Since I've Been Gone...

... not a whole lot has been going on for the eternity three months I've been away. 

In case you missed it, my short story 'Long Hair' was published in the latest issue of Per Contra. Below is an excerpt, and you can read the full story here.

When Jennifer first joined our school everybody asked her all the time, ‘Jennifer, are you mixed?’ ‘Jennifer, is your mother from London or America?’ Jennifer liked it when the other girls asked her these questions; you could tell she was the proud type. She would laugh and say yes to everything: Yes, I am mixed. Yes, I was born in London. Yes, my mother is related to the Queen. But we all knew she was joking. We had seen her parents – they were both fair but they were not white. 

All the girls liked Jennifer but I used to look at her with side-eye; her type of hair needed an explanation. Nigerian girls don’t have this kind of long hair just like that and for no reason. We pay for her type of hair at the market, and then we pay more at the salon so they can fix it in for us with thread or glue. Then we wear the hair for six weeks so that the money we spent on it doesn’t feel wasted. And when it starts to itch we beat on our heads like drums, because everyone knows your fingers can’t reach your scalp when you’re wearing a weave.

Also (and this is some serious throwback), for six weeks in the months of May and June I travelled Nigeria with a team of fellow artists - writers, photographers and a filmmaker - on a project by Invisible Borders tagged 'Borders Within'. We blogged about our experiences on the road trip here.

Here, I write about my anxieties travelling to Maiduguri; and here's a post about fear and our hotel in Calabar getting robbed; and here I experience my hometown Asaba with new eyes.

Happy reading!

*tiptoes back into oblivion*