![]() Some months ago, for the first time in my life, I pulled a piece out of a publication because the editor brutally edited the work to meet the taste of the audience of the publication. It became difficult to revert to my old habits of thinking and writing. ![]() At the time, I was reading Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine.Įverything changed when I started reading African books. I would also contest the usage of certain words, such as when I argued with my brother that his use of the word ‘flushing’ was wrong because ‘Flushing’ is a place in New York. In Nigeria, secondary school students wear uniforms and do not leave class unless the teacher does. In some books I read, high school students didn’t wear uniforms and left the class immediately after the bell rang. Until I started reading books by African authors, there were things I mixed-up, such as using ‘high school’ when I really meant ‘secondary school’ in my writing. This tendency to over explain was influenced by the kinds of books I read growing up. I would then also launch into a long-winded explanation of what eba was. If I had to use a word like garri, I would spend the next few sentences explaining that garri is a food product extracted from cassava and either eaten plain with cold water or prepared with hot water to make eba. I struggled through the process of explaining in English what I could easily have expressed in Yoruba. When I first started writing, I avoided allowing my indigenous language, Yoruba, to ‘interfere’ in my work. ![]() I now know that I have a responsibility to write in my most authentic voice.’ ‘But everything changed after I read Vagabonds!. ‘My fear of writing in pidgin English stemmed majorly from an anxiety that foreign readers might not understand my work,’ the author writes.
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