As a writer who was born in the U.K. to Nigerian parents — and who has spent the last 13 years living in D.C — identity, as it relates to locale, to place, has always been something that my work has raised questions about. As a result, my writing in recent years has been interested in the relationship between different diasporas, be it the relationship between African Americans and Nigerians, or between British Nigerians and Nigerian Americans, and so forth.

I’ve long been interested in not only what differences and similarities these groups and their ranging subcultures share, but also the tensions that are created when they intersect, tensions examined under the lens of identity, power and, above all, class — an area that is of particular interest to me, and that I feel doesn’t get enough critical attention. It is work concerned with Black love, and by that I don’t mean love in the conventional sense. Instead, my writing speaks to the frictions that are created when the Black diaspora is in dialogue and, for me, unearthing these conversations represents an act of love. The Black global community is a heterogeneous community and within that lies an inherent instability that I liken to atomic instability, the same way that everything solid is, at its atomic construction, unstable, so too the Black community is simultaneously stable and unstable. It is collectively formed out of an heterogeneous state, all these different national and cultural sub communities, coming together as one. Multifaceted, but so often called on to be singular, political advocacy, representation etc. So my writing explores the dialogue within the Black diasporic community, those fault lines that are created between Black cultural communities. When we rub up against each other, like tectonic plates, what small earthquakes are we creating? What discussions of class, identity, love, gender etc. can we have between, say, Black Britain and African Americans, African Americans and Nigerian Americans, Nigerian Americans and Black Britons of Nigerian descent? What do these discussions unveil? What can we learn?