By Osa Mbonu-Amadi

Aishat Musa’s artworks tell stories of loneliness, homesickness, and nostalgia with which diasporan Africans, especially in London, grapple. Crossing to Peckham, Jollof in Brixton, Night Shift at King’s Cross, Two Weather Hearts, The Underground Gospel, Letters Never Sent Back Home, Frozen Breath in Stratford, The Afro Hair Salon on Rye Lane, Silence of Heathrow, Oyinbo Winter, African Soul, The Chicken Shop Flat, and Home Is Calling, all tell a different segment of the story known in Nigeria as the “Japa syndrome”.

Forced to leave home by unconducive social and economic conditions, these young Africans, mostly from Nigeria, compromise on many things, including their professional trainings, and settle for all kinds of menial jobs, just to make ends meet. Although the social and economic conditions of their new environment are better than the condition at home, they are struck by homesickness.

Using digital illustration, Aishat Musa documents the emotional life of Africans who come to London in search of greener pastures. The emotions are one of duality: the present, shaped by the current environment, and the past, fueled by memories of how it used to be at home.

This theme of emotional duality is most captured in the piece the artist titled Two Weather Hearts. In this piece of art, a young female immigrant finds herself between two mirrors. The first mirror portrays an African environment that is full of sunshine while the second one depicts a dreary London road. The latter is the reality in which she finds herself, while the former represents a happy memory of her native land.

Night Shift at King’s Cross narrates a deeper level of dual identity and split emotion. Here, an immigrant cleaner silently mops the floor after midnight in an office environment. Unknown to her employers, the lady, back home in Nigeria, was an art teacher. She had just taken up the cleaning job in London as a means of survival.

Night Shift at King’s Cross depicts at a glance what many immigrants do in the diaspora: they suspend their real professions and skills and pick up menial jobs, because job openings in the more dignifying professions where they are trained are not available. The more prestigious jobs are occupied by indigenous people in their host countries.

Aishat Musa’s other works in the series reinforce the same themes of loneliness, homesickness and nostalgia established by Two Weather Hearts and Night Shift at King’s Cross.

In Crossing to Peckham, the immigrant experiences a winter for the very first time as he rides a commuter bus. The window of the bus is fogged, but through it, the lonely immigrant could see bright lights in two shops with the inscriptions, “Afro Foods: African & Caribbean Groceries” and “Omo African Store: African Groceries & Cosmetics”. The lights, reminiscent of the sunshine in Africa, and the African stores intensify the immigrant’s homesickness and loneliness.

In Jollof in Brixton, one almost gets to smell the aroma of jollof rice, a tasty food from Africa, as the mother prepares the meal amid her children. The children, in their British accent, beg for pizza but their mother demands that they eat jollof rice. It is a nostalgic scene for any immigrant watching.

In The Underground Gospel, a chance meeting of African immigrants in a transit bus ride rekindles memories of how it used to be in Africa. In that brief chance meeting, the Africans share music, prayer and stories about home.

Letters Never Sent Back Home situates disconnect with relations at home occasioned by long distance. The letters are supposed to bridge that disconnection. Why this immigrant decided not to send the letters after taking the trouble to write them beats our imagination. Another question that begs answers here is whether people still write letters in this age of mobile phones and ICT. Whatever the answers may be, the artist succeeded in using Letters Never Sent Back Home to sustain her themematic preoccupation.

Other works by the artist exploring the established themes are Frozen Breath in Stratford, The Afro Hair Salon on Rye Lane, Silence of Heathrow, Oyinbo Winter, African Soul, The Chicken Shop Flat, and Home Is Calling.

Aishat Musa’s works are quite notable for their minimalist approach. This is an artist who says so much with so little. Another dimension of this minimalism is her use of simple gestures such as laughter, food, cooking, cleaning, etc., to delineate universal conditions. These qualify her works to be described in one word: impressive.