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Writing

Writing

GETTING REAL ABOUT MOVING BACK

My friend Tolu Ogunlesi recently wrote a witty and cynical piece offering a few words of wisdom to ‘we’ repatriates or returnees as we have been termed in recent times. I really shouldn’t be using the words ‘We’ because frankly my foreign accent has long disappeared and so has the relevance of my ‘Oyibo’ degree. […]

Writing

Sour Grapes

They say I take a lot from my father. The love for words, simplicity and even thriftiness. He always had big books. I could never really understand any of the words in the books. There was a long row of encyclopedias on the living room shelf. He spoke with very robust vocabulary. It was always […]

featured, Interviews, Writing

LOLA SHONEYIN ON FREEDOM, FEMINISM AND POLYGAMY

By Wana Udobang Lola Shoneyin is a poet and novelist. Her collections of poetry include All The Time I Was Sitting On An Egg and Song Of The Riverbird. Her novel, The Secret Lives Of Baba Segi’s Wives is a tragicomic tale of the four wives of a Nigerian patriarch. The critically acclaimed Baba Segi […]

featured, Writing

WOMEN MOVING FORWARD

By Wana Udobang It has been six months since my return from Davos, and Davos was all and more that I was told it would be. It was a consortium of some of the most powerful minds, smartest innovators, influential business people and policy makers in our world today. Nothing prepares you for the Davos […]

featured, Writing

THE S WORD

By Wana Udobang My friend Saratu and I were seated on my couch engrossed in one of our random linear conversations. This time around, we were both gushing about our newfound love for Taiye Selasi, the photographer and author whose fiction debut The Sex Lives of African Girls made Granta’s “F Word” issue. We found […]

featured, Writing

WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT

  Gomez is lying on the floor, curled like a foetus. His head placed on Bisola’s lap as she kneads her palm into his temples. Someone else is squeezing his toes as he muffles sounds between clenched teeth that I can only make out to be something like, “Harder Harder”. He can barely move. I […]

featured, Writing

ON ART,MOTHERHOOD AND BIPOLAR DISORDER

By Wana Udobang The year was 2007 and I was a final year student inEnglandliving in a predominantly white town called Farnham when I discovered Bassey Ikpi . It occurred during one of my long night stretches of illegally downloading movies off the internet and watching hours of Russel Simmon’s Def Poetry Jam footage on […]

featured, Writing

INTERVENTION

By Wana Udobang As far back as I can remember, my weight issues have run a circle above head like a halo of insects underneath a florescent light. I was placed on my first diet at six and by seventeen I had been through a fair assortment of diets. I can comfortably say the experience […]

featured, Writing

TO ANY BIDDER AT ALL

By Wana Udobang The walls of my mother’s living room are littered with photographs, photographs of all of us five children and my niece Ellie. One photograph in particular I find intriguing that it still has a space on the wall. It is a portrait of my family, including my mother and father. In the […]