Why I love Nigeria? Why I love Africa?
Tell me, where else in the whole wide world can you make a khaki cocktail with big stout and emu funfun?
I love Nigeria I nor go lie.
Happy New Yam, friends.
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Tell me, where else in the whole wide world can you make a khaki cocktail with big stout and emu funfun?
I love Nigeria I nor go lie.
Happy New Yam, friends.
Henry Drewall, the philosopher of sensiotics, wrote a couple of days ago that, “Moyo mi owon — you have turned pain into paint…for us to see and feel….”
He should know. Sensiotics is the archeology of feelings within the human sensibility.
This painting shared here is about the pain and joy of departures and arrivals, as one of my Transatlantic Series: in 1992, I started it in Nigeria just as I was relocating to the to the United States, where I completed it.
Moyo Okediji
Title: What the MoMA Did To My Momma Series #1
Medium: Collage
Date: April 2018
Dede Mabiaku was an undergraduate studying drama at the University of Benin in 1981 when I was a graduate student there.How did I meet Dede?Late one evening, I packed my Volkswagen car, popularly called Bintu, near the University of Benin theater during a drama rehearsal.I was the stage-design director for the Convocation play in December 1982.
Potter:
What wants you from us,
One legged man?
Me: I’m here to study with you
the ancient art of terra-cotta.
Potter:
You, a university professor,
Coming to us to study,
We humble peasants and illiterates?
Friend welcoming me back to the US.
I’ve missed Babylon.
The land of alienation has its consolations.
I thank you all, my friends, for your support.
Isn’t it so wonderful to be back home in Nigeria, to spend time on the very land in which you grew up, to measure what has remained the same, evaluate the changes, and survey the landscape with an eye irrevocably altered through gazing at other countries and interacting with foreign landscapes?