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
I went on a walk this morning, and it felt really good.
As I walked, something occurred to me: The world is an incredible garden in which we were meant to simply hang out, enjoy, party, make love and multiply.
But what do we really do?
We bitch, hate, steal, cheat, lie, cry and even kill.
The Corona prophet, therefore, came to warn us.
Madam Ngu finally cornered me in the buka.
If I had any inkling she was coming to that buka that fateful day, I would rather have starved than be found dead there. She had been looking for me for weeks. And I had been evading her. I was trying to break free of her influence and she was trying her very best to ensure that she stamped herself into my art, my being, my style of creating, and my idioms of expression. She had studied at the Royal College in London and was trying to make me a master draughtsman who painted in the European fashion. And I was a radical looking for a way to break out of the western mold of painting.
The Fear of Cops Is the Beginning of Wisdom when I was a child of about four years old, my father attended a one-month residential workshop in Ibadan.
2: The Return
He was flying back “home” for the first time in his life.
At thirty-six, he felt that he had waited a little too long.
But better late than never: this is the moment he had been waiting for all his life.
He peeped out through the window of the aircraft as it descended toward their landing, with the building, vehicles and roads becoming bigger and bigger as the plane drew nearer the landing ground.
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.
“I was cursed by a mad woman,” said this caller.
It all began with a message I found in my Facebook messenger box.
“Prof, what is your WhatsApp number,” the Facebook message reads. “My number is xxx. I want to discuss something important with you and I don’t want to write it on Facebook.”