Is This Us? The Many Holes in Nigerian-American Portrayal of the Nigerian Experience | Damilola Oyedele

Is This Us? The Many Holes in Nigerian-American Portrayal of the Nigerian Experience | Damilola Oyedele | Essay

A few weeks ago, as I watched Yvonne Orji explain Nigerian slang to her audience, feelings I couldn’t immediately name rose in me. In a 12-minute vignette for Vanity Fair, Orji broke down the sometimes unexplainable, always hilarious sentiments behind Nigeriannisms like ‘wawu’, ‘tufiakwa’, ‘ashewo’, ‘yansh’ and other slangs. As I watched, I tried to […]

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The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

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