I often talk about the period when I lived in Nigeria for the first time as an adult because it revealed something fundamental about my perspective. Before then, my knowledge of Nigeria came secondhand—from family, college, and the media. I believed that because my parents were born there, and I had been given an Ibibio name, I somehow intrinsically understood my ancestral homeland. Living there quickly challenged that assumption. I saw that I, too, had been caught in a single story of my understanding of Nigeria. And I believe that many of us in the diaspora, in our fight to be seen as full people in the West, can sometimes forget that our perspectives can also flatten the experiences of those we seek to connect with on the continent. It’s a quiet tension we navigate, one that brews beneath the surface as our storytelling meets the realities of people who actually live in these countries full-time, in ways we may not fully grasp.
Even before I lived there, I knew Nigeria had a thriving literary scene—stretching from Ibadan to Lagos, Abuja, and Kaduna—where writers gathered formally and informally to share and critique their work. Open mic nights hosted by the Abuja Literary Society were legendary: packed rooms, sharp feedback, and audiences unafraid to challenge a line that didn’t land. There was a reverence for the written word, and a collective commitment to sharpening one’s craft into something that could illuminate a life, a generation, and stand the test of time.
The same rigor and critique I witnessed at open mic nights were also present in book discussions, especially when analyzing novels by African diasporic writers from the West. One organizer who led many literary events told me that when those of us in the diaspora write, we’re often not wrong in our understanding, but we tend to write to find ourselves, without deeply engaging the economic and linguistic realities of the people. He noted that Africa often becomes a site for spiritual reclamation in our narratives—we don’t recognize that those living on the continent may not share—or may even resist—such impulses. This conversation wasn’t about who was right or wrong; it was about perception: how millions of people are seen, and how both the diaspora and the continent hold their own ideas about a place.
I was challenged, too, on my own understanding of the Biafran War. An event I had assumed, even as a journalist, had affected everyone in the way it had affected my family and the people I knew. I wanted to write about the war in an essay I was writing on grief within a Nigerian and Afro-diasporic context.
This conversation wasn’t about who was right or wrong; it was about perception: how millions of people are seen, and how both the diaspora and the continent hold their own ideas about a place.
Thankfully, I was in Abuja when writing this article, and made it a point to speak to as many people as I could. I learned that depending on one’s political positioning and experiences of this war, some preferred to call it the Nigerian Civil War. I saw that this cataclysmic event was still under hot debate, and that memories can become spaces of contention depending on the vantage point of the story. Internally, I was sure it was the Biafran War, and till this day, that’s the way I feel. But this is what I ended up writing:
“What one group remembers, may not be the exact story another group remembers, and therein lies the predicament. When looking at the legacy of the Nigerian Civil War, this could not be more true. In a country of 200 million people, where those people speak over 500 languages, and where there are over 250 ethnic groups, there is not one single truth around the events of the war; whether it was right or wrong, or whether certain groups were deeply impacted by it. But what people can share is their experience of it.”
And even in writing this, I know I could be wrong—missing something vital. In war, after all, claiming neutrality can itself be an act of cowardice. But as a writer who often draws from Nigerian influences, I began to realize how important it is to acknowledge that when I write about Africa, I’m really writing about a tiny sliver of it. In fact, I may not even be writing about Africa at all; I’m writing about what my mother told me about her days picking mangoes in her grandma’s garden in a village in Akwa Ibom State, and I am writing about, perhaps, the spiritual fissure I feel being pulled from a country I never knew, and living in a country where every day I’m told, in no uncertain terms, that I’m a stranger.
Perhaps that’s why the writers and creatives I met in Nigeria were so comfortable with debate—because experiences are vast, and ideas and truths must be talked through and tested.
While living in Nigeria, I witnessed writers and readers actively celebrating and championing their own authors, both online and in person. Some of them I remember: Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms, Damilare Kuku’s All the Men in Lagos Are Mad, and Chimeka Garricks’ Tomorrow Died Yesterday. What all these books had was specificity and nuance; they spoke to people without feeling the pressure to speak for all people.
As we refine our work and navigate a publishing landscape where our proximity to major Western houses often centers our perspectives, it helps to remember that we may be writing from partial understandings.
Even though those of us who live mostly in the West have pushed for nuance and complexity in our stories, there’s always more to do. As we refine our work and navigate a publishing landscape where our proximity to major Western houses often centers our perspectives, it helps to remember that we may be writing from partial understandings. This doesn’t make us wrong or inept; it simply means there’s more to learn, to realize—and I think not knowing everything can become an incredible source of power, if we let ourselves hone it.
Weren’t we the ones who had to closely observe and translate the humanity of our parents navigating white structures in the US, Canada and the UK? Didn’t we have to know what was being said but not actually said, and didn’t this make us wiser? Astute? And didn’t we spend years listening carefully to others so that, when the time came, we could hear ourselves clearly?
Being in the in-between, then, is our wheelhouse. Our writing negotiates the tension between absence and presence, knowing and not always knowing.
Part of the rigor, then, is asking: What am I not able to tell fully, and can not having the full picture become a site of literary curiosity?
