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Yemisi Aribisala Quotes
born 1973 Nigeria
Yemisi Aribisala (born 27 April 1973) is a Nigerian essayist, writer, painter, and food memoirist. She has been described as having a "fearless, witty, and unapologetic voice." Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Vogue magazine, Chimurenga, Popula, Google Arts & Culture, The Johannesburg Review of Books, Critical Muslim 26: Gastronomy, Sandwich Magazine (The African Scramble), The Guardian (UK), Aké Review, and Olongo Africa.
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18 quotes
There are so many dissimilarities, so many unique points of difference between this one country in Africa and the rest of the world.
Parents have a lot of professing power over their children. Praise and admonishments are crafting tools like names.
The more handling of a wide variety of food that one can manage the more open one’s mind and palate.
There are many things that happen in the human being that bypass the brain.
Investing one’s own disadvantage in words: Opening an artery onto the page, that kind of thing, apart from a love for the theme being written on.
The pandemic has forced a balance in the nation’s perspective where food writing is concerned.
We don’t have a Nigerian culture of cooking and monologuing. It is coming along now with social media and Nigerian food celebrities.
There is nothing any of us can do about the fact that the world is shrinking so we need to learn how to speak more languages, not fewer.
Attitude hardly counts at all when we are attempting to determine what foods nourish the body. A lot of intolerances and allergies as they concern individual bodies are life and death issues and toxicology issues.
There is a need to speak on something and I don’t agree with the status quo. The self-deprecation probably comes from not fitting in no matter how hard I try.
One of the greatest ironies of writing is that you can write for a hundred years, write reams, but until you have something that resembles a book, you are never allowed to call yourself an author.
I come from a society where the default is conformity. I don’t know how to conform and I find myself putting question marks against everything
I am writing all the time on being Nigerian and living in Nigeria but I have been accused of being stylistically un-Nigerian. My direct address of taboo objects, subjects and descriptions of people are supposedly un-Nigerian.
“This book tells the truth about every single Nigerian. This is our food. These are our stories. This is just a slice of our humanity. I take a lot of pride in being Nigerian,”
When CNN does not reciprocate with simple engagement with our hills and valleys, our romantic ideals, often only with our traumas. And everyone in the world has trauma. If you know where Naples is or Mount Vesuvius, then you are clever.
In Nigeria, we have given ourselves no other option than the institutional use of the English language. We haven’t, in addition, provided the necessity and the resources of mastering the use of multiple languages. And that opportunity is so pertinent.
The truth is you have to get on top of the reading as soon as possible and you have to keep in mind that this is the sum of people’s YEARS of hard labour, sweat and pain that you hold in your hands. Without being able to meet all the people who make that thing in your hand possible, you have to conjure up their presence, interact with every single book with great reverence.
If one wants to be a good essayist, one needs to connect and do it at the level of the gut, infiltrate the blood–brain barrier and lose prestige or the footing of pride. Or shall I say, you have to give something of value away to gain the investment of the reader’s time and attention.
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