Tag: academia
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Keep 4 girls and women with ending cervical cancer!
Each day, nearly 28 women die from cervical cancer in Nigeria. Angela Akumuo, my sister-in law, was one of them in the summer of 2021. She was 53 years old. Her death, like those of many women who continue to die from cervical cancer in Nigeria and globally, could have been prevented. It was also…
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Keep time!
I’m not a poet. But I am mesmerized with how words come together to evoke meaning. Those that dimple everyday. Those that promise things simple, golden and gay. The lines, the forms, all the meters, and style are appealing as they are intriguing. Those who specialize in poetry have my deepest respect with the magic…
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Keep your habits!
Octavia Butler once shared the following: ‘Forget talent! If you have it fine. Use it. If you don’t have it, it doesn’t matter. As habit is more dependable than inspiration, continued learning is more dependable than talent.’ As I begin to slowly wrap up this year, I am making sense of all I did this…
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Keep prevailing Black women. Prevail like Gwendolyn Brooks demands!
Every now and then, I come across poetry that is arch and precise. Some focused on the sublime that is our sublime, like the earth that is our earth. And when I seat and mediate on the words, reflect too on the light they carry, I am pushed to carry this light too. Knowing there…
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Keep poetry.
When I speak of power, I’m speaking not only of the stuff we keep to ourselves, the ones we keep from blowing up, the ones we keep from starving to death. I am speaking of the ones we ought to let go, cut like an umbilical cord, so it has a life on its own.…
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Keep protecting those you love!
We entered the month of November in silence. Death has a way of keeping people mute. Last night, there was a rumor that the son of a Nigerian musician was dead. We prayed it was a bad dream and all would be right with the morning sun. Only that it wasn’t a bad dream and…
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Keep your history!
I walked through the halls of our school of medicine today. Something about history moved me. There were things about the school’s history that I didn’t know. Like a Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1943 to Dr. Edward Doisy for his discovery of vitamin K. When I started this blog, legacy was the…
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Keep sustainability in mind!
Since the pandemic began, I cut back from a lot of things and people. Cut back from conversations that were unproductive, people too. I focused on things that elevated and forced me to keep anything. Last year, I took it to another level. Death has a way of helping you find your purpose and mine…
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Keep lions telling their own story!
What makes for knowledge? How is it acquired? And how should it be used? I have been grappling with this notion ever since I arrived at the place called home. I came to teach, but I found myself being the student more than the teacher. I found myself asking questions internally and also doing so…
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Keep formalized curiosity!
Zora Neale Hurston described research as a ‘formalized curiosity.’ One that involves poking and prying with a purpose. I have been blessed to call research my job. To engage in this formalized curiosity full time is the best gift I have ever given to myself. Many take it for granted, but I know what I…
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Keep alert!
A swarm of insects stroll in perfect stride, one after the other, all heading somewhere, any where, no where. The skies above them, stretch out like curtains, something reduces them to nothing, something leaves them light as dust. Something in the wind. Lord, it’s coming for us.
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Keep knowing that we are legions!
I see dust coming from the sky. A cloud full of dust. Coming towards me. In it, there is an army with no cowards. They surround me, ready to do battle for me. They will destroy all that ails me in a single night. Destroy them so I feel no pain. Only peace and joy…
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