Exodus: Essays

Coming March 2nd, 2027 - Books will ship the final week of February
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Exodus is a searching, intimate essay collection about memory, migration, grief, and the fragile idea of home. Moving between Abeokuta, Kansas, and St. Louis, Tolú Daniel maps the emotional terrain of a generation shaped by political unrest, displacement, and longing. These essays revisit childhood fables, family tragedies, nationalist dreams, the aftermath of the ENDSARS protests, and the disorientations of diasporic life with lyrical precision and emotional candor. At once deeply personal and sharply observant, Exodus asks what becomes of those who leave home carrying entire countries inside them, and whether belonging is ever truly recoverable once exile begins.

Tolú Daniel is a Nigerian writer and scholar. His essays and short fiction explore the textures of exile, home, and belonging. He holds master’s degrees from Kansas State University and Washington University in St. Louis. He is the recipient of the 2025 Isele Nonfiction Prize for his essay “Notes of a Nonresident Alien” and a Heartland Journalism Fellowship 2025–26. His work has also been supported by Monson Arts, Writivism, and the Goethe-Institut Nigeria. Daniel lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where he is completing a PhD in comparative literature.

from The Year of Noise

I have another memory. I am three. My mother is pregnant with my younger sister, and it is Christmas. She dresses me and my older brother in our year’s best and marched us to the house of our cousins on the other side of town. It is, at the time, the largest house I have ever seen—a sprawling bungalow set on three plots of land, surrounded by hibiscus and bougainvillea. Mummy Onitiri, my mother’s aunt, lives there, and for the holidays, her house swells with visitors. My mother’s cousin, Aunty Remi, had come from London with her children, Bonike and a boy whose name I no longer remember. Their accents are soft and rounded in ways I have only ever heard on television. They wear denim jeans and T-shirts, while my brother and I twin in our brown khaki shorts and butter-colored floral shirts sewn by the family tailor, Iya Tisha.

Before we arrive, my mother fusses, warning us to keep our clothes clean. I remember not understanding her anxiety. When Mummy Onitiri welcomes us, she pulls us into a tight hug and overwhelms us with her perfume, as though she hadn’t seen us in years. Perhaps she hadn’t. For me, it is the first time she is emerging from the myths I know of her. She glimmers in a pink iro and buba, her lace gleaming in the midday light. Aunty Remi, on the other hand, barely acknowledges us.

At that age, I speak neither English nor Yoruba with any real fluency. The older women in our compound and my nursery teachers whisper that I might be slow-witted. But what I lack in language, I make up for in imitation. I mimic the sounds people make, even if no one else can understand what I am saying. That day, I remember walking outside into the foggy heat of harmattan, drawn to the riot of colors in the flower bed: the pink of bougainvillea, the red of hibiscus, the precise white of orchids. Entranced, I fail to notice the green water pipe coiled on the ground. When my eyes finally landed on it, dread seizes me. Weeks before, a documentary on OGTV had shown a python swallowing a rabbit, and I had pledged my eternal hatred for snakes. In a panic, I dash back into the house, yelling in my private gibberish and punctuating my sentence with the only intelligible word I know: “Snake.”

The house is thrown into brief confusion. The other adults around look at each other flummoxed. My mother decipher my gibberish and the maid, followed by my distant cousins, comes running into the living room where the party is, laughing as they explain that what I saw was only a water pipe. The details of that incident matter less than what followed. We spent four hours in that house and were never offered so much as a drink. Meanwhile, Aunty Remi hosted other guests, feeding them steaming plates of jollof and fried rice, fried turkey and other delicacies that made my mouth water. Each time new visitors arrived—all speaking the same London English as her children—she lit up, beaming as though the room had suddenly brightened. She spoke to them warmly, barely glancing at us.

from Notes of a Nonresident Alien

1.

Suppose I were to begin by saying that I don’t know what I am doing. That even this process of writing this essay, of committing my thoughts to paper, has become like everything else, a chore. That in the last month, I have traveled to two bigger cities, one for work and the other to relax, only to return home with a foggier consciousness and everything scrambled. Suppose I were to tell you that I am in a rut. A writing rut. A mental rot. Everything suddenly hopeless and exhausting.


2.

The night I arrived in Chicago, a strange snowstorm arrived as well, unannounced on any of the weather apps on my phone. I dragged my feet one after the other, each step sinking into the ground with every move forward. The ridiculous snow on the ground made everything impossible, even simple tasks like dragging a four-wheeled travel case. It took my beloved’s knowing smile to keep me from returning to the Union Station to demand a return ticket to St. Louis.


6.

I have been gone from Nigeria so long sometimes I forget the details of my presence where I am. I forget that the document that justifies my stay in America also calls me a nonresident alien—with the weird skin minus the big head. I forget that even this place, this country, with everything in it that attracts me, doesn’t want me back. I forget the passive aggressive questions about when I will return home—questions occasioned by the revelation that I am a Nigerian and in fact an immigrant—and the expectant faces of the questioners, and the way they always crumble into frowns whenever I deliver my response about how I have decided to remain in America. I forget the occasional comments about my accent—the insult in the way an American could never acknowledge that the history of both our countries intersected when we expelled the Brits. I forget the days of random and unprovoked harassment by the police—especially the consistency of this fact after I arrived in America. I forget the evenings in Adigbe and Quarry Road sitting in the darkness of my apartment with no electricity and no money to buy fuel for the generator. I forget the frustration of living in a country where nothing works. I forget the frustration of living in a country where most things work but some things are made not to work for people who look like me. I forget my beloved, and her brown eyes and pale skin, the way she sometimes interrupts my worries with assurances. I also forget the fact of the privilege to swing my bag behind me to leave and start again elsewhere. I open my eyes, I am sitting at a bus station, the sound of early morning commute ram themselves into my consciousness. There are many tall buildings around me. Many people are walking toward me, each person wrapped in the prism of their own existence. Car horns blasting impatiently, shoes clicking loudly like soldiers marching. For a second I forget where I am. I am in Seattle.

In Exodus, Tolú Daniel’s essays are pulled between his travels and the land that roots him. Alien, flaneur, migrant, exile, and pilgrim, these essays wander and wonder as Daniel helps us know a place through both his incisive mind and restless feet. Through delis, city streets, parks, bookstores, museums, and nightclubs we are asked to think about the hopes that draw us to places and the losses that rewrite our origin stories. Profound and beautifully crafted, Daniel’s writing draws us into the quest with no destination—a life forever lived between homes.

—Traci Brimhall, author of The Grief Artist

Tolú Daniel has chronicled the pathway of a generation that began with the hopes of democracy and now inhabits the vast dispersal of migration, where its members are forced to reckon with the world around them, a world for which he has found a language.

—Romeo Oriogun, author of The Gathering of Bastards

What thorny delight to travel the diaspora—from Abeokuta to Accra to St. Louis to London to Manhattan, Kansas, and more—with a thinker like Tolú Daniel. Part portrait of an artist, part call to action, this collection charts an urgent course through questions of migration, belonging, state violence, memory, friendship, ambition, art, loss, and love. In a voice wry and knowing, attentive and alive, Exodus performs the difficulty, grace, and wonder of finding a place between—in Daniel’s words—“what you know to be true and what the world insists on believing.”

—Edward McPherson, author of Look Out and The History of the Future

Exodus is a wondrous testimony of life itself. Its throughline is the earned wisdom of attentiveness to the world. This is Tolú Daniel’s brilliant reckoning with his pasts, loves, griefs, and convictions—a remarkable achievement from a writer who has found his mature voice.

—Emmanuel Iduma, I Am Still with You

April 2027
208 pp
Trade paper – 6x9"
$25
ISBN 978-1-960327-27-7
Emerging Voices in Prose