Fiyin's Blog

            One's home is perhaps the most crucial aspect of one forming an identity. As you are young, you take up aspects of your country and general culture into an ever growing outlook that is one's life. However, conflict occurs when your birth place and the country you spend your life in aren't the same. Through out my teen years, I felt a sense of never being a full Nigerian. Whether it be my 'oyinbo' way of speaking, my disinterest in Nigerian language or my interests never falling into football, I have always felt a certain disconnect from my Nigerian upbringing, that maybe I wasn't fully Nigerian, maybe my correct place was in my birth place, America. I feel for many who are born in one country but live in another, they might be experiencing similar feelings as I did and through this essay I want to explore the possible conflicts and how one can deal with their cultural identity.     I was born in America but lived in Nigeria most o...

I watched the livestream of the Black Arts Baltimore event. It was an hour-long live session by historian Mary Rizzo, in which she discussed about her research into Black artists activists of Baltimore in the 60s and 70s. She discussed about the less archived artists that weren’t recorded by general history and the much more nuanced aspects of the artists. From what I understood from her talk, a big message and a core of what she is trying to get across is the idea of a standard history and counter history. A standard history means the general knowledge regarding the history of a certain time or place while counter history is viewing history from a very different point of view; not changing what actually happened but coming to a different conclusion regarding them. This relates well into what the actual event was about; the 1968 Baltimore Riot being considered the defining narrative of the 60s in Baltimore but how that doesn’t tell the full story of that era. What this doesn’t take i...