‘Write Something Every Day’

Our questions are italicized.

My mom taught English and Literature and loves to collect books. So, I grew up surrounded by tons of African and non-African books of fiction, poetry, mythology and history. Books like Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood, Second Class Citizen and Destination Biafra, Mariama Bâ’s So Long A Letter, and Zaynab Alkali’s The Stillborn and The Virtuous Woman shaped my understanding of the things women were and are still facing in Nigeria. I particularly enjoyed reading Mabel Segun’s My Mother’s Daughter and Sorry, No Vacancy; and I read Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard and The Brave African Huntress countless times.

I also read a lot of African classics; from Cyprian Ekwensi, Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, Doris Lessing, Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo, Flora Nwapa, Camara Laye, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Elechi Amadi, Ousmane Sembene, Chukwuemeka Ike, Ferdinand Oyono, Nyengi Koin, Karen King-Aribisala among many others. My all-time favourite book growing up was The Mysterious Ebony Carver by Uyi Ibizugbe. I also enjoyed reading a book called Time for Adventure, which was about a group of children who embark on a space adventure. Both books are out of print now.

I read a lot of non-African fiction as well, including the work of H.G Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, C.S Lewis, Enid Blyton, Salman Rushdie, Jules Verne, Steven King, Agatha Christie, George Orwell, H. Rider Haggard, etc. A book that shaped my childhood was My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell; it was a funny book about islands and animals and was like nothing else I had seen. I read a few books that were age inappropriate now that I think about it. I read Marie Corelli’s Vendetta and Sorrows of Satan, Maryse Conde’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem and a lot of Stephen King growing up. We read widely in my family. There were very few books in my mother’s collection that were out of bounds to me and this freedom to read and explore fiction and non-fiction really shaped my early ideas. I thought I would be a writer of fiction but that changed when my dad gave me a book about international refugees and migration when I was a teenager.

I don’t think I would rewrite any of the books I have read. However, if I could, I would give the female protagonists in Buchi Emecheta’s stories the good karma that they deserved. Happy endings are underrated, and I would love to see more happiness in what I read, especially in books about African women.

I usually try to find good or useful information in the things I read. Nevertheless, the last piece of work I ‘disagreed’ with was a UNDP report titled ‘Informal Justice Systems: Charting a Course for Human Rights- Based Engagement’. The report conceptualized informal justice as rooted and enforced via traditional, religious or customary frameworks and specifically in post-conflict contexts and with economic development as the end result of informal justice. In this conceptualization, traditional rulers, religious figures of authority, and cultural tenets are central in the establishment and implementation of informal justice. I disagreed with this aspect of the report because informal justice is found in spaces that do not necessarily fit into a post-conflict, customary or religious box. Informal justice arises in refugee camps, undocumented migrant communities, stateless communities, slums, displaced communities and other spaces that face exclusion from the formal protections of the law and the state. In these spaces, informal justice is not a means to an end. It is an end and the only option available to members of these communities. There is a lot to learn from these communities about legal consciousness and mobilization. My research in China and Nigeria focused on this type of knowledge and expanding the discourse on informal justice to include different types of communities in the Global South.