Creative Matters

Making Makeshifts in a Storm: Fragments on Vision, Faith, and the Body

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.15.43523

Keywords:

creative non-fiction

Abstract

This essay is a reflective, fragmentary meditation on disability, perception, and faith, written from within the lived experience of visual impairment. While disability is often discussed through theory, policy, medicine, or theology, first-person African narratives of disability remain comparatively scarce, especially narratives that attend to the intimate textures of stigma, faith, cure-seeking, family burden, gendered judgment, and survival. This essay enters that gap by treating disability not as an abstract category or isolated bodily condition, but as a lived grammar through which the self is read, misread, disciplined, loved, and remade. Treating vision not as clarity or cure but as survival, the essay traces how sight, belief, and the body are continuously improvised through listening, posture, intimacy, memory, and endurance. Through scenes of medical finality, public scrutiny, religious promise, everyday misrecognition, and embodied tenderness, it resists redemptive theologies that sanctify suffering or relocate meaning to a deferred heaven. Its central contribution is to offer an African disability narrative that thinks from the body rather than merely about it, showing how faith can be reworked into accompaniment rather than repair, and how gratitude can become not obedience, but the difficult labor of staying.

Author Biography

Alapa Odugbo, Emory University

Alapa Odugbo is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University, whose work brings together ethnography, philosophy, African Studies, and the anthropology of religion. His research examines how African metaphysical worldviews, especially in Nigerian contexts, shape interpretations of illness, suffering, moral obligation, and survival, attending to how experiences of affliction are embedded within spiritual cosmologies, kinship structures, and moral economies rather than framed solely through biomedical categories. He conducts multi-sited ethnographic research in Nigeria, combining interviews, participant observation, and digital methods to study death and post-mortem presence in African Christian worlds through what he terms a “horizontal afterlife,” accounts in which the dead remain “unfinished” and continue to circulate not only toward heaven or ancestorhood but sideways into everyday spaces such as markets, homes, hostels, and distant cities. His work interrogates the silences, fears, and doctrinal tensions surrounding these encounters, asking how communities narrate, manage, and live with the continued proximity of the dead. Alongside this metaphysical inquiry, Alapa engages disability studies as a critical and theoretical field, using storytelling and poetry as both an analytic device and a methodological experiment that unsettles inherited assumptions about normalcy, embodiment, vulnerability, and the limits of the human. Taken together, his scholarship and creative practice probe the fragile borders between medicine and spirit, life and death, impairment and possibility, offering new conceptual vocabularies for thinking about suffering, presence, and personhood in African worlds.

Published

2026-09-28

Issue

Vol. 15 (2026): EJLW

Section

Creative Matters

Copyright (c) 2026 Alapa Odugbo

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