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The Necessity of Return: On Years of Ritual Killings in Nigeria
In a dream on one of my first nights in Iowa, I was weeping into a river. The river was flowing swiftly, washing away many people. In the logic of the dream, I knew their faces—they were the same...
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How Tochi Eze Found Her Writing Voice in Igbo Folklore
I was seven years old the first time I learned you must not make water angry. My teacher, Aunt Edwina, was our housekeeper. She’d come from the village to our home in Lagos with no more than a bag of...
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From Lagos to Calgary the Resource Curse Condemns Nations to Corruption and...
In 2016, Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced, “We have developed a case of oil addiction in Saudi Arabia.” This was an understatement; the modern state was created solely by oil, its economy financed...
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How a Novel by Mildred D. Taylor Helped Glory Edim Understand Being Black in...
When I glanced out a window and noticed that the sky was turning dark outside, I poked Maurice and told him to gather up his things. I carried the well-loved hardcover of Little Women to the library...
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Writing Between Worlds: Navigating My African and American Identities on the...
If you had known me when I was much younger, and asked how I identified, I would have told you that I was Black. This would have been my way to acknowledge my Blackness in America, being that I was...
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How Catalyst and Iskanchi Press Are Bringing African Writers’ Work to a Wider...
I met Kenechi Uzor a few years ago when he was new to publishing and launching his press, which focuses on publishing African writers. My own company, Catalyst Press, which also focuses on publishing...
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Paradise Lost: How the Transatlantic Slave Trade Helped Fuel Violent Conflict...
The male and female warriors who stole the liberty and destroyed the town of those trafficked to the United States on the slave ship Clotilda launched their assault before dawn. The townsfolk were...
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Rape As a Weapon: A Tragedy Both Ancient and Modern
On a brilliant blue-skied July afternoon in Stratford-upon-Avon, swans were gliding serenely on the river, while I sat in the dim auditorium of the Royal Shakespeare Company and watched Titus...
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When Writing a Novel Bridges a Gap Between Mother and Daughter
I was deep in the throes of a slow-moving depression, feeling frustrated with a job I had held for seven years, and reeling from the disappointment of a first novel that debuted without the critical...
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Emmanuel Iduma’s Reckoning with the Silence, Inheritance and History of the...
Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right...
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How Nigeria’s Ideological and Ethnic Map Reflects Its Enduring Divides
A video, recorded on May 26, 1967, begins with a noiseless pan of faces: mostly men who are gathered, it seems, in front of the State House in Enugu, the capital of Nigeria’s Eastern Region. They’re...
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Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ on Capturing What it Means to Live in Contemporary Nigeria
This week on The Maris Review, Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ joins Maris Kreizman to discuss her new novel, A Spell of Good Things, out now from Knopf. Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your...
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How Stories Create Individual and Collective Pasts, Presents, and Futures
My cousin Galaxy’s baby fell out of a two-story window and survived. They called the baby a miracle child like they called my brother a miracle child when he was thrown from a motorcycle only to live....
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Beyond the Colonial Gaze: Readings From Contemporary Nigeria
As an author I remain passionate about telling the stories of Black characters from an historical perspective. It’s my way of showing how Black people were so much more than popular slave narratives....
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Hiding My Sexuality to Preserve My Life in the Nigerian Church
At eighteen, I was in college and I got ordained as a minister of the evangelical church, the Redeemed Christian Church of God student chapter in Enugu, Nigeria. Sunday mornings began with waking up as...
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Romeo Oriogun on Life as a Poet in Exile from Nigeria
Romeo Oriogun speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his poem “The Sea Dreams of Us,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. In this conversation, Romeo talks about his life as a poet in...
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Bridging the Gap Between My Two Cultures with Fictional Foods
“They were all hungry at lunch-time. They went back up the cliff-path, hoping there would be lots to eat—and there was! Cold meat and salad, plum-pie and custard, and cheese afterwards. How the...
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All Shades of Iberibe
Kandudi opened her eyes to a flood of light, a welcomed contrast from her recurring dream of traipsing through the dark woods, tailing the cry of a baby. Her head throbbed. It was worse at her right...
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On the Politics of Language in Nigerian Literature
In the back of Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún’s new book, Ìgbà Èwe, a Yorùbá translation of Childhood, written in English by an American poet, academic and philosopher, Emily Grosholz, Ngugi wa Thiong’o writes,...
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The In-Between World: On the Mythology of The Famished Road and the Literary...
“I felt on the edge of reality.” These are the words uttered by the narrator of The Famished Road as he recalls his venturing to a location that looked like “a strange fairyland in the real world.” The...
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