The thing about depression in an African home is that you can never say it out loud. It's not something you give life to, you don't speak it, you don't breathe it, you don't dream it, you don't even think it. You swallow it with your eba and gulp it down with water, you bury it and burn it the way you burn used sanitary pads. Having depression in an African home means that you need to find a realistic reason to explain why you can't possibly make your lower limbs move faster when your father asks you to get him some water or when your mother asks you to fetch a broom from the kitchen. You'll learn to blame your incessant migraines on physical stress and you eventually learn to stop talking about them because you really can't be stressed everyday, can you? As for your highly irregular sleep pattern, you learn how to deal with it and not let it affect your duties, because how could you possibly explain that during the day, your brain wants nothing more th
It's become increasingly hard to practice your art the way you want to in this world of ours, much less in a country like Nigeria where everyone wants to control what the other person is doing. If you're not doing it the way your neighbor wants you to, then you're doing it wrong. If you're not doing it the way the vast majority wants you to do it, then you're most definitely on the wrong path. It's heartbreaking and terribly frustrating. Once you're an artist or a celebrity of some sort, everybody expects you to live your life a certain way, the way they would live theirs which is practically impossible because we're all different and we can't all do the same thing. I decided to talk about this because the amount of backlash I've received over the past few weeks has been alarming. I recently started a poetry series I intend to compile and publish soon titled, "Dear May (Letters from June)", where I write a poem everyday for the month