The Oshun Diaries by Diane Esguerra
It is the start of an extraordinary friendship that sustains Diane through the death of her son and leads to a quest to take part in Oshun rituals. Prevented by Boko Haram from returning to Nigeria, she finds herself at Ifa shrines in Florida amid vultures, snakes, goats’ heads, machetes, a hurricane and a cigar-smoking god. Her quest steps up a gear when Beyoncé channels Oshun at the Grammys and the goddess goes global.
Mystifying, harrowing and funny, The Oshun Diaries explores the lure of Africa, the life of a remarkable woman and the appeal of the goddess as a symbol of female empowerment.
Trailer - https://vimeo.com/340907769
Readers can order the book from the Lightning Books website at 30% off (with free UK p&p) if you enter this code at checkout – BLOGTOUROSHUN
The following extract is from the opening chapter of The Oshun Diaries:
Memory is visceral. All I can recall, about the drive into the southern Nigerian town of Oshogbo that November afternoon in 1986, is the screech of worn tyres on khaki-coloured roads, the all-pervading dust, the torrid heat and the rivulets of sweat trickling down the back of the albino driver’s neck. After the 150-mile drive from Lagos on a gridlocked highway I was desperately thirsty and dying for a pee. So intent was I on finding somewhere to satisfy my bodily needs that I scarcely took in my surroundings. Victorian explorer Henry M Stanley used ‘dark’ in the title of his book Through the Dark Continent to describe that which is mysterious and unknown. Little did I realise, that day, that this would be the start of my journey into a dark, hidden Africa.
Pulling up outside her home – if you could call it a home – was a different matter. After all these years the image of that baroque, semi-dilapidated Portuguese-colonial edifice with alien-like carvings clinging to its walls remains soldered to my brain.
Something in me hesitated before knocking on her front door; a crisis of confidence, I suppose. I’d given no thought as to how I was going to present myself to the woman I’d travelled all this distance to meet. As an English writer and performance artist with a keen interest in anthropology? The ex-wife of an architect working in Lagos? The truth of the matter is that on that first visit my motive for wanting to meet her was essentially a monetary one. I was broke. I hoped that this woman whose door I was now banging on would be a worthy enough subject to merit a documentary proposal.
‘Come away. Your persistence may anger her,’ Ebis advised, leading me gently back to the car. ‘Let us take some refreshment and return later.’
In the windowless, earthen-floored bar with its ineffective plastic fly-screen and unwiped tables we sipped Fanta and chewed on stale Lincoln biscuits.
I let out a sigh. ‘I can’t believe I’ve come all this way for nothing.'
Ebis smiled. ‘No journey is ever wasted.’
She lives in Surrey with her partner David.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DianeLEsguerra
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