to my erstwhile readers....

To my erstwhile readers who I'm sure have stopped checking this blog after my long absence,

This is what has been going on in my life since I last posted:

1) I defended my proposal and became a dissertator.
2) I left the university town to stay with my grandmother, while I applied for my visa, bought my ticket, etc.
3) I recieved the news that I did not recieve the big grant I had applied for last year, meaning that I will be a very poor researcher this year.... but I'm still going...
4) I finally recieved my visa from the NY Nigerian consulate--a very nice 12 month student visa. I hereby applaud, praise, and give hearty thanks to the NY consulate immigration section.
5) I bought my ticket and will be leaving the U.S. next week.
6) Somewhere along there, I managed to quite unexpectedly to "meet someone" who was not one of the players in the narrative of my life for the next couple of years that I had thus far written in my head... and have for the past month or so been in the process of negotiating, every night for several hours on the phone, what one negotiates when one meets someone right before leaving the country for a year (and previously secretly hoping that one would be gone much longer than a year), and in the meantime scandelously neglecting all sorts of things I should have been doing. In short, I have absolutely no flipping clue what I am doing.
7) And in the meantime I have becoming more and more concerned about the atmosphere surrounding the film industry in Kano. Hamisu Lamido Iyan Tama, one of the pioneers of the Hausa film industry, has recently been arrested for releasing his film Tsintsiya in Kano without first allowing it to be censored by the Kano State censorship board. Here is a short article from BBC, and a longer more detailed one from Leadership on Ibrahim Sheme's blog. It is a very disturbing situation, and I hope to hear more first hand in a few weeks.

So that's it for now. I'm sorry for the dogon shiru (long silence). I will probably post a little less frequently than I had in the past, especially once I arrive back in Nigeria, but hope to keep the blog fire burning, at least every two weeks or so.

-T-C