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
Best In Africa
I was arrested for the first time at age 62. For building an Orisa house, in Ile Ife.
I made the statement to a bunch of police officers most of them young enough to be my children.
It was an act of humiliation at the least.
ENGLISHMAN IN BENIN CITY 1982 (Part Thirty-seven) “You are quite ugly too,” Mary said without a pause. “I knew you had too much palm wine today.”
“You are angry?” I asked.
“No,” she responded. “Did I sound angry? If so, I apologize.”
“I was only trying to let you understand a simple fact of life,” I explained. “Because you were unable to sexually arouse Joshua does not imply that Gina would also be unable to sexually arouse him.”
The Yoruba people are agitating to be free from Nigeria.
They have discovered that they gain nothing from being part of Nigeria, but they lose a lot by remaining in Nigeria.
I ask, “Why do they want to move away from Nigeria?”
They say they are concerned that northerners are invading their villages, abducting their women and children, polluting their rivers with illegal mining, driving cattle through their farmlands—and making legislation (with the assistance of the few Omo Aale among them), to strip their lands to build the north.
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?
On my 64th birthday anniversary, I celebrate my mother, the one person most responsible for who I am today.
She does not even know the date of her birth.
But she keeps mine so close to heart.
My father, Oladejo Okediji, is the known one. He is the famous author, who wrote novels, plays, poems, and essays. When he passed last year at 90, nobody even mentioned my mother once, as they poured deserved eulogies on him.
The most central building on our school campus was also the building that gave me claustrophobia. It was the school chapel.
Right in front of the building was a stone monument. Within the monument was a plaque, with the inscription, “STUDY TO SHEW THYSELF APPROVED UNTO GOD. 2 Timothy, 2:15”
That, certainly, was not good English, I concluded. Even at age eleven, I felt they needed a copyeditor.