The Final Two Audio Installments of Mr. FiFi’s Summer by Octavia McBride-Ahebee

 

I’m adding here the final two audio installments of Mr. FiFi’s Summer.  At its heart, this is a story about how generosity travels: through the practice of craft, through friendships sustained across borders, and through the quiet, enduring acts that allow people to remain connected despite change and departure.

Thank you for listening and for staying with the story to its close. Stay tuned for the next stories. You never quite know where you might find yourself: Rwanda, Mauritania, North Philly and all points in between.

Comments are welcome for those who wish to respond. *The audio version is narrated by a voice artist. All installments are available here. Click link.

https://open.substack.com/pub/octaviamcbride/p/the-final-two-audio-installments?r=74n5p0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Listen: Mr. FiFi’s Summer, a Serialized Audio Short Story by Octavia McBride-Ahebee

 

Image-K. Addo

         If you haven’t yet listened to the first two audio installments of Mr. FiFi’s Summer, they’re available on my first Substack post-located at the end of the post. The final two audio installments will be shared on Friday. And subscribe for future posts, for more stories and do leave some comments.

Here is the link: 

https://substack.com/@octaviabmcbride/note/p-185217469?r=74n5p0&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web

Strangers No More: Street Portraits Across Cultures-Yaprak Soysal at Plays and Players Theatre by Octavia McBride-Ahebee

I have been following the work of Yaprak Soysal for some time now, encountering her street portraits as they surface on my social media feed, quietly, without fanfare, yet insistently asking to be seen. Again and again, I find myself pausing. These photographs do not clamor for attention; they bear witness. They invite recognition.

While the portraits shared here were first encountered online and may not be the same works presented in this new exhibition, they nonetheless offer a window into Soysal’s way of seeing which is one that makes the exhibition especially anticipated. 

Strangers No More: Street Portraits Across Cultures-Photography by Yaprak Soysal will open tomorrow, Saturday, January 17, 2026, 4-6 p.m., at Plays and Players Theater, 1714 Delancey Street. 

Soysal’s portraits present something essential about who we are as a city. They remind us that the soul of a city resides in its people. The ethnic and cultural diversity so often discussed in abstract terms comes into focus here as intimate, grounded, and dignified. Each face carries a story, but Soysal resists the urge to over-narrate. Instead, she allows presence to speak.

What strikes me most is her refusal to exoticize difference. These are not images that turn cultural markers into spectacle. Rather, each subject meets the camera with agency and calm authority. The photographs suggest a moment of mutual recognition; an exchange rather than an extraction. Even when I encounter these images digitally, I sense conversation behind them: a pause, an agreement, a shared curiosity.

Street portraiture can be fraught. It carries questions of power, consent, and representation. Yet Soysal’s work consistently conveys care. The viewer is not positioned above or outside the subject, but alongside them. The portraits feel collaborative, as if shaped by trust in the brief space where two strangers meet and decide, together, to make an image.

As someone who has lived, worked, and written within multicultural communities, I am especially attuned to how easily difference can be flattened or

 misunderstood. Soysal’s portraits resist that flattening. They insist on complexity without drama, on individuality without isolation. Each photograph feels like a small act of civic faith.

In sharing some of these portraits here which are images I have encountered previously through Soysal's Facebook posts, I want to honor the way her work has already been moving through the world, touching viewers one at a time. Strangers No More is not only a title; it is a proposition. It asks us to slow down, to look carefully, and to reconsider how we see those we pass every day.

I know Soysal not only through her work but personally, and she photographed me during a project we were  both a part of.  That experience deepened my respect for her practice and resulted in one of my most cherished photographs.

Her photographs are worth seeing in person. 

Strangers No More: Street Portraits Across Cultures-Photography by Yaprak Soysal will open tomorrow, Saturday, January 17, 2026, 4-6 p.m., at Plays and Players Theater, 1714 Delancey Street. 

Listening Together: Poetry and Kora by Octavia McBride-Ahebee

Shoutout to Larry Robin and the Moonstone Arts family for a deeply moving evening of poetry. It truly felt like a family reunion. The upstairs of the famed Irish pub Fergie’s was packed with young and old, representing every corner of our city, just as it should be.

In that space, we also acknowledged the crisis our country is in and the vital role poets play in bearing witness, speaking truth, and imagining change .

Octavia McBride-Ahebee reading her work as master kora musician, Youba Cissokho, weaves sound beneath the words.

Heartfelt thanks to master kora musician Youba Cissokho for accompanying my reading. I was honored to read alongside the other featured poets and inspired by the open mic, especially the phenomenal Adriann Just-the-Pen Bautista, Aaren Perry , Elijah B. Pringle III and Ray Garman. And thank you to the evening’s host Liz Allen.

72nd-Generation Kora Musician Youba Cissokho

Poet  Adriann Just-the-Pen Bautista

I had the loveliest table mate for the evening, poet Anne-Adele Wight ! I am so looking forward to reading the collection she’s working on. Such a gentle and generous spirit.

My work is a kind of ode to migration not as a crisis, but an essential, enduring expression of human hope. 

I am always uplifted by my dear friends Phyllis, Tony, Mona, my daughter Sojourner, and Sami, whose love and support over the years continue to carry me. Thank you. Thank you !

Letting the Kora Hold the Poem by Octavia McBride-Ahebee

 

My literary work is shaped by the convergence of cultures and the many ways people move across the world be it by choice, by necessity, or by force. I write toward intimate relationships and everyday lives, even as they unfold within broader systems of global inequality. Aging, memory, and care sit at the center of this work, revealing how history quietly lives in the body and in shared spaces.

I’m deeply influenced by the West African tradition of the griot as represented by the kora player as historian, witness, and keeper of collective memory. Long before written archives, griots documented lineages, migrations, and lives through story and song. This is why master kora player, Youba Cissokho, will participate with me: he carries seventy-two generations of history, not simply as inheritance, but as living knowledge. In this collaboration, the kora does not merely accompany the poem, it remembers with it.

I invite you to join us for this poetry event. 

A Poem to Share: An Audio Preview Ahead of My Upcoming Reading by Octavia McBride-Ahebee

This poem, Where My Birthmark Dances, which also lends its name to a poetry collection of mine, is voiced by a Haitian child whose mother has left both her and Haiti to seek economic opportunity in North America as a nanny. The poem directly addresses the children now in her mother’s care, inviting them to consider who she is, where she comes from, what she has left behind, and the physical journey that brought her to them.

Where My Birthmark Dances is a direct appeal from a daughter, a child herself,  to those children: an invitation to know her mother, and to love her mother in the daughter’s absence. Click below to listen to an audio rendering of this poem 

Andrea Walls: Seeding Joy Through Art, Ritual, and Intention Jars by Octavia McBride-Ahebee

Kudos to creator and curator Andrea Walls of the Museum of Black Joy, who once again facilitated a powerful workshop to usher in the new year. Hosted in one of the stunning open galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, this intention-setting gathering was rooted in African diasporic spiritual practices of reflection, ritual, and care.

Playwright and Workshop Participant Mona R. Washington with Andrea Walls 

Participants were invited to release what no longer served them-to name this- and to call into being what they desired for themselves, their families, and their communities using an amalgamation of herbs, oils, sacred objects, and spoken intention.

Workshop facilitator Andrea 

Walls, creator and curator 

of the Museum of Black Joy, 

opens Seeding Joy by sharing 

the intentions and goals for 

the gathering.

Ahead of the workshop, participants received a list of herbs and the spiritual work associated with each. Hibiscus, red raspberry leaf, lavender, nettle, holy basil, Spanish moss, and dandelion were among them, along with cowrie shells and rose quartz. Oils such as sweet almond and sunflower were also introduced. In the open gallery space, surrounded by artwork created by young people, a long table was laid with an abundant offering of herbs. Each participant received a notebook and pencil, a mason jar, and squares of African fabric to later decorate the jar.

Participants Octavia McBride-Ahebee and Patricia Eads

We were then invited into the gallery where Zoe Leonard’s Strange Fruit is on exhibition. Our time there unfolded as a collective conversation shaped by individual responses. The installation, which consists of nearly 300 hand-sewn, slowly decaying fruit peels, commemorates losses from the AIDS crisis and takes its title from the anti-lynching song. Intended to decompose, the stitched skins challenge traditional ideas of preservation while evoking mortality, memory, and the dehumanization of the epidemic.

Hand-stitched fruit peels in
 Zoe Leonard’s Strange Fruit,
holding grief, memory, and endurance.

The work asks us to bear witness to histories of endurance, grief, and presence. Like African diasporic spiritual traditions, Strange Fruit holds what is difficult without turning away and gestures toward care, survival, and transformation as collective possibilities.

Following our discussion, we returned to our workspace to create our intention jars. 

  

We were given a sheet of paper with a line dividing it down the middle: on one side, we wrote what we did not wish to carry into the new year; on the other, what we hoped to bring forward. After tearing the paper in two, the list of what we were releasing was folded away from the body and collected to be burned later. The list of desires was folded toward the body and placed inside the mason jar. 

The open gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, filled with light, art, and shared intention.

We then filled our jars with chosen herbs and oils and offered prayers, each in our own way, to God, our ancestors, the natural world, or all three. The jars were sealed and taken home to be placed in our living spaces. Andrea also invited participants to consider creating additional jars for other meaningful places in their lives. 

Poet and artist Victoria H. Peurifoy
shares words of wisdom for the new year.

Teddy Poneman, supporting creative programming that connects Drexel students and community neighbors.

Participants hold their New Year’s desires, sealed in intention jars.

Participants shared how deeply they enjoyed SEEDING JOY: An Intention-Setting Workshop, leaving with both a ritual object and a renewed sense of purpose for the year ahead.

*Special thanks to Teddy Poneman, Associate Director of Programs & Engagement at Drexel’s Writers Room.