Break room here 🛝

_︎︎

^{The map here shows the part of Enugu where my family lives.

Enugu is where I, my parents, their parents and parents’ parents... are from.}

^{Consider taking a seat here.}

Press play.

^{Eddie Okwedy’s song is a celebration of life that takes us to Enugu in 1970 when the Biafra war ended. It’s a patient celebration of live, a graceful nod to the complexity and chance that makes us possible. Survival is a style.}

Sometimes, I marvel at life... my four grandparents, my father, all their friends I’ve met, surviving the Biafra war. My mother born just after the war officially ended and began unofficially... I think about the war a lot, and have been thinking about it a lot since 2015, when I did a research project on it and decided it would remain a private matter for me. Most people around me go about it like it’s a private matter anyway, for good reason too. So I don’t know if they’re thinking about it as well.

But in the open, I think about other collective hauntings. The plane crash in 2005 that took my brother’s earth life. The tyrannical ways we sometimes hold one another. The legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and British colonialism, not as ‘what they did to us’ but as ‘what many people did together’.

Recently though, I found that love can persevere beyond grief, that there can be a place beyond grief.

Here’s me/my work in the press:

2023

Abebi AfroNonfiction Award, The Guardian
First Draft Interview: Immaculata Abba, The Republic Journal

2022

Review of Wahala Dey short films screening at Film Africa festival, Nourishment Film Group London
7 Women You Should Know Who #BreaktheBias Everyday, SOAS University

2020

Q&A, The #BlkGaze

^{On my bedside table:

Lost and Found by Kathryn Schulz}

last updated May 30, 2025