#CRPressXYNaija at Ake: Ayesha Haruna Attah; Day 2 – Day 3

Ayesha

Writers can boogey! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Day two of the Ake Arts and Book Festival was fire. At first, when I saw the programme for the opening ceremony, I groaned: what were all these speeches? But was I in for a treat! In addition to dances and Dr. Chibundu Onuzo’s amazing singing, all the speakers were brief, funny, and left the audience with nuggets to mull over. To me, the Vice-President of Nigeria, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, was especially surprising. He told us an autobiographical tragi-comic love story, involving his mother intercepting a love poem he had written, and flipped the script on us at the end of his speech, when he asked us if we’d enjoyed his story. “It was fiction,” he said and laughed off the stage. The nugget he left me with was if weren’t being introspective enough as a people, and that question was a thread that followed me through Chibundu Onuzo and Michael Donkor’s book chat, a panel on Black Britishness and a parallel one on homecoming.

I especially enjoyed the talk on the Fear of the Queer, where I was left with the idea that queerness itself is an elastic term. Bisi Adjapon had the audience cracking up as she read from her new book, and the day was capped with a concert featuring Brymo, Queen Salawa, and others. Nobody wanted to go home.

If there was a theme on day three of the Ake Art and Books Festival, it was that we have to complicate everything. The What Women Want panel featured Egyptian writer and feminist Mona Eltahaway and the writers of Slay in Your Lane, Yomi Adegoke and Elizabeth Uviebinene. The answer to the question of what women want: to end patriarchy—to smite to pieces the current world order and start a new one.

In Paul Beatty and Nicole Bern’s book chats, they talked about mothers, language, and abuse in the black community. The most heated panel I attended was that on Afropolitanism, featuring Ronke Adeola, Ade Bantu, and Panashe Chigumadzi. The big debate centered on why we need a new word to describe what pan-Africanism already embodies, and some of the panelists found afropolitan as a term too reductive.

Journalist Kunle Ajibade held a conversation with the festival headliner, Nuruddin Farah, and we learned about Farah’s journey of writing in exile, which he says, “Allows the possibility of seeing things from a distance and seeing things for the way they are.”

At the end of the day we were regaled with the uproariously funny The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives play.

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

cool good eh love2 cute confused notgood numb disgusting fail