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  • Grief: The politics of grief, loss and healing

    In the past years, most of us have experienced deep loss and emotional trauma that has put some of us in disarray. We are grieving many lives, many experiences, and many unexpressed…

  • Hope: The Root and the Tree

    The current social, political, and economic landscape can leave us with enormous despair. We have access to tragedy after tragedy through social media, television, words of mouth, from many across the globe,…

  • Queens of Sheba – Theatre Review

    “I am a mixture of racism and sexism, they lay equally on my skin passed down by my next of kin. Passed down unknowingly by my next of kin.” Rate: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Soho…

  • Learning to Dance with Love

    Trigger warning: This piece does contain mention of sexual violence and drug usage. This piece is slightly erotic, mostly raw with remembrance and reflection on my encounters with love and lust. The…

  • Book Review: Dear Senthuran by Akwaeke Emezi

    “What do you do when your life turns into this breaking and resetting of bone, of spirit, of self, of reality?” Someone recently told me that the word they think of when…

  • SOFTNESSDOUCE

    sunny haze, delicate hues  red-yellow iroko  hard-soled cheap Chanel sandals, 1500 XOF vintage hand woven aso oke  monogaga sand okinawa shells holy mary iron lemon and garlic  slip brown dress Toumani Diabaté’s…

  • From heartbreak, flowers bloom

    I hope to grow Roots scattered across the forest floor Leaves rising, Yielding towards the moon. To push through the earth  To sieve through the grit To meet a glory My glory,…

  • Musings on Travel

    Sometimes the world swallows us whole. Drags us through the mud in order to just be, live, survive this system which encases us. A world where even the beauty that rises from…

  • Archiving the past, the present and the future. Adeola Aderemi in conversation Lanaire Aderemi

    What is the role of the archivist in our society? how do we learn from the past to co-create the future?
    Adeola sat down with Lanaire to discuss the important role of archivist in modern Nigerian society and the work of Lanaire Aderemi as an archivist.

  • What does Nigeria owe its people?

    “His unfinished education, his joblessness, his hunger, his poverty, all these he found out were different forms of violence. It consisted not of physical, brutal assault but of a slow and graduate…

  • Finding God Amongst the Living

    I look out at the world with questioning eyes and wonder how could all of this be? The beauty of a running river that is hypnotic as it is mysterious, the tallest…

  • Conversation with Adeola: Get to know our Writer in Residence Her tempest Tongue

    Our questions are italicised. When did you know you had to honour your artistic calling and began creating music, poems and what was your push for that decision? As a child, I…

  • Becoming my Mother, Becoming Myself

    When I think of my own relationship with my mother, I think of who she was before she decided to have children and how what she dealt with poured into her relationship with her children. The behaviours she has that I do not like and that affected me are exactly what she received from her own mother as well as a direct influence of her surroundings in Nigeria and what being a woman in that period meant. I definitely know that no matter what, I am my mother’s child and that this means that I will share similar behaviours with her but to truly become myself and separate myself from her own traumas, I have to find myself and reconcile with the rejections that can exist in my own becoming.

  • The Symbolism of Citizenship: The Threat of the Dual Identity and Colonial Borders

    The Symbolism of Citizenship: The Threat of the Dual Identity and Colonial Borders On Friday 26th February 2021, news broke that 21-year-old Shamima Begum will have her British Citizenship revoked. The idea…

  • The Artist as a Vessel Societies’ responsibility to Artists

    There are artists whether that be painters, sculptors, poets, or songwriters who speak of creating art from a source which originates from a place that isn’t theirs alone as if something is being channelled through them. Socrates once said, “God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his minister.” And it is exactly that: some artists believe their art comes from a spiritual place within them, channelled by God/The Divine/The Source.

  • Book Review: Who Owns Truth| All My Lies Are True

    The announcement that “The Ice Cream Girls” was getting a sequel, made me physically squeal, partly because Dorothy Koomson has been famously anti-sequel but also because I, naively, hoped for the perfect…

  • Black Lives Matter: Discussing and eradicating anti-Blackness in the Muslim North African communities.

    Decolonisation of all of Africa is still an on-going process, the hegemony and dominance of previous colonisers not entirely rooted out. While the work of equalising power relations and resolving conflicts that are residues of colonial divisions is vital. It is also important to decolonise racism and anti-blackness as concepts and practices. African Muslims are far from being a homogenous group, their diversity is rooted in their cultural backgrounds which often determines their religious affiliations. This makes the task of acknowledging and decolonising racism is quite challenging.

  • Saturn in Aquarius 2020 transit — A prediction

    The Age of Enlightenment meaning a lot of us will begin to see the bigger picture of things as illusions around us begin to break. Truths will be revealed and clarity will take over. People will ascend to become more evolved humans as they wake up from this Matrix. It’s always been a game and now it’s to play it right.

Distinguished Diva

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