond the jest lay something more combustible. Ikhide’s incredulity that Sanya could beat The Road to the Country revealed an enduring fracture in our understanding of literary worth. In his estimation, Obioma, with his Booker shortlists and international acclaim, had transcended the petty parochialism of national prizes. To submit his book for such a contest, Ikhide wrote, was beneath him—“like Adichie applying for the prize. Maka why?” The comparison was meant to sting, but it also exposed a hierarchy that still governs how Nigerian literature is perceived: that true mastery resides abroad, and that the domestic sphere is a site of apprenticeship, not arrival.

The backlash was swift. Among those who responded was the acclaimed Nigerian poet, Romeo Oriogun, himself a past winner of the Nigerian Prize, whose career has never been free from controversy. To his critics, Oriogun’s success is the product of identity politics, the convenient celebration of queer visibility in a conservative society. But to his defenders, he represents precisely what a national prize should honor: artistic courage, innovation, and commitment to craft rooted in the lived textures of Nigerian life. In his Facebook post, Oriogun turned his defense of Sanya into something larger, a defense of local labor, of the invisible infrastructures that sustain Nigerian writing.

He wrote with palpable anger, accusing Ikhide of “talking down on the efforts of someone like Othuke Ominiabohs,” the founder of Masobe Books, which published Sanya. “He is one of the few Nigerian publishers,” Oriogun insisted, “maybe the only one, who still publishes unknown voices from Nigeria and its diaspora, and he makes sure those books are available in most bookshops across the country.” The post was less a rebuttal than a counter-theory: that literary value is not just a matter of language or aesthetic precision but also of access, of the quiet logistics that make reading possible. Masobe’s achievement, Oriogun suggested, was not merely in printing books but in reimagining the ecology that allows a book to live in its own country.

What emerges from these two posts, one caustic, the other impassioned, is not just a disagreement about who deserved the prize. It is a generational conflict over the meaning of literary authority itself. Ikhide represents a diaspora generation whose critical formation happened under the long shadow of Western publishing, where to be called a “Nigerian writer” was to be granted access to global circuits of recognition. His skepticism toward local publishing is the residue of that history, a belief that the international gaze remains the final arbiter of seriousness. Oriogun, on the other hand, speaks from within the exhaustion of that very system, a generation aware of how global validation often comes at the cost of self-erasure, and how the celebration of diasporic success can obscure the material struggles of those writing from home.

The prize, then, becomes more than an award; it becomes a mirror for our national insecurities. Each edition replays the same anxiety: we want to be recognized by the world, but we also want to believe that our own recognition matters. We want the prize to mean something, to confer prestige, to signal excellence, but we are unsure whose standards should define that excellence. When a locally published novel wins, we question its merit; when a globally decorated author wins, we question the prize’s purpose. We are, as Oriogun put it, “damned if we do, damned if we don’t.”

There is something tragic about this pattern. It suggests that our literary imagination remains caught between two impossible desires: the longing for external validation and the yearning for self-sufficiency. The Nigerian Prize for Literature, in theory, was meant to resolve this tension, to create a homegrown canon, to build local prestige independent of foreign recognition. Yet the prize has become a symptom of the very condition it sought to cure. Its winners often vanish into obscurity after the applause fades, their books poorly distributed, their readership minimal. The infrastructure that might sustain their achievement does not exist. As Ikhide quipped, finding Olugbile’s book in Nigeria is “like trying to find honesty in Aso Rock.” The irony is painful: a national prize that cannot even circulate its own laureates.

And yet, despite all this, the prize endures, because the idea of it still holds symbolic power. It is, in some sense, a collective performance of hope: that Nigeria can still care enough about literature to give it public attention, that writing can still be a national project. But as these online skirmishes reveal, what we are truly fighting over is not the prize money or even the books themselves. We are fighting over who gets to define the center of Nigerian literature, those who write from within, or those who write from without.

To understand why debates like the one between Ikhide and Oriogun matter so fiercely, we must first understand the historical conditions that produced them. Nigerian literature has always been entangled in the question of audience. Who are we writing for? Who do we imagine reading us? The earliest generation of postcolonial writers—Achebe, Soyinka, Clark, Okigbo—wrote with the dual consciousness of nation-builders and global ambassadors. Their works emerged under the imprint of Heinemann’s African Writers Series, a British publishing project that gave African literature global visibility even as it centralized its gatekeeping in London. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart became not just a novel but a passport, the text that announced African literature’s entry into the modern world. But it also established a dangerous precedent: that legitimacy came from being seen by the metropole.

That tension never quite disappeared. Even as new generations arose, the gravitational pull of the West remained. By the 1990s and early 2000s, when Nigeria’s publishing infrastructure had collapsed under the weight of military rule and economic decline, the possibility of a robust local literary ecosystem seemed remote. The so-called “third generation” writers—Adichie, Abani, Habila, and later Obioma—found their voices through MFA programs, Western presses, and global literary prizes. They became the face of African writing abroad, a development that many Nigerians embraced with pride. Yet that same success produced a lingering anxiety: had we outsourced our cultural imagination? Was the “African novel” now something produced in Iowa or New York, only to be shipped back to Lagos for applause?

This is the paradox the Nigerian Prize for Literature was meant to resolve when it was founded in 2004 by Nigeria LNG Limited. Its purpose was noble: to reward excellence in Nigerian writing, encourage a reading culture, and rebuild national prestige. The prize rotated through genres—poetry, prose, drama, children’s literature—each edition promising to reaffirm literature’s centrality to our collective life. But as the years passed, the prize became increasingly abstracted from the reading public. The winners changed; the conversation did not. Instead of igniting curiosity about new writers, the prize seemed to deepen the gap between Nigeria’s literary elite and its actual readers.

Ikhide’s posts, for all their acidity, reflect this disillusionment. His mockery of the prize is less about Oyin Olugbile herself than about the system that elevates a book few people can find or read. His complaint “How in the world has this poorly advertised book helped the reading culture in Nigeria?”speaks to the heart of the problem. Literary prestige, in Nigeria, has become almost ceremonial: a ritual of recognition detached from distribution, readership, and infrastructure. A book wins the prize, disappears from circulation, and is rarely discussed again outside of the award announcement. The prize confers value, but it does not sustain it.

Oriogun’s rebuttal, however, reframes the issue. His defense of Masobe Books was not merely sentimental; it was strategic. He was pointing to the quiet revolution happening beneath the noise, the emergence of small presses like Masobe, Narrative Landscape, and Ouida, that are reimagining what it means to publish from home. These presses operate in difficult conditions: poor electricity, exorbitant printing costs, fragile logistics, and a thin reading market. Yet they persist, often driven by a stubborn faith that literature still matters. Oriogun’s frustration with Ikhide was, in essence, a demand for new critical empathy, a call for critics to acknowledge the labor behind the art, not only the aesthetic outcome.

There is a deeper irony here. The very writers Ikhide champions—Obioma, Adichie and their likes—are products of the same global circuits that now marginalize local production. Their books are beautifully edited, widely distributed, and critically acclaimed abroad, but often inaccessible to the average Nigerian reader. To expect local publishers to match that infrastructure overnight is unreasonable; to dismiss them for trying is cruel. What Oriogun recognizes, perhaps better than most, is that the future of Nigerian literature depends not only on the brilliance of its writers but on the survival of the institutions that make writing possible.

Still, the generational divide persists because the terms of value have shifted. For Ikhide’s cohort, the critic is a kind of high priest, a moral custodian of taste who must protect literature from mediocrity. His wit, his abrasiveness, his refusal to flatter, these are tools of that priesthood. For Oriogun’s generation, criticism that does not account for material reality feels obsolete, even cruel. The question is no longer whether a book is “good” in the abstract but whether it lives, circulates, and reaches readers. For them, literature is as much about distribution and community as it is about metaphor and style.

This is where anecdote becomes allegory. The quarrel over Sanya and The Road to the Country dramatises the larger condition of postcolonial literary life: a struggle between idealism and survival. Obioma’s novel, with its grand allegorical ambitions, seeks to universalise the Nigerian condition; it aims for epic scale. But it falters, in my opinion, under the “weight of its self-consciousness,” unable to balance moral vision with formal coherence. Olugbile’s Sanya, by contrast, may lack such epic sweep, but its victory signals something subtler: a return to intimacy, to smaller narratives that emerge from lived proximity rather than mythic abstraction. The fact that the prize recognized this kind of work, published locally and distributed modestly, may not be the scandal Ikhide imagines; it may be a sign of quiet recalibration.

And yet the discomfort remains because we have not reconciled the two traditions that claim us: the cosmopolitan and the vernacular, the global and the local. Achebe and Soyinka once managed to hold these tensions in productive balance, writing for the world without losing sight of home. But our contemporary moment, fragmented by digital chatter, global migration, and economic precarity, makes that balance nearly impossible. The critic, the writer, and the reader now inhabit different worlds, connected only by the fragile thread of social media, where taste is negotiated through virality rather than reflection.

In that sense, Ikhide and Oriogun are both right, though for different reasons. Ikhide is right to demand rigor, to fear the dilution of standards in a culture too easily satisfied with sentiment. Oriogun is right to insist that criticism divorced from context is not only elitist but historically blind. Between them lies the abyss the prize was supposed to bridge, a gap not just of opinion, but of imagination.

Every argument about a prize in Nigeria eventually becomes an argument about the country itself. The outrage, the cynicism, the fatalism, these are not just aesthetic responses; they are forms of civic feeling. The literary community, in miniature, rehearses the same disillusionment that animates the nation at large: our institutions promise excellence but deliver confusion; our leaders speak of merit but reward familiarity; our best minds compete for the validation of foreign audiences because home is too small, too unstable, to sustain them. The Nigerian Prize for Literature, in this sense, is both symptom and mirror. It reflects the country’s inability to build trust in its own systems of value.

That is why every winner is haunted by suspicion. When Sanya was announced, the question was not, is this a good book? but rather, who decided it was? When The Road to the Country failed to win, it was not read as the triumph of an underdog but as the embarrassment of a system too insecure to reward greatness. In a country where the rules are always shifting, we have come to distrust verdicts, however well-intentioned. And yet, we keep returning to these contests, as though the act of arguing about them might somehow redeem our disappointment.

Perhaps this is what Ikhide’s posts enact each year: not mere provocation but a ritual of mourning. Behind the satire lies a genuine ache, for a time when literature seemed to matter, when the critic’s word could shake a room, when prizes signaled not just patronage but possibility. His nostalgia is not simply for better books but for a moral order that has disintegrated. The world he longs for is one where reading was an act of seriousness, not self-promotion; where critics earned authority through discernment, not virality.

But nostalgia, however eloquent, cannot rebuild what no longer exists. The conditions of literary life have changed. The critic no longer stands outside the crowd; he is part of it, posting on Facebook, arguing in comment threads, competing for likes and retweets. Authority has been democratized, sometimes beautifully, often disastrously. Everyone now has an opinion, and every opinion must announce itself as a revelation. The result is not dialogue but noise, a marketplace of certainties where no one pauses long enough to listen.

Oriogun’s response must be read against this background. His defense of Olugbile and Masobe was not simply an act of solidarity; it was also a refusal of cynicism. He was saying, in effect: it is still possible to build something honest here. His anger was not against criticism itself but against a style of criticism that assumes bad faith from the start. For him, the prize represented not corruption but labor, the slow, unglamorous effort to sustain a literary economy in a country that offers little support for it.

It is telling that Oriogun’s post was as much about publishing logistics as about aesthetic merit. “Masobe’s book distribution network is more efficient than a lot of smaller presses in the West,” he wrote. In that sentence lies a quiet revolution. For decades, Nigerian literature was defined by its inability to circulate within Nigeria. Books printed abroad were celebrated but rarely seen at home. Now, at least, there are people trying to reverse that imbalance. Yet, even these small triumphs are met with derision, as if to remind us that success achieved locally can never quite be enough.

The truth is that both Ikhide and Oriogun are responding to the same absence: the absence of a shared evaluative center. What makes a book good in Nigeria today? Technical mastery? Cultural significance? Distribution reach? Moral urgency? Diasporic prestige? Each answer generates its own faction. The critic clings to the idea of form and craft; the writer insists on visibility and fairness; the reader, when we remember there is one, wants a story that feels alive. In the absence of consensus, prizes become battlegrounds for deeper grievances: about class, geography, language, and the politics of belonging.

This confusion is not unique to Nigeria. Around the world, literary institutions are struggling to define value in the age of content. But in Nigeria, the stakes feel sharper because literature has always borne an extra burden, it is asked not only to entertain or enlighten but to redeem. We want our writers to articulate national dignity, our critics to safeguard truth, our prizes to symbolize justice. When they fail, as they inevitably must, we experience it as betrayal.

And yet, beneath the exhaustion, something still flickers. For all our cynicism, the arguments persist because the idea of literature still matters to us. The fight over Sanya and The Road to the Country was not a fight between enemies but between lovers quarreling over a fading romance. Each side wanted literature to mean something again, to inspire the kind of faith that can only exist when people still believe that art might change how we see the world.

What would it take to recover that faith? Perhaps we must begin by accepting that there is no single center anymore. The age of the critic-as-prophet is gone, but so too is the myth of the infallible writer. What remains is the possibility of community, a more modest, collaborative form of seriousness where criticism becomes conversation, not decree. The work of the next generation may not be to build new canons but to build new circuits of care: small presses, reading collectives, literary festivals that bring books back to the people who live in the stories.

The Nigerian Prize for Literature, for all its flaws, could become one of those circuits if it were willing to reimagine itself, not as a monument to prestige but as a catalyst for participation. Imagine if, beyond the award ceremony, the prize sponsored national reading tours, classroom partnerships, or open-access digital editions of winning books. Imagine if it treated visibility not as an afterthought but as the prize itself. Only then would the money translate into meaning.

Until then, the debates will continue—online, in bars, in classrooms—each side claiming the mantle of integrity. And perhaps that is not entirely a tragedy. For even in our disillusionment, we are still talking about books. We are still quarreling over what counts as excellence, still yearning for standards even as we dismantle them. The noise, in its own way, is proof of life.

In the end, the abyss that the prize reveals is not just institutional but emotional: a crisis of belief in the very possibility of collective judgment. Yet it is precisely this crisis that gives our literary culture its strange vitality. For in arguing about what literature should be, we are also arguing about what kind of country we wish to become, one that measures worth by the echo of foreign applause, or one that learns, finally, to listen to itself.

And perhaps that is the quiet gift of every controversy, every Facebook rant, every angry defense. It reminds us that, even in fatigue, we still care enough to fight for the meaning of a book. That is not nothing. In a country where almost everything has lost its value, caring about literature, even through conflict, might be the last act of faith we have left.

Leave a comment

That midnight in 1996, after Kanu Nwankwo turned his long legs into a national treasure and Abeokuta spilled into the streets celebrating the Nigerian Dream Team’s qualification for the Olympic football final, my siblings and I carried home more than flags and songs. We brought back the chicken pox.

My oldest sibling, about twenty-one then, was supposed to chaperone my older brother and me, eleven and seven. They wore Nigerian jerseys imported from the border where our village sat—gifts from our grandmother, who had forgotten me, the third child. I bawled for a jersey of my own. Nobody cared much for my noise except my sister. She cradled me, gave me a white shirt and a green scarf to wrap around my neck, and followed me like shelter. Everyone else told me to shut up. “Don’t let your little sister see you cry. Man up.”

Oke Sokori was frenzy. People waved the Nigerian flag as if a fairy were about to drop coins under pillows. Even our resident fries seller, whose akara and fried yam sold for three naira, kept her shack open, selling subsidized one-naira fries. With akara and fried yam in hand, we marched the length of Ijeja singing, “When Nigeria beat Brazil, When Nigeria beat Brazil oh, Bebeto wa benuje,” the midnight air biting and warm at once.

If I have a single vivid childhood memory—patriotic, chaotic, electric—it is that night. Mum did not lock us away while the neighborhood caught the Olympic fever. In the biggest house, Ile Alhaji, a table-soccer tournament ran and my brother emerged champion after three rounds. His team’s Sprite-bottle-top players had been fixed with candle wax so they looked and played better.

We went home greasy, hoarse, and satisfied.

Around six in the morning, fever found my siblings. We shared a small room at the back of our three-bedroom flat, a little far from where our parents slept. My sister wriggled and cried from pain; my brother echoed her. I woke unscathed and walked the verandah to knock on my parents’ door. No one answered.

I returned and watched my brother melt on the bunk above mine, my sister cradling his head against her lap, soaking a towel and pressing it to his fevered brow. Slowly, inch by inch, he went back to sleep. I could not tell if she slept. She stayed awake, still as a small island. When mum came in the morning to scold us for oversleeping, she saw the fever dancing on both their bodies. The beads of sweat had crusted on their noses. That began a family battle with chicken pox—one I somehow evaded that time, thankfully.

Subscribe now

***

Sometimes illness teaches how to listen to the body, though my father would deny it. He was our household’s Junkie-General, ill after years of avoiding it. He lived on pills and loved telling stories about how it was better to avoid illness than to treat it. There was never a time I did not see him take some medicine. If not his eyes, then his legs, or his nose. He was the nerdiest man I had met, tall, with a thick afro and dark glasses, spending half his fathering hours buried in books and BBC broadcasts. He had no academic career, though he would later turn that into guilt, saying he stayed home to raise us.

He fell sick after attending his stepfather’s burial. He complained of joint pain that traveled through his body as if the pain itself were mobile. He had not wanted to attend the ceremony; he resented the man and blamed him for his parents’ marriage collapsing. But he went out of duty, careful not to exert himself. Back home, illness assaulted him, and he blamed the dead stepfather.

He complained and complained until he eventually recovered. When someone called him babyish, he denied it with a straight face as if that could make up for endless days of difficult behavior.

***

My mother has a rare genotype that makes her superhuman. Until Monday evening, July 12, 1999, I did not think she could fall ill. She was an over-worker whose ethic would shame anyone for sleeping a minute too long. That evening a stranger arrived our house with a face so grave, it inspired tears from my siblings without him uttering a word. My little sister had traveled with my mother and returned instead with the stranger. My older sister tried to shake the words out of Dupe, asking what had happened. The stranger instead, speaking Yoruba with a strange accent, explained that man plans and God divines. It was a sermon and news at once.

It was the first time I saw my father openly show anything other than angry slurs when he debated our Head of State, Abacha with his friends. The suspense of not knowing had swallowed him; he wept, spoke, and stabbed the air as if Mum stood in front of him. “Nike, this was not what we agreed on,” he said and collapsed into his chair. I patted his back and told him nothing was wrong with my mother, and perhaps she was only hurt. And that was ok because people recovered from things like that. I felt as if I knew something the others did not. They looked at me, surprised, irritated and confused all at once.

The stranger took over then. Mum had been hit by a truck driver but had not died. He described how Dupe had stepped into a busy road in Osogbo and how Mum ran out yelling for her to stop. Stepped in front of a speeding truck. The driver’s best efforts could not prevent the impact.

She survived.

***

A few weeks earlier I had returned from Abuja, where I’d gone for a visa interview to attend the 51st Belgrade International Theatre Festival. The trip had been uneventful, except for a cab driver who bet he would not use his horn for the whole ride and kept his word. When illness first visited me, I blamed stress. I took two days off from work and slept through them with help from piriton. I resumed work to begin a crowdfunding drive for flight tickets. The Serbian embassy delayed our passports until the day we were to travel, so the trip fell through.

The morning after that disappointment, my eyeballs ached as if someone had cruelly propped them open. When I went to the bathroom to wash my face, I found to my dismay, two giant pimples on my nose waving at me from the mirror. So I did what I always did—bust them. By evening fever came. I called a doctor friend who prescribed medication. Three days later, the pimples I had burst had become pustules. New ones appeared in strange places, even between my crotch.

I panicked and self-diagnosed a killer disease. My friend told me to go to the hospital. That afternoon I learned the truth: the chicken pox I had avoided since childhood had finally found me. When it had taken my siblings years before, I had been quarantined against my wishes. Mum would not let me see their Calamine-lotion faces and the disgusting disfigurement that came with it. I was unprepared for my own encounter. My body resisted Calamine and the fever turned the world slow. By the third day, pustules covered me, even my palms. I begged my brother for pain medication. That helped the fever, but did not quiet my mind.

Even sicker, I became a restless wreck. Deadlines and books haunted me. I did not want visitors, ashamed of the monster I had become. I tried to read, to edit, to sketch a novel outline; the illness turned letters into enemies. I scrolled through Twitter and Facebook without satisfaction and could not focus on a film.

So my mind wandered through family histories of illness and my role in each recovery. I remembered reading to my father while he lay complaining that the illness would take him. I thought of an uncle who had mistaken me for my older brother and beaten me savagely when Mum pleaded with him during her years of invalidity. Everyone shouted for him to stop, but he kept lashing, saying,

“They are all the same—both Tolu and Yomi—only the cane can straighten them.” I have hated him ever since.

Years later I found myself furious again when I saw him and his autistic son at my brother-in-law’s funeral; bile rose to my throat until my older brother intervened and forced me to say hello. Over time, and with the nudging insistence of surviving each other, forgiveness settled in. I now remember him with more than venom. He once rescued me out of a financial jam in my final year and gave me five thousand naira when I needed two. That memory lived beside the other one, each testing the weight of the other.

Illness taught me many things—patience and forgiveness chief among them. My body now lectures me daily whenever I attempt tasks from my pre-illness life. I try to resist and call it laziness.

My face is a house of scars. My brother calls me Scarface. I laugh and wait for the glow to return. The scars are proof that the pox visited. I wish for a wand, but there is no such thing. Every day is a lesson in patience. When fatigue comes—when standing too long or lifting too much brings me low—my body drops a reel of those feverish days in my mind. Without anyone telling me, I sit down, like a used spoon, and practice the patience I learned.

Leave a comment

When I began this newsletter, I committed to showing up here weekly, to think alongside you about craft, culture, and all the quiet, tangled questions of diaspora life. That rhythm has been both grounding and exhilarating. But as the semester deepens, I find myself needing to adjust the pace.

Graduate school has been exciting and demanding in equal measure. Between coursework, research, and the ongoing writing projects I am nurturing, my days have taken on a density that leaves less room for the weekly cadence I had hoped to maintain. Rather than stretch myself thin, I would like to give both my academic work and this newsletter the attention they deserve.

So, for the rest of the semester, I will be shifting to a monthly posting schedule. Think of it less as an absence and more as a recalibration: a chance for me to gather thoughts more slowly, to return each month with essays that are not rushed, but ripened by the time they’ve taken to form.

In the meantime, if you need to reach me, you can always do so by email—I’m only ever a message away. And as the world continues to feel uncertain, I hope you are finding ways not only to care for yourselves but to guide your hearts as well.

I’m grateful, as always, for your presence here. Knowing that these essays have found their way into your inboxes, and hopefully into your thinking lives, sustains me more than I can say.

Until next month,
Tolu

Subscribe now

A Nigerian passport is a heavy thing. Not in weight — it is flimsy, green, fraying at the edges — but in what it carries. Each time I hand it over at a border, there is a pause. The official flips through its pages, slow at first, then quicker, as if expecting something to appear that is not there. A visa? A guarantee? Proof that my belonging has already been approved by another gatekeeper? In that silence, the whole choreography of exclusion is distilled. The line of travelers behind me grows restless. The officer’s eyes lift from the passport to my face and back again. The pause thickens. I find myself rehearsing answers in my head, my pulse syncing with the shuffle of the queue: Where are you coming from? Where are you going? What do you do? Why should we let you in?

There is nothing loud about this moment. No sirens, no handcuffs, no barking orders. Only the sound of pages being turned, the sound of time stretching thin. And yet the pause itself is a kind of violence. It holds me at the threshold, suspended in uncertainty. In that instant I know the passport is not a key but a test, not a door but a wall.

We are told the world is a map of colored blocks. Each block has its capital, its anthem, its story of who belongs. But step into an airport queue with the wrong passport and you see it differently: the map is not geography, it is a system of gates. Each line is a fence. The nation-state, that proud promise of safety, is often less a sanctuary than a cage.

And yet it is hard to think outside of it. The idea of the nation has seeped so deeply into imagination that even resistance is often phrased in its language. But Black life has always unsettled this order. Paul Gilroy reminds us that the defining vessel of modernity was not the flag but the slave ship — a floating, brutal site where people were wrenched into motion, crossing and recrossing oceans, creating identities that no border could contain. Blackness has always been a disruption of national purity, a reminder that the story of the world is not linear and enclosed but oceanic, hybrid, unfinished. Whenever I press my Nigerian passport into an official’s hands, I feel the inadequacy of its claim over me. I belong as much to the restless waters of the Atlantic as to the land that issued the booklet.

The state knows this, which is why it guards its gates so fiercely. Brent Hayes Edwards writes about the décalage, the subtle gaps and shifts that mark diasporic life, differences of language, geography, experience. These differences are fertile, the ground of creativity and connection. Yet the state is expert at turning them into fractures. Passports, visas, embassies, surveillance, this is the quiet bureaucracy of isolation designed to keep us from moving freely, from finding one another across borders. I think of the countless hours spent waiting in consulates, of the nervous shuffle in immigration lines, of the official glance that decides a future. Paperwork is not a formality; it is the barbed wire itself.

Even time becomes part of the enclosure. Michelle M. Wright urges us to notice how nations tell stories in a straight line: slavery as a past tragedy, emancipation as progress, the present as redemption-in-the-making. But the violence that stalks Black life refuses such timelines. It arrives multiphasically, yesterday and today at once, police bullets echoing the plantation whip, the colonial decree, the checkpoint interrogation. To call these ruptures “setbacks” is to accept the nation’s story of forward motion, when in fact the line itself is a fiction. What we live is not a march from past to future, but a constant folding of times into one another.

So what does freedom look like if the nation cannot contain it? Not smoother paperwork or longer visas. Not better seats at the table. Freedom looks like currents that slip past borders, solidarities stitched in the gaps the state cannot close, a refusal to choose between mourning, resisting, and imagining. The map is not the territory. And for those of us caught in its barbed wire, the task is to redraw it, not with the neat pen of the cartographer, but with the unruly ink of the diaspora.

Subscribe now

My reading of Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land grows out of the questions that shape much of my work: how histories of empire and displacement complicate the ways we see one another, how fragments of memory and archive press against the present, and how mimicry, often born of asymmetry, can nonetheless produce new forms of intimacy. In previous essays, I have traced these concerns through African contexts—whether in the entanglements of gospel music and Nigerian worship, the fragile afterlives of African literary prizes, or the inheritance of diasporic dissonance. What drew me to Ghosh’s text is how it stages these same tensions on another shore: in the medieval Indian Ocean world of Bomma and Ben Yiju, and in the late–twentieth century Egyptian villages where Ghosh conducted fieldwork. Reading this book alongside my other inquiries reveals a continuity—across continents and centuries—in the struggle between parochialism and cosmopolitanism, misrecognition and mutuality, forgetting and excavation.

Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992) is a work that defiantly resists categorization. It is at once a work of history, travel writing, memoir, and a meditation on the very nature of storytelling. Through its ingenious dual narrative structure, the book dismantles the rigid boundaries between past and present, East and West, and in doing so, offers a powerful critique of colonial historiography while celebrating the intricate, cosmopolitan threads of a pre-modern world.

The book’s brilliance lies in its interweaving of two narratives. The first is Ghosh’s own anthropological fieldwork in the 1980s, as part of his doctoral research in social anthropology at Oxford, living in the Egyptian villages of Lataifa and Nashawy. Here, he is the outsider, a “kafir” from India, subjected to the curious and often humorous scrutiny of the villagers, with whom he debates everything from the efficacy of water pumps to the inexplicable (to them) Hindu practice of cremation. This contemporary narrative is juxtaposed with Ghosh’s historical detective story: his reconstruction of the life of a 12th-century Indian slave, Bomma, and his Jewish master, Abraham Ben Yiju, a Tunisian merchant living in Mangalore, on India’s Malabar Coast. Ghosh pieces this story together from the fragments of the Cairo Geniza, a cache of medieval Jewish documents.

This structural choice is far from mere stylistic flair; it is the core of the book’s argument. By placing his own experience as an Indian in Egypt alongside the story of an Indian in medieval Egypt, Ghosh highlights a stark contrast. The world of Ben Yiju and Bomma, as revealed through their letters, was one of astonishing mobility and cultural syncretism across the Indian Ocean. A Tunisian merchant could thrive in India, employing an Indian slave who conducted business in Egypt, all within a network built on trust and a shared lingua franca of commerce, preserved in Judeo-Arabic documents. This was a world not yet fractured by the hardened national and religious identities of the modern era.

Ghosh’s present-day Egypt, however, is a world shaped by the aftermath of that fracture—colonialism and the rise of the nation-state. His conversations with the villagers constantly circle back to a defensive, often narrow, sense of Islamic and Egyptian identity, a direct product of a history of Western domination. The most poignant moment comes when Ghosh is confronted about Hindu funeral rites and finds himself, despite his best intentions, locked in a futile “contest of absurdities” about the relative merits of their cultures. He realizes that both he and the Egyptians are “travelers from an antique land,” trapped within stereotypes created by the colonial gaze, unable to see each other outside of its reductive framework.

What emerges, then, is not just a story about Bomma’s lost life but about a lost mode of human connection. Ghosh’s literary excavation makes clear that the parochialism he encounters in modern Egypt is not an eternal truth of “East–West” relations but a historical outcome. The title itself is deeply ironic, borrowed from Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” For Ghosh, the “antique land” is not only Egypt but also this forgotten model of cross-cultural exchange, whose ruins lie buried not in sand but in the archives and in the altered consciousness of modern people.

In an Antique Land is a masterpiece of postcolonial literature because it goes beyond simply criticizing empire. As much a work of ethnography as of literature, it bends academic genres to literary ends. Through its lyrical and scholarly journey, Ghosh actively reconstructs a suppressed narrative. He demonstrates that history is not a linear progression but a palimpsest, where older, more inclusive worlds lie just beneath the surface of our modern divisions. The book lingers as a hopeful, though melancholic, reminder that the boundaries that separate us are not immutable. In listening to the whispers from the Geniza, Ghosh asks us to imagine a different past and, therefore, a different future, built not on isolation but on the antique yet enduring premise of shared humanity. This invitation—to read the archive for possibilities rather than closures—resonates with my own insistence that the fragments of memory and displacement that survive empire can still generate new forms of recognition.

My fellowship with The Common Reader has begun and this is my first installment. Please read and share what you think.

On this week’s book recommendations. We look towards poetry as Gbenga Adesina’s debut collection of poetry Death Does Not Begin at the Sea arrives to some critical reception. We can also look forward to Jide Salawu’s Contraband Bodies which drops next month. In fiction, I have seen a lot of buzz for Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds, although I am yet to engage it myself, but it will happen soon enough. The New York Times described its central concern as devotion, comparing it to Luster by Raven Leilani.

You can support these writers by preordering and ordering their books and engaging with them.

Subscribe now

The semester has only just begun, and I find myself living in that charged interval between preparation and enactment. The first weeks are always heavy with possibility, as though each class might set the tone for everything that follows. But what has occupied me most this time are not just the classroom dynamics themselves, but the questions I am carrying into them — the texts I am rereading, the talks I am preparing to give, the ideas that seem to circle one another but have not yet resolved into clarity.

Later this week, I will be giving a craft talk on Creative Nonfiction at the University of Minnesota. It will be on memory and on writing from the edge of legibility, and I have been thinking about how to frame it so that it doesn’t simply rehearse familiar arguments about writing from lived experience. For me, memory is not just material; it is form. To write nonfiction is to acknowledge that one is always writing through collective history, carrying traces of others, negotiating with absence as much as presence. The essay, at its best, is porous; it holds what we remember but also what we have forgotten or misremembered, and it makes something legible out of that uncertainty.

The talk will be moderated by my friend Ciara Alfaro, an essayist whose work I love deeply. Her writing has always reminded me that the essay can be both intimate and collective. I know her presence will push the conversation in unexpected directions, and perhaps that is what excites me most: that the event will not be a lecture but a dialogue, a rehearsal of thinking aloud in community.

Because school has begun yet again for me, I have been besotted with returning to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in these opening weeks. Fanon’s book is not about writing in the narrow sense, but it is about form. The forms of politics, of consciousness, of community, that must be reimagined after the collapse of colonial rule. To reread him now is to realize how much of his vision remains unresolved. Fanon insisted that decolonization was not just the substitution of native faces for European ones; it was a wholesale reorganization of the psychic, cultural, and economic structures of life. He warned against mimicry, against the newly independent nation-state settling into the same exploitative patterns it had inherited. What was at stake, he argued, was nothing less than the invention of a new humanity.

That word — invention — still arrests me. Fanon saw the postcolonial moment as one of radical possibility, but he also understood how easily that possibility could be foreclosed. Reading him now, I cannot help but think of the many ways in which postcolonial states have fallen into the very traps he described: the persistence of authoritarianism, the hollowing out of revolutionary ideals, the entrenchment of inequality. And yet, his call remains: to imagine and enact new futures, not by looking outward for models, but by drawing on our own histories and capacities. Writing, too, is a kind of invention — each essay or story a rehearsal of a humanity not yet realized, a reaching toward new forms of being.

Later this year, I will be teaching a class on African futures, and Fanon’s diagnostics are fresh on my mind for this reason. When November comes, I will stand before my students and ask them to consider how literature participates in this work of imagining futures. Afrofuturism, with its roots in the Black Atlantic, offers one set of answers. Born out of the displacement of slavery and diaspora, it often looks to the cosmos, to outer space, to speculative technologies, as a way of recovering what was stolen or obscured. Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany — their visions are cosmic not just for the sake of scale, but because displacement itself demanded an imagination large enough to account for what had been lost.

Nnedi Okorafor’s concept of Africanfuturism, by contrast, insists on grounding speculative work on the continent itself. Her manifesto sets out a clear distinction. Afrofuturism is diasporic, shaped by the experience of Blackness outside Africa. Africanfuturism is continental, centered on African settings, characters, and concerns. In theory, the difference is sharp, and I understand why she felt the need to articulate it: to resist the assumption that African writers must always write in the key of the diaspora, or that Afrofuturism, as a category, could be stretched to cover all Black speculative work. But when I read the works themselves, the distinction blurs. Okorafor’s own novels and stories gesture toward African landscapes and mythologies, but they rarely embody the full conceptual rigor her definition promises. It is as though the term has outpaced the fiction, the idea running ahead of the body of work that might anchor it.

This gap between word and work is not unique to Okorafor. It is, in some sense, the very dilemma Fanon described: the difficulty of naming a future before it has been built. Namwali Serpell has critiqued the rush to coin new literary categories for precisely this reason. Movements, she reminds us, become legible retrospectively; we see their contours only after a body of work has cohered around them. To name a movement too early risks reducing it to a slogan, useful for marketing perhaps, but fragile when pressed for substance.

So I find myself caught between these voices — Fanon urging us to invent, Okorafor naming a new speculative mode, Serpell warning against premature definitions. And I realize that my preoccupation this semester is not with resolving these tensions but with inhabiting them. How do we teach and write in the space between vision and enactment, between what has been named and what has yet to be made real?

When I stand before my students, whether this week in the craft talk or later in the lecture on African futures, I want to give them more than definitions. I want to show them that these debates are alive, contested, unsettled — that they are not just matters of terminology but of practice, of how we tell our stories and imagine our worlds. The question is not only what Afrofuturism or Africanfuturism mean, but what kinds of futures they enable us to envision, and how those futures are written into being.

In this sense, the semester itself feels like an essay: fragmentary, recursive, circling an argument that is still in draft. I have not yet given the craft talk, but I am already thinking of what I might say. I have not yet taught African futures, but I am already rehearsing the questions. Fanon lingers in the margins, reminding me that possibility is not the same as realization. The work is always ahead of us, unfinished.

Beginning again, then, is less about arriving with answers than about dwelling in uncertainty. Perhaps that is what I want my students — and myself — to learn most of all this semester: that writing, like imagining, is never complete. It is always provisional, always in the process of becoming. To write from memory is to accept that memory itself is unstable. To name a future is to admit that the future will resist the name. And yet, it is in this space of instability that the most urgent work takes place.

So here I am, at the start of another semester, rereading Fanon, revising lecture outlines, scribbling phrases in the margins of my drafts. I am waiting — for the craft talk, for November, for the conversations that will unfold. And yet I know that waiting is itself a form of work, a kind of preparation, a way of keeping the questions alive until they find their shape.

For now, it is enough to admit that I am still at the beginning.

Subscribe now

There is a kind of slow alchemy to reading a book that does not simply offer escape but rather recognition — a mirror angled toward a self you have always suspected but not yet encountered fully. Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss was that kind of book for me. I entered its pages expecting distance and instead found a terrain unsettlingly close, a quiet sprawl of exile and longing that did not sit politely on the page but pressed itself against me. Desai writes with a precision that is both tender and unforgiving, her sentences stitched from the melancholy of fractured identities and the long shadow of colonial legacies. The novel refuses passive consumption; it breathes, and in its breathing, it unsettles the dust in my own mind. Every paragraph feels like a key turning in a lock I had left deliberately ajar, opening a door back into the novel I had abandoned to the drawer.

That manuscript of mine had begun to feel like an artifact — a thing I visited instead of inhabited. But Desai’s characters, oscillating between Kalimpong’s mountains and New York’s cramped kitchens, unsettled me. They forced me to return to my own characters not as inventions, but as silences waiting to be excavated. What unspoken griefs are lodged in their bones? From which landscapes of memory have they been exiled? Which histories do they inherit even when unacknowledged? Reading Desai is not to encounter a blueprint but to experience resonance, a tuning fork struck so cleanly it sets your own instrument humming. She reminded me that fiction’s power is less in the event than in the echo it leaves within the body of the reader.

That solitary echo has found its counterpoint in the communal pulse of the Lolwe Nonfiction classroom. If Desai gives me stillness, my students provide the tide. To log into our virtual room is to be immediately pulled into currents of sharp, unflinching insight. Their energy is not the freshness of novelty, but the urgency of those who know their work matters. They write and speak from a hunger to make sense of their worlds — of memory, of place, of the body as archive, of politics as lived weather. We read essays that dig into personal history like archaeologists, and in their responses, I see them beginning their own excavations, sometimes halting, sometimes fearless.

But the moments I cherish most are when the classroom tilts toward argument, when a question spills from the text into the wider agora: What is the role of the African writer today? It is in those collisions of perspective that our space hums. Some hold fast to the weight of history and the demand for witness. Others argue for the freedom to roam, to play, to write the surreal or the tender without apology. Always, we circle back to Binyavanga Wainaina’s How to Write About Africa, not as a dismissal of responsibility but as an insistence on complexity — the freedom to be contradictory, to be whole, to resist the neatness demanded of us.

In this contested ground, a novel like Tochi Eze’s This Kind of Trouble feels indispensable. The book is fiercely Nigerian in its texture, but it refuses to flatten itself into a cultural proof. At its heart is a love story — ordinary, enduring, transgenerational and yet rendered with a quiet boldness that insists intimacy itself can be political. It is precisely the kind of fiction my students are hungry for: work that bears witness to the specificities of its world but claims, without hesitation, the universality of the human heart. The book’s refusal to explain itself is, in its own way, a manifesto.

Alongside Eze’s novel, Ayotola Tehingbola’s debut short story collection, Lagos Will Be Hard for You, also feels significant in this moment. I have not yet read it myself, but the early conversations around the book suggest a writer committed to mapping the contradictions of city life with unsparing honesty. Even its title carries the weight of a generational recognition — that Lagos is not merely a backdrop but a force that shapes bodies, relationships, and desires. Together, books like Eze’s and Tehingbola’s suggest a widening horizon for African writing today: one that holds space for intimacy, for difficulty, for a refusal of simplicity, and for stories that are deeply local while conversing with the universal.

To be at the nexus of these debates — Desai’s meditative echoes in solitude, my students’ restless insistence on articulation, and the emergence of novels like Eze’s — is to glimpse a literary consciousness in the making. It is raw, intelligent, alive with contradiction. These students are not waiting for permission to define African writing; they are doing it in their essays, in the chat box, in their disagreements that always return to respect. Their urgency is tonic. It pulls me from the quiet of my desk and reminds me that writing is, at its heart, a long conversation — between author and reader, between memory and imagination, between teacher and students who are already becoming the writers they want to read.

Somewhere between the inhale of solitary reading and the exhale of collective debate, a new rhythm has emerged for me. Desai grants me the language for inwardness; my students, and the fiction they demand, grant me courage for outward creation. Together, they complete the breath of a writer’s life.

Subscribe now

The poet’s fingers left damp crescents on the title page as they signed, ‘for Tolu who sees, not understands.’ That careful revision, ‘sees,’ was the first crack in the performance. It revealed the machinery at work: the demand that an African artist be legible as symbol before being heard as human. I stood back with the book after, and watched them from afar, signing books for others.

The room was filled with all kinds of people, white, Black but mostly African. This had been the most I had seen of Africans generally since I joined our chiefly white elite university in the middle of the US. The poet looked regal as the stage lights erased their pores and scars to reveal a kind of spectacle. The ‘African Writer’ as archetype, not individual. This was the representational machine in action, the system that strips context until all that’s left is a lesson, a trauma, or a soundbite. It made me wonder ever so briefly, how exactly the people in the room were anticipating their experience of the poet’s text: if they imagine that they might find something novel in the work, or something that confirms the bias that they were seeking confirmation for.

When the poet paused before answering the inevitable question that arrived towards the end of the reading, what does your work say about the African condition? It wasn’t hesitation I saw but what Saidiya Hartman might call the burden of adjacency: the cruel arithmetic where your story only matters when told beside the shadow of a continent on fire.

You learn early, if you come from a place with a name other people can’t pronounce, that you are not a person so much as a premise. Every utterance is fielded for meaning beyond itself. In 1986, when Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize for Literature, much of the Western press didn’t marvel at his craft, but at the novelty: an African laureate. Even at home in Nigeria, the headlines were sensational, turning his private achievement into a public emblem. Soyinka, to his credit, resisted the tidy narrative, condemning what he called the West’s appetite for ‘the grotesque and superficial,’ a demand that African art perform as folklore or political allegory. But the machinery hardly ever dwells in its on critique, especially when it comes from a person it has anointed.

If you are a woman from that unpronounceable place, you become a premise with footnotes, your body a contested margin where race and gender collide. When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote We Should All Be Feminists, the West crowned her the voice of African womanhood, flattening her fiction into manifesto. Meanwhile, at home, critics accused her of importing Western feminism into their society, as if the desire to breathe freely were a colonial artefact.

This is the double bind: to be either token or traitor, your complexity distilled into a lesson plan or a cautionary tale. Even Buchi Emecheta, writing in 1970s London, faced publishers who demanded more “authentic” suffering, proof that the machinery of representation grinds finest when polishing Black women’s pain for foreign eyes.

We are all trapped in this minority feedback loop, that endless echo chamber where every gesture gets amplified, distorted, and fed back to us as demand. I recognized this when Burna Boy dismissed Afrobeats as “mostly about nothing” in a 2023 interview and Twitter erupted. The outrage wasn’t about music. It was about his violation of gratitude, that unspoken rule that successful Africans must perform a perpetual indebtedness to their origins. His crime wasn’t criticism but refusing to stay in the communal lane assigned to him.

Yet Burna Boy’s rebellion is selective. The same artist who mocked ‘Afrobeats’ as trivial once brandished the phrase ‘African Giant’ not only at the Grammys but on all the big stages he mounted on his way to success, trading radical honesty for marketable Pan-Africanism. The genius of this action lies in how he made the spectacle work for him, even as he pretends to break it.

Yet the burden of representation isn’t new, not by any means. Neither did it begin with Burnaboy and others like him. You could trace it back to the 1977 FESTAC gathering in Lagos, when musicians, poets, and thinkers from across the Black world gathered in a grand attempt to consolidate a Pan-African cultural identity. Even then, artists who veered too sharply from nationalist narratives or the ideal of cultural unity risked censure. The burden of being both individual and symbol was already unbearable.

You could argue that no one felt this burden more acutely than Fela Kuti. While the Nigerian state dressed itself in the language of Pan-African solidarity, Fela saw the rot beneath the surface. He rejected the invitation to perform at FESTAC, dismissing it as a hollow spectacle staged by a corrupt regime desperate to launder its image. Instead, he threw open the gates of his Kalakuta Republic, staging his own countercultural gatherings just a few miles away from the official venues. The consequences were swift and brutal: weeks after the festival’s closing ceremonies, soldiers stormed his commune, setting it ablaze, beating its residents, and fatally injuring Fela’s mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti who herself was a towering figure in Nigerian anti-colonial history. It was a stark reminder that the very project of cultural unity could be wielded as a tool of erasure, punishing those who refused to conform to its terms.

And Fela wasn’t alone. Even within the festival’s gilded spaces, you could sense the strain between individual artistic expression and the pressure to perform a seamless, triumphant vision of Blackness. Some poets and playwrights, notably South Africa’s Keorapetse Kgositsile, navigated this tension by weaving jazz-like improvisation and subterranean citations into their work—gesturing, through rupture and rhythm, at the silences in FESTAC’s official narrative of unity. Others, like Wole Soyinka, who served as a member of FESTAC’s planning committee, would later speak of the uneasy compromises demanded by such grand nationalist pageants.

The festival, for all its celebration of diasporic creativity, left little room for dissent or ambivalence. To veer too far from the script — to insist on one’s complexity, one’s contradictions — was to risk being cast out of the collective story. And so the burden endured: to be at once individual and symbol, artist and ambassador, a self and a stand-in for something impossibly vast.

The literary world has its own versions of these traps. When critics crowned Chigozie Obioma “the new Achebe,” they enacted a kind of canonical ventriloquism, a demand for inheritance, not innovation. During interviews where these claims are invoked, one can infer a tactical dance: Obioma nods to Achebe’s legacy when the Booker jury leans in, then pivots to his Igbo oral influences when critics press for ‘authenticity.’ His resistance is intermittent, a survival script for the machinery. For instance, when an NPR review praised him for being “in love with the English language,” the praise carried with it an aftertaste of linguistic conquest. You could trace this to the era of the Makerere Conference in 1962, where African writers gathered to debate the future of literature on the continent, only to find the conversation endlessly rerouted to whether English or African languages should serve as its medium. Decades later, the question still haunts prize lists and blurbs, a relic dressed in contemporary grammar. Even the Booker shortlist, which Obioma is famously celebrated for, having been shortlisted twice, has a neocolonial tasting ring to it, less a stage than a gilded chokehold he is learned to loosen, but not remove.

Yet some artists turn the trap into a stage. When Marlon James won for A Brief History of Seven Killings, he didn’t sanitize Jamaican patois for the judges, he made them choke on it. Meanwhile, prizes like the Caine Prize for African writing and the now defunct Etisalat prize arrive at the scene with the sole aim of disrupting the circuit, but what they end up doing, as many critics have noted, is reinforcing that which they shouldn’t be. In the years that have followed however, there have been a few efforts to reposition the system, but none have had any last impact. Yet hope remain in the form of artists who refuse to participate in this dance. The late Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o famously abandoned English for Gikuyu, choosing erasure over eulogy. The cost of agency is counted in the currency or silence; neither choice is free.

In America, this machinery operates with different calibrations. Like Soyinka’s Nobel, Obama’s presidency became a spectacle of exceptionalism, a template for how Black success is instrumentalized. His presidency became what Fred Moten might diagnose as the exceptionality paradox – where one Black body’s success gets weaponized against all others. His composure under pressure, served dual purposes: proof of Black capacity and alibi for continued violence.

This isn’t new. In 1901, Booker T. Washington was invited to dine at the White House, a moment hailed as historic progress. The backlash was swift, with Southern newspapers decrying it as an affront to white dignity. Yet Washington, like Obama, became both the symbol of racial possibility and its limit. The spectacle of Black success has long been staged to reassure rather than unsettle power.

But back home, the machinery hums a different tune. The movie The Woman King’s reception exposed the machine’s fractures: Western feminists hailed its ‘girlboss Amazons,’ oblivious to Dahomey’s role in the slave trade. In Benin, historians rolled their eyes at the Hollywood gloss, while Twitter Nigeria debated if the movie was ‘empowerment’ or erasure? The divide revealed a truth: the African audience is no monolith. Just as Burna Boy’s African Giant played as ‘authentic’ abroad but sparked debates at home about activism, the machine grinds differently depending on who is listening. This is the paradox of the African creator: too foreign for home, too native for abroad.

Yet in this friction, new dialects emerge. At literary Festivals held on the continent, the work is read not as anthropology but art, and the audience’s gaze is a mirror, not a microscope.

We see this same dynamic when African artists get praised for their poverty aesthetic, that sweet spot where trauma becomes artful enough for white consumption but never so raw it demands actual reckoning.

And yet.

There are cracks where light gets in. The poet’s damp fingerprints warping the page. Burna Boy’s smirk as he said “nothing,” a small syllable, but a landmine under the museum floor. Obioma’s quiet shift when interviewers invoke Achebe or Okri, a barely perceptible wince. These micro-resistances accumulate into tiny sabotages of the representational machine, not enough to dismantle the machine, but sufficient to jam its gears.

I am reminded of an unverifiable story an old friend told me of Fela Kuti, who he claimed once told a London journalist that he didn’t make music for white ears, then proceeded to fill the studio with horn blasts so unrelenting it forced a bodily reaction. You couldn’t theorize your way out of a Fela track, the old friend said laughing, you had to submit or leave. These small refusals, the off-script gestures, are what make the spectacle glitch.

Yet some argue that the spectacle can be hacked. When Trevor Noah jokes about South Africa’s apartheid era on The Daily Show, he weaponizes his ‘African’ label to smuggle radical history into American living rooms. The risk? The machine co-opts even rebellion, Beyoncé’s Black Is King was called ‘Pan-African’ by critics but critiqued by Nairobi artists for its commodified aesthetics. The double bind persists, but the battle lines keep shifting.

Perhaps true freedom lies not in refusing categories, but in proliferating them until they collapse under their own weight.

The poet signing books while rain smudges the venue’s windows. Burna Boy sampling Fela while dissing the genre. Obama humming Al Green at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. For every Obioma playing the Booker’s game, there’s a Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o rejecting English entirely; for every Burna Boy courting the Grammys, a Fela Kuti blasting horns too harsh for white ears. The difference isn’t purity but pressure: how much leverage one risks. Small acts of simultaneous embrace and evasion of identity’s grip.

The poet’s book warps on my shelf, its pages buckling like a spine resisting straightening.

Outside, storm winds peel leaves from trees in translucent strips. They curl at the edges, like Obioma’s pages warping under humidity, like Burna Boy’s smirk fading when the cameras cut. These are not revolutions but residues: proof that the spectacle, however hungry, cannot digest everything. They stick to wet pavement, not flags but fingerprints, smudged, partial, human.

Subscribe now

It is that time of the year again — when summer, in its final breath, reminds you that routines are about to return. There is a particular texture to late summer days: a kind of reluctant stillness, as though the season itself is bracing for the onrush of movement. For me, this week has been a quiet negotiation between anticipation and preparation. In a few days (maybe weeks), I will begin my second year as a PhD student in Comparative Literature. This will mark my fifth year in higher education. Five years of syllabi, seminars, deadlines — and still, every new semester feels like stepping into a familiar room that rearranges itself the moment you walk in.

Usually, semesters like this always feel like a small reset. But this year, the reset feels heavier. Not just because of the coursework to wrap up, or the dissertation project slowly taking shape in the distance, but because of an underlying atmosphere of imminent change. The world feels tense in ways that seep into the classroom, into the work, into the very act of writing. There is an edge to the social and political climate, a low hum of unease that colors even the most routine preparations. And so, the ever-present question returns: how will I hold the center when everything else demands to be done? How does one stay rooted when the ground itself feels unsettled?

Beyond the university walls, I’m stepping into a different kind of classroom. This August, I will be tutoring in the Nonfiction section of Lolwe’s Creative Writing Classes. Teaching nonfiction, especially within a space like Lolwe, feels personal. Perhaps because I have witnessed on myself, the form’s quiet, transformative power. Nonfiction has been more than a genre for me; it has been a kind of therapy, a mode of survival. It is through essays that I have performed this searching and knowing of the self, a process that continues to unfold with every draft I write.

I think often about how essays — those quiet, searching things — have always been the way I make sense of life’s dissonances. There is a particular kind of solace in sitting with a blank page and allowing questions to take form without the pressure of resolution. When my father passed away two years ago, I found myself caught in a cruel limbo — not only of grief but of distance. The bureaucratic indifference of visa regimes made it impossible for me to return home to pay my last respects. It was an ache compounded by helplessness, a reminder of how migration often demands a severing from rituals that give grief its language.

In that season, it was to the essay that I turned. Not because it offered answers, but because it gave me a place to sit with the weight of what had no answers. Writing became a kind of ritual in itself, a way to mourn, to negotiate absence with language. In the act of composing sentences, of tracing the jagged edges of loss, I found a fragile but necessary sense of balance. The essay held space for both the things I could say and the silences I needed to honor.

To be entrusted with guiding others through that craft feels like an extension of my own apprenticeship to the form. It is humbling, and honestly, a little daunting. Because teaching, at its core, is not about expertise. It is about holding space, for questions, for half-formed thoughts, for drafts that don’t yet know where they are going. In this way, I am reminded of those who have held space for me, teachers, mentors, friends, those who were, so I can be. Their generosity makes this new role feel less like a task and more like a continuum I am grateful to enter.

Amidst all these preparations, my time as a Heartland Journalism Fellow will begin. Over the coming months, I will be writing a series of essays that reflect on migration, identity, and life in the American Midwest, particularly St. Louis. These essays will live at the intersection of reportage and personal narrative for The Common Reader magazine. For those of you who have followed my work on diaspora life and literary criticism, this new chapter will feel like a continuation, but also an expansion.

The American Midwest, in many ways, is a canvas that resists easy definitions. It is often flattened into flyover country in national discourse, yet it carries within it a complex, layered humanity. It demands a kind of writing that listens before it speaks — a writing that refuses to impose meaning too quickly. That’s the kind of work I hope to do in this fellowship. Essays that look outward, into the histories and lived experiences of a region, but also inward, into the quiet negotiations of belonging and becoming. And more importantly, essays that do not begin and end with the struggle of migrant life, but that linger on the acts of resistance, care, and joy that happen in-between the cracks. Stories where community is built on dancefloors. Where defiance sounds like a song sung in a mother tongue. Where survival looks like a shared meal in a corner restaurant far from home.

So I want to invite you, my readers, to join me on this journey — not just as an audience, but as co-travelers. Your reflections, your comments, your questions will be part of the dialogue I hope to nurture through these essays. The conversations we build together will shape the texture of this work. You have been with me through essays on mimicry, on diaspora, on literary spaces; I hope you’ll stay with me as I try to map new terrains.

Lately, I’ve been reading Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon, a memoir that moves with the precision of poetry, yet carries the force of a tide. It is a book about language, liberation, and the quiet negotiations between selfhood and family legacy. In many ways, Sinclair’s narrative feels like a companion to my own preoccupations, the struggle to articulate identity while navigating the visible and invisible borders that shape us.

For those of you looking for a new read, I also want to recommend Tochi Eze’s This Kind of Trouble, which releases today. It is a novel that captures the dissonances of contemporary Nigerian life with humor, tenderness, and a sharp, unflinching eye. You can find it wherever you get your books.

So this is where I am right now: standing at the threshold of multiple beginnings. A new academic year. A teaching role that feels like a return to my own craft. A fellowship that invites me to write outward, into the world. It feels like a lot, I know. But isn’t that the nature of seasons like this? They stretch you, not in a way that breaks, but in a way that insists on your capacity to grow. A gentle but firm reminder that life is always, in some form, under revision.

I will be writing through all of it, of course. And I hope you’ll stay with me.

Subscribe now

Readers beware: This review contains spoilers.

In Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo’s quietly shattering debut novel Tiny Things Are Heavier, Bloomsbury 2025, a young Nigerian woman named Somkele — Sommy, to those who love her — arrives in the American Midwest bearing the weight of guilt, grief, and the unhealed ache of familial entanglement. The novel resists grandeur in its form, but not in its ambition. It moves like memory: episodic, circular, pulsing with the ache of things imperfectly remembered. This is a story not only about a woman in motion, but about what clings to her as she moves — the detritus of origin and rupture, the subtle violence of translation, the quiet unraveling that comes from trying, failing, and trying again to find coherence in a country that cannot quite hold her.

From Lagos to Iowa, Sommy relocates after a familial act — one part omission, one part protection — implicates her in a tragedy she cannot speak of. Her older brother survives a suicide attempt and then cuts her off. That silence, cavernous and unexplained, shadows her across continents. When she arrives in Iowa, the first person she draws close to is Bayo, a Nigerian man who reminds her, somehow, of her brother. She begins sleeping with him not out of love, necessarily, but out of proximity, of need. Bayo is available, uncomplicated, sometimes loud-mouthed, always around — and in the strange new quiet of Midwestern life, his presence offers temporary anchorage.

Then she meets Bryan, her soon-to-be biracial American partner, and everything shifts. Not cleanly — she never breaks things off with Bayo — but gradually, messily. Her relationship with Bryan becomes the first axis of geographical and emotional fracturing. His world, with its casual wealth, its midwestern whiteness, its literary aspirations, begins to consume hers. He brings her into his family, his nostalgia, his mythologies. What at first appears as romance slowly reveals itself as subsumption.

The novel’s choice of setting is not incidental. Iowa — cold, literary, white — sits comfortably within a growing archive of African migrant fiction that places its protagonists in America’s interior. From Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go to Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers, and even in the silences of Teju Cole’s Open City, we find African characters confronting the deep blankness of America’s heartland — university towns, snowdrifts, and all. Okonkwo’s decision to locate Sommy in this tradition is both a formal nod and a narrative risk: it expands the genre without falling into its expected grooves.

But what makes Tiny Things Are Heavier so arresting is not simply the setting, or the fact of migration. It is the emotional torque of its relationships. The novel’s most devastating rupture doesn’t explode in drama but accumulates in silence. When Sommy discovers that Bryan has been writing about her — not with affection, not even with understanding, but with clinical detachment — it undoes something elemental between them. “You said everything was okay. That it was fine. That we were fine,” she says, grasping for clarity. Bryan replies, not in remorse but in wounded self-defense: “But this is how you see me? I take you to my home, to my family, to experience my deepest nostalgias, and this is what you write?”

In that moment, the asymmetry becomes unavoidable. Sommy is not just betrayed by a lover; she is rendered into metaphor by someone she let in. She becomes, in Bryan’s narrative, not a person but a symbol of Otherness — uncivilized, opaque, and raw. What stings most is not the writing itself, but the disavowal of intimacy. “I barely wrote a thing about you,” Bryan insists, as if omission is absolution. But the erasure is its own kind of violence.

Okonkwo’s treatment of Bryan’s character is subtle and unsparing. He is not a caricatured white liberal, nor the saviour type. He is, instead, biracial, abandoned by his father, and possessed of what he believes to be a radical self-awareness. But his wounds, too, harden into entitlement. His pain becomes a license — a reason to assume moral clarity, to conflate vulnerability with virtue. In Bryan’s world, introspection is currency. But it is Sommy who is asked to remain silent, to be legible only when useful, to serve as catharsis rather than counterpart.

This is not merely a story of cultural misunderstanding. It is a meditation on narrative control — who gets to define pain, who gets to speak first and loudest, and whose stories are allowed the dignity of complexity. Sommy is not a passive victim. She is difficult, reticent, and often opaque even to herself. She makes mistakes, avoids confrontation, and lets things fester. But Okonkwo’s great strength is in preserving her interiority from being overwritten. Sommy’s consciousness remains intact, uncolonized by the gaze of others.

If the novel has one flaw, it is in its ambivalence around class. Bryan’s quiet upper-middle-class privilege — which he first minimizes, then weaponizes — becomes both a source of fascination and friction. Sommy’s own middle-class upbringing in Nigeria is what eventually allows her to resist total absorption, but the mechanics of that resistance are sometimes elusive. One wishes for more clarity in the novel’s class politics — not in declaration, but in texture. Still, the novel gestures at these tensions with enough self-awareness to merit further conversation.

The ending does not offer resolution so much as divergence. Sommy and Bryan do not collapse in flames, nor do they find a way back to each other. Instead, they separate, quietly, irreparably. For readers steeped in African migrant literature, this feels like a familiar echo. In Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, in Cole’s Open City, in Tope Folarin’s A Particular Kind of Black Man, we see protagonists circling around versions of home that recede just as they approach. In Tiny Things Are Heavier, that ache is even more intimate. It is not just about where one belongs, but whether one's grief can be carried — or even seen — by another person.

In portraying a deeply flawed Nigerian woman navigating the fractured terrain of migration, Okonkwo offers a fierce and unconventional kind of nationalism. Not the kind that flatters, but the kind that endures. This is not love as redemption, but love as insistence — weary, furious, sceptical, and still, somehow, intact. Sommy does not stand for a nation, but she contains its contradictions. Her loyalty is not performative; it is haunted.

What Okonkwo has written is not a novel of heroic migration, but of minor ruptures — the sorrow that resists spectacle, the wounds that don’t announce themselves. It is about what happens when intimacy becomes a form of erasure, when the self is asked to bend too far in the name of belonging. It is about surviving, barely, with no clear resolution in sight.

And in the end, Sommy is still there. Heavy with memory. Still unmoored. And somehow — impossibly — still whole.

Subscribe now

Last week, I finished a draft of my novel.

I say this without ceremony, because the only thing more exhausting than finishing a novel is figuring out what to say once it's done. I should clarify: by “finished,” I mean I reached the end of a first full draft—some 50,000 or so words that didn’t exist in this form even a month ago, but had been gathering shape over the last five years. A mess of beginnings, voice experiments, false starts, and the kind of stubborn ideas that stay lodged in your chest until you surrender to them.

I began this novel as an essayist. That is to say, I didn’t begin with a plot. I began with questions. I began with a tone. I began with a hunch about two characters who couldn’t tell each other the truth, and a third who stumbled into the silence they left behind. The first year was ideation. Then came the slow walk toward a voice that felt right. I wrote pieces of it in notebooks, during long bus rides, in the margins of receipts, after phone calls, after reading other books. I talked the story out with friends— usually in the middle of conversations, as if I needed to sneak it past myself.

But even with the ideas intact, there was still the question of trust. Could I write something that wasn’t obviously an essay? Could I hold a narrative arc long enough without unravelling into analysis? Could I — and this was the hardest one — stop editing long enough to just write?

Eventually, I stopped asking and simply surrendered to the story. Not because the doubts had vanished, but because the novel didn’t care about them. It wanted to be written.

In the first year and up until last year, I failed at every attempt to write this novel appropriately. Even during my seclusion at a residency, I kept working on it in secret, swearing myself into silence about the actual work.

I spoke to other writers about other projects, as if I thought that speaking about it might ruin my ability to actually focus.

Now, the first work is over. The careful work begins.

I’m thinking a lot about revision as rewriting. About chiseling what I have — wild, tender, imperfect — into something more solid. Not finished, not polished, just shaped. I’m thinking about how every scene that feels necessary today might be up for deletion tomorrow. And I am trying not to panic about that. The goal now is not to perfect, but to clarify. To find the pulse in what I have made. And once it steadies, I will begin to share it with my first readers, and perhaps it might gain a life as a book that would grace a shelf someday.

All of this has made me newly aware of how porous the line is between my essayist self and my novelist self. There are parts of the novel that were born out of essays I couldn’t finish, thoughts that refused the neatness of argument but found their home in a character’s voice or silence. And I suppose I have carried this porousness with me elsewhere, and what joy this has been. It has been strangely freeing.

This past week, I also watched reactions unfold to my essay on Olongo Africa, where I tried to name something I have long felt—a condition I called the false crisis of African literary estrangement. I wrote the essay quickly, but from a place of long-held frustration and hope.

I have been heartened by how it has been received. Some people have read it as a provocation. Others as a balm. A friend in a phone call during the weekend also informed me about how an acquaintance of his dismissed some of my arguments. It made me giddy with excitement, not because I like to be contradicted. But because, perhaps, these essays are doing exactly what I hoped they could do. Getting us to the table, talking, and debating again.

Either way, I’m glad the words reached people. There are more essays in that series coming. Some will come neatly folded inside book reviews. It is my way of saying, “look at how these writers are saying the same things I am trying to say, even better.” If you haven’t, you should consider reading the first one. It is here on this Substack.

So yes, it’s been a week of words. Finished drafts, unfinished thoughts. New readers, old questions. It feels good to be here, in this between-space, with all of you.

Subscribe now