Names That Refuse to Die—Artist Statement 

This work is born from the spaces between lands and languages—from my childhood in Lagos, Nigeria, to my coming-of-age in Queens, New York. As someone who grew up straddling worlds, I’ve long felt the rupture of spiritual and cultural dislocation. I am Yoruba. I am queer. I am a child of ancestors whose names were once prayers, whose stories now flicker at the edge of memory.

In this project, I return to the root: names. In Yoruba culture, names are more than labels, they are prophecies, histories, living declarations. They speak of time, place, intention, ancestry, and divine alignment. Yet, under the weight of colonialism, Christianization, and globalization, many of these names—and the cosmologies they carry—have been forgotten, altered, or dismissed. This work seeks to remember.

I’ve found that embedded within a single Yoruba word is often a story, a worldview, a spiritual philosophy. As part of this project, I delve into the etymology and layered meanings of Yoruba words, tracing their definitions back to oral traditions, mythology, and everyday rituals. These words, like names, hold root. They carry encoded memories and truths that have survived through generations of dislocation and erasure. To study a name is to study a belief system. To speak a word is to summon an ancestral memory.

Through a synthesis of creative writing and printmaking, I explore these naming traditions alongside language—how both have evolved, resisted, and morphed through time. 

I ask: When did we begin to forget the power embedded in a name? What does it mean to carry a name denied to you because of colonialism and the erasure of queerness? How do we reclaim our spiritual inheritance when so much has been buried, renamed, or mistranslated? 

                          This is not a mourning. It is a re-membering.

Drawing from oral histories, ancestral beliefs, and Yoruba storytelling practices, I examine the names I have held, the ones whispered behind doors, and the ones I am still becoming. These names, whether molded in clay, etched in lino, or spoken in verse, are sacred acts of return. They map a journey toward spiritual wholeness, toward a self and a community that existed before the Western gaze tried to define me and my people. This project lives in the liminal: between generations, between Nigeria and the U.S., between tradition and transformation. It bears witness to the way Yoruba culture lives on not just through language, but through spirit, resistance, and the artistry of survival. I will continue to work on this in the summer and fall, making it into a full length book so stay tuned.