“We created the same portrait of the protagonist in the film Columbiana.”
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Let us make man in our Image. And hence, Nikki came to be. The words of God made. Not begotten. Nikki Ariyo, at twenty, was a virgin…a rare form of holiness in modern-day Nigeria, or for that matter, anywhere else in the world. That alone was a miracle and not a happenstance. She chose chastity, even as she was not obligated to live the life of a Nun, nor was any form of a sexless life forced upon her.
Given what she faced daily in the barrios of an obscene enclave, northwest of the bigger hound dog…the spacious, truly metallic junkyard of a city known as Lagos, she escaped the pressures of being amorally pleased from prowling businessmen overloaded with cash. The three-minute gratification wasn’t her calling. Her college schoolmates were the extra burden she bore listening to their adventurous tales of illicit sex…in the hospitality game. As far as Nikki was concerned, her female collegemates, at least most of them, didn’t believe they were prostitutes even as most lived out their four-year stint at Bendel University with the same comportment and immoral bearings as the notorious whores of Bangladesh.
The book Nikki is a collaboration. Chika Elizzy Mbah, my co-author, threw me the lifeline to a searing, scintillating paragraph about Nikki. I knew then we could make something out of this mild-mannered character. Could we transform her into an astute, take-no-prisoners vixen? Or could she be thrown off-tangent, dirtied up some, just to make her a bad Mama-Jammer? Chika and I did both. It was rough going at first. But as the tales of intrigue about her were propagated, finessed, and then torn to pieces before she was sewn back together, the tapestry of immense, internal beauty and badassery began to make sense; we created the same portrait of the protagonist in the film Columbiana.
The book, Nikki, will be published and released this May.
♦ Don Okolo, Professor and filmmaker, is on the Editorial Board of the West African Pilot News. He is the author of many books.
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