Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You're caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn't go running with Curt today because you don't want to sweat out this straightness. You're always battling to make your hair do what it wasn't meant to do.

Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?

I have many problems in my life, but I don't think that identity is one of them.

When the writing is going well, I'm obsessive. I don't shower, I don't take phone calls, I hardly respond to text messages, I don't do email. I take breaks only to read, and usually I read poetry. When it's not going well, I just lie in bed and eat chocolate.

I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.

If I had not grown up in Nigeria- and if all I knew of Africa were of popular images- I too would think that africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting sensless wars, dying of poverty and aids- unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner.

There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.