Recorded live at the 2026 Nairobi LitFest on Mother's Day.

What do our mothers give us beyond life? Language. Courage. Silence. Resistance. Sometimes even the freedom to choose a completely different life.

Lilly Bekele-Piper sits down with three of today's most celebrated international writers, Safiya Sinclair, Dr. Nick Makoha and Lina Meruane, to explore the complicated inheritance we receive from our families and how literature helps us make sense of it. The conversation moves far beyond motherhood into identity, migration, feminism, memory, faith and the responsibility of telling difficult truths.

It begins with a deceptively simple question: why is literature uniquely able to hold contradictions? From there the panel reflects on language as technology, poetry as medicine, and writing as an act of survival.

In this conversation:

📖 Mothers as our first teachers of language, imagination and identity

✍🏾 Writing memoir versus fiction, and why truth matters

🌍 Migration, race, and becoming someone else through displacement

🤎Motherhood as choice, expectation and political identity

Featuring:

Safiya Sinclair, award-winning poet and author of How to Say Babylon.

Dr. Nick Makoha, Ugandan poet, playwright and founder of the Obsidian Foundation.

Lina Meruane, Chilean writer, scholar and author of Against Children.

Hosted by Lilly Bekele-Piper

This session was supported by the Open Society Foundations' South-to-South Initiative and the British Council's UK/Kenya Season 2025.

Selam & Hello is a Pan-African storytelling platform where Africa and her diaspora come to think, reflect and be heard.

Find us: https://linktr.ee/selamandhello

Email: lilly@selamandhello.com | producer@selamandhello.com

More information:

- NBO LitFest: https://www.hayfestival.com/nbolitfest

- Book Bunk: https://bookbunk.org/

- Open Society Foundations' South-to-South Initiative: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=1015010532&gbraid=0AAAAAD8I51aAC9lgxa5iY18T9CB_eY5tS&gclid=CjwKCAjwpqHTBhAcEiwAj2Afug7iT-hlaeiLoZJmcFQK4T_AromoOZ_fOV6ygAdgBC7jKjbcUX7CUxoC0zYQAvD_BwE

- British Council's UK/Kenya Season 2025: https://www.britishcouncil.co.ke/uk-kenya-season-2025

Music Credits: Selam & Hello Jingle by Silas Piper

All platforms @silaspiper / https://www.youtube.com/@SilasPiper