Winner of the 2024 W.S. Porter Prize
I’m a child of the 90s. A fact of which I’m proud. I listened to artists like Salt N Pepa, Aerosmith, Ginuwine, and Selena. I walked forty-five minutes to Friendlys and swam at the local YMCA. I watched the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and The Cosby Show. I wore bell bottoms and frosted eyeliner. I read Sweet Valley High and Beverly Cleary books, until I stumbled upon writers like Alice Walker and Nella Larsen in my father’s library and felt like I was getting closer to myself. I ripped the sides off computer paper before computer paper was what it is now. I lived in Southbridge, which was right next to Sturbridge, and about a twenty-five minute drive from Worcester. Some of the people who lived there could trace their roots to Puerto Rico, Belarus, Ireland, the Philippines and the Mayflower.
I remember that when we first arrived in town, a neighbor had knocked on our door with a tray of cupcakes to welcome us to the neighborhood. She had blonde fluffy hair and a congenial smile. Years later, on that very same street, someone would steal our mailbox and chuck it somewhere in the woods, not so congenial. We knew the person who had stolen the mailbox wasn’t a particular fan of us, for many reasons. I’m not so sure how I felt about it, but what I did know was that whatever happened, good or bad, we would likely endure it. My parents were committed to living on the street that was in a quiet and respectable neighborhood. They had already endured so much to live there, and this wasn’t about the reality of our situation as the only Africans on the block, it was about a chance at a dream. For me, I couldn’t fathom a life elsewhere. I had been born and raised in the US, I figured there would always be someone who saw us on some street and figured we belonged somewhere else.
As I got older, I’d go on to encounter more people and systems with many contradictions, some congenial, some not. These encounters also led me to confront some of my internal contradictions, which to my surprise learned were also along the congenial to not congenial spectrum. The constant through all these life shifts was that I always had my pen and paper in hand, writing. In every story I wrote, I tried capturing this precariousness I felt, this fragility in being alive. It felt like we were all hanging onto life by a thread. Some of us softened to this fragility, finding the possibility in it, while others hardened. This is what prompted my short story collection, Ajebutter Women, after living three years in Nigeria and witnessing this fragility I felt bubbling to the surface again. I was there at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the end SARs protests on Lekki Bridge. What I experienced living in the country of my parents birth was transformative, joyous, frustrating and at moments, incredibly cruel. Sometimes I wanted to harden myself to it all, but then, it would have been impossible to see the full breadth of a person, someone who laughs, cries, loves, and betrays. No one is exempt from doing life
in all its beauty and rancor, I guess. And as I had met and learned from women like myself who had spent their formative years in the West and returned to Nigeria in search of belonging, I began doing what I do best, writing stories.
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Itoro Bassey is an author and journalist at the BBC. Her short stories have been published in Prairie Schooner, Catapult, and Hippocampus, among others. She won second place in the International Literary Seminars Fiction Award for her short story, “How Eno Became Enobong,” and the piece is forthcoming in the literary journal, Fence. She has received fellowships from the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, the Edward Albee Foundation, and elsewhere. In 2018 she lived between Kenya, Nigeria, and Ethiopia for five years. Her debut novel, Faith, was published in 2022 by Malarkey Books. In her spare time, she supports writers in the Washington DC area as a board member of The Inner Loop.
