Oluwafemi Hughes Storytelling
Oluwafemi Hughes
Umbrella title “Building a Life” ??”The Dignity of Being Human” ??
“LEGACY: ON BECOMING A FULL HUMAN BEING”
Oluwafemi Hughes
Oluwafemi in her project to write chapters for her book.
Remembering and witnessing the goodness and perseverance of the three generations of Cathy Horan in Fife.
First Storytelling in February or March 2018
‘Living and non-living as a child in a Catholic Institution: Barely a kind of existence”, a storytelling by Oluwafemi Hughes.
Oluwafemi writes, “Writing the legacy of my family history, based on my own experience, has been an illuminating and a painful journey of enquiry. For it is difficult to write about oneself when there’s an emotional turmoil, a disaster that turned upside down, a people, a history and a culture. For second generation African /Asian /British kids, like our family, we were like branches without a trunk, with no roots, no reference point to the earth or to the four directions, no frame work from which to begin a life.
How does one begin to tell one’s story? One needs to have a narrative that belongs to her cultural traditions, a people with a history and a voice. One needs a person who is the author of her own story, a map of a place she belongs to, someone who has a self that is free from another’s definition of what and who she is. How does one make sense of a self’ or the world, when stories of one’s ancestors were of strange barbarians with eyes in their stomachs, who ate others, who were, early European’s decided, ‘non human? Sub human’s, who apparently, had no history before that fated meeting.
To begin to write, I needed to be free. Free from a ghost, a barely audible whisper that clouded my first 40 and more years – a whisper that became the air I breathed, had pervaded my inner world. A ‘mental slavery’ mirroring, what had been and something yet to be undone. For the ghost of slavery had not been exorcised in me or in the world. It had taken almost a lifetime to convert the murmuring whisper that dominated my world over this time into a coherent mantra:
“We tolerate your inherent deficiencies, we turn away from our entangled histories,
Just stop storming, conform to our norming”
page created 11 December 2017 JL