America, America – Tochukwu Okafor

Tochukwu Okafor’s project for the 2021 Jack Straw Writers Program is a story about a young gay man coming of age in Nigeria. In his conversation with curator E.J. Koh, they discuss what it’s like to be gay in Nigeria and bond over their shared experiences with both Catholicism and the engineering world. “I don’t know if I should get offended when people ask me ‘so what’s it gonna be,’ am I going to give up my engineering career for my writing career . . . and I’m always asking them why can’t it be both?”

Music by Andrew Weathers, produced in part through the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.