PORTFOLIO

Pictured above, in a natural element that always leaves enough negative space for a pithy block of text to be overlayed when his photograph appears unbidden on someone's screen, is the writer Walé Oyéjidé. Walé is many things to many people. He is an acclaimed designer, a regretful lawyer, a musician, and a savant when holding a ladle full of fried plantains. Above all, he is a story-teller.

In his writing, Walé draws on his experiences as a designer, an attorney and a global citizen. He is adept at tapping into the concerns that face uncelebrated populations, and conveying those issues in a manner that is widely digestible but still authentic to the original subjects. He believes that words written for a wide audience do not need to be any less clever, any less urgent or any less true, simply because of the large scope of the prospectives readership. It is his goal to tell human stories broadly, without losing sight of the magical details that make us who we are.

P R O S E

The following passages were written for different campaigns by the brand Ikiré Jones,
to convey its ethos of cultural inclusion and global acceptance.

Speculative fiction

The following passages were written to combat negative tropes about the African continent
by recasting real African cities and neighborhoods in futuristic settings.

narratives

The following passages are fictional first-person accounts
written from the perspectives of different individuals in African society.

longform fiction

The following passages are excerpts from a longer manuscript.

The Collector

          Despite his career-long presence in the periphery of violence, my father was loath to raise his fists against anyone in our new country. His turn away from the brute negotiation techniques that had once brought him notoriety as a Nigerian Intelligence Officer was not because his fellow Americans were any less worthy of an occasional bludgeoning, but because he did not want his status as an exiled coup plotter hiding among immigrant taxi drivers to be prematurely revealed. So, while we sat in front of a collection of old African statues that had been exhumed from the attic of deceased missionary, it came as a surprise when my father suddenly stood up in the middle of a museum auction to walk across the room and whisper into the ear of a retired ethnography professor that had been out-bidding him all evening. There was a short, quiet, exchange. Then the professor put his hand down. “Sold,” the auctioneer exclaimed a few moments later, as the professor nervously wiped his glasses before hurrying out of the room. “One Lot of pre-colonial Igbo masks,” the auctioneer continued. “To the dapper gentleman from Nigeria!”

“What did you say to him—the other bidder?” I asked my father. While absently flipping through the evening’s brochure to find his next conquest, he responded: “I told him how many of our people had to die for these statues to arrive in this elegant museum. And then I asked him what his feelings were on the concept of proportionality.”

You see--my father had become a collector.

          Like yours, my people have some familiarity with the affairs of an auction block. In the 19th century, men and women bearing my resemblance stared ahead defiantly while customers examined their teeth and sought to negotiate the bills of sale that had been hung around their necks. Seeing no better alternative, some other ancestors helped affix irons around the necks of their neighbors while considering themselves fortunate to be able to return to their homes. There were those that remained free of the slave trade’s grasp, but in other ways, they too suffered an unwelcome acquaintance with the colonial chattel industry. The experience of watching one’s family being split apart and sold to discerning buyers is an unspeakable horror. But to a lesser degree, so is the experience of seeing one’s culture being sold piece-by-piece to the highest hand of a foreign bidder. As my people learned, some of history’s most prodigious distributors of human misery were also the most prolific collector’s of stolen art.

          Among his many misdeeds, the great emperor Napoleon is known for looting the four bronze Horses of Saint Mark’s Basilica during his conquest of Italy. The horses had stood triumphantly outside the basilica for six centuries before being taken by the French in 1797. When Napoleon’s troops tore through the city of Venice, they also tore timeless masterworks from the frames in which they had been hung. At the peak of the Napoleonic Wars, French soldiers could be seen strolling through the streets with the remains of priceless oil paintings slung over their shoulders. On those evenings, the helpless Venetians watching this take place grieved for more than the sacked city that smoldered around them. They grieved also for the brushstrokes that they would never see again.

          Later, German soldiers with imperialist ideals would also prove to be avid patrons of the arts. Because it was not enough to crush the human spirit by herding thousands of civilians into concentration camps, the Nazis also stole paintings and artifacts from private homes, museums and temples all over Europe. Afterward, buildings, books and sculptures that did not meet their critical standards were razed to the ground. As they were in all things, Hitler’s followers were ruthlessly organized. Government sanctioned looting agencies sought out cultural works that had been itemized on lists of prized items to be seized for the Fuhrer’s collections. On more than one occasion, quiet meals in small Jewish homes were interrupted when large groups of soldiers stormed into the dining rooms to demand a rumored masterpiece be produced. Several decades later, irreplaceable pieces of art would still be found in the dusty attics of forgotten war criminals that had lived to become loving grandparents. 

          Regrettable as these acts of piracy were, they pale when compared with the unbridled looting of West Africa’s treasures. The theft of European art throughout the ages has been widely recognized as unjust. And where possible, stolen items have been returned to their rightful nations of origin. Whereas, the plunder of African art has barely been acknowledged outside the continent. Masterworks made of brass and clay move quietly from one private European collection to the next. Little mention is made of their pedigree, and nothing is said of their mysterious journeys from a distant continent. To do so would be to peer under the slave-woven carpets that hide the many atrocities upon which this world of Western comfort was built.

          In the 1990s, the small New York City apartment of a nurse and taxi-driver was not the ideal place to house a priceless collection of African art. In its confines, we kept all of the luxuries that one would expect of a newly immigrated family. There was a small television with a metal antenna that mirrored the mapping of distant constellations, a worn mantle-piece that held salvaged pictures of once-regal people who ruled in better times, and above the couch there was a large Nigerian flag that my mother occasionally ironed while sighing with regret. I should have known it was just the beginning when I woke one morning to find a wooden pair of Yoruba Ibeji figures on the coffee table. It wasn’t unusual for my father to come home from his long drives with something curious in his trunk. The people of New York discarded all sorts of things on their street corners—old furniture, neglected loved ones, and occasionally forgotten antiques from a different world. The two identical Ibeji figures had tribal marked cheeks, beaded necklaces, and skirts made from straw. If you had seen triumph and suffering in your life, you could be assured when looking at their miniature faces that they had seen more. Sculptures like this had inspired the work of Pablo Picasso, and had even brought him to speak against the colonialist tendencies of some of Europe’s most beloved nations. But more importantly, for centuries, sculptures like this had inspired people of West African descent to persevere. On the cracked coffee table of a working class Nigerian family in New York, the figures only stood a few inches tall. But whenever I looked at them, I felt a hundred feet taller.

          At home, when we were part of the upper class, my parents had never cared much for cultural trinkets that recalled our primitive past. Growing up, it had been my impression that in Nigeria, the less Nigerian one pretended to be, the more sophisticated he would seem to everyone else. But half a world away, without the thick accents and aromas of home surrounding us, the two small sculptures in our living room felt like a long awaited reminder of the beauty from which we had come.

          Sensing a way to reclaim his previous identity, my father became compelled to collect more artwork from his homeland. He began by scouring the backs of discount stores. But soon, he made a weekly habit of infiltrating antique auction houses after pressing the suit he had been wearing during our escape. There were few things that could surprise the fellow residents of our project building. The youngest of our neighbors had seen slashed bodies with outstretched feet that prevented the elevator doors from closing. They had seen disasters on the scale of Gomorrah outside their doorways, with no policemen in sight. But before my father’s obsession came to fruition, they had never seen a middle-aged man cursing in Yoruba while trying to push a six-foot Malian sculpture up a narrow staircase.

          Over the years, our home became increasingly crowded. One couldn’t cross a room without staring into the eyes of a mask from Benin, or without narrowly avoiding being impaled by the spear of a statue from Ife. Every facet of African culture was on display. And when viewed in its grand scope, no one with vision would have called any of it primitive or unworthy of pride. Still, it was an overbearing space to live in, and his collecting never stopped. For months, I wondered why my mother didn’t put an end to Baba’s madness. Later, I came to understand that she appreciated something about my father, and our people, that I did not.

          Slowly, the stabbings in our building’s elevators abated. Outside, the commerce of crack in the courtyard came to an end. Things became different in the sort of ways that populations without artisanal coffee shops rarely experience. Eventually, there was only a respectful silence and the long pilgrimage of visitors that queued around an unremarkable project building in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. From far and wide, people of all shades came to visit The Collector. But there was a special significance for those whose forefathers had come to this land while shackled in the bowels of unregistered boats. For them, it was perhaps the closest they would feel to finally coming home

her Reluctant Wardrobe

          We ask too much of the women who care for us. We do so with rigid-unwritten customs bolstered by the weight of a thousand years. We do so with stone-inscribed roles carried down from distant mountaintops by overly serious men who have been endorsed by God or by the State. And we do so while listening sympathetically with an impotent ear that claims to understand, but refuses to do anything differently because this is all that we have ever known. We ask much of these women. Not least of which are the implicit demands that they bury who they are, that they forget who they one day hoped to become and that they do it all without complaint, because there are the ever-present needs of others to consider. We ask these things because we know that they love us. And because we know that they will not refuse. We ask these things because we always have.

          My mother’s uniform was a shapeless and inoffensive pair of scrubs. To some, these clothes were a symbol of pride, an outward representation of care and service. But not to her. My mother wore them with resentment. Years before, on a different part of the globe, she had worked hard enough to ensure that she would never have to wear a pair of scrubs again. This new world was one that, by all rights, was supposed to be long behind her. Yet, there she was every day. At work with downcast eyes and a barricaded tongue, as she took orders from uncertain physicians who were born a generation after she earned a license to practice and eventually teach medicine in her country.

          Unfortunately, there are few things that a brilliant career trajectory and a reputation as a gifted musician can do to appease a mob of military assassins with plans to draw their annual salary bonus from whatever heirlooms are hidden inside your home. When she fled with her husband and child to a foreign country under the guise of a new name, my mother also left most of what she was behind. “It’s all still there,” she would sometimes say. “It’s all in our house, waiting for us to come back.” Somewhere in that smoldering building that no one would ever call “home“ again, the fragments of a ground breaking doctoral thesis lay unrecognizable in the ashes. Various diplomas curled up softly at the edges as their glass frames crunched under the boots of soldiers and scavengers who would periodically ransack the property. Souvenirs procured by my mother while giving lectures around the world were torn from their cases and distributed among the soldiers’ wives-of-the-day. With my 11-year old hand in hers, my mother had ducked under the spinning blades of a helicopter that would carry us to safety. As we ran, a duffel bag she was carrying fell on the helipad and was torn open. A hundred photos flew out of her favorite album. Birthdays, weddings and award ceremonies. All of those memories were pulled into the vortex of the helicopter’ spinning blades and thrown over the sides of a tall roof. As we rose above the city, she knew then that there would be no past for us her to hold on to. On the many nights when she would feel abandoned and alone, there would only be the present to contend with.

          Unlike everything else in her well-ordered life, my mother’s scrubs lived in a crumpled mass at the bottom of her small closet. Every evening, they would be sequestered in the dark; victims of her tiny attempt to momentarily discard the life in which she was now unjustly imprisoned. It was a temporary escape, until the morning. But above the wrinkled work clothes, perfectly pressed on matching cedar hangers, hung the few salvaged dresses of a now-disgraced statesman’s wife. And there they would wait, exalted and perfectly preserved, even if hell itself came. Until the day my mother returned home.

In addition to the branding and copy authored for Ikiré Jones,
Walé Oyéjidé's writings have been published in legal journals and in Litro, a literary magazine.