Where do you consider home and why?

Home is many things and many places to me—a physical space, a people to whom I belong, a community I can rest my head. Perhaps the two most significant in my life currently are Ughelli, Delta State where my maternal family is from, the land of my closest ancestors. And home is also New York City where I live and the place I’ve spent building a career and a life that is my own.

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

Belonging. Food. Love.

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

I get homesick for Ughelli often, for the taste of fresh banga, for being around people who understand not just my history, but the history that precedes me. I get homesick for a culture that I am a part of yet sometimes have become an outsider to. 

What is your opinion about brain-drain?

Brain-drain seems to be the consequence of the lack of progress on African development more than anything else. I am arguably a person who contributes to brain-drain living in the West currently, so I’m conscious of that, but when I examine the political, economic, social, and cultural structures’ lack of progress in my home country, I am left with a question: how do you create a society, a country in which people are willing to stay because they believe there is adequate opportunity and state that is forward-thinking?

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

A space that is clean, a space by a body of water, a space that has lots of greenery, a space that is neither too quiet nor too loud, these are my favourite spaces to work in. But I am also a journalist and regardless of space, one of the lessons of that work is that work can and must still be done.

What is your preferred mode of travel and why?

If I could walk everywhere, I would. I don’t enjoy driving and have avoided having to do it for most of my adult life. Laughably, I don’t mind being driven. Planes over cars if I must choose but trains over both.

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?

          I’m not quite sure but likely dreams that are formed in childhood perhaps.

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?

Absolutely not. I think humanity has done enough damage on one 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?

I am hoping to bask in the aura of some of the brightest African minds and just honestly have a good time.

What does Africa need right now?

The continent and its countries likely need very different specific things. But with climate change already ravaging communities, we need to be executing a plan that aids in the survival of people and places, where possible. This needs to be done simultaneously as we grow stronger economies and political structures, and an Afro-futurist development of personal liberties that allows true freedom for all people, especially those marginalised one way or the other by the state.