The Read: For Sizakele

June 18, 2014 | ELIXHER

ELIXHER chats with author Yvonne Fly Onakeme Etaghene about her new novel, For Sizakele.Read More

InspiHERed By: Yvonne Fly Onakeme Etaghene

March 28, 2011 | ELIXHER

InspiHERed By spotlights phenomenal women in the Black queer community—everyone from artists to activists. Each week ELIXHER features someone whose personal journey and individual craft inspire us to dream bigger, laugh harder, and love deeper. This week we catch up with Yvonne Fly Onakeme Etaghene, a dope 30-year-old Nigerian poet.

ELIXHER: So tell us a little about yourself.
YVONNE: [Clears throat.] Ok, let’s see. Yvonne Fly Onakeme Etaghene. That’s who I am. I’m from Nigeria. I was raised in Nigeria as well as upstate New York. What I do is always an interesting question because I feel like a lot of times what people do is known as who they are. But I am a poet. I’m a performance poet, playwright, visual artist, dancer, and essayist. I’m working on my first novel. I crochet and I cook. I like to make things.

ELIXHER: What drew you to your craft?
YVONNE: I feel like art chose me. I remember I started writing at nine. I was very lonely and I had just moved back from Nigeria. I had an accent. I didn’t feel like people “got” me. I just had a couple of friends, so I’d write stories. I used to write those five-teenagers-stuck-in-a-haunted-house kinds of stories.

If I look at all my art forms, painting is probably one of the newer ways of expressing myself, so I’m not as confident in it sometimes. I almost resist that desire in myself to paint because I’m like, “Oh, I can’t do it.” But then when I just let go of those things and I just paint, there are just all these things I can say and ways I can touch people through that medium.

So the art forms really choose me and I can choose whether or not I listen.

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