Where do you consider home and why? 

Outside: breathing with the open cosmos and exploring free nature. There, I feel myself belonging to a larger swathe of possible being than I do in the crumbling shelters and social dramas of the cityscape. The machine of modern civilization has isolated humanity from natural spaces and the essential energies they provide to the human body and soul. Inside: a room where my spirit can find meditation and my body, rest.

List three words or phrases that come to mind when you think of home. 

Safe in sound. Love-enveloped. Ship.

Have you ever been homesick? Tell us the circumstances and how it felt. 

I have never really felt at home, queerly embodied as I am, in Nigeria. Early on, I longed for home in some other country or otherworld, but now my homesickness is towards our nascent futurity, a yearning for harmony between species and universal systems of liberation that work to expand individual and collective possibility.

What is your opinion about brain-drain? 

A symptom of our national disease, not the actual problem. We can’t force or ask those who have the chance to live fuller lives elsewhere to remain in a failed system, in the name of patriotism. The brains are draining towards systems that value and nurture their dreams.

In what way does your physical location impact your creative output? 

Explicitly. I grew up in Lagos. I’ve written in a mode of survival my entire career (thus far) due to the constraints of space, bending around noise and the tug of basic needs to make stories. I am curious to see the stories I will tell in a less chaotic environment.

What is your preferred mode of travel and why? 

The okada—when the road is free and smooth, the purity of momentum can be quite affecting. 

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? 

Sigmund Freud theorised on parental projection, and its effects on the personality of the adult their child would become. We are all mirrors of our parents in some way, carrying pieces of them everywhere with us. It is said that we are often drawn to partners that exhibit characteristics that we first noticed (or didn’t notice) in them. “freudian dreams”, to me, whispers of the inescapability of parental presence or absence in the lives we live and the people we come to love, no matter how far we go away from home.

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? 

This is interesting. Earlier this year, I wrote a science fiction novel about an AI utopia that blankets West Africa (for the Lagos 2070 Project), and a Martian colony is one of the features of this new world. I personally wouldn’t go to Mars as I’m too claustrophobic for interplanetary space travel. Also, the Earth is yet to be known in all her fullness.

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? 

I have worked the festival as a volunteer and then, I felt the behind-the-scenes rigour that went into making the event(s) flow smoothly. I have also been an attendee and observed a global array of disparate artistic energies and thoughts come together for exchange and to find common ground. As a guest, I simply look forward to witnessing the then and there.

What does Africa need right now? 

This feels like a question for an essay. Let’s see—ecoconsciousness, ancestral healing, a decentralisation of political spaces, worldbuilders, and, new indigenous thought (as it relates to the nearing horizon of technological advancement and discovery.)