The Rest of Us is a series about, well, the rest of us. It’s where we celebrate the community of writers and creators who make up Inkstick, especially the sides of us that wouldn’t normally make it into our stories.
This week, we highlight Obiora Ikoku, who has written several dispatches for Inkstick on African affairs. This week he wrote on Guinea-Bissau.
Who are you?
I am a 38-year-old man who looks at least a decade younger. A writer and freelance journalist, I am constantly alternating between moments of excitability and brooding as I conjure ideas in moving pictures and swirling words in my head. I developed bad handwriting — an illegible scrawl I have been told — because my poor fingers have never been fast enough to translate onto paper the motions of my mind. I wear prescription glasses but would scream if called a nerd.
Where are you?
I reside in Lagos, the bustling commercial center of Nigeria.
What keeps you up at night?
I ideate more when it is dark so it is my restless mind that mostly keeps me awake at night. That and the occasional Netflix under the covers.
What side activities do you do that seemingly have nothing to do with your work (yet, perhaps have everything to do with it)? What are the links between these aspects of yourself and how do these other sides of you contribute to/frame your global security work?
Art! I am a graphic artist, sculptor, and art historian. In reality, I could sculpt before I could write. So in that sense, art was my first medium of expression and the core of my being. In fact, at the risk of sounding weird, if I am asked to describe my writing method, I could simply say that I sculpt with words, with a pen acting as my chisel. So in that sense, I start from the whole and work my way backward to the minutiae.
But on a serious note, I have always seen art as a medium for preserving culture, venerating beauty, telling stories, and making social commentary. Art also curates our understanding of what has happened in distant eras. The Odyssey and Iliad bring us tales of love, adversity, valor, and courage in a world long gone. When you look at the wreckage of past civilizations, you are able to gain an in-depth understanding of who the people who came before us were, how they looked, how they organized their affairs, and what challenges they grappled with by simply looking at their architecture, statues, and fragments of their pottery, cave drawings and painting, etc. In a nutshell, art lets us see in any dimensional form the beauty of the world we live in which many of us are sometimes too busy to notice.
Unfortunately, global security issues like great power rivalry, climate change, wars, political crises, insurgency, electoral violence, and conflict especially in the age of Nuclear weapons mean the world as we know it can suddenly go up in flames — this beauty can disappear! I am passionate about these issues and I am always struggling to see how best to explain them to a diverse audience utilizing all the possible means of expression my creative energy can afford.
What do you wish we were talking more about?
Inkstick is doing a great job already. Apart from being a contributor, I always enjoy reading every piece written by someone else! Children are the people I wish we were talking about and to more. There are millions of them coming into the world every hour of every day. Innocent and without blemish, they suddenly find themselves in a world made sick and unsafe by their forbears. We have a duty to make the world better for them and that starts with having them and their issues in every frame of conversation. That is where art comes in!
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Some of Obiora’s favorite pieces for Inkstick:
