and it is true, to touch water this consciously
is to be touched by a mother pulsing with the pulse of dreams that sank with paperboats

I am not close to ending, yet, but I listen 

for what speaks to me without voice; violence; 

God

After a week in our house, furious Aunty Coreen left. She’d located a Professor friend who taught at the University to host her. The Professor friend telephoned our house for help finding Uncle, but Daddy spoke to her at length without committing to anything apart from lists of names and places. Even Mama, in the years of being married to Daddy, had never heard these. Finally, speaking in Kiswahili, Daddy told the Professor about Aunty Adelaide, and that he and Mama didn’t want to break his new marriage. He had taken so long to settle, they said

When he took the hand, the three of them began to ascend. Nothing to be done by anyone but to watch as the sun glowed behind her head like an apparition, and the breeze caught and billowed the hem of her loose wrapper.

That Saturday, we did not enter the market complex but waded through the makeshift stalls in the compound looking for the most compelling displays. When we settled on a shop—after being tugged and pulled and snatching our hands back from sellers who wanted to make a sale—we sat on a wooden bench inside and the young man began to show us his stock. A few minutes later, our eyes started to water. In a blink, we were coughing and tearing up and the shop had become cloudy. We exited quickly. Minutes later, news started to filter in that a trader from whom we refused to buy released some sort of gas into the shop to stop our purchase. I am still shaken by this memory.

1 I take my coffee black, no sugar, with a few ice cubes and a squeeze of lemon. That wasn’t always the case. I used to like it how my grandma does—warm with too much […]

Ecologists believe that all organisms are connected in a complex web to each other and the material resources that sustain them. Sometimes, the web is literal, the entanglement of roots and fungi found in mycorrhizae. Many humanists adapt the idea to the context of human relations: I am because you are. My existence is predicated on yours.

I think it is important for every writer to define what “winning” is for them. They have to discover what gives them fulfilment or value because writing, the act of putting words on paper for oneself or for others, is quite different from the industry that has sprung up around writing. 

A Short Talk is a series of short interviews and conversations with writers, editors, artists, and cultural workers across Africa and the Black diaspora. It is conceived as a companion (not an abridgement or summary) […]

It may be said that we become most aware of the bonds we share when those bonds are threatened; we realize how powerful they had been all along when they become strained. A woman misses her father most acutely when he is no longer around. A man in exile yearns with nostalgic ache for his home country. A marriage, like a manacle, chafes when love grows cold. All of these are fertile nodes of inquiry. But what of our untroubled bonds, what of the relations in which we are at ease? Here Achebe offers us an Igbo proverb by which we advance: “Where one thing stands, another will stand beside it.” There is something against which ease rests, something it stands beside. Literature must illuminate those as well.