Beyond the Essay - Ope Adedeji

A Conversation between Ope Adedeji and Tolu Daniel.

Issue 1.

Ope Adedeji is an editor and writer with over a decade of experience in media, tech and publishing. She is currently the Editorial Director at Big Cabal Media, where she’s in charge of designing the vision, strategy and agenda of the organisation’s three publications: Zikoko, TechCabal and Citizen. Previously, she was the Managing Editor at Paystack, where she built the foundations of the content marketing team and operations. She has worked as Managing Editor at the famous book publisher, Ouida Books and was one of the architects of the rebirth of the digital culture publication, Zikoko, again as Managing Editor. She has recently completed her Miles Morland Scholarship, which she was awarded for her novel, the Making of Gods. In 2021, she completed an MA at the University of East Anglia, where she was a Booker Prize Scholar, and was called to the bar after attending the Nigerian Law School a few years ago. She has won several literary awards for her writing, and maintains a Substack on the art and science of writing and editing.

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Last week’s edition of Ellipsis featured her personal essay A Room, a Home, a Country of One’s Own, a meditation on the ways in which women find home and space to pursue their artistic desires and the attendant implications of these choices.

Tolu Daniel: In the essay, you explore the ideas of home by putting Virginia Woolf, James Austen, and Buchi Emechata in conversation with yourself. It made me think about a question someone asked me after they read "A Stranger at Home," an essay I wrote on Noo Saro Wiwa’s book Looking for Transwonderland, about what it means to feel like a foreigner in a place that is supposed to be home. In the context of your own essay, you invert this idea, and it made me wonder, what it means to look at a foreign place and call it home. Could you speak a little about that?

Ope Adedeji: Being here - in this foreign country - and calling it home is ironic. In reality, it’s not at home. Government policy - with the snap of a finger - could push me off this thin rope. In 2021, I visited an uncle who’s lived here with his wife and sons for almost two decades and he said that he still emphasises to his sons - citizens who were born here - that they’re second class citizens in England. He says it’s his way of reminding them that this isn’t home. And that idea that we—I—will always have to sit on the edge of my chair has made me thoroughly uncomfortable. Thousands of Nigerians - including brilliant writers - will leave Nigeria each year to face this reality in England, America and elsewhere. We cannot possibly live on the edge, or live watching our backs constantly. It’s not healthy, and hardly an atmosphere in which one can create joyful memories—let alone stories. This is why I decided to choose home—or create home. Find a space, both mentally and physically in this place to call home. I have always struggled with ‘home,’ where home is a sense of community. As a Christian, for long, I found it hard to fit into any community. As a writer, that was also my experience. Similarly at work and other spaces that demand some inkling of fitting in. Even my body and culture have left me feeling like foreigners in spaces where they were supposed to belong. My grandfather also moved. From Ibadan to Lagos. It’s a fascinating story. His father had been next in line to a throne but was killed by the opposing faction. His mother, a Beninese woman from Port Novo, took my father and fled. He rarely — if ever — returned home. He wasn’t returned when he died. He was buried a few miles from home. When I tell people the name of my village in Ibadan, they say it doesn’t exist. So then I wonder, do I even have a root? 

The jarring experience of moving abroad to find this continued experience made me decide I’d had enough. I had to build my space - which I did, in a sense. Home is physical. It is also mental. It is also a person. Like the James Badwin quote, it is many things. And that’s not to say that I feel a hundred percent at home here. It’s more to say that I have a fortress that is untouchable, that belongs to me. Well, something like that. 

TD: In the essay, you also touch on the pandemic, albeit slightly. I understand that the effects of the pandemic on all of us is yet still fresh and possibly even frustrating. But it made me wonder about the effects of the pandemic itself on your writing. Especially when one considers the magnitude of the changes you had to make, moving to another country - smack in the middle of it - with the attendant change in your status, as an international or a migrant, if we can call you that. Are you finding yourself writing stories that remind you of a past, or are you writing characters that are forcing you to look forward, or think forward, to this new normal that we are experiencing? Or can we expect that your new migrant experience is making its way into your prose?

OA: That’s a good question. During the pandemic, my stories became even more delirious and magical. Of people who got stuck in dreams or who lost memories. My interest or curiosity about death and Yoruba myths helped here. One time, I wrote an entire series of fictionalized letters to my niece who was born during the pandemic because I thought I’d never get to meet her; I was 70% sure the pandemic was going to steal my soul so I was writing every other night, as though my life depended on the number of stories I could tell. 

And then I went to grad school and I began to pace myself and explore other themes, some of which focused on home, for example, Pockets as in Nigeria. 

I’ve always been a light writer, I think. I see my prose and think of butterflies or a painter painting thin strokes on a page. That’s not to say my work will leave you feeling good or in the mood to kumbaya (feats I haven’t accomplished, yet!) or that I don’t cover heavy themes. I do. But lightly. In a way that might make you chuckle or maybe even roll your eyes. It’s also wicked. Or can be wicked. Mischievous characters doing silly things and thinking silly thoughts. My writing has kept this tempo, and I think it will keep it, irrespective of now being a migrant — although not a word I typically use to describe myself. 

In the past few years, my work has morphed to the extent that it features the spaces and cities where I live. So for example, when I lived in Norwich, spiders seemed to love my flat during the hot and dry summer. You would see them etched in corners and across the ceiling. I hate spiders and I remember that several years ago when my family moved to a new house in Joseph Harrison Street in Lagos, we saw a giant spider in the stairwell on the first night. My dad used the back of his slippers to kill it. Something like this - both experienced - or creating some kind of juxtaposition between these kinds of realities, has made its way to my work. I draw inspiration from the odd and the ordinary. Sitting in the tube, I might look up to notice my reflection merging or melting into each other. And it might remind me of sitting in a danfo and the twisted look in the conductor’s eyes as he tried to steal a passenger’s destiny (or at least joked about it). And that might trigger a story. 

TD: These answers are very interesting to me, particularly the anecdote you shared earlier about your grandfather. It made me think about an idea I once had for an essay but never really got into writing about. The fact of how we are all migrants, whether or not we acknowledge it. Land is a resource that is always shifting, or in motion, our ancestors moved from landlocked areas to places where they would find water. The history of the Yorubas, for instance, is one long tale of migration from a mythical east till they arrived at Ile-Ife. The past is an endless trove of people moving and shifting. Yet this aspect of human endeavor is one of the most regulated. 

Like the story of your grandfather and your Dad, I have similar familial roots in Benin Republic. Except when my grandfather’s family moved, they never made it to the cities, they settled in the villages around the Nigerian border. Yet eventually, it was education, or the act of seeking a kind of difference that made my father leave the place, and when he did, he left for Ibadan as well. It makes me think about the limitations in the minds of those who make these policies that are supposed to discourage people from seeking home elsewhere. The anecdote you shared about your uncle and his kids felt eerily poignant as well in the way of how time never changes anything. Yet people keep moving, people keep migrating, it is the most human of things to do. So I am wondering, in talking about moving, about migration and all its attendant implications, have you ever been fascinated or drawn to the toll of these choices that people make in your work? What I mean here is that, have you ever been drawn to historicize these events of people moving from certain places to make home in other places in any of your stories, both the ones we have read and the ones you are currently working on?

OA: My family can be quite uninterested in telling stories of our past. I grew up hearing stories, but not the stories I needed to hear. A lot of my history, and interest in it, came from living with my grandfather during my undergraduate studies. He often told me stories; right before I left for school or at night after power went off. They were short and incomplete. And where they bore even a measure of completeness, the language barrier — I’m not quite proficient in Yoruba — made it hard for us to interact. In some way, this is a blessing. It allows me to take what I know and mould my world, my past and maybe even shape my future. This is satisfactory in its own way. As a writer and storyteller yourself, you would understand this power and constant need to be a creator and to define the narrative. And in many ways, these gaps have made their ways into my story. Several years ago, I went on a school trip to three West African countries. One night, we ended up stopping  at the border in Benin Republic. It was a painful night, but knowing my great grandmother had sojourned through that country and perhaps, even passed through that border — I can’t remember which it was now — made me eager to write speculative fiction that drew parallels between then and now. 

And when my history is not influencing my story, the overarching theme - movement - is happening - somehow - in my work. I’m drawn to the fact that throughout our collective histories as Nigerians, ruthless governments have chased us away in search of better opportunities. Movement has become an intrinsic part of our person. Sometimes, it’s crossing state borders, other times, it’s travelling across the ocean to form a new life in the West. Still, we move. My latest project features migration, quite subtly. But its significance cannot be mistaken. Japa is a culture. And it’s our culture. Fortunately or unfortunately. And if fiction - my fiction, in any case - imitates life, you’ll always find someone in some kind of movement. 

TD: Thank you very much for joining us on the first edition of Beyond the Essay. And more importantly, thank you for being so generous with your answers and contributing to Ellipsis. We can't wait to read more of your work.

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