Where do you consider home and why?
Home isn’t a place. For me, it’s a feeling. Home is wherever I feel free, at peace and accepted. Home is the people I choose to love.
List three words or phrases that come to mind when you think of home.
Peace, freedom, love.
Have you ever been homesick? Tell us the circumstances and how it felt.
I never have. I miss people, not places.
What is your opinion about brain-drain?
That it’ll continue to happen unless we appreciate our own.
In what way does your physical location impact your creative output?
In the sense that I’m more creative when my mind is at peace and when my environment is friendly.
What is your preferred mode of travel and why?
Is this a trick question? The answer is, of course, books. I also love air travel because it is fast and everything is nicer in the sky.
In her debut collection of poems Home Coming, Sonia Sanchez’s writes:
“i have returned \\ leaving behind me \\ all those hide and \\ seek faces peeling\\ with freudian dreams.”
What does the phrase “freudian dreams” mean to you?
The things we crave, what inhabits and shows up in our unconscious mind are the things around us. In the words of Eddie Iroh, “What the eyes do not see, the mouth does not water for.”
The mission to establish a colony of humans on Mars is becoming a realistic proposition. Would you agree to be one of the founding members?
No, thank you. I’ll cheer from this planet.
This is the 10th anniversary of Ake Arts and Book Festival. If you have attended this festival before, please tell us what was special about your experience. If you have never attended, what are your expectations?
During Aké Festival, I’m like a kid in a candy store. I’m still in awe that I get a period of cultural and literary immersion with some of my favourite people. Nothing beats this feeling of community. That is the most special part of Aké.
What does Africa need right now?
Africa needs a lot of things right now but the most important as far as I am concerned is that it needs to be a place we can be proud of.