Jen Soriano’s writing pulls the reader into her memoir in essays starting with a chronological history of medicine and its approaches to the nervous system. Soriano studied the history of science at Harvard; thus, her book has abundant historic detail. Included in her chronology are the Kahun Papyrus medical documents from 1900 B.C. written by women and focusing on women’s health. These documents were later obscured during Europe’s Middle Ages when St. Thomas Aquinas warned that women were weak, those who practiced healing were minions of the devil, and that hysteria was evil. By 1486, two centuries of witch hunts began across Europe. In 1894 Santiago Ramón y Cajal, founder of modern neurosciences, described the nervous system as organic and flexible, like a system of waterways. And it wasn’t until 1980 that the American Psychological Association stopped using the term hysteria and replaced it with stress disorder.
How does this history fit into the life story of Jen Soriano? Soriano describes herself as someone who has always been nervous. From the ages of twenty-eight to forty-three, she had a series of diagnoses connected to her nervous system. Not only has she suffered from nervous disorders, but she has also had a life of chronic physical pain — pain so great that it kept her awake at night and resulted in her being prescribed meds. So chronic that it led to suicidal ideation in her twenties. Yet Soriano didn’t accept her medical and psychological suffering as an individual circumstance related only to her personal life. Because she had experienced violent dreams of her grandparents for three decades, she was left wondering if she was experiencing transgenerational flashbacks from her grandparents’ trauma in the Philippines. She became certain that the war experiences of the Philippines — including her grandfather being tortured and then disappeared as a prisoner of war and her grandmother having to eke out survival while her home was enemy-occupied — lived on inside of her.
Born in the US, Soriano realizes that not only her personal experiences, but the history of her body is connected to her forebears and the history of the Philippines. The violence that has been inflicted on the Philippines is hidden behind the American myth of Filipinos as simply agricultural and later healthcare migrants. Yet Filipino immigration to the U.S. has been part of the push-and-pull of colonialism and revolutionary resistance that began with three and a half centuries of Spanish domination. The Spanish viewed the island territory as an outpost for trade where they didn’t even bother teaching the indigenous population Spanish as they did in Latin America. In 1896, the Filipino population revolted against Spanish rule, and during the Spanish-American War that began in 1898, Spain sold the Philippines to the U.S. for $20 million. The war lasted until 1913 and resulted in the deaths of more than one million Filipino people. In World War II, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, they went on to bomb eight targets throughout the Philippines. In the summer of 1942, the U.S. surrendered the country to Japan. And from 1941-45 more than 1.1 million Filipinos were killed, and some as a result of horrid war crimes that included skinning victims alive.
When Soriano’s parents immigrated to the U.S., they left a large portion of that tragic history behind. Her father was a medical doctor and her mother, an industrial pharmacist. Both parents focused on upward mobility in the Chicago home where they raised the writer and her two brothers. Her father viewed his nuclear family – now cut off from the larger extended family in the Philippines — as a sign of progress. And when her parents took their kids back home for vacation, they stayed in hotels instead of staying with family. The effect on a young Soriano was the absence of a sense of secure attachment with her parents. She felt she hardly knew her dad because he was constantly working. Her mom was distant and did not assume the role of a nurturer. Also, during her youth, both of her medically-trained parents dismissed her complaints about body pain – a dismissal which caused her emotional pain greater than her physical aches. In sum, the writer viewed many of the experiences with her parents as emotional neglect.
The writer’s young adult years included both a process of self-discovery and learning to cope with pain. During her studies at Harvard, Soriano felt alienated from the White elites in her environment. After moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in her mid-twenties, she became part of a Filipino population much larger than she had encountered in the Midwest or on the East Coast. The move to the West Coast brought her closer to her ancestral shores and allowed her to immerse herself in political activism as well as ethnic studies. Performing in a protest band not only served as a therapeutic ritual that advanced social transformation, but it also led to her forming lasting relationships with some of the most significant people in her life. She describes hanging out with her Filipino friends as akin to constructing her own nipa hut that sheltered her from pain and isolation.
Jen Soriano sees the connection between our personal lives, our history, our communal experiences, and the natural environment. For this reason, she can draw the conclusion that nature functions like an autonomic nervous system regulator and our human health depends on the health of our natural environment, especially our rivers. She experienced the interconnection between the personal, social, and environmental firsthand while participating in a protest to resist the damning of the Chico River – the largest river in the Philippines. For centuries, the Chico River has sustained the farming, trading, and daily life of the indigenous people who live near its shores and farther afield. For more than five decades, activists have resisted plans for the construction of hydropower dams on the river system. For Jen Soriano, the Chico River symbolizes a critical crossroads between the exploitation of natural resources and a more sustainable way of being that is not reliant on colonialism, exploitation, and trauma. To experience the full force of this crossroads, we must submerge ourselves in the crystalline whirlpool of the narrative that is her memoir in essays — Nervous.
I think about my ancestors often. Specifically, I think about matters like healing, faith, hope, and love. Currently, my curiosity centers around how enslaved women were denied time for self-care. In historic photos enslaved women donned hair rags and hair wraps; the difference in wrapping could distinguish between a woman who worked in the house and a woman who worked in the field. Under the wrap one might find fine curls or course matted hair. Mulattos, by no choice of their own, often inherited their enslavers hair. Some head wrappings were cultural, and some were worn as acts of resistance.
I am reflecting on hair wrapping as a result of being denied the right of self-care. Neglect of personal hygiene at the demand of an enslaver. I started thinking about this, trying to connect the lessons of self-care for our hair based on the lessons that have been passed down over generations without questioning if we should do things differently.
For most women our hair is a symbol of beauty and for some, hair can be a symbol of protest and independence. My curiosity is focused on the emotional and mental trauma that our ancestors experienced in not being able to care for their hair. What was the psychological cost of enslaved women losing their hair because they were denied the personal right to self-care? This is what has been on my mind. The inability to relieve mental pressure by feeling water wash over their heads on a regular basis, having an itch that caused them to scratch until blood was drawn. In some cases, if they wanted to untie the coverings, they were denied the right to expose their hair.
I can’t imagine working in a field among flies, mosquitoes, grasshoppers, and caterpillars and not being able to return home and wash my hair. I cringe at the thought of scratching my scalp infested with lice or creating remedies out of bacon grease, butter, and kerosene while being denied the right to cleanse my scalp. Imagine hearing a sermon in church about cleanliness being next to Godliness, but being denied the right to bathe. I am pained by the thought that my ancestors, being treated as property, were made to feel inferior to white women enslavers. White women could flaunt their tresses that enslaved women had to wash, and comb, and care for, while covering their own tresses in a rag. Is there anything more painful than providing the highest level of care to someone that looks at you and calls you property?
Today we are hyper-focused on our hair because our hair has a history in enslavement, oppression, rejection, and classism. Our hair has a connection to our African ancestors and our white enslavers.
I grew up getting my “hair done” — meaning washed and pulled into an afro puff, or washed, pressed and curled once every two weeks. Unless it was summer, which meant I went swimming every day. I am grateful that my mother never required me to wear those gawd awful rubber swimming caps. She did, however, demand that I wash and deep condition my hair after my swimming excursions. Water running through my curly, wavy hair felt comforting. For me water is healing, cleansing, a source of renewal and rejuvenation. After immersing myself in water, I feel pretty, clean and shiny, like a new penny.
My cousin and I celebrated rainy days walking in the rain, no umbrella. We bought Tropical Punch soda pop and walked home slowly. The fun and laughter on those walks still rank as the best days of my youth. Our faces so wet, raindrops hitting the top of our heads; it was magical.
During COVID, I stopped using chemical straightening products in my hair, gaining the pleasure of washing my hair more. I love how water opens my mind, clears my head. Great ideas come to me in the shower. Watering my crown from the top with no protective covering is like watering my garden on a summer’s day. I ache thinking of how the ancestors, after laboring until broken, after being beaten, raped, and forced to produce babies, survived the atrocities of enslavement without being able to wash them away. What kind of monster was an enslaver to make bathing an option? I mean, water is recovery.
Harriet Jacobs wrote about her life of enslavement; she hid in the attic of a shed for almost seven years to avoid the wrath of her enslaver. She survived summer heat, the cold of winter, fever, and near death. Harriet writes in Incidents of a Slave Girl, “I suffered much more during the second winter than I did during the first period my limbs were benumbed by inaction, and the cold filled them with cramp. I had a very painful sensation of coldness in my head; even my face and tongue suffered, and I lost the power of speech. Of course, it was impossible, under the circumstances, to summon my physician. My brother William came and did all he could for me. Uncle Philip also watched tenderly over me; And poor grandmother crept up and down to inquire whether there were any signs of returning life. I was restored to consciousness by the dashing of cold water in my face.” The mental trauma, emotional toil, and physical hardships are unmeasurable. Thinking about her hair might appear trivial. Yet imagine what she must have felt when her scalp started to itch uncontrollably? Surely, it must have felt like the torture experienced by prisoners of war. I would love to ask her about her journey back to health. I am sure it began with water. Water. I wonder how they made it over, from enslavement to freedom, without the daily ritual of a water dance.
When a mother’s water breaks, she brings life into the world. Water is a representation of all things new. Water is used to dedicate our lives back to the Creator. Water is used to keep the body hydrated, the earth moist, plants, animals, and the universe from overheating and dying. Water is the spiritual renewal of life. When water hits my face in the mornings, I feel renewal. Enslaved women, rising at daybreak with stiff bones, and aching backs, were crippled early in life by the demands of a slave breaker daring them to bring underweight sacks into the storehouse. If working in the field didn’t break you, a whip for not meeting your quota would. I linger in the shower knowing it is a privilege provided me by my ancestors.
I decided to make washing my hair a priority, not for styling, but for connecting to my crown chakra and, in a sense, connecting to my ancestors. The crown chakra gives us access to our intuitive energy and wisdom. The divine feminine is supported innately by the spirit of the Creator through our intuitive understanding. I require connection to creativity, nurturing, maternal connections, and healing support for my self-care. I can be more supportive of others when I am fully centered. The process for spiritual renewal is immersing the whole body, starting at the top of our crown, in water, dedicating ourselves back to life. My water dance feels like that moment after the rain; my body opens like a flower, tired muscles relax, my skin softens, letting the rain roll down my body.
After experiencing macro and micro-aggressions, our crown requires renewal. I believe our ancestors would consider washing our hair several times a week a privilege. I want to honor them as I work to ensure my own self-care at the highest level of love. Maybe our blood pressure would be lower, maybe our mental health would be better, maybe our thoughts would be clearer. Just like the dew of morning, the mist of water on my brow connects me to something greater than myself.
Black women were not created to be a human resource, a tool for production, an appliance for usage like a machine. We were not created to support everything, everyone, and women of other cultures while neglecting ourselves. We are not made of steel. We can’t carry the anger of the world around us because everyone except us, men included, are immersing their entire bodies in water for renewal daily; meanwhile we wait to refresh our entire body when it is convenient to wash our hair. We are delicate, we are made to be graceful, we are meant to seek our help from the Creator. Ours is a culture of peace.
Our hair is not our crown; it is the ornament of protection decorating our crown. Our hair doesn’t determine how the rest of our body, mind, and soul respond to the issues of life. Yet, great hair is beautiful when topping a nurtured crown. In the end, it is our crown that enables us to radiate from the inside out. When we care for ourselves, we honor our ancestors.
April L. Smith is a writer, literary agent, and motivational speaker. She is committed to eliminating mindsets that obstruct diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, especially for African American women. April is a Yale Writers Workshop alumnus. She loves spending time with her two adult children Kinnidy and Zackary. April lives in Raleigh, NC. She can be found at The Kinzac Group Literary Agency and Marketing Company and on instagram and facebook.
There is no place like home. So, the idiom goes. And generally, it is agreed upon as true. Or, as containing some element of truth at the very least. Not every idiom about home is as literal as this one though. To say a man’s home is his castle doesn’t mean exactly that. To say, in a patriarchal sense, that it is the responsibility of a man to bring home the bacon doesn’t exactly mean that either. If it did, one might ask, jokingly, where that leaves the vegetarian or vegan family.
In a recent PSA by PETA, the animal rights organization appealed to people to stop using anti-animal language. I agree, words matter, but I disagree that using an idiom like “bring home the bacon,” is comparable to using language that would be considered racist, homophobic, or ableist. I’m sure this would likely have me tagged as a proponent of speciesism, which PETA insists is part of our daily conversations. Much like idioms are. Besides “bringing home the bacon” other examples noted by the PSA include “beating a dead horse,” “killing two birds with one stone,” and “taking the bull by the horns.” PETA, of course, provided alternatives for what we might say instead. For “bring home the bacon,” it suggests “bring home the bagels.” For “beat a dead horse,” “feed a fed horse.” For “take the bull by the horns,” “take the flowers by the thorns.”
I love the fact that things mean more than what they purport to mean. It’s why idioms fascinate me. More often than not, I incorporate them in my work. However, I deploy them in a literal sense, usually to emphasize the absurd, but also to find what new thing might show up. Consider, as an example, “beating a dead horse.” In a poem that is a meditation on Coltrane about joy, I wrote:
—born running from lord-knows-what…
No. Let allusion find no stable in this song.
No room for measurements, or compromise.
It’s dead, I know, the horse is dead—
but what to do with the music
trapped under its hide?
In an earlier draft of the poem, which invokes the idiom even more directly, I wrote: “Yes, I know the horse is dead and I want to stop beating it / like a percussion instrument, but what about the music / that’ll stay hidden under its hide if no one lets it out?” I hate to think about what would be lost if I were to follow PETA’s recommendation. The poem is, as I wrote earlier, a meditation on joy. To be more specific, it is about the reality of joy as something one must fight for, especially when there seems to be so much that seeks to rob one of it. By virtue of my name, which translated means joy fills the house, joy should be natural for me, to me, and in some ways, it is. However, it is a difficult thing to think about joy when the reality of death is always at the foreground, especially in this country where one isn’t able to escape the constancy of news about the killings of unarmed Black people. To be sure, the question of home is political. As is the body. And really, what in this country (or anywhere else for that matter) isn’t?
Last year, I couldn’t stop obsessing about death. About the reality that I could be next to have my name included in the long list of names — known and unknown — of people who have been victims of police brutality. It is a terrifying thing. I wrote feverishly. As if my death were near. I could not escape, as my mother pointed out, metaphors about being swallowed. Every poem was essentially about death or dying. As has been the case for me since I started writing, writing was a way for me to figure out all the questions I had. Why is this happening? What can I do to make sure I am not next? Is this even possible? And so, poem after poem after poem, I sought to explore what it means to live inside my body. With this constant fear of death. How exhausting it was. How exhausting it is. The poem above came at a period when I was indeed tired. I wanted to write about something other than death, but it almost seemed impossible.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, to beat a dead horse is:
to keep talking about a subject that has already been discussed or decided
to waste time and effort trying to do something that is impossible
In a way, I became the horse. I couldn’t stop beating myself up for my inability to come up with a solution for systemic issues that are, essentially, the foundation and the building blocks of this country, if we are to think of it as a house. My poems didn’t mean shit. In another poem I ask: “What good is a poem? What good is a poem if it can’t stop a bullet?” In yet another, I ask, “What is a Black body if not an unending question?” I have no answers.
For this poem, I was curious what it means to literally beat a dead horse. It isn’t too far a leap to consider how once, at a point in history, Black people were subjected to burden in the way mules are. Still are. One only needs to consider, for instance, how mass incarceration is just a modern iteration of slavery. It turns out that we are nowhere past the reality of Du Bois’s treatise about striving in The Souls of Black Folk. Even then, I was curious if there was music to be found in the beaten hide, something akin to joy. My name, as I mentioned above, means joy fills the house. And though a house is not exactly a home (that distinction matters), the body too is, in some ways, a house. Or a home. Can be at least. Whatever language we decide on, however, we can agree that not everyone feels at home in their body. I don’t always.
I don’t always feel at home in most places. Born in Nigeria, in Ilesa, Osun State, I have lived in the United States since I was seventeen. First, in Cypress, TX. Then, Houston, TX. Huntsville, TX. Kingwood, TX. Humble, TX. I have also travelled a bit across the United States. A few years ago, in 2016, I took my first and only trip thus far outside the U.S., to Costa Rica which reminded me so much of home — the gravel road, the hills and mountains on the way to Monteverde were reminiscent of the trips to Imesi-Ile, where my grandparents lived, where my dad was born.
In a recent interview, the question of home came up. “Tell me about home,” the interviewer says. In response, I say:
My relationship with home is kind of a complicated one. For the most part, I believe it is nowhere or rather, everywhere we make ours. I believe we find it, or sometimes, it finds us. In the geographical sense, Nigeria is home. I was born and lived there till I was 17. It was home then. In some ways, it still is though it doesn’t quite feel like home anymore. For the most part, I’ve lived in Houston since 2007. That means it’s been home for that long. In some ways, it too doesn’t feel like home anymore. I still live in Houston, or at least around its perimeters — I currently live in Humble. So, in some other ways, it still very much is home. Home for me isn’t really a fixed place. However, both places have equally been home in the way I understand home — anywhere you belong, where you’re known and always welcome and, where you can return to if you ever leave it.
In the scientific sense of the word, displacement is quite simply a change in position. In a sense, it can be argued that the word displaced is an accurate descriptor for everyone who leaves — either by choice, or otherwise – the place they’ve historically known as home. This, I think is what it means to be in diaspora. No matter how settled one might be in a new home, I think it’s impossible to escape the feeling of homelessness. Of restlessness, which is, for me, a default.
As with my poems, this essay was prompted by a question: Is there still no place like home? The straightforward answer to the question is either a yes or no, but I think it’s more complicated than that. It has something to do with the word ‘still’ which was, in 2018, my word for the year. I don’t remember when I first started deciding on a word for a new year, but the earliest documentation I have of this practice is 2012. The word for that year was “run.”.
I love that a word can have more than one meaning. Still. Still. Still. By definition, being without motion, the continuance of an action or condition, or a static photograph (specifically one obtained from a motion picture). In retrospect, I think the word ‘still’ was important to me in 2018 because the year before that, I was everywhere. I was hardly home. Even when I was home, I spent the majority of my time away from my apartment – a residence I really had so I could have somewhere to sleep when I returned. I almost didn’t do anything else there. In 2017, touring for a book took me to 11 cities outside Houston, across 3 states. Texas: College Station, Laredo, San Antonio, Austin, Galveston, Huntsville, San Marcos. Louisiana: New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette. Missouri: Kansas City.
To return to the idiom, I found out that its origins trace back to a time in Europe, “before the 14th century when the institution of family started taking precedence over other factors. Society, environment and family life all came into being and also the realization that the person is truly at ease when at home” (theidioms.com). In so many ways, the family we grow up with (or without) shapes our understanding of home. The world outside isn’t always a safe place, and the family, home, in the most ideal circumstance, provides a sense of safety, a sense of refuge.
True as that may be, a question remains for some of us. How can one, how does one, feel at home in a country that wants one dead? I have no answers. Still.
Ayokunle Falomo is Nigerian, American, and the author of Autobiomythography of (Alice James Books, 2024), AFRICANAMERICAN’T (FlowerSong Press, 2022), two self-published collections and African, American (New Delta Review, 2019; selected by Selah Saterstrom as the winner of the New Delta Review‘s eighth annual chapbook contest). A recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, MacDowell, and the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where he obtained his MFA in Creative Writing–Poetry, his work has been anthologized and published widely.
It takes a reminder, a compelling moment, to bring the scope of sorrow and beauty back into focus. As I entered an RV park in Payson, Arizona, a mountain town favored by locals for its mild summer months, I had such an experience. Often, in the light of something truly magnificent and inspiring, equal measures of sorrow and beauty mingle. We might know it as poignance, wherein joy and sadness combine to become a sweet fermentation of experiences. This is generally reserved for later years of life. And yet, despite its power, this condition often goes unnoticed.
Upon arriving, I immediately noticed towering cottonwood trees, their leaves gently agitated by the wind. Safely away from the Phoenix sun, I felt a sense of freedom; no scorching heat would triumph against the breeze or bear with us into the evening. With that thought in mind, I felt refreshed. However, as I drove my motorhome over the winding path to my site, I took note of other things, situations contrary to the beauty of trees and sunlight.
Although called a “resort,” the place is really a trailer park in a small town, pleasantly overshadowed by mountains. Those of us with modest means either vacation here or live in “park model” homes year-round. And, with that, a sense of sorrow prevails, despite the sheltering cottonwoods that resist summer heat. I spoke to a few residents who were older and very concerned about skyrocketing rent. In a mobile home park, you must purchase your unit and then continue to lease the land—until you either sell or vacate the structure. For some residents, the latter option might be their only choice. Few people consider this as they enter such communities. Park owners present new units, ready for purchase, and emphasize the conveniences and amenities of the arrangement. Most people forget that the homes are very costly to move, and they devalue quickly. Moreover, the rent will increase annually—without fail, rent control being very much a thing of the past. Even with this in mind, I am still intrigued by the contrasts of the place.
A tour of the park reveals a large, well-maintained clubhouse, a handful of newer Class-A motorhomes, and the shiny “park models” awaiting their new owners. Also in evidence are dilapidated structures, dreary with the neglect and desperation of older people who simply cannot afford to move. I spoke to one woman who cares for her 96-year-old husband. After he passes, she plans to walk away from their mobile home and live in a renovated van. And there are other stories, as well.
My nearest neighbor to the west had a number of drunken arguments with her son, when he came to visit and brought his little dog. Hailing from Tennessee, the family has been devastated by opioid addiction and the tragic death of a daughter and sister. Across the road and just to the north, a frail woman in her forties smiles in the mornings, attempting to be cordial as she hurries to work. She was ostracized when her pedophile boyfriend arrived to share her trailer. Although it’s nearly July, they keep Christmas lights blinking in the yard, draped around stone cherubs and pots of wilted flowers. With such occurrences, tragedy feels like the prevailing aspect of life here in the “RV resort.” However, there is still the soft beauty of nature to enjoy, a power that abides throughout the seasons. And the place is not without a bit of charming irony.
As the only African American in the park, I was greeted in an interesting manner by a white neighbor. She said, quite sternly, “It’s a nice place, very quiet. We don’t have any riff-raff here.” Right. I tried not to laugh out loud or take offense at her insinuations. After all, I am not the owner of a park model. As a full-time writer and RV nomad, I am free — merely passing through as a seasonal guest. Although I am relieved to be leaving, I feel a strong sense of sympathy for this environment, this place of contrasting themes.
For the moment, mountains and pine trees prevail, as I regard the poignance before me. The glories of nature and a gentle climate are powerful in their role, softening an atmosphere of desperation with a sense of beauty, albeit temporarily. And this is the way of things in so many small towns. Such places embody poignance, demonstrating the scope of sorrow and beauty. I will be grateful to move on in a couple of weeks, as new horizons await.
A. M. Palmer is a writer, graphic designer, and retired park ranger with work appearing in Belle Ombre, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Dissident Voice, and other publications. Inroads: An Urban Park Anthology is the author’s first book. Palmer holds a master’s degree in history from the University of San Diego and continues to research art and social history with a variety of upcoming projects. The author is a member of the National Association of Independent Writers and Editors. Read the author’s latest work at A.M. Palmer, Literary Nonfiction.
JESSICA and ANNIE were two of the most super-duper, uber forces in my second-grade class at Brethren Missionary School where I had been banished by my professor parents. Run by and for White expatriates, the admissions practice at Brethren meant no colour bar impeded wealthy Nigerian locals and rare hybrids.
At seven years of age, I was aware that these two big timers’ energetic vibrations seeped insidiously into everything – everywhere – altogether — without discrimination.
Yes indeed, everything about JESSICA and ANNIE was big, bold, brassy and BOMBASTIC.
Boom! Boom! Boom! KABOOM!
Reverberating echoes flared, flinched and flickered every time these two beauties entered any room with their long, loose limbs, luxurious locks of accessorized hair, high top sneakers and empty, shell-blue peepers. It seemed that everywhere I went, they were there too. Not because they relished gazing at my brown face but because they took up SO-MUCH-SPACE, evidently enjoying using their invisible elbows to prod me out of their way with impunity.
OUCH!
My motley-type of mother said JESSICA and ANNIE were “strapping yet striking” in response to my query about how pretty she thought they were. Come again, Mummy?
“Strapping and striking like the Vikings?” I further inquired.
“That’s right, Cher!” she chuckled. Then smiling, she stated dryly, “Hitler would have been proud of those two”.
Her pointed wink and suppressed girlish giggle told me the last point wasn’t intended to be a compliment, and so I garnered she was trying to comfort me in her familiar, feeble-while-bizarre kind of way. Regardless, I was under no illusion that I was of any significance when standing alongside the two little-girl giants christened JESSICA and ANNIE. Me, with my cornrow hair; them, with their corn-colored hair seemed to say it all.
Corn-colored was better than cornrowed.
I didn’t know exactly why this had to be so, but it seemed incontestable by the way JESSICA and ANNIE looked right through me as if I wasn’t there.
I will never look like them, no matter how hard I try.
From their imperious ribbon hair ties all the way down to their frilly ankle socks, these two outdid me in every way. Even more hellacious were their voguish backpacks hanging side by side in their respective cubbies; one red and one blue, sequined embroidered initials and all, commanding attention from every corner of the room.
One warm morning, swaddled by the green-grey, partially misty hills of the Jos Plateau — an emerald shawl, perfectly draped, ethereal as a scene from the Brigadoon of my wildest daydream — all thirty of us children were sitting cross legged on the floor of our open-door classroom, when Miss Rose chose JESSICA and ANNIE to show and tell where they were in their science project. Springing to their feet in unison, and speaking accordingly, these beauties proudly yet aloofly held up their once empty jam jars now filled to the brim with piles of brown pellets. They explained that they had spent the previous week collecting the pellets, which were actually called cocoons — if you please — and were going to keep a close watch on them until they turned into butterflies. Up until this point, I had been staring at these two in reluctant admiration.
A shrill, sane voice from the back of the class asked Miss Rose, “What are they going to do with the butterflies?”
Now grinning in unison, JESSICA and ANNIE produced a glass frame divided into separate compartments, the way a pair of premeditating magicians might, and said they were going to poke the butterflies through the heart in order to kill them, using colored pins (they gestured to their weapons) then place them in the glass frame as a gift to the class so we could all admire them forever and ever.
Silence.
Then, the worst type of stabbing pain began to form in my gut, a sort of wretched chronic punch, as I slowly digested the information amidst these monsters’ beaming faces.
Jagged red evil eyes.
Why was Miss Rose nodding and clapping?
Looking around the room, I noticed some of the other children in my class with accentuated downward-turned smiles.
☹☹☹
I didn’t need to find out how many of them felt the same way that I did.
I just knew that I had to act stealthily and FAST!
***
If anyone had been paying close attention, they might have perceived that I became very quiet for a good portion of that whole day. Indeed, they might have noticed that I went missing at lunch time. But I don’t think that was the case. Nobody noticed at all that during our tennis class, on the tennis courts, while everyone else was baking in the generous Nigerian sun, under the scrupulous watch of three large birds of prey– stately as the magisterial magi of Persian fame and biblical proportions — I stole my wily way back up to the second-grade classroom.
HA-alleluia! It was my lucky day. (No one was there.)
Feverishly I made a bee line for those cocoons, and wouldn’t you know, when I ransacked the red and blue sequined embroidered backpacks, those darlings rose to the top almost immediately, making things easy peasy. I grabbed the two teaming-full jars, wrapped them in paper towels, wedged them under my arms and fled the scene running and running and running until I came to the old, prickly briar patch that nobody liked to go anywhere near — the one that I had always fancied the plantation proverbial Brer Rabbit would have loved. Then my seven-year-old fingers successfully prised off those ghastly jam jar lids, and I threw those darlings into that briar patch as far back as I possibly could.
“You’re free now!” I whispered, gleefully.
***
Immediately fleeing the scene, my surroundings became more nether-worldly with each step. Somewhere in the not-too-distant landscape I pensively observed my sister, Clare, milling her way around the school compound.
Hmm. What was this?
Not only was Clare a whole three years older than me, but she was also quite a bit taller, and skinnier too, and she walked with a slight stoop. Her eyes were larger than mine, with a slight bulge about them, and she wore her dark brown hair in a short, tightish, slightly unkempt afro. Sometimes when she poked around aimlessly, she reminded me of an ostrich, and other times she seemed like Olive Oil (the cartoon character with the annoyingly high-pitched American voice).
Today my sister is an odd-looking ostrich.
At school, Clare was devilish in her modus operandi. As an interesting consequence of her “unacceptable acting-out behaviors” she was often to be found enjoying enviable coloring activities — during which she was allowed to use thick, bright, smelly, and interesting-looking crayons in the counselor’s office — and otherwise wander around, unfettered, to her hearts content.
Mmm, how I love the scent of those pens.Especially the grape.
Ordinarily Clare despised, and saddened me, but today I felt so happy and lucky to see that weirdo sister of mine en route to rejoin my classmates at the tennis courts! A potentially positive interaction had to be possible.
What if I tell Clare?
As I got closer to her, I became aware that my sister was not alone. Elouise, her orange-haired, freckle-faced partner in crime — as coined by my mother — had popped up like a bad penny, and now they both were looking at me with slightly sardonic grins on their faces. My feet, in seeming concert with my heart became languid with apprehension. I hesitated.
Don’t be a fraidy cat.Shuku shuku is for supper tonight!
Feeling a small burst of hopeful energy, I began to open my mouth…but before I could get a word out, the dubious duo vomited gibberish at me, projectile style, in the “secret language,” that existed only between the two of them, and ran off laughing, apparently metamorphosed into a pair of frenzied, howling hyenas.
I’d been effectively ditched by the feathered critter and its sidekick.
Once detached from Daliesque reality, it was easy to slide back onto the tennis courts unnoticed. Next to JESSICA and ANNIE, I was not that visible after all. Later on, back in the classroom, my spine trembling like a jellyfish, I watched and waited to see what would happen if per chance these two huntresses decided to furrow into their bags before the end of the day.
Well, they did of course.
Oh, my. Big ugly tears!
And later, threats that when found, their missionary daddies would expel whichever uncivilized thief it was who stole from them. I shrugged (inwardly, of course).
Oh, well. I suppose the crème de la crème did not get the cream today?
“Jesus is watching, he will PUNISH you!” was J and A’s final ominous warning, followed up by a long menacing stare unmistakably directed towards the five darkest-skinned pupils in the room. I must have been momentarily unrestrained for I accidentally allowed something sounding like a scoff to escape from my throat. Upon so doing, my thunderously unhelpful heartbeat dropped into my gut…and then, WHAT in the? Suddenly a storm of butterflies was trapped in that hysterical tummy of mine. Well, a real MIRACLE must have happened, right around that time, because somebody without any type of face that Iwas able to see, ever so swiftly transformed my scoff into a camouflage cough.
Ahem. Ahem, AHEM…!
“Oh, thank you, Miss Rose”. I watched the words float out of my mouth in a big fluffy thought bubble, syrupy sweet, and soft as candy floss, as I reached for the partial glass of lukewarm water my missionary teacher had extended in my direction as I furtively rubbed my belly.
Relax butterflies.
Jesus was not going to punish me. Up until this point, I don’t think I had ever been as sure about anything in my whole, little-kid life.
A little later on, the boarders and I watched the Nigerian Sun set
slowly;
a hazy, lazy red eye, filled up and fed up
with enough hungry secrets to last one hundred lifetimes,
its hot sultry stare seeming to devour my mulatto skin, knowingly
nurturing my Blackness without my consent,
and it was then that I remembered, something my misfit-of-a-mother liked to say:
“Cheryl wears her heart on her sleeve”.
Well, maybe—I thought, with the most insolent-looking, inward eyeroll that my mother could have possibly imagined. But, not this time. This time, my poker face was simply superlative.
Cheryl Atim Alexander is an African European woman primarily of Nigerian, Greek, and British descent. Born into a family of readers and writers, she has never known a time when she wasn’t reading or writing lyrics, poems and stories. Currently an MFA student, Cheryl is enjoying leaning into a newer identity as a multi-genre writer. Her writing material emanates from lived, professional, and educational experiences surrounding holistic mental health and wellness, new thought spirituality, and human and animal rights. She aims to entertain, educate, agitate, and activate soul-filled inspiration to anyone who may have temporarily misplaced their voice. You can find her on LinkedIn at Cheryl Atim Alexander, LICSW, RMT.
In 2000, I was working at Shell in Bangladesh as a reservoir engineer, when I was sent abroad to Netherland for training. The training center was a microcosm of Shell’s global operations, with new employees from Scotland, Spain, France, and America, as well as countries that were just starting to hire local employees where Shell was developing oil and gas. There were geologists and engineers in training from Venezuela, Brunei, Syria, and other Arab countries.
In the Bangladesh office, I was the only Bangladeshi engineer in the explorations team, besides two local geologists. I had fought to join the explorations team, at great opposition from the explorations manager. The country manager had forcefully inserted me into that team. I forget what they, the expats, called us, the local employees, in the Bangladesh office. Perhaps we were locals, or perhaps we were called natives. The global employees sat separately at lunch, and, in general, expressed vicious frustrations about the country and the local employees working for them. They complained about the air quality – they were concerned about their children’s health, and many of the employees’ spouses wanted to leave Bangladesh. One geologist referred to Dhaka as a block of concrete. There were other, constant snide remarks, about the corruption of Bangladeshis, the laziness of Bangladeshis, and the lack of technological capacity. Once I made the mistake of asking an expat if they had traveled in Bangladesh, mentioning the Sundarbans, and the man looked at me with shocked eyes before replying that his children were too small to travel.
Most of the global employees were Dutch or British, with a few Americans. The atmosphere was toxic. In the explorations team, no one spoke to me, except for the reservoir engineer who was training me. When I did speak to someone, they were hostile, and they let me know what they thought of me. I had studied in the US for my undergraduate and master’s degrees and just returned to the country, so this level of open racism was shocking to me. It felt like I was back in colonial times. Once, I was asked to prepare a report. When I was about to send it out, the English engineer who was supervising me, a tall, bald-headed, smooth-faced guy, one of the nicest people in the office, said that he would check over my work first, as he was a native speaker of the language.
After months of facing constant prejudice and humiliation in Bangladesh, being in the Netherlands among other bright-eyed international trainees was a welcome change. Everyone was friendly, and there were no barriers among us. The training center was located between Noordwijk and Noordwijkerhout, beside the North Sea. I believe this was the Hotel NH Noordwijk Conference Center in Leeuwenhorst. At the end of the day, we went out to either town, Noordwijkerhout or Noordwijk, for shopping or dining. We hired out cycles to bike to the North Sea and walk on a beach scattered with striking blue jellyfish.
I was there to attend two courses. The first course was introductory. Expensive consultants had been hired to facilitate team building among new employees. We were split into several groups. Each group had to arrive by themselves at a retreat in Liege, in Belgium, while performing some wild tasks en route. The first challenge was that we had to hit about five or six countries on the way. We cracked the riddle ecstatically, putting our heads together. We would simply visit the embassies of these countries in Hague, and then take a train to Maastricht. On the train, we had to sing a song and get strangers to sing along with us. In Maastricht, we slept outside the train station all night in the cool fall weather, till finally making it to our cabin, where we slept on bunk beds and cooked and cleaned the cabin ourselves. By the end of the first week, we were fast friends.
When we returned to the training center, many of the trainees would show up at the Schiphol airport on the weekends to catch a flight to another European city. Others rode the super-fast trains to cities in the Netherlands, Belgium, or Paris. There were other kinds of entertainment. Some of the men went to a live sex show, or they brought women home with them to have sex and then later clean up after them. At our training center, no outside visitors were allowed. It was a big hotel, with a dining hall downstairs that served the same food for weeks. The only relief was the Indonesian sambal served on the side, an acquirement from the Dutch colonization of Indonesia. This bottled sambal added some spice to our bland food. We used to all dream of our native foods at night. Once, the young American engineer from Texas begged me to go out to a McDonald’s restaurant with her. I forget where the McDonald’s was. Amsterdam? Hague? Or in the local village? I will never forget that meal. We relished our burgers and fries, marveling that Europeans ate their fries with mayonnaise. The American engineer, whom I remember as a round-faced, blonde-haired, jolly person in T-shirts and jeans, was my favorite person there. She was charming in her innocence and earnestness, and we soon bonded over our nostalgia for America.
On a November day in 2000, as I watched the US election results from my hotel room, there was a shocking turn of events. George W. Bush had won the election. When I rode the elevator downstairs, all the international trainees at the dining table were stunned, either speaking in fast voices or sitting mutely with ashen faces. There was a heavy sense of bad things to come. Only my dear American friend from the Houston office seemed blithely unaware of the cataclysm the rest of us feared. Despite being my favorite person, she often made remarks with which the rest of us vehemently disagreed. We would round on her and educate her on the spot.
Once we had been having breakfast in the dining room, digging into fried eggs and fried tomatoes and paring grapefruit, when she had said, “America is trying to help world poverty by sending food and money to other countries, but how much can America keep giving?”
The rest of us had challenged her, saying that was not what caused poverty or famine, not a lack of food, and that America was not helping by keeping countries in debt. Through these debts, America and other Western countries controlled these countries’ government budgets by spending, siphoning off poor countries’ resources and controlling their policies by holding them hostage.
In a few weeks, we finished the introductory course of team building and bonding. I stayed on for another course with the other engineers and geologists. Downstairs in the hotel lobby, a large poster showed the price of oil in barrels. One day, an Iraqi employee arrived. We were immediately put on high security. Even before the man stepped foot on campus, all the trainees were briefed on the conduct we would have to follow. We were not to speak to him. He was not allowed in several areas. I believe he was not allowed access to the computers. I never saw him, but like others, I was disturbed by the tense atmosphere in the conference center. I couldn’t stop thinking about how he must feel, moving through this sea of hostility, restricted access, closed doors, and frightened faces turning away from him.
In 2008, when I read Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland about 9/11 and its aftereffects on a Dutchman living in New York, a novel the former President Barack Obama gave his seal of approval by telling the New York Times magazine that he was tired of briefings and was relaxing at nights with the novel Netherland, I was already familiar with the Netherlands, its colonial history and its neocolonial present. In 2000, I had sat together at meals with young people from all over the world with a dread in the pits of our stomachs that President George W. Bush was going to turn the world upside down. For O’Neill’s character in Netherland, 9/11 was a shocking, lifechanging event that struck a blow to his comfortable cosmopolitan existence in New York. His character didn’t seem too concerned about the US invasion of Iraq — a war that would result in over a million dead Iraqis, over five million orphans, the torture of Iraqi civilians, depleted uranium waste left behind that caused widespread cancer, and the rise of ISIS. But from where we were sitting in 2000, the people outside of America, we could already see the future, beyond the scope of the novel Netherland.
Gemini Wahhaj is the author of the novel The Children of This Madness (7.13 Books, Fall 2023) — a complex tale of modern Bengalis that illuminates the recent histories not only of Bangladesh, but of America and Iraq, and the short-story collection Katy Family (Jackleg Press, Spring 2025). Her fiction has been published or will be forthcoming in Granta, Third Coast, Chicago Quarterly Review, and other magazines. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston, where she received the James A. Michener award for fiction (judged by Claudia Rankine) and the Cambor/Inprint fellowship. She is Associate Professor of English at Lone Star College in Houston.
I stack up the memories of my defeat, one on top of the other, until a mountain of setbacks is facing me. Once again, I am my mother. I am the dreams she had to bid farewell for the sake of a happy marriage, a happy husband, a happy family. I would rather we were miserable — since dreams that don’t live long enough to see the light always turn into nightmares ready to hunt down our peace of mind.
I often observe my mother’s blank face. I wonder in what alternate universe her dreams would have become reality and what she would have had to sacrifice in the process. I wonder if she often imagines a child-free life as her own, if she embraces, when no one’s looking, the possibilities that she left behind, and if she would have had any regrets in the depths of her heart had she prioritized academic success over the mechanized duty of motherhood.
Now that I think about it, almost every single one of my aspirations had something to do with my mother’s miscarried dreams. She wanted to go to med school, to become a university professor, to have a career in writing, to live in the United States. And when none of those dreams came true, I dreamt of doing all those things on her behalf. I sit alone, I wonder and wonder, but I never find the courage to ask her. What if she finds it insulting that I would ever think her life didn’t go as planned? What if she wasn’t even aware of her potential when she settled for a regular job that kills creativity, a slow torturous death?
My mother wrote a whole dissertation about the evolution of Muslim societies when it comes to women’s assumption of leadership roles. She made sure I read her work before I was old enough to understand the dynamics of sexism in academia, before I could even comprehend the weight of being a woman and a scholar — the responsibility and the burdens, the times when giving up feels like the best option at hand, the state of being in the shadow of your male colleagues or in the outskirts of your professor’s vision. My mom’s dissertation made me think that I knew it all, that I’ve officially found the ultimate cheat codes, the road that leads to academic success even when your crippling sense of self feels like the biggest obstacle in your way.
I smiled every time someone reminded me of the similarities between me and my mother. “Even your dreams and life goals are similar” they say, not knowing that it was all too deeply engraved in my conscience, that I had planned every part of this puzzling resemblance that they now praise so effortlessly with words so easy to utter when you’re not the one putting in the work.
My grandmother’s face comes to mind whenever the word resilience graces my hearing. I remember her miscarried dreams too, and when I do, I find myself trying to overcome a strong urge to cry. My grandmother was married off at fourteen, forced to let go of what her once young heart desired. Her brothers grew up to become successful in their fields of study — one is a lawyer and the other is a doctor of medicine. While they worked hard to achieve their goals, she cooked and cleaned and raised the children who came from her infantile uterus. At sixty, she learned to make bitter jokes about the childhood stolen from her, careful not to laugh too hard at what still pains her heart until this day. Her youth a ripe fruit, a blossoming flower, carelessly thrown away.
My womanhood has taught me to live for the sole purpose of embodying the dreams of my female ancestors. Despite all the stories of the unfulfilled desires of the women in my bloodline, I long to dream freely and live my life in service to every dream that got away.
Aya Anzouk is a college student from Morocco, Rabat. She‘s pursuing her higher education in Clinical Psychology and Sociology. She’s an opinion writer for Arabic Post, formerly known as HuffPost Arabi, and an Arabic fiction writer for ida2at and The New Arab. Aya enjoys reading in her free time and is interested in philosophy and history. One of her favorite books is The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord.
The Book of Mormon, questioning the representation of Uganda in the musical:
In recent years, burgeoned by efforts to decolonise education, literature and general popular culture, we’ve seen an increase in critical engagement with classics and their depiction of what is considered as the racialised “other”.
These include Shakespeare’s plays Othello (1603) and The Tempest (1611), Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899) and Camus’ novel The Stranger (1942). However, what is still needed is a greater scrutiny of plays which are currently running — plays which are offering up diversity and inclusion as a facade, and by doing so reinforcing racial stereotypes, rather than combatting them.
You might have heard of The Book of Mormon, a Broadway musical first staged in 2011 and still celebrated today. When I went to watch it, I knew nothing about it other than that it was hailed as “the best musical of all time” and had won a cabinet of Tony Awards. My analysis comes from the fact that I am African myself working on colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial issues. Therefore, the musical was racist rather than humorous to me.
From the outset, Uganda is represented as an undesirable location. Upon hearing their destination, the two white missionaries who are sent to Uganda are not only shocked but also unhappy and jealous of their counterparts with missions in other countries like France, Norway, and Japan.
As soon as they arrive, their belongings are stolen by armed men who terrify them and the whole village, which goes back to what Edward Said (1978) referred to that “the East has always signified danger and threat”. People of the village also laugh when the missionaries ask for the police, which mirrors the dichotomy of order and disorder, developed and underdeveloped.
The staging highlights a gloomy yellowish and dull green landscape, mud huts, dirt , and other disturbing images (a cast member pulling a dead animal around the village, another one pulling a wheel around, and a skeleton of another dead animal kept outside in the open).
These images correlate one of the Mormons saying, “there are a lot of disturbing things in Uganda”. These images differ from the residence of the Mormons in the village with light, a colourful sofa, a board, and books with bright colours around them. This depiction accentuates a dichotomy of “civilised”, “uncivilised”, and “primitive, developed” that implicitly insinuates how the “racial Others” and “white civilisers” are seen and understood.
Other problematic aspects of the play are the stories of rape (raping babies to cure AIDS), circumcision of women, AIDS among the people, militia threatening the villagers, poverty, and violence. However, it did not seem that people were aware of the stereotypes and the racist depiction of people from Uganda while the stories of AIDS among other issues made people laugh in the room.
So how is this depiction of Africa, precisely Uganda, different from other works and depictions that postcolonial and decolonial studies have tried to deconstruct? How is it different from the negative representation of Africa and Africans in Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness that the postcolonial author Chinua Achebe criticised for its racist illustration of Africa and Africans?
The theatre plays an important role in the quest for decolonisation. The Theatre can have a positive impact byraising awareness, educating the public and bringing people together while addressing past and present inequalities.
However, it can also have the opposite effect by emphasising certain stereotypes. Some shows problematically enforce labels using comedy. This idea is referred to as “Ironic racism” which has been criticised in the media for tolerating shows’ absurd racist tropes by actors and comedians.
Jason Osamede Okundaye discussed ironic racism in comedy considering it naïve and dangerous. What is alarming is that racism often hides behind humour. Thus, there are limits to humour especially when it is racist. Moreover, the world is moving towards decolonisation, which means speaking against stereotypes and labels attached and following certain people (in the play, Africa) from the past.
White Missionaries and the colonial image of Africa in the musical:
In colonial times, missionaries were sent to colonised lands to spread their religion and educate the “uncivilised Africans,” while colonised people were seen and portrayed as “primitive”. Frantz Fanon highlighted the role played by the missionaries in colonised lands as calling to the white man’s ways rather than to God’s ways (Fanon, 1967). In the musical, one of the missionaries taught false information to the villagers because he had not read the book himself.
The people of the village are portrayed as naïve and simple-minded in accepting the new religion even when the information communicated by one of the missionaries is an invention. For instance, one of the Mormons convinced the people of the village to have coitus with frogs to treat AIDS. Therefore, the dichotomy thinking of civilised and uncivilised, victim and saviour, white and black (one of the characters was referred to asNicotine), East and West, order and disorder, developed and underdeveloped are strongly and directly accentuated throughout the musical.
The white missionaries are portrayed as the rescuers of the village and its people from their “primitive uncivilised” ways. One of the characters said “the Book of Mormon will do those Africans a lot of good”. The message implies that the two white missionaries and their book are bringing a positive message and way of life to Africans, and that they need it. This mirrors the past through the role played by white missionaries in colonised countries reinforcing the stereotypes that have long followed Africa and Africans.
While the show title centres around the Book of Mormon calling it a religious satire musical, the story centres around the racist depiction of Africa. It emphasises colonial legacies of a set of stereotypes attached to Africa in general, and Uganda specifically (Aids, violence, superstitious beliefs, poverty, rape, primitiveness) that the “white man” can change, and which the show reinforces. It is the image of Africa through the lens of colonialism, which Edward Said (1978) refers to as the “recurring image of the other” (p4).
The show could take place in France, Norway, or Japan. Nevertheless, there is a deliberate depiction of an African country, stressing colonial stereotypes, not challenging them. It was not France or Japan or Norway that was laughed at in the show; it was Uganda.
The arguments presented in this article serve to raise awareness about the reproduction of racial stereotypes in the theatre and decolonise these reproductions. Decolonisation is about depicting and speaking about these issues that are racist,dangerous, and provoking. It is not only the show, but also the laughs across the room and the silence around its racist messages and depiction of people in Africa which is dismissed by people saying “it is a joke”.
Decolonising the theatre means educating ourselves about the past and using it to raise awareness. It is acknowledging how the past, shaped by colonisation, still has an impact on today’s national and international landscape between “the West and the rest”. The theatre can and should be used to combat stereotypes — not reinforce them — and change the colonial narrative about locations and people outside the Western world,decentring white supremacy.
Decolonisation is not only for academics to tackle but also for everyone. Decolonization of the theatre “rests with the people, the theatre audiences”. Depicting and speaking about racism is not only for academics as well as it is for everyone, everywhere to reach a level of decolonisation.
Who is Edward Said?
Edward Said (1935-2003) is one of the pillars of postcolonial studies. He authored several books that are still the starting points for colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial theory. Some of his most celebrated books are Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993).
Concepts and terms:
The dichotomy references in the article come from the representation of the East and the West, self and other, orient and occident in Edward Said (1978), orientalism, as well as the dichotomy of coloniser and colonised others in the work of Franz Fanon. This dichotomy thinking underpins the colonial system at the time as well as the colonial legacies of our time.
Decolonisation’s definition in general can be a contested concept that bridges different foci from Frantz Fanon (1967) questioning the colonial system and structure to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1981) writing on decolonising language and the use of colonial language to Chinweizu decolonising the literature and the mind (1980/1987). However, the definition used here is thinking about decolonisation as a “way of thinking about the world which takes colonialism, empire, and racism as its empirical and discursive objects of study” Bhambra et al, 2018, p.2
For further readings on the subject please check:
Ben Luxon (2018) The Book of Mormon is as racist as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (2002) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature.
Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancıoğlu(2018) Decolonising the University.
Herb Scribner (2020) “It’s Time to Talk About Race and ‘The Book of Mormon’ Musical”
Johnston, A. (2003) “The British Empire, Colonialism, and Missionary Activity,” in Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860.
Udengwu, Ngozi (2018) “Decolonize or Else – Negotiating Decolonization through Popular Theatre”
Sarah Elmammeri is a final year PhD candidate at the University of Liverpool working on refugee and border policies in Europe from a postcolonial perspective. She tackles issues surrounding the othering of refugees and asylum seekers at the level of external, internal, and everyday borders in Europe. She is interested in issues surrounding migration in general and refugee and border policies, specifically colonial, postcolonial and decolonial theory, inclusion, and diversity.
I never need to open my refrigerator to know what produce it houses; I keep a mental file of what I have purchased. For instance, I know that right now nestled next to the long-lived carrots and celery are a single red pepper and a package of cremini mushrooms.
These vegetables nag at my memory because they must be used soon, or they will spoil. Fruit is easier to track; it mounds in changing patterns, visibly, in a bowl on the counter. I bought a bowl from a Signals and Wireless catalog warehouse sale nearly twenty years ago, and since then it has been a focal point of my kitchen. Today I removed a large cantaloupe from it and cut it up; I peeled an orange yesterday, and as I bit each section in half, its sweet, sticky juice ran down my fingers. I will keep eyeing the lemons this week, pondering—muffins? lemon-sauced chicken?
Somehow, I have become a person who plans meals around produce—around a deep-seated fear of wasting. It should not be surprising to anyone that fear leads to oversight—to order. For me, this particular fear manifests as a steady anxiety as I move through each week—even before that, as I shop, agonizing over the amount of fresh goods to buy. Often, I place three apples in a bag, then return one to the display, calculating: how many days will I cut one up for lunch? I weigh a bag of hearts of Romaine in one hand and a bundle of Brussels sprouts in the other—too much for a single week?
I used to plan meals enthusiastically for my three boys and myself, the years we were alone, especially as they reached high school, and I had to maintain a budget. They could eat enormous amounts of food. It was my job to make sure there was enough, that it was affordable, and that it was relatively healthy. I always went to the store with a list of dinner ideas for that week—hearty meals, often pasta-based, that would feed these young men who ate like a crowd — chicken lasagna, spaghetti pie, brown rice hotdish. Buying extra ingredients, especially fresh ones, was a burden I avoided. I could succeed only if I avoided waste.
I made up rules in those days, too, allowing myself permission to buy certain items that were stocked in abundance—say, cereal—only when they were both on sale and I had a coupon. It was never onerous to remember the parameters I set for myself; I was proud of my frugality and practicality.
Now, things have shifted; I have shifted. I go to the store with a list and some vague ideas, but I prefer to plan as I cook. This week, I will make a pinto-bean and vegetable casserole on Monday that will use peppers, zucchini, loads of onions; chicken drumsticks and a potato kugel on Thursday that will incorporate one package of mushrooms hiding in the crisper drawer and the remnants of a carton of sour cream. As the week progresses, I will worry more and more, scour through cookbooks to find the recipe that will allow me to use what I have before it goes bad.
When I wake in the middle of the night, I wonder: What will I do with that red pepper? An egg bake? I experience a strange mixture of triumph and relief as I figure it out, plot to avoid my shame — letting food spoil.
* * * * *
The kitchen of my childhood was not always a happy place. My mother stayed at home with my two sisters, my brother, and me for many years, filling our table with hearty meals she had grown up with on the farm — fried chicken, pot roast, meat loaf. She served what my father wanted, always—never scrambled eggs because he preferred them fried; bacon that was limp rather than crisp. We begged her to make our Sunday frozen orange juice in the blender; we craved the light froth at the top of our glass and, as we kept sipping, the cold tart taste of orange that followed. Though she made it that way sometimes, she seemed annoyed that we would constantly ask.
She did some canning in those days, too. I remember standing next to her, my nose just above the cupboard’s edge, watching her pour hot paraffin onto jars of chokecherry jelly. I sensed she did not like this work; she spoke sharply to me when I asked to have a jelly sandwich for lunch. I knew even then she was trying to be frugal, having watched her peel a sink full of the tiny apples that grew on the tree right outside the kitchen window for a measly pie or two. The thin spirals of peel mounded in the sink, as she turned each fruit in her hand, boring out the bruises, their sweet, cidery odor filling the kitchen. She did the work because she knew she ought to and because she had helped my grandmother on their farm do it as she grew up, but it didn’t seem to give her much joy.
Then, my parents divorced (my father was an alcoholic and a philanderer), and my only brother died — twin tragedies that would change the whole trajectory of our childhoods and family life. My mother had to take multiple jobs to support us, since at the time she had no marketable skills. She’d gotten married at 19, having given up a decent secretarial job and independence, as did many women in the early 1960’s. She had four children in quick succession and had to use her energy to clean and cook and keep us out of her hair. What spare energy she had was spent to defend my father against bosses made angry when he missed work or came in hung over. She had little energy left over to hold my father accountable for his dalliances; the lipstick collars (the worst clichés) slid by with little fuss, until he confessed to my mother that he had carried on an affair with the next-door neighbor couple. That was enough for her, and the Catholic faith she treasured, to permit divorce.
After the divorce, my father rarely paid child support (which we discovered only years later), and so my mother shouldered the entire burden of feeding us on a very strict budget. I wonder if she was as proud of her efforts as I am of mine now.
The divorce changed the way we ate, of course. Dinner was whatever could be made quickly — Kraft macaroni and cheese, Dinty Moore beef stew, spaghetti with Ragu sauce, fried Spam sandwiches. I assumed some of the responsibility for cooking—really, heating—those simple meals because I was interested and because I knew it would help my mother. The mood in our kitchen, not surprisingly, was often lighter without my father and the tension his drinking had brought to the family. But there was still a hint of tension underneath.
We were not destitute, but we were poor. We had enough. Mostly. Sitting around the kitchen table on Sunday mornings, we scoured the newspaper—together, all of us, my mother, my two sisters, and I—for grocery coupons and sale items. Eventually, I shouldered this task of meal planning for the entire family. Trips to the grocery store would be as purposeful and efficient as I could design them—there was no extra money for frivolous food we didn’t explicitly need for meals. I relished the task, took pride in making sure we ate well on our skimpy budget.
Toward the end of the month, inevitably, money dwindled. No more shopping could be done. We ate generic canned chicken noodle soup (with its salty, slightly rancid broth) or oatmeal, sometimes bread and gravy — a dish I despised. I understood that using up leftovers was our only choice, but I swallowed my mouthfuls grudgingly.
Once the beginning of the month came, my mother got paid, and the welfare check came, we’d have a full cupboard — beginning again a cycle of abundance and want that became a familiar element of the landscape of my childhood.
We were not unhappy. Dinners were full of conversation; we cleared the kitchen table and did homework there. A single box of Chef Boyardee pizza mix, embellished with a bit of hamburger, fostered a celebratory mood. We picked up slices speckled with small mounds of meat, bit off greasy mouthfuls, tangy with the flavor of the sauce. A simple bowl of Dinty Moore beef stew over a toasted English muffin satisfied; its gravy scent was overlaid with the sweet, earthy smell of carrots. The glory was not that the food tasted good; it was that we were together, fighting—though we wouldn’t have said it at the time—for our place in the world, in spite of setbacks.
The older I got, the easier it got; my mother gained job experience. She moved into accounts payable and then into credit — work that was both higher paying and more satisfying. It took less effort to make ends meet. She eventually began cooking again, as she transitioned from multiple jobs to just one. She cooked for pleasure now: rich manicotti, affordable sirloin steak — seasoned and broiled –, mashed potatoes, baby peas.
When we three girls were in high school, she bought a dishwasher and had my uncle install it, though that did mean no more nights when my two sisters and I stood at our separate stations—washing, rinsing, drying and putting away the dishes—with music and good-natured bickering our soundtrack for this simple work.
* * * * *
The kitchen of my present is a perfect room. It is large and square, painted recently a pale gray green with one wall—the one above the windows that face the front yard (with its bird feeders, hosting cardinals and chickadees)—painted a rich lavender-blue for contrast. Cupboards line three walls, including a tall pantry cupboard.
This is the room that sold the house to me. I spend most of my time here—it’s where the music is, where guests gather. It’s where I scan cookbooks and magazines, looking for creative ways to use the vegetables in my crisper drawer.
This morning, as I diced that red pepper I was so worried about for scrambled eggs, I smelled its sweet acidity and felt a deep satisfaction with my life; I did not know I would end up here, in such abundance. I lead a life of privilege, one that still takes me by surprise. As a child, we rarely had fresh vegetables, except for potatoes and carrots from our garden. As I chop, I feel enduringly grateful for what I have.
Out of abundance comes vigilance. I must not waste what I am lucky to have. To have enough also enables me to give, to extend my good fortune to others.
My son Nate stopped by yesterday because he was sick and needed to borrow a thermometer. He took his temperature in my kitchen, then pocketed the thermometer because he needs to make sure he’s fever-free for work. Before he left, I also managed to place in his hands a few bottles of non-alcoholic beer I bought for him for a recent family gathering. I offered packets of tea for his cold, and a lemon — too good in the tea — for the vitamin C.
On rare occasions, a stalk of celery browns and wilts, or a bowl of leftover gravy or spaghetti sauce (always homemade) molds in its dark corner of the refrigerator. I throw the celery into the compost bucket—a good save since most food that goes bad in my house can be saved in some way. If I had a dog, I’d save even more: I’d feed him whatever I couldn’t eat, as my grandmother did on the farm.
I have wrestled my demons and won, warded off the certain shame that comes with failure. The reward is the wrestling. I keep my convictions in a world of ease and waste, with muscular effort.
Tracy Youngblom earned her MFA in Poetry from the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers. She has published two chapbooks of poems and two full-length collections, including her most recent, Boy, set to release in February 2023. Her work has appeared in journals such as Shenandoah, Big Muddy, Cortland Review, New York Quarterly, Potomac Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and many other places. She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry, most recently in 2017.
We pronounce them “luckies,” which always made sense growing up because we felt so lucky to eat them. It was their salty richness, their fluffy potato innards, their cascade of oil soaking the paper towels ensconcing them on the dinner table.
There were other delights at Hanukah every year, from sweet gelt munched far too early in the day, to strips of corned beef I adorably termed “Hanukah bacon,” to the classic gefilte fish only the adults looked forward to. But latkes, for our ever-secularizing family, were the reason for the season.
It was my aunt, Sherri, who guarded the latke recipe. As a teenager and young adult, Sherri had been a wayward rebel, eschewing her parents’ warnings as she threw herself from one reckless adventure to the next. But in her mellow middle age, she had come to adopt a respect for tradition that even Tevya from Fiddler on the Roof would have been proud to see.
Sherri diligently grated potatoes every winter, carefully sprinkled matzo meal into the gloopy mess, and unfailingly watched for the telltale browning on the little pancakes. Her partner, Ron, stood by her side at the stove, piling the sizzling latkes on the paper-towel-laden plates. Early on, I learned that if I helped dish out the spoonfuls of batter into the boiling oil, I might be able to snag a latke or two fresh off the stove.
And as the years went by, I also gradually learned the family recipe for latkes. I learned the delicate but entirely unscientific proportions—one to two potatoes per person, two onions per ten potatoes. I learned how to identify just the right consistency of the mush—it should be gloppy, but not runny. And I learned how to navigate the all-important oil that brought the whole ceremony together, turning spoonfuls of lifeless goop into morsels no one could put down—it had to be sizzling, but not popping. That was the key.
While my three younger siblings washed their hands as soon as potato-peeling duty was over, I, like my aunt before me and who knows how many eldest daughters before us, hovered in the kitchen learning the family lessons.
But would it be enough to make latkes on my own?
I wouldn’t have a choice, moving from Pittsburgh and its rich multicultural heritage, to a Montana town with just over 20,000 people and no synagogue.
I wrung my hands as I drove from outlying town to outlying town, scouring each small grocery store for the crucial Manischewitz ingredient. I eventually thought to google matzo meal, and my kind Jewish forebears directed me to the exact aisle where a tub of the essential item could be found.
I carted my treasure back to my studio apartment, along with my eggs, onions, potatoes, salt and, of course, oil. I bought a cheese grater and sat down to work, pulling the trash can beneath me like we had always done at home. I sawed with a small knife and missed my aunt’s Rotato device.
My fingers bled, potato chunks flew, and I found myself missing the camaraderie of peeling — the familiar arguments over music and the competitions over potatoes peeled. I glanced at my new menorah, still gleaming and free of wax. It had been a gift from my mom when I moved to Montana.
I wrung my fingers out after the unending chore of grating. I mixed in all of the ingredients and, with more than a little trepidation, began to pour the oil.
My first spoonful sizzled sharply, and I winced. Hot oil splashed out of the pan at me. I reached for another dollop, and then the fire alarm started blaring.
I panicked and grabbed the entire pan, yanking it off the burner and running with it out onto the apartment lawn. I threw the hot pan into the snow and fanned at the smoky air with the door. Eventually, the alarm stopped sounding, and I gingerly picked up the pan.
With a fan blaring and the door propped open to the cold December air, I carefully ladled out the rest of my batter. I let the latkes cool in the soaked paper towels and seasoned them generously with salt before I dared try one.
They looked like my aunt’s, they smelled like my aunt’s, but after six hours of nonstop work in the kitchen, I couldn’t bear it if they didn’t taste like my aunt’s. I selected a cooling latke from the top of my pile. And there it was. The salty flavor. The flaky texture. As good as I had tasted in my grandmother’s small apartment in Pittsburgh.
Glowing, I eagerly wrapped up the rest and piled Tupperware upon Tupperware into my green VW Beetle. I careened into my office, my arms laden with latkes, ecstatic to share my triumph with my coworkers.
“Latkes,” I called out breathlessly. “I made latkes, everybody.”
The newsroom stared at me. No one made a move to get out of a chair. I remembered how my family always pronounced Yiddish and Hebrew words differently, from latke, to kebosh, to l’chaim.
“Lat-kuhs,” I deliberately enunciated. “There are lat-kuhs here.”
Still, no commotion.
I wasn’t deterred. I picked up one of the Tupperware containers and carried it to my nearest coworker. He just looked at me blankly. Then the next just stared, and the next, until I found that not a single Montanan in my forty-person newsroom had ever heard of a latke.
Bewildered, I tried to explain their potato-filled flavor without dumbing them down to simple potato pancakes. I couldn’t help but start to panic as I saw the steam on the sides of the Tupperware begin to vanish, signifying the beloved latkes were cooling at an alarming rate.
“Try one!” I insisted.
My friend Jake, a blonde-haired Idaho transplant, lumbered his way over to me and my sprawling latke collection. I babbled about applesauce and sour cream as he took his first bite.
“A little oily,” he noted as he chewed.
I grinned and grabbed one for myself. “I know.”
Bret Anne Serbin is a journalist in Montana. Her nonfiction has been featured in Deep Wild Journal and is forthcoming in Archer Magazine. She graduated from Swarthmore College with a degree in English. She’s originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
We have crossed the Big Island of Hawaii to the western Kohala shore in search of a sandy beach and surf. It is raining hard on the eastern shore, in Hilo, where we are staying for two weeks. We haven’t come this way – over seventy miles of two-lane roads – because of the rain. No, the rain is agreeable to us: the rain is warm, the air is warm, the rain comes and goes like a Top Ten Hit every twenty minutes on the AM dial. Our condo on the eastern shore is on the third floor of an old concrete building, and our generous lanai is perched over Carlsmith Park, where the flowering jungle is kept back by the pool wall. Beyond the wall, tiny, clear, blue inlets weave in among the palms and acacias, and turtles break all the state’s laws about staying ten feet away from tourists. This is what I imagine when someone says “paradise.”
We have come this way, west over the saddle road, because paradise and all its rocky cliffs, all its turquoise and white water, waves humping unyielding lava flows, are not the best place to take a dip, to boogie board, or to stroll along the sand. Hapuna Beach is one of the island’s few sandy beaches, over on the western, older shores of the island where time and water have tamed the lava. And so, we have driven over in an old, faded, dirty Honda Civic rented from a local boy named Tony who surely knows his wrecks. We are standing under a shade tree with round, shiny, dark green leaves the size of lunch plates. Stu is holding a boogie board and scanning the sea.
But there are no waves on Hapuna Beach today. Stu shrugs and tosses the boogie board on the picnic table under the tree, and we walk out across the beach. For the afternoon, we read and walk and read and swim. Stu sits at the picnic table after a swim, sees something in the sand, and wiggles loose a piece of flotsam with his toe. It’s a teaspoon, dropped by some recent picnicker. He sets it on the bench and wanders back to the sea.
The sandy teaspoon is upside down on the bench. Something about its shape is familiar to me, and as I reach to turn it over, I know what I will see: a few curlicues and a small flower stamped into the cheap stainless. The very same pattern on the flatware my parents bought with Green Stamps in California and that I used every day of my childhood. A few pieces even came with me when I left home and are still somewhere in our camping equipment in Oregon, sixty-three years after my parents handed those Green Stamps over to the gas station attendant and took home the service for eight, serving spoon and butter knife included.
The spoon, like so much else in Hawaii, is not from around these parts. The spoon is an example of what’s thwarting me in my Don Quixote-like search for the local and the real – the people, the food – on this big, fecund island. Which, oddly enough, I’ve been thinking about a lot on this particular afternoon, sitting under the tree with the lunch plate leaves, reading MFK Fisher’s Serve it Forth. When I travel, I come full of expectations. Not that I will shop in boutiques or put on a tan. I come looking for local food and local people I can talk to about the food they eat. Just as Fisher in her book is traveling the centuries, looking to make sense of how and why we eat what we do, I want to understand the food of Hawaii, and why and how Hawaiians eat it. I want to experience it from the inside out.
When we arrived at the condo in Hilo, I opened a cupboard to find two boxes of Jell-O left by the previous renters. Not an abomination exactly, but a curious purchase in the land of papaya, passion fruit, and macadamia nuts. Why did they buy Jell-O? And why didn’t they eat it? Maybe they visited the big Hilo Farmer’s Market one morning and brought home a papaya, which made them forget entirely about the strawberry banana Jell-O in the cupboard.
It is hard to override our baser tastes, driven by convenience and habit. Our condo Jell-O eaters, the spoon in the sand, they’re why I am tilting unsuccessfully at this windmill, searching for local food, and the old ways of eating it. All 1.5 million Hawaiians and the eight-to nine-million tourists who visit here each year are consuming mostly imported food. Only about twenty percent of what Hawaiians eat is actually produced in the islands. In 2013, food imports here were almost $7 billion of Jell-O and other pantry staples, $8 million in bread, pastry, and cakes, $16 million in beer, $19 million in frozen beef, and $23 million in tuna. The number-one fruit import? Oranges. Yet nearly every neatly trimmed yard we pass is home to a tree that groans under a canopy of oranges. So many oranges that paper bags full of oranges are often left at park entrances for our pleasure.
As I sit thinking about the power of local food for local people, I watch the Hapuna Beach gardeners raking up the fallen leaves and the larger-than-life, almond-like seeds that have fallen from the trees with the big green leaves. Could these be the Malabar chestnuts I’ve read about? After we return to Hilo, I read up on Hawaiian trees and discover I have spent the afternoon under a Sea Almond, and that its seeds are a prized nut in India. Here in Hawaii, where they import eighty percent of their food across thousands of miles of ocean, they are swept up and tossed away.
There are farmers’ markets here on the Big Island every day of the week. This is a positive sign, no? Farmers, coming together, selling local food. But I had been warned before we ever arrived that most of the food sold there was bought wholesale by the vendors from large produce suppliers, much of which is not even grown on this island or any of its brothers here on this chain of lonely isles, the farthest from other land masses of any islands in the world. Some vendors offer a backyard papaya or long beans from their garden, but the rest of the items on their tables come right out of Dole boxes, sitting in plain sight, and are parceled up into convenient tourist-size bags, meant to go back into that tiny fridge in the resort hotel.
Yes, there were passion fruit, lychee and rambutan. And I was happy for them, and even for the common, familiar things like eggplant and peppers. A banana grown here, or a fresh pineapple is full of the flavor we never taste on the continent, 2,500 miles away, after a long ocean voyage en route to mainland cold storage.
But I wanted more, things I had read about and longed to taste: tree tomatoes, egg fruit, ice cream beans, Malabar chestnuts, ohelo berries from atop the volcanoes. I asked about them, or about particular things I did not know or understand, and a veil came down over the seller’s eyes. They pointed out that papaya was five for $3. What else did I need to know? A busy market is not the time or place for history and cooking lessons. I left, a few somewhat familiar items in my bag, but an ache in my heart to know more, taste more, to be for a moment not a haole, a cracker, a gringo, a honky. But for just a few days, a part of the āina.
Āina. It’s what Hawaiians call the land, but it is more than that. It is more than the Italian notion of terroir, which is merely all the physical things — land, earth, soil, sun — that impart flavor to a particular wine. To Hawaiians, the land is alive in a very human sort of way: “… it can do things, want things, and know things. [Hawaiians] are the offspring of a union between the earth and sky, making the āina a direct relative,” writes Judy Rohrer in her book, Haoles in Hawaii.
All Hawaiians needed, the āina provided, and then Captain Cook showed up in 1778. Suddenly, āina was not enough. In less than one-hundred years, ninety-five percent of native Hawaiians had disappeared, ravaged by diseases and our ways. “This powerfully demonstrates” writes Rohrer, “how colonialism can be seen as a form of genocide in Hawaii.”
Now the islands are dependent on the mainland and foreign markets (mainly Indonesia and Thailand) for mattresses, cars, the oil to fire their electric generating plants. And yes, stainless steel flatware, oranges and Jell-O.
Maybe I want what is inappropriate for a haole to desire. Or for a honky to want in New Orleans, a gringo to crave in Oaxaca. My own whiteness means I am forever shackled to the only food culture most of my kind can experience and most of it does not interest me: processed fast food and the diminution of the world’s cuisine. Think French cassoulet recreated as franks ‘n beans in a can. I can never make rabbit as a Frenchman, or gumbo as a Cajun, or poke as a Hawaiian. And yet, I want to go deep, make it part of my marrow. I, who am a symbol of another kind to Hawaiians. I am the spoon, I am the Jell-O. I am the descendant of Captain Cook.
So, I bash along against the tide. I arrive. I observe, I ask questions, and I teach myself. I paw through Hawaiian cookbooks in the Hilo bookstore, and set aside in a stack on the floor, unwanted, the books by celebrity Hawaiian chefs and the recipe collections by haoles much like myself. Where is the good stuff, the original ways? There is nothing else left on the shelf.
I come home to the condo from the Maku’u Farmer’s Market on Sunday with taro and pumpkin blossoms. I dice the unfamiliar pale purple taro and boil it until tender. Is this the way? I don’t know, but I know tubers, and this seems right. When the taro is fork-tender, I drain it, let it cool, mix it with local goat cheese, and stuff the mixture inside the pumpkin blossoms. I dredge them in flour and egg and flour again, and fry them, and serve them up on a salsa of peppers, avocado, papaya, shallots, and cilantro. They are not Hawaiian, but they are very good, out on the lanai, near the turtles.
Kathy Watson is a chef and writer. She is the lead chef of the Chefs Collective at Ruby June Inn in Husum, WA. and was the owner and chef of Nora’s Table in Hood River, OR. She recently completed her first novel, Orphans of the Living, and is searching for an agent. Her earlier journalism career included six years as editor-in-chief of Oregon Business magazine. She lives with her husband, writer Stu Watson, and wonder dog, Satchel, in Hood River. When she is not cooking or writing, she runs the hills. She can be found on her website, Hunger Chronicles, and on twitter at @KathyisHungry1 .
I have always known that “Black is beautiful” even before I became aware of the popular phrase that is now a cliché. Black is beautiful because Black skin is the most durable of all human skins on earth. Its pigmentation is resistant to many skin diseases. It’s a covering that slows and belies the scourge of aging
Have you ever seen a senescent White man? Mr. Joyman is my paramount boss and owner of a flourishing bakery in Port Harcourt. He is sixty-seven, with a frame slightly bent not by sickness, but old age. A sixty-seven-year-old African is still fully erect. A sixty-seven-year-old African is still blessed with a tough, smooth skin. And some, still boyish! The African blood is a beauty that displays its soldiery in the war against virus and bacteria. Have you ever wondered why in the past the colonisers from the West were easily afflicted and sent out of the world by malaria, cholera, and dysentery? Have you ever wondered why the newest afflicter, coronavirus, has killed far more white blood than a black blood? That is the answer.
Africa also had another beauty, a greater one in the past. I am a voracious reader. Sundays free me from my bakery’s assignments. We do bake on Sundays, but as a supervisor, I have the privilege of staying off work. It is a privilege that affords me the time to read books about different facets of life. I am more a fan of literature and history. I have a bulk of these books, more so than any other kind, in my mini library at home. It is from my home library I draw out this past beauty of Africa, written in poetry:
“Rejoice and shout with laughter
Throw all your burdens down,
If God has been so gracious
As to make you Black or Brown.
For you are a great nation,
A people of great birth
For where would spring the flowers
If God took away the earth?
Rejoice and shout with Laughter,
Throw all your burdens down
Yours is a glorious heritage
If you are Black, or Brown.”
Gladys Casely Hayford, an African American woman titled her poem, written in the 1930s, “Rejoice” because she wanted Africans to be proud of a glorious heritage, a great birth, and a great nation. Casely Hayford makes me realize that Africa had an impressive past, unlike what the likes of former President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, wants me to believe. The Frenchman gave a speech on July 27, 2007 at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal in the presence of an audience of 1,300. He said: “The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history…They have never really launched themselves into the future. The African peasant, who for thousands of years has lived according to the seasons, whose life ideal was to be in harmony with nature, only knew the eternal renewal of time… In this imaginary world, where everything starts over and over again, there is room neither for human endeavor, nor for the idea of progress.”
Unfortunately, or rather, ironically, Sarkozy said this at a center of learning named after a great Africanist, Cheikh Anta Diop. Diop was an anthropologist and a historian. He was among the first whose works dug out the glorious history of Africa hundreds of years ago. The first Black man to point out through his findings that the ancient Egyptians were Black. Yet his findings are still debatable on the table of scholars and historians.
While some researchers and archaeologists believe the Black race entirely populated ancient Egypt, others see the ancient land as multiracial with the Black man existing among the Hamitic and Semitic inhabitants; Black pharaohs also sat on the Egyptian throne. Other historians give a flat no to the concept of Black inhabitants in ancient Egypt. But the doubtless truth is Africa has a history of abundance. The Sarkozys of this world attempt to deny that and reduce our ancestors to peasants who were only in tune with their natural surroundings, and dead to ideas and exploits.
The Francoise-Xavier Fauvelles of this world will continue to counter the fallacy with: “People like to think of Africans as more rooted in nature than culture. But history teaches a different lesson: of kings, diplomats, merchants.” And the Mutabarukas of this world will continue to educate with his reggae song, “Great Kings of Africa.”
Ironically, Anta Diop’s namesake and fellow Senegalese, poet David Diop, gave a glowing tribute to Africa of old during his short life on earth. I can still remember Diop’s most famous poem titled, “Africa:”
“Africa my Africa
Africa of proud warriors in ancestral savannahs
Africa of whom my grandmother sings
On the banks of the distant river
I have never known you
But your blood flows in my veins
Your beautiful Black blood that irrigates the fields … “
My library holds a history book called The Story Called Africa, written by Maina Maikasuwa. Maikasuwa, through extensive research and quoted works from other researchers, Europeans and Africans, unearthed an authentic African story. It is a balanced story of “gory” and glory. I heard the book won a prize a few years ago.
But my former favorite books on Africa were: Toward the Decolonization of African Literature by Chinweizu Ibekwe and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney. Now my favorite is the voluminous work by Amanga Habinomana titled The Unveiling of Timbuktu.
The Rwandan author chronicles the gradual rise of Timbuktu, a sort of city state in the ancient empire of Mali. Initially this African city was a large storage house for salts and other goods. It was a waiting area for traders to choose goods for trading at big markets. Travelers coming from Europa, Arabia and the Americas brought gold to trade for salt. Some of these traders chose to make Timbuktu their permanent residence, and before long the village became a small town and, in turn, a city.
By the early 1300s, Timbuktu had become a hub, a center of attraction, and the pride of the Malian empire. People came from across the continent. Europeans were awash with rumors of Timbuktu’s abundant wealth and resources. It was said that, in 1324, Mali’s sultan-leader, Mansa Moussa, travelled for pilgrimage to Mecca with 60,000 slaves and servants and with an abundance of gold. During his visit to Cairo in Egypt, the price of the precious metal dropped precipitously. Explorer Ibn Battuta from Arabia visited the famed city 30 years later, and his descriptions of the bustling city stoked the flames of European imagination.
During the period, Europa (as Europe was called then) was plagued by the ice age and the bubonic plague. Listening to the constant impressive tidings about a faraway African city spurred a dream they wished to achieve. They dreamt of streets lined with gold in Timbuktu. The city was a sort of African El Dorado.
Can you imagine that? White folks longing to visit an African city? Wow! Timbuktu was at that time, what London, Dubai or New York means to Africans in our present days. Many Western historians will never broadcast this African history of glory.
I also read that the peak of Timbuktu’s greatness occurred in the late 15th century. And guess what the prime commodity in the city was? I know many will shout out gold! But it wasn’t; it was books! Hundreds of scholars studied at the almost 200 maktabs (Quranic schools in Mali). These scholars worked as scribes, which increased the number of manuscripts in the City-state. Visitors to the city, especially scholars were specially welcomed and entertained in the hope that they would share their knowledge and books.
I read a Nigerian newspaper that has a column squarely dedicated to African Literature and history. The columnist quoted from the words of an American intellectual at California State University, Brent Singleton. Singleton graciously, or rather, factually corroborated Habinomana’s Unveiling Timbuktu, about the importance of books during the golden day of the land. He said, “The acquisition of books is mentioned more often in Timbuktu than any other display of wealth, including the building and refurbishment of mosques.“
Like Timbuktu, the Nok civilization is also a reminder of Africa’s beauty. The old-time civilization was located in the southern part of Kaduna state, Nigeria. The people of the land had perhaps the finest sets of terracotta in the world. It’s no wonder, bulks of these sculptures, stolen by thieves, are still nowhere to be found.
The Benin civilization, unlike Nok’s, has good news about her stolen artifacts. Not too long ago, French President Emmanuel Macron demanded the return of twenty-six artifacts that were stolen by the French colonial power in 1894 from the kingdom of Benin. The stolen goods have been returned and were received by Oba Ewuare II, the current Benin monarch in the modern day Edo state of Nigeria. In 2014, his predecessor had received two artifacts taken from the Benin kingdom in 1897 during an invasion by British soldiers which resulted in the monarch going into exile. But why steal from a people considered inferior and crude? Well, perhaps, that will be a discussion someday.
Africa had produced great minds in the past and has produced new great minds today. These include Soyinka, the first African man to win the Nobel prize; Wangari, the first African woman to win the Nobel prize; Okri, the first African to win the Booker prize; Evaristo, the first black woman to win the Booker prize; Adichie, for her feministic revolution and impressive mastery of writing stories; Kperogi, for his unusual mastery of the English language – an exceptional wordsmith; and Weah, the first African to be crowned world footballer of the year by FIFA in 1995 and the only African to date.
Africa has produced firsts worldwide. Ethiopian Haile Gabreselasi, was the first human being on earth to run a marathon with a world record time of 2:03:59 in 2008. African American Ben Carson became the first doctor in the world to perform the first successful neurosurgical procedure on a fetus inside the womb, the first to dissever a set of twins conjoined at their heads, and the first to develop new methods to treat brain-stem tumors.
“Africa’s history has been badly distorted,” says a friend of mine whom I visit. Like me, he is passionate about the history of our Africa. Often times, when we converse, our conversations unconsciously revert to history. I visit him on a Sunday with two loaves of bread as a gift. Bassey is a chronic consumer of Joyman Sweet Bread. I use the adjective “chronic” to describe my friend because he eats bread and drinks tea to a state of disgust; at least, that is how I see it. I have never seen anyone else eat bread and drink tea for breakfast, lunch and supper. And when he wants to add something different, it is either bread and beans, or bread and akara, or bread and moi moi, or bread and butter. But the day I met Bassey adding okra soup, I understood he badly needed redemption from his addiction. He had sliced the Joyman Sweet Bread into two halves and smeared it with two spoonfuls of a thick okra soup.
“Bassey, what on heaven and earth are you eating?”
“Okra pie,” he replied gleefully with a mouthful of the odd combination.
“Okra what?” I asked with a repulsive mien mixed with something like a smile.
“You don’t know what you are missing. This is hyper delicious and nutritious.”
It would have been a great disservice to my pal, going to his house without Joyman Special Bread. Ha ha ha! So, we sit on the only settee in the living room which also doubles as the bedroom. His bed is directly opposite his settee. We are still full-blooded bachelors. The need for living for a two-room apartment for family has not arrived. I confess I rented a room and a parlour a few months ago to free myself from the harassment of my immediate boss who kept chiding me for being a supervisor living in a single room. “Don’t you know you are the only supervisor in the world living in a single room?” He would mock.
The reason I said our history has been badly twisted,” Bassey continues, “is because of two things. First, because of the racist slur unleashed on Bernadine Evaristo last year by the BBC when she became the first Black woman to win the prestigious Booker Prize. Without this age of information technology, her achievement would have been deleted, twisted or buried forever like the achievements of some African greats in the past. No one would have known her as a Black writer of worth. She would have become hearsay, a rumour, a myth.
I listen attentively to my friend’s analysis even though I remember everything with more detail. It was in October 2019 that Evaristo’s historical feat was bruised by the racist utterance of a presenter on the world’s most popular radio station, the BBC. I still remember every word uttered as the presenter said, “Now, this is a bit different from the Booker Prize earlier in the year where the judges couldn’t make up their minds, so they gave it to Margaret Atwood and another author, who shared the prize between them.”
The first Black woman to win such a coveted prize as the Booker was contemptuously reduced to a nameless “another author” while her white co-winner was named. The degrading comment instantly sparked a public outcry. Evaristo, herself, understandably provoked, tweeted to her huge fans on twitter. She said disappointedly, “BBC described me yesterday as ‘another author’. How quickly and casually they have removed my name from history – the first Black woman to win it. This is what we’ve always been up against, folks.”
The BBC apologised and stated that their presenter’s words were not intended to belittle Bernadine Evaristo. Whatever. The damage has been done.
“My second point is,” Bassey continues, “how can a race be labelled as inhabitants of the Dark Continent? Do you know what that means?” Of course, I know, but I shake my head to listen.”It means the race is full of shit and negativity. It means the race has never been blessed with exploits and adventures; therefore, it has no history. A fat, smelly lie peddled by white racists.”
Bassey puffs out carbon dioxide from his nostrils; a glum appearance dampening his visage as if the lie and mischief are newly inflicted. As if he is the new Kunta Kinte. Ha ha ha! That is Bassey, always an emotional being. I release a throaty cough to pave the way for me to speak, but Bassey speaks on. He says,”But we must, just like Chinweizu and Habinomana, continue to kill the lie and rise to speak about our truth: Our undiluted African story, a story of worth. We must rise up in spite of the heavy burden of falsehood and hatred on our heads bent to pin us down forever. Maya Angelou told us to rise above our enemies’ lies. Remember her poem, ‘Still I Rise’?” I nod. The first stanzas of the poem captured what I just said now. She says:
“You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”
I leave Bassey that evening with a truth he agrees with. The truth is that we can only rise if we love ourselves and unite, like Bob Marley’s “Africa Unite” encourages. After all, part of the injustice of lies and slavery meted out on us were rooted in the inharmonious postures we assumed and the lovelessness reeking out among us. We may be playing the second fiddle now, but we must have a hidden plan to become an equal economically with the West. We need a new Sankara, Lumumba, Sisulu, Biko, Che, Brutus, Gani, Bitek, Mitshali, Zik, Rodney, Mandela, Kenyatta, Sawaba, Tosh, Marley, Macaulay, Awolowo, Funmilayo Kuti, Balewa, and more; we can attain this feat.
Langston Hughes, a great African American poet, talked about this equality years ago in his poem, “I, Too”. He said:
“I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody will dare
Say to me,
‘Eat in the kitchen,’
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed!
I, too, am American.”
We must be proud of who we are to achieve this equality. We must be proud of Africa to beautify Africa. Stephen Adinoyi’s “My African Pride” echoes that pride when he says:
“Oh Africa, so proud to be yours
Your colour on me, my glory
And I vow not to bleach
Sweet Africa, wish every day I could make merry
For the graceful natures of your abode
Low I bow sometimes to kiss your lovely soil
Which beneath lie my ancestors
Proudly, I cherish my differences from other races
My colour is my crown
No reason to frown
Loving the way I was born
Oh Africa, with you no boredom.”
Finally, it’s necessary to say this: the West is not the eternal enemy of Africa. We have gained some things from the White man. Their advancement in science and technology is one of the sweet pies they have shared with us. If we are fortunate to become strong economically, we mustn’t rustle our feathers on their faces in their presence. But rather, stretch open arms of harmony to them. The world badly needs this.
Again, Stephen Adinoyi says it well in his poem called “Black or White,” about this harmony I desire. He says:
“Open your arms
To Black or White
It’s no mistake
For that Hand to make
Black and White
Able to make
All Whites
All Blacks
But He makes Blacks and Whites
His discretion makes the difference
Yet in the difference lies sameness
Inside the White
Lies the replica of the Black
Colour is no crime
Cos the content is one
All fashion so fine
By the greatest Divine
Open your arms
To Black or White“
Stephen Adinoyi is a writer of prose and poetry. His poetry and a short story have won multiple prizes. His published novella is titled “Teen of Fifteen.” He is a fellow of the Ebedi Writer Residency. His writing has been published in various newspapers including New NigeriaNewspaper and The Sun. He has been published in numerous journals and literary journals including Ebedi Review, and Ake Review. His writings have been anthologized in several publications including Fireflies, After The Curfew, and Footmark. He is the Chairman of the Association of Nigerian Authors, Kaduna Chapter.
When we come to the round table of literary discourse and are asked questions about our identity as writers of African extraction, what do we say in response to the query that questions our identify as African writers?
Who is an African writer?
Many contemporary writers from Africa, particularly those in the Diaspora have debated over this.
So that we do not peel off the cicatrix and bring back injuries from edgy debates of the past on this subject matter, you would expect that I tread with caution. You would expect that I do not dig deep or say more than should be said.
As a writer whose focus consists primarily in telling stories of the human condition, I will be writing not only through the prism from which I observe as an insider, but also from that of fellow writers of African extraction.
Writers from Africa presently in the Diaspora form the chief part of this discourse.
Going back to the cicatrix metaphor, to say that this topic isn’t ideal for contemporary discourse, or that it has become stale, would mean missing the mark.
Questions of identity are always with us. The problem has always been that we sometimes fail or refuse to acknowledge them, especially when new discourses take centre stage. They are always here but they keep changing from one form to another.
Aaron Bady, in African Writers in a new World: An Introduction, offered insight. He sought for an answer to the question posed above by conducting a series of interviews with African writers on Post45, “a collective of scholars working on American literature and culture,” (as written on the Post45 website, http://www.post45.com).
According to Bady, some of the writers interviewed on Post45 dislike the categorisation, “African writer…some were indifferent to it, and some accept it without particular enthusiasm.” In his article, he made reference to Binyavanaga Wainanina’s satirical piece, How to Write About Africa, which brings a sense of urgency to the misplaced understanding of the African continent common amongst westerners. The article also refers to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TedX talk, Danger of a Single Story, where Adichie pointed out the danger of telling a particular set of stories until it becomes a stereotype. In her popular talk, she says, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.”
A good example of this stereotypical craving in our stories is the set of stories in the early 2000’s in Africa that portrayed Africa as a poor continent, the practice of which unfortunately hasn’t phased off completely in the present. In fact, the term “poverty porn” was formulated to categorise such kind of stories that tend to disregard other aspects of the African continent. Binyavanga’s satirical piece, in its rib-cracking flow, illustrates this very well:“Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the ‘realAfrica’, and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel queasy about this: you are trying to help them to get aid from the West.”
Many African writers have lambasted this overindulgence mentality, this unnecessary dwelling on poverty-related issues in our literatures even to the point of smearing the totality of a work with it in such ways that you find it hard to know whether the perpetrators of this are approbating, excoriating, or analysing.
It is important we put things in proper context. So, I go back to the business of questioning. Who is an African writer? Is there an “African writer”? Is he or she the one who lives in Africa and writes about Africa?
Is he or she the one who lives either in Africa or the Diaspora and writes mainly about Africa and African-related themes in total exclusion of other such themes in places other than Africa? Indeed, there are numerous questions. And while the questions look simple, this assumption may be quite misleading. Let me make recourse again to Bady’s article.
Bady referred to the 1962 Conference of African Writers of English Expression which had in attendance the likes of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Grace Ogot, Christopher Okigbo, Lewis Nkosi, Kofi Awoonor and several other reputable writers of the time.
The Conference examined the questions: “What constitutes African literature? Is it literature written by Africans, literature that depicts the African experience? Does African literature have to be written in African languages?”
This Conference was held in the 1960’s. Considering the varied phases of events in present times, we realise that the issue still lingers – the issue about who the African writer is. Should the Black writer born in Texas whose Nigerian parents migrated to the US and who has never been to Nigeria not see himself as an African writer?
I think it is one thing owning up to being an African writer; it is another choosing the dynamics of your thematic engagements over time.
Theme plays a very important role and can be an influencing factor in arriving at the issue of perceived identity. Predicated on theme is the environment where the writer finds himself.
British-Nigerian writer, Ben Okri, presently residing in the UK, explores themes relevant to Nigeria and his British environment where he has lived for more than three decades. In his 1991 Booker-Prize-winning novel, The Famished Road, he utilizes a plot that is influenced undoubtedly by African stories on spirits. Over the course of his writing career, Okri has written works informed either by his Nigerian heritage, or his British nationality.
I will proceed with few more examples, but not of a detailed nature, since this is a brief essay that seeks only to scratch the surface concerning who the African writer is. The example of Adichie, whose works have explored Nigerian and American settings as well as other places, is a well known one— a testament to the mutable nature of cosmopolitanism in a rapidly changing world.
American-based Nigerian novelist, Chigozie Obioma, explores a Nigerian and a Cyprian setting in his second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities. Beyond just exploration, these settings also serve as stimulus for writing that dives deep for true, cultural penetration of the setting referents.
The ambiguity surrounding the definition of who an African writer is still lingers. And while it does, the world keeps evolving, the language of culture and commerce amongst nations is bridging, and common grounds and divisions are taking place simultaneously.
II
The areas of focus on discussions of identity keep shifting from generation to generation.
Looking back at early-twentieth-century West Africa, we observe the efforts of Senghor, Cesaire, and a few other intellectuals of the time who created and popularised the Negritude movement in Africa and the Diaspora. While it was an intellectual movement that sought to popularise African values, features, and similar considerations, at their core these juxtapositions aimed at the concept of identity.
During this period, especially after the Second World War, there was a big wave of nationalism blowing across the African continent. Although, African nationalism, being more a political ideology, sought to liberate African nations from imperialist subjugation, it also served as a conduit for defining identity, whether at national or continental levels.
From the early twentieth century, when nationalist fervour began to gather momentum, to the middle of said century, when the wind of independence swept through much of Africa, writers pushed the identity debate constantly.
If we look kaleidoscopically at the concept of identity, perhaps we may be forced to consider overarching political interpretations of it. In this wise, history offers the millennials of today, me included, surprises and counter-surprises knowing that some of our Nigerian intellectuals in the 70’s and 80’s canvassed vehemently for a socialist state. Beyond that, they wore the socialist toga as part of their identity and revealed it consistently in much of their works during that period. Samuel Ikoku and Tunji Braithwaithe are two prominent intellectuals who come to mind in this regard.
The affinity shared between our findings from history on the one hand, and what Nigerian writers think about identity in contemporary times shows the protean nature of identity. There is also another set of writers who are not comfortable with the African writer descriptor because on the face of it, it appears limiting—as it connotes that they are restricted to writing about certain themes only. We keep seeing changes in the views of writers from both divides.
III
Many popular Nigerian authors writing today have at one time or the other been to Western nations like the USA or the UK, or were born and bred there, or born in their respective African nation but later relocated to these Western nations. The effect is that Western ideals rub off on them over time. Because some writers passed through the educational systems or publishing industries of these nations, it becomes difficult for them to separate themselves completely from such influences.
These writers embed in their work plot narratives or themes that include both their adopted Western nation and the African nation of their cultural heritage. This juxtaposition of plot or setting, involving both the Western and African nations, explains why the immigrant narrative has become a well pursued theme. This is a personal preference which I think every writer has the liberty of acting upon. I do not think it is an indulgence. It is a response to an ongoing synthesis of different worlds in the writer’s mind, or a response to the association or dissociation of various aspects of different worlds within the writer’s experience.
We see a quintessence in Abdulrazak Gurnah, the 2021 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, whose work consistently portray themes of displacement, exile and colonialism in settings that are predominantly along the coasts of East Africa.
For the sake of clarity, I have not in any way tilted my opinion to any side of the divide– whether it is wrong for these writers to refuse to be tagged as “African writers” or for them to readily accept it. I should add another category, the set that are “indifferent.”
Some of these writers who refuse to accept the tag “African writer” may do so because they see it as a limiting description, something that boxes them into a fixed spot with little or no alternatives. To push this argument further, I assume that they look at the whole issue from this angle: If I am called an African writer, it probably means most of my readers will think I write only about Africa and nothing else. The radical effect of such thinking portends that these writers have nothing to say about literature from other parts of the world.
It is imperative for the 21st century writer to write about events happening in the world today, not just politics, but socio-economic matters as well, not just culture, but religious matters, too. To expect the Nigerian writer to write solely about African-related themes would be a sheer display of myopic tendencies in a global setting where boundaries are perpetually making way for commonalities and hybrid thinking.
For example, if there were another September 11 (not that we wish for another),Nigerian writers irrespective of their “Africanness,” should not dodge such issues. They must air their views. I believe what comes first is who we are as humans. Humanity is the basic unifying factor amongst us all. Another example to pursue the ongoing argument is the current COVID-19 pandemic in which virtually all nations of the world have been affected, African nations not excluded.
IV
While we know that the global economy is spreading technology across continents at an astronomical rate, we know too that this sort of diffusion is also happening in politics, culture, and other vital indices within nations. The news in California announcing the release of a new Apple iphone arrives in all parts of the world at the same time.
We have witnessed the undeniable power of social media activism. The sheer power for social engagement through a simple hashtag underscores the capacity of social media in aggregating mass views. In 2014 when over 276 girls were abducted in Chibok, the #bringbackourgirls hashtag surfaced on Twitter. Although it was started in Nigeria, more Americans shared it online than did Nigerians.
Universities in the West are now including the study of literature written by African writers, whether resident on the Mother Continent or in the Diaspora. In addition to educational institutions, there are literary institutions that allow for collaboration amongst writers from different parts of the world. This allows for a gradual whittling down of polarities across national lines and racial focal points.
V
Linguistics, just like culture, has no rigid rules for the interpretation of the meaning of certain words or phrases. A word or phrase might have shades of meaning in several world languages. The same can be said of the phrase, “African writer.” That a writer is called an African writer doesn’t mean he or she writes only about the African Continent or issues pertinent to it; neither does it mean he or she is thoroughly or partially precluded from cosmopolitan literary discourse. One of the interpretations that can be drawn in an attempt to “deconstruct” that phrase could be this— that the writer was born in Africa or the writer has parents who were born in Africa or are Africans, or that the writer was not born in Africa but contributes significantly to African discourse through his writings. Another possibility is that the writer at some time in his or her life lived in an African nation and wrote about Africa. The possibilities listed here do not cover the field sufficiently.
This brief piece is meant to stoke the base of this often-ignored topic. What I will not agree with is the argument that there is no such thing as an African writer or African writing based simply on the pretext that Europeans do not use the term European writer. Neither do I think it is right to argue we have no need for the descriptive tag because we live in a globalised world where the dynamics of a person’s place of origin is gradually paling.
Living in a global world does not do away with our past or our histories. Western nations, home to some of our most popular and influential African writers, all place a premium on their cultural legacies, whether in art or literature. We, too, have a past from which we have walked into the present. To deny our identity will be too grave an act despite the fading of boundaries and the flourishing of hybridized thinking.
It is left to the writers who are the subject of this piece to speak for themselves at the round table and state whether they are comfortable being called an African writer or not.
Onis Sampson is an award-winning Nigerian writer, lawyer, and singer currently recovering from a singing hiatus. He was recently longlisted for the 2021 African Human Rights Playwriting Prize. He was a finalist in the 2019 Inspire Us Short Story Contest for his short story, An Unassuming Woman. His poems, short fiction, and nonfiction have been published in Ake Review, Lunaris Review, Vinyl Poetry, Erbacce, Praxis Mag, World Reader, Tuck Magazine, Authorpedia, African Eyeball Anthology, African Writer, Kalahari Review, and elsewhere. You can find him on twitter with the handle https://twitter.com/OnisSampson
Decolonial Passage is honored to announce the nominations for next year’s BestSmall Fictions Anthology. This list includes writing published from January to November 2021. Congratulations to the nominees!
Image Description: painting of an amorphous, colorful figure that sits in and seems to be part of a wheelchair — two black wheels are present, but otherwise it is unclear exactly what part is the figure and what part is the chair. The figure seems vaguely humanoid in that it “sits” in/on/around the wheelchair, but has no discernable limbs, head, or other physical features. Instead, the figure’s multicolored form twists and branches out from its trunk.
Too often, disability and mobility aids are often regarded as separable from disabled people, or worse, something that exists outside of, or in opposition to nature and goodness. This painting rejects that ableist premise and instead frames a wheelchair as essential to and integrated with the divine and good.
I think that the way many disabled people (including myself) personify their mobility aids is fascinating, and I took inspiration from that phenomenon while creating this piece.
The colors and style of my work are guided in part by my disability; I don’t have the motor skills for precise work and need higher-contrast colors for vision reasons. This has shaped my art to emphasize bright, varied colors as I embrace big, blobby shapes. Watercolors are well-suited to this approach. In this painting, I also did some strategic water dripping to make the colors of the divine’s “body” flow up and out and into the ether.
I was deliberate in titling the piece TheDivine rather than ADivine, not because I think that there is only one or because I claim to possess such a singular truth, but because I want this portrayal to sit solidly in opposition to the white, male, cis/straight, nondisabled god that is so often elevated and granted the “the” when others are simply an “a”– much in the same way that writing about a normative/privileged god is considered “theology” while other areas of study are “queer theology,” “Black theology,” “disability theology,” etc. This god in/of a wheelchair is not a novelty or token, but an equally valid and plausible understanding of divinity as any other.
Wheelchairs provide freedom — however individual and/or limited by inaccessibility — to many disabled people. And insofar as divine beings represent or create freedom for some people, it felt appropriate to me to portray a god in/as a wheelchair.
the Decolonial Passage 