Abba’s Favourite: Navigating the Architecture of Memory and Meaning
Ayodeji Ake
A prolific writer, Chidinma Ibemere wrote from the intersection of migration, loss, and radical self-acceptance, crafting literature that refuses the simplicity of single narratives.
This collection of creative nonfiction operates between testimony and literature, where personal experience becomes a lens for examining larger questions about identity, belonging, and the construction of purpose across borders.
What distinguishes Ibemere’s work is her refusal to present a finished self. Instead, she maps identity as terrain constantly being discovered and redrawn.
The essay “What God Calls Me” exemplifies this approach—a 2021 morning ritual of checking makeup transforms into revelation when she hears “Abba’s Favourite” spoken in her spirit. The ordinariness of the moment (white powder, biology scripts, getting ready for work) grounds what could easily become abstract. This is creative nonfiction’s essential alchemy: the transcendent emerging from the mundane.
Her exploration of Igbo naming traditions elevates the personal essay into cultural preservation. When she lists names like “Azubuike – Past experiences are my strength” and “Chizurum – God is enough for me,” she’s not simply listing translations. She’s arguing that language carries philosophy, that every time someone calls “Nwamaka,” they’re declaring the existence of beauty.
This linguistic anthropology embedded in personal narrative demonstrates how creative nonfiction can perform multiple intellectual tasks simultaneously.
“Brown Pews and the Lessons of Humility” reveals Ibemere’s capacity for self-critique with humour. A first-year university student, confident after an easy exam, declares she doesn’t “know why people have carry-overs.”
The reversal arrives swiftly—a practical exam descending into chaos, papers distributed unfairly, an invigilator’s slap, exam time cut in half. But Ibemere’s achievement extends beyond the comeuppance narrative.
She situates personal hubris within systemic dysfunction. The Nigerian university system, underfunded and overcrowded, becomes visible through specific details.
Her humiliation operates on two registers—the personal lesson about pride, and the institutional violence of educational systems failing students.
“When Bex Came Back” documents rescue through specificity: a movie invitation on September 3rd, 2023, two days before the dissertation deadline. A phone call with devastating news. A plate of pasta and a cold drink appeared an hour later. A hug. A prayer.
The essay’s power lies in its attention to friendship’s material dimensions. Bex doesn’t offer platitudes; she offers food, physical presence, and intercession.
This essay also captures the contemporary migrant experience with precision: dissertation pressure, social media threats, family drama managed across continents, and the vulnerability of being far from home during a crisis.
“To Oppressors” shifts dramatically to a prophetic register: “We have watched you rewrite histories, silence voices, and call cruelty ‘order.'”
The piece’s political ambiguity—never naming specific oppressors—functions strategically, keeping the oppressor generic so the essay becomes portable across contexts of institutional injustice.
Ibemere has produced a collection that works simultaneously as a cultural archive and social intervention. Her essays move between registers—intimate, pedagogical, defiant, contemplative—with the confidence of a writer who understands that creative nonfiction can hold contradictions.
The work’s significance extends beyond literary merit. In documenting her journey from Lagos to the UK, from medical school aspirations to education advocacy, Ibemere creates a record of contemporary African women’s intellectual and geographic mobility.
Her contribution to creative nonfiction lies in her synthesis of the particular and universal, the cultural and personal, the retrospective and immediate. She demonstrates that essays can theorise while remaining grounded in lived experience, that personal writing can advance social justice, and that vulnerability and strength coexist.
This is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary African literature, diaspora studies, or simply beautifully rendered human complexity.
Ibemere represents an important emerging voice in global creative nonfiction, bringing necessary perspectives on migration, education, and young African women’s agency to literary discourse.
