Yemisi Aribisala

Yemisi Aribisala (born 27 April 1973) is a Nigerian essayist, writer, painter, and food memoirist. She has been described as having a "fearless, witty, and unapologetic voice." Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Vogue magazine, Chimurenga, Popula, Google Arts & Culture, The Johannesburg Review of Books, Critical Muslim 26: Gastronomy, Sandwich Magazine (The African Scramble), The Guardian (UK), Aké Review, and Olongo Africa.

Yemisi Aribisala in 2016

Quotes

• There are so many dissimilarities, so many unique points of difference between this one country in Africa and the rest of the world.
  • Her reply when asked if any readers outside of the African continent commented on noticing similarities in their own cultural customs or spiritual beliefs from those she shared in Longthroat Memoirs (30 November 2016)
• Parents have a lot of professing power over their children. Praise and admonishments are crafting tools like names.
  • During a conversation when she was asked what her name; Aribisala means (17 February 2017)

• When CNN does not reciprocate with simple engagement with our hills and valleys, our romantic ideals, often only with our traumas. And everyone in the world has trauma. If you know where Naples is or Mount Vesuvius, then you are clever.
  • Talking about a time when her father and her were watching CNN, when a quiz like “Where is Mount Vesuvius came up on the screen

• The more handling of a wide variety of food that one can manage the more open one’s mind and palate.
  • Her reply when asked how one can train to be able to successfully write of food in a way that evokes not just the taste and smell of the food, but also the overall essence of that food

• Investing one’s own disadvantage in words: Opening an artery onto the page, that kind of thing, apart from a love for the theme being written on.
  • Key to good food writing, and essays (19 April 2017)

• There are many things that happen in the human being that bypass the brain.
  • Explaining a scenario while comparing it to a story in the bible

• We don’t have a Nigerian culture of cooking and monologuing. It is coming along now with social media and Nigerian food celebrities.
  • Her response to radical creativity with local cuisine

• If one wants to be a good essayist, one needs to connect and do it at the level of the gut, infiltrate the blood–brain barrier and lose prestige or the footing of pride. Or shall I say, you have to give something of value away to gain the investment of the reader’s time and attention.
  • What makes a good essayist

• One of the greatest ironies of writing is that you can write for a hundred years, write reams, but until you have something that resembles a book, you are never allowed to call yourself an author.
  • INTERVIEW: Yemisi Aribisala speaks on feminism, sex, culture — and Long Throat Memoirs (4 September 2017)

• I come from a society where the default is conformity. I don’t know how to conform and I find myself putting question marks against everything
  • Her reply when asked where she got her energy from because of her usage of strong opinions in her books

• There is a need to speak on something and I don’t agree with the status quo. The self-deprecation probably comes from not fitting in no matter how hard I try.
  • Her useful way of thinking and writing about personal or contentious topics

• What better way to spend one’s time in the country of fringe dwellers than capitalising on one’s failures? Why wallow in failure? If you can’t beat them, or join them, then you write about them. Yes, it does end up as a kind of power and advantageous positioning in standing out from the crowd because most people don’t want fringe-dweller strength
  • The inspiration behind her book; Sister Outsider

• There is nothing any of us can do about the fact that the world is shrinking so we need to learn how to speak more languages, not fewer.
  • How it feels writing in English

• In Nigeria, we have given ourselves no other option than the institutional use of the English language. We haven’t, in addition, provided the necessity and the resources of mastering the use of multiple languages. And that opportunity is so pertinent.
  • Her description of English in the Nigerian context as "an antibiotic, sterile, necessary, but aloof.

• I am writing all the time on being Nigerian and living in Nigeria but I have been accused of being stylistically un-Nigerian. My direct address of taboo objects, subjects and descriptions of people are supposedly un-Nigerian.
  • Ways she considers her own writing to be particularly Nigerian

• Attitude hardly counts at all when we are attempting to determine what foods nourish the body. A lot of intolerances and allergies as they concern individual bodies are life and death issues and toxicology issues.
  • Her reply when asked if her attitude creates much of a problem for her as a food writer

• The pandemic has forced a balance in the nation’s perspective where food writing is concerned.
  • Cookery writing in the UK

• The truth is you have to get on top of the reading as soon as possible and you have to keep in mind that this is the sum of people’s YEARS of hard labour, sweat and pain that you hold in your hands. Without being able to meet all the people who make that thing in your hand possible, you have to conjure up their presence, interact with every single book with great reverence.
  • How she starts with her cookery books and the process in whittling them down to her longlist (8 February 2022)