A Nigerian Activist, Healer, Teacher, and Performance Artist

Peace and Greetings. My name is Adaku Utah. I am an activist, healer, teacher, and performance artist committed to nurturing authentic expression within people, and creating transformative and healing community spaces. I am a proud social justice co-conspirator, committed love warrior, and ever-evolving mover and shaker.

I founded Soular Bliss, a collective online space to share and create, to discuss recipes, remedies, rituals, and resources for healing ourselves and our communities. I am also one of the founding members of Palm Wine (www.palmwine.org), a collective community space that collects and share authentic, honest information about Nigerian LGBTQ lived experiences in Nigeria and beyond.

We honor our his/her/our stories of pain and trauma and use them as sites to celebrate the power and resilience we have to break all rules, traditions, and patterns that hinder us. We generously offer free to low-cost resources in New York City that support healing, rejuvenation, relaxation, transformation, mindfulness, and individual and collective wellbeing.

In 2012 I was selected by the Africa Regional Sexuality Resource Center in Lagos, Nigeria, as one of their Sexuality Leadership Development Fellows. In this capacity, I travelled to Lagos in July to organize, skill-share, and collaborate with brilliant African organizers. We explored cutting-edge conceptual, theoretical, and programmatic issues around sexuality, sexual health, and sexual rights and built leadership to advance sexual well-being, healing, and transformation in Africa.

I had not been back home in over seven years, and so it was also a chance to show people in my homeland some of the work that I’ve been passionately engaged in for the past twelve years in the U.S.

The Africa Regional Sexuality Resource Center is part of a Ford Foundation initiative called “Global Dialogue of Sexual Health and Well Being” whose goal is to give visibility, depth, and legitimacy to the field of sexuality in Africa. The center (http://www.arsrc.org/getinvolved/index.html) promotes intentional and affirming public dialogue on human sexuality and seeks positive change in the emerging field of sexuality in Africa. It focuses on developing creative mechanisms for learning and organizing at the regional level.

One of my personal projects is a segment of (Un)conditional Love: Bringing Back Home. This is a physical, emotional, and spiritual exploration of queer and normalized love within relationships between Nigerian women and their daughters, colonized Christian values and Nigerian people and within the deepest and rawest parts of ourselves that beg to be healed, heard, and held.

Soon I will also kick off our international “Share Your Bliss” tour. We will be traveling to people’s living rooms and kitchens, asking them to share their healing recipes, remedies, rituals, and resources.

I am a lover in awe of all the manifestations of infinite love around me. I see pain and trauma as sites of inspiration, transformation, and healing. I invite all that has challenged me to speak its truths and dance with me to wholeness. Living a life fully expressed physically, emotionally and spiritually is my beautiful struggle and my act of resistance.

We all live multiple identities. I seek and create spaces where each of these identities can thrive in the midst of an imposing, toxic, monolithic, oppressive world.