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Showing posts from June, 2020

Unsolicited Opinions

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 ...

We are all racist.

We are all racist , stop fighting it. Just accept it. Remember when we were little and we would watch all these movies about how a Yoruba mother didn't want her son to marry an Igbo woman or how an Ijaw man didn't want his daughter to marry a Hausa man? Sometimes, they didn't even have to be from different tribes, they could be of the same tribe, just from different villages. You'd hear things like "don't marry him, our village doesn't marry from that village". In my hometown in Edo state, there are certain villages where I'm not allowed to marry from even though we're all from the same local government, even though we speak the same language. Tribalism is something that runs so deeply, so freely in our veins that it's almost now part of our culture, here in Africa and yet, we're always so quick to call the white man evil and spit on him for treating black men as slaves or lesser beings. A lot of us have forgotten that some of thos...