Memory is supposed to preserve the important things. Yet sometimes it keeps the one thing you wish it would let disappear. I was in my second year at university, working part-time as a gym instructor in the evenings. There was a woman in one of my classes. She was troubled. I could see that much, although I didn't understand what I was seeing. She asked to speak with me. Then she said six words “I want to kill my baby.” I had no idea what to say. I did not know what had happened before she said it. I did not know what was happening inside her. I did not know whether she was asking for help, confessing something, testing whether someone could hear her without judging her, or trying to put into words something she herself could not understand. I only knew that I had heard it. And then I went home. Life continued. University continued. Years passed. But her words stuck to me. Years later, a television scene opened a portal I thought I had closed. In early 2021, I was watching a televi...

What My Grandmother Knew About Peace I grew up adjacent to this violence. Not inside it. Adjacent. Close enough to hear its frequency. Close enough to feel its draft. But protected, somehow, by a woman who never raised her voice to answer it. My grandmother had a way of being in rooms where criticism lived and refusing to feed it. I watched her do this for years without understanding what I was seeing. I thought, at first, that she was simply deaf to it. That age had softened her hearing, or her pride, or her need to be right. I was young. I believed strength was loud because every example of it I had seen was noisy. Defensive. Armed with comebacks and evidence and the urgent need to correct the record before it solidified into truth. She had none of these. When they spoke — the relatives, the neighbors, the ones who mistook protection for pampering, who confused kindness with weakness, who believed that love given freely must somehow be illegitimate, she did not leave the room. She di...

Some beginnings do not welcome us into life. They welcome us into the scars that will one day teach us how to live.  There is a kind of silence that becomes so familiar it feels like furniture. The empty chair at the table. The single hand at visiting day. The form that asks for a name your heart has learned not to speak. We do not talk about these wounds enough because they are so common they have become invisible. We have built entire languages around avoiding them. "Fatherless." "Abandoned." "Broken home." Each word is a diagnosis that misses the living. Each label is a cage built by people who have never had to live inside the story they are naming. But what if the wound is not the end of the story? What if it is the first sentence written in a language we spend decades learning to read? I have been thinking about scars. The actual, tissue-deep marks that remain when something has been torn and, against expectation, refused to stay torn. The body does...

  The Silence After Rejection There is a particular silence that follows a rejection. The slammed door, the angry email. The quiet kind. The sort that settles in your chest when you realize a door you longed to walk through will not open. I know this silence well. March 2025, I submitted Shadows of the Cradle to Ankara Press. The esteemed romance and women's fiction imprint. The champion of African voices. The gate I had dreamed of entering since I first imagined myself as an author. Weeks later, their response arrived: polished, professional, and ultimately a no. "Not quite right for our current list." I revised. I resubmitted. The door remained closed. I turned next to Brittle Paper. The influential literary platform that has shaped African literary discourse for over a decade. Their response came with encouragement I clung to like a lifeline: "Try again. The story has merit." Three words that both sustained and haunted me. Try again. As if the story were a...

  The Dream That Became Veins of Light I was in my early 20s when the dream came. I stood in a house I did not recognize, watching a woman whose face I could not see. She held out her hands. The veins beneath her skin were not blue. They were luminous — pulsing with light that seemed to carry memory itself. She did not speak. She did not need to. The light was the language. When I woke, I knew I had been given a story I did not yet understand. That dream became Veins of Light . The Tradition African literature has never treated the dead as gone. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart carries the weight of ancestors in every proverbs. Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes listens to the voices that arrive in dreams. Ben Okri's The Famished Road dissolves the boundary between living and dead until they are simply co-present . The ancestor is not memory. The ancestor is voice . And voice does not die. But for much of my reading life, ancestral memory was treated as metaphor — a literary dev...