What the MoMA Did To My Momma Series #1
Moyo Okediji
Title: What the MoMA Did To My Momma Series #1
Medium: Collage
Date: April 2018
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Moyo Okediji
Title: What the MoMA Did To My Momma Series #1
Medium: Collage
Date: April 2018
Once upon a time, a tick and a dog sat together on a green field.
Quickly, the tick buried itself inside the skin of the dog and began to suck the blood of the dog.
The dog, feeling dizzy from the loss of blood, wanted to remove the tick from its skin, but the tick invited the other ticks on the field to join in the blood-sucking feast.
1980: One Friday, Rufus told me that we should visit the messenger of the University of Benin, Department of Creative Art, whose wife just gave birth to twins, both boys.
I told him that we needed to go to the bank to withdraw some money. I kept the purse for both of us. We were out of cash, and it was the end of the week. But Rufus said we would go to the bank later.
What happens among the Yoruba and the Chinese on the night of the wedding?
Here I was, instructing my students at the University of Texas, Austin, on the principles of Ifa computational coding. How I wished I also enjoyed the opportunity to teach young people in universities in Africa this same skill. But I have no such opportunity. And it’s not for a lack of trying, even offering my services for free.
Yesterday we met again to see if they had hot pepper soup at the local African joint.
Logically, when these simple folks enter a pepper soup joint, it is like Ṣẹ̀lẹ́ enter spirit: matters get philosophically historical like magicadabra.
“We are in October again,” I said, just because the bottle of stout looked chilled.
Independence Day
Mother, why birth me black
in a white caul
with a white umbilical chord
feeding me off a tube
connected to your navel
from my prosimian body?