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Tag Archives: family

Features, Stories and Poems, Submission 2017/10/25

For What Are Butterflies Without Their Wings? | Troy Onyango | Fiction

Troy Onyango’s “For What Are Butterflies Without Their Wings?” won the fiction prize at the inaugural Nyanza Literary Festival in 2016. * It was she, the girl whom everyone called Girl as if she didn’t have a name of her own, who first came and told me we had lost you. Those were her exact […]

#CainePrize2017 | On Fragility and the Dynamics of Gay Love in Fiction | Interview with Arinze Ifeakandu | By Ebenezer Agu

Arinze Ifeakandu is the first writer published by Brittle Paper before his shortlisting to be recognized by the Caine Prize. We published his nonfiction, “New City,” an exploration of the city of Kano, and his memoir, “What It Means to Feel Adrift,” a meditation on, well, what it means to feel adrift. We further published his interview […]

November 1, 2015 | By Michael Inioluwa Oladele | A Story

“We both always thought I would be the one to die first. The reasons were obvious. I was the one with asthma who carried an inhaler about.” The day you died, nothing strange happened. It was a day like every other day. The sun rose at the right time. Everything happened as it was […]

And They Say Dreams Are Meant For Sleeping | By Zulaikhah | African Fiction

“Then she would see a cockroach on her bedroom wall, staring back at her languidly as it cleaned its antennas with long, lavish strokes. The anger would bubble in her throat and her mother’s voice would sing to her from a long gone time.” *** She stood at MMIA, watching her husband go and trying […]

Broken | by Hanna Ali | African Fiction

“I, reeking of grief and sex, will be waiting” *** I saw my future husband today in a petrol station seven miles from my house. He is filling up the 2007 Hyundai Sedan that his wife is still embarrassed about. Which makes him hold on to it even more. He doesn’t know it yet, but […]

Mama Junior | by Uzoamaka Doris Aniunoh | African Fiction

“‘You see this front seat?’ she asked, pointing at the car. ‘That front seat belongs to my first son Junior. And if Junior is not there, it belongs to Chuka.” Mama Junior worshipped God in truth and in spirit. She wasn’t always that devoted to the Christian God until she left her husband’s home […]

Mama Hadiza’s Money | by Dare Dan | African Fiction

SOONER OR LATER in life—at one’s very last breath perhaps—something welcomes one to the world again; its strangeness; its shock; its cruelty; and its implausibility. I didn’t get this sort of welcome in Lagos; I got it in the faraway North, Kano. I was thirteen. We (my two younger brothers, my mum and I) lived […]

Mondays Are for Secrets | by Munene | African Fiction

ON A MONDAY in February, father came home. He had been gone for seven years. He left on a Saturday when I was six years old for a business trip and did not come home till that day. The guise of a business trip had worked for a few years but at some point it […]