Nobody wants to be a stranger at home, even if one wants to feel at home in an alien country. Celebrated Nigerian author Tanure Ojaide in this memoir recounts his experiences as a Nigerian living and working in the United States. Feeling at home in the United States, but not all the time is coupled with a longing to visit his natal home, as if possessed by the god of nativity, to his home country he goes. Drawn both ways, in a tough tug of war, depending upon where he finds himself--he is caught up in an unending oscillation; now at home and wishing to leave, and soon outside and wishing to be back at home. Often feeling like a stranger no matter how long he has lived and worked in the United States. Not feeling like a stranger he has also refused to blend, wearing materials that make him stand out as an outsider, an African, a Nigerian, a foreigner. There are other differences of beliefs and ideas which do not follow the mainstream, he seems to see things often from different perspective, as a postcolonial fellow, and the others from their metropolitan position of power. He feels he was already formed as a man before his relocation, maybe he is what he is by choice or remain so instinctively.

Author Biography

A renowned poet, Tanure Ojaide has won major national and international poetry awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Africa Region (1987), the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award (1988), twice the All-Africa Okigbo Prize for Poetry (1988 and 1997), and thrice the Association of Nigerian Authors' Poetry Prize (1988, 1994 and 2004. In 2016 Ojaide was awarded the the prestigious Fonlon-Nichols Award at the 42nd annual African Literature Association (ALA) conference in Atlanta. He is currently the Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.