They applauded, “Hear, hear!” My grandfather patted the rooster’s head. The chicken cried. And the yam festival had begun.
I was going to call my debut album YAMS. I called it SWEET TOOTH instead.
I was gathering fragments for stories I didn’t yet know how to tell. This one begins in the summer of 2018, visiting my grandfather in Enugu, in the east of Nigeria, where my mother’s family calls home.
August 17, 2018
Many people go “home” for the yam festival. It marks the end of the rainy season. And it feels like a holy storm. In my grandfather’s home, laughter spills from the walls; it’s like stepping into the prequel. The title reads: YAMS.
Iri Ji, “the eating of new yam,” is a ceremony to give thanks. Two cocks are sacrificed: one in the home, and the other on the farm. My grandfather is surrounded by faces I do not know. They wait for his words, heavy with expectation. NEPA has taken the light, and the room is dark. Still, they gather to hear him speak, to cast the blessings of this new season, to welcome new life. “Hear, hear!”
Once the ritual is done, the yam is presented for everyone to eat.
Yam dipped in palm oil.
Yam porridge.
Yam with egusi.
Yam with Ogbono
Fried.
How do you like your yam? Now you have tasted the sun and the soil.
Six years later, I would find myself in a different kind of ceremony.
November 2024
I’m back home, this time with my cousins. For some of them, it’s their first time visiting Nigeria. We’re here to commemorate my grandfather, who has since passed.
Again, we gather in my grandparents’ home, now in the dry season. We sift through old records. Gasping at old photos of faces we borrowed. Letters, post cards. Portraits painted in thick paint. It’s those fragments again.
While here, SWEET TOOTH has been four years in the making, and I am at a pause. I have to honor my grandfather, I tell myself. The album can wait. But of course, the trip transforms the album entirely.
I have always felt like a black sheep in my family, the only one pursuing music full time. From a line of educators, it didn’t make sense. But there, on the shelves, is the most extensive record collection I have ever seen. And so I and my army of cousins begin digging. One crate. Another crate. A stack, a treasure. An original Michael Jackson Off the Wall — signed. Curtis Mayfield. Bob Marley, Donna Summer. The Pointer Sisters. Osita Osadebe, Tchaikovsky!
I fall in love — with my grandparents, with my home, and this new understanding of myself. I had always felt I had to justify making music. As if it were wrong somehow to desire this life. But holding these records, seeing the care and love my grandparents had for this music, it all makes sense. My heart swells with pride. I can continue, contribute to a legacy of music lovers.
My connection to music is not just mine, but something I, too, have borrowed. Like the faces in the photographs. I am one of them, and their love is in me.
A few days pass, and we have the exit ceremony for my grandfather. I’m filled with pride and heartbreak. Closer to him and my grandmother than ever. We return to Lagos the next day. Lagos is alive in a way that doesn’t give you a choice; you surrender to the rhythm or you get swallowed. At the club or on the street, you are sweating through humidity.
We go to the club twice. The first, before the ceremony, feels like a toe dip — a release party for an artist my cousin knows. Bottle service, hookah, a bongo drummer, and a man in a space suit. The second, after the ceremony, is where “cocoa body” is born. My cousin leans over and says, “This could be Brooklyn.” I think of the diaspora, how alike our experiences are no matter where we gather. In between, we stay in the house, driving through musical streets… Always in ritual, in celebration. The taste, always bitter and sweet.
Dec 3, 2024
Leaving home that weekend, I feel torn. But I also feel a profound realignment of my identity, my truth and my place in the world. I have the fragments I need to complete my album. My artwork will showcase my identity. I buy the red coral beads at the airport, the ones I wear in the cover art. I feel so grateful to be here and alive! I post this on Instagram as a little time-capsule reminder: text over a picture of the Lagos Lagoon. I’m grounded in the knowledge that this journey, this music, this pursuit is never in vain.
