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...

  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...