As someone who is mystified by the intricacies of the Yoruba language, and whose interaction with the deeper levels of the layered language is mostly from artistic expressions created with the language, I sometimes find myself attempting to parse what a Yoruba expression might mean. This happens when said expression is not in daily usage […]
1. I came to like football as a careful choice unlike many of my friends for whom the sport was a natural favorite. Growing up, the sport that came to me naturally was basketball. Of course, there was wrestling from TV that I tried out with my younger sibling, which earned me a chipped tooth […]
# 1. For a while now, I really believed I could no longer write anything worth reading. Many times I have written entire paragraphs in my head, edited, restructured, before discarding. I imagined certain readers finding their way to this blog, reading what I have written, then cringing at the words. In my books, no […]
I love Emeli Sande. We share a couple of things in common (says every fan, I guess). I love her music more. My favorite video of one of her songs makes a powerful portrayal that I identify with, and which has provided me with another number for my notes. My relationship with words started […]
I grew up recently. I remember the day it happened; it was the kind of day my ten year old self loved. It had just rained when daddy took me and my siblings to our farm; we rushed to the farm’s store and took out head pans. My brother, my little sister and I placed […]
I watch my father forget things and realize he’s getting old. *** When I was six, my father taught me to tell time. It was with the big, round Quartz clock that hung on the wall right above the faded brown couch. He would bring it down and set it on the centre […]
I feel something close to pleasure when someone I am speaking with for the first time, someone who has known me for a while but with whom I have never spoken, calls me Akintunde. My name has appeared as Akin everywhere between leaving secondary school and leaving the university. Before then, in the spaces for […]
We were walking, picking our way through a dusty road, and arguing, two bowed heads under the New Year Day’s sun, about what must have been said at the Cross-over Service at my church the night before. I didn’t hear what the Pastor said before the New Year thanksgiving offering was collected. My mind was, […]
2013, on a morning in Nkewelle, I felt a rush that now, three years after, feels alien to me. I had completed my first piece of fiction and was eager to share my creation. I posted the story on Naija Stories—a website containing stories posted by a lot of young Nigerian writers—under a pseudonym and […]
1. When I write prose fiction and poetry, the sparks that birth my words ignite from within, a thing riotous and chaotic, kindling and kindling until cooled, but when I sketch essays or anything else, it all begins with a small, calm flame outside of me, a gathering glow out there in the world. Mornings, […]
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