“Every time I write about my brother, I make him possible again.”
The Fire in My Memory (2023)
Client / Publication: Inaugural Abebi Afrononfiction Award/Isele Magazine
Role: Writer, memory ethnographer
Focus: Collective trauma and the moral architecture of infrastructure
Summary:
The Fire in My Memory is a lyrical essay that revisits the 2005 Sosoliso plane crash—one of Nigeria’s most haunting public tragedies—through the lens of personal and collective memory. Part memoir, part moral inquiry, it meditates on what happens when a nation refuses to metabolise its pain. The piece explores how infrastructural failure across an airline, an emergency response system, and a governance structure becomes a site of collective spiritual injury.
Through intimate recollection, philosophical reflection, and journalistic excavation, the essay reconstructs grief as both a private wound and a civic condition. It moves between the body and the body politic, asking: what does it mean to grow up in a country that cannot guarantee safety, and what forms of love or faith survive that knowledge?
Read more: https://iselemagazine.com/2023/12/12/the-fire-in-my-memory-immaculata-abba/
🌟 Why clients value this:
This essay demonstrates how storytelling can hold space for public mourning and civic reflection. It models my approach to narrative as a diagnostic and healing tool — one that bridges personal experience with systemic critique.
For foundations, media organisations, and cultural institutions, it offers a template for how narrative strategy can recover dignity and emotional intelligence in conversations about national trauma, public safety, and collective accountability.