Art / Culture

The housemaid remains a fixture in many Nigerian middle-class families, attesting to the social stratification in the dominant culture. Ironically enough, not many Nigerian novelists have significantly dramatized the plight of domestic servants, the world of servitude that entraps many of their kind.

The disastrous Body Zone exhibit of 2000

Unstable leadership in African countries hasn’t just ruined family lives, it has fried the mental house of men and women whose talents and skills could have built a thriving society.

Siwo siwo siwo Siwoooooooooooooo

A prominent feature of post-colonial Nigeria was a remarkable fondness for everything white. This included western education and white-collar jobs, leading to the demonization of certain informal professions. For some reason, artists were among the most reviled.

SID AND GERI is a Taiwanese visual creator and maker of short films, exploring themes of identity, the body, and the peculiarities of human culture through the mixed mediums of animation, special effects, and live-action skits, often all spliced together into one jarring video. They are arguably more well-known for the music videos they have directed for Taiwanese musicians, the most recent of which being the video for “寶貝好壞 Baby Is So Bad” by Mars Ma (馬念先).

The label on the wall describes the painting as a self-portrait, but I see it as a mirror

FATHER (爺爺和父親) is a standout documentary, whose strengths primarily derive from the revealing moments it manages to capture on camera. This is due to the fact that director Deng Wei is filming his father and grandfather as the documentary’s subjects.

Readers of Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon, Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street, and Ifeanyi Ajaegbo’s Sarah House may find Onyeka Nwelue’s The Strangers of Braamfontein familiar, especially in its discussion of sex trafficking of African women.

That evening, the prophet singled me out & asked the church to fervently pray for me

The magic of solving a cryptic crossword is in the joy of discovery. It’s a playful, thought-provoking, confounding, and strangely amusing pastime—a world away from solving standard crosswords, where, in all but the most subtle examples, cleverness and wordplay take a back seat to the exercise of memory and a kind of pattern recognition.

We notice ourselves in the villainesses of these stories, antiquated and avant-garde alike. We see ourselves in these evil women because they have taken their cues from us. Queers. Brown women. Black women. We know it when we look at them. They’re tall, dark, and hairy, just like us. Centuries of not-so-subtle racist and queerphobic caricatures tend to distinguish themselves like that.

It is not difficult to understand why a volume of poems on the subject of suicide by an African poet can be a difficult thing. The subject is the last taboo, obdurate and stiff as death.