ayo deforge

  Before I was thirteen, I was content with being a reader. After this period, I began expressing grief through poetry, because I didn’t think I had the voice to sing out my pain. But poetry couldn’t contain everything I had to say, nor could the short stories I began to write after I met the owner of True Love Magazine. Long before I started writing Tearlessness, I knew I would write that story. I carried around notepads with plot ideas and themes I wanted to explore. Around 2004, I finally embarked on the odyssey and in 2007, I was priviledged to workshop a portion of it during Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Creative Writing Workshop. Fast forward to 2015, and I completed the first draft, but that was just the beginning. It has since taken numerous rounds of revision to fine-tune every word, every emotion, and every twist in the story. The process wasn't always easy, but it’s undeniably worth it. After almost two decades of dedication and countless hours of crafting and refining,

My hesitance to take the vaccine in the beginning wasn’t because I was an anti-vaxxer. It was simply because I was not ready. My husband received his first covid jab in April 2021. The first few days, he had a sore arm, followed by headaches and fatigue. As for me, having gone through four days of extreme uterine contraction pain induced by stillbirth labour and Bakri balloon – which had me begging for death weeks before – I was not ready for any type of pain, as little as it may be. I knew however that I would take it when I felt ready. I just needed time. I was in a lot of emotional pain back then and I needed time to heal from my deep emotional wounds. I needed to be physically, mentally, and emotionally ready before taking the shots.  On Monday 12th July, President Emmanuel Macron announced that a vaccine passport would be needed to access everyday places. The President said that he was doing so to encourage people to get vaccinated. He used the word ‘encourage’ as though it is a s

The acknowledgement of race to improve lives and livelihood in France’s Black communities. In France, race is taboo and immigration a hot potato. These are two of the first lessons I learnt upon relocating back to the country in 2012. The French Republic is officially “color blind” because the law bans the collection of data on race, ethnicity and religion, asserting the idea that all citizens are equal and free from these distinctions. This practice dates back to the Holocaust, when the Vichy regime singled out Jews for deportation to Nazi concentration camps. Today, the reality is that France’s color-blind policy doesn’t only make it blind to race but to racism as well.  As one would expect, the national political debate around immigration is fraught. There’s hardly any election where immigration—particularly as it relates to Africans and Middle Easterners—does not take a front seat. Emigration, on the other hand, does not get as much publicity as immigration. It is known that French

Photo courtesy of Sora Shimazaki I was ten when my breasts started to develop. I remember feeling ashamed when the small bumps became noticeable underneath my school uniform. During that time, I used to play with the kids in the neighborhood after school, staging wrestling and pillow fights and organizing football and running matches. As my shape changed, I became self-conscious and stopped playing with the neighborhood kids, who were mostly boys. I began wearing loose-fitting shirts and isolating myself indoors after school.  I wasn’t happy when I had to give up my colorful training bras for adult ones. At my all-girls school, my sense of shame was profound, as I developed breasts earlier than everyone else. I felt embarrassed every time one of my classmates jokingly undid my bra. It happened a lot to those of us who started wearing hooked bras early.  I was mortified when my first period came and stained my light blue school uniform. I remember wishing it had started at home so that

Spare by Prince Harry of Wales is written in a three-act structure—his childhood, his military experience, and his relationship with Meghan. The nearly sixteen-hour delivery of the memoir is read in the Duke of Sussex's own voice. It explores the collision between royal reality and royal fantasy through the life of a backup Prince.  The book narrates how, at twelve, when Prince Harry learned of the death of his mother, Princess Diana, in a car crash, he believed that she'd gone into hiding from the Press to make a fresh start, and she would soon send for him. He and his brother, Prince William, fourteen at the time, were asked to walk behind their mother's casket, but weren't allowed to cry in public. That, however, paled in comparison to how the ceremony ended for the poor boys, shaking hands and consoling mourners in public. The book stresses how the shock of his mother’s death continued to haunt him for a decade. He remained convinced that she was not dead, despite h

 Some mornings, I wake up feeling blue. Sometimes, I don't know why because the night before, I had gone to bed feeling light-hearted. Sometimes, I wonder if it is my hormones. Sometimes, I wonder if it is normal to feel melancholy.  This morning is a perfect example. I went to bed feeling cheerful at 2 am but woke up cheerless at 6 am. While looking through friends status on WhatsApp, I discovered a tweet by Paulo Coelho. I admire his quotes most of the time, but this one left me feeling sadder than I had woken up. I disagree with what he has written. The problem with his tweet is that he said 'all' and not 'certain'. He first tweeted the quote in 2014 and then he repeated it in 2016. I would have loved to have a conversation with him. I would love to tell him that when one is struggling with loss and grief, for example, it has nothing to do with 'living to please others'. The stress, anxiety and depression that overwhelm me now and then are caused every ti