My full name is Oluwadamilare Oyefeso. However, I go by Joka. Pronounced (joe-kay). People always seem to ask why I prefer to be called Joka and that is because it is my middle name. All my life this is the name I have gone by. Even at home this is the name my family calls me. My first name means “God has vindicated me.” Joka ultimately means for people to come together to love, care and pamper me. I am a first-generation Nigerian student. My parents are both from Nigeria but from different cities. My mom is from Owo, Nigeria while my dad is from Lagos, Nigeria. These cities are probably about 2 hours away from each other if one were to drive from one to the other. My parents met in Brooklyn through a mutual friend. When my mom first came to this country when she was 24 years old, she was staying with a friend whom my father also had already known. I always found it amusing that my parents lived in the same country for over 20 years but then met in a different country. About 15 years later, I was born. Just 7 years before my older brother and sister and 11 years before my two eldest sisters. I am the youngest of 5 children. I met my two older sisters when I was 10 and she was 15, then the other when I was 15 and she was 26. Out of 5 of us kids only 3 of us know our country’s native language which is Yoruba. Unfortunately, I am not one of those 3. My older brother and I are the only ones in the house who don’t understand or speak Yoruba. However, my brother is in the process of learning and is real determined to become fluent. He does this through listening to Nigerian music and ultimately making his own. It often just comes out as broken English, but he is making immense progress. He gets some help from my grandmother who also lives with us. She’s 86 years old and she just moved to America in 2015. So, you could imagine the difficulty with us understanding her. Although English is Nigeria’s first language, at times it is still hard for my grandmother to understand what I am saying.
My family and I are middle class and live in Staten Island, Ny. However, all of my mother’s kids were born in Brooklyn. So no, I never lived in Brooklyn, but I was born there. Since I could remember, my family and I always went to church, every single Sunday. We are Pentecostal. We’ve always went to the same church that goes by the name of Christian Pentecostal Church, CPC for short; However, when I was about 10 years old, I stopped going to church with my mom and started going with my dad. Cornerstone Christian Ministries (CCM). This church is still Pentecostal however, the difference is that 99% of the members of the church is Nigerian. So even though I don’t know the language, I literally hear it 24/7 and even when I am not at home with my family I am always around the culture. When I was about 6 years old my dad enrolled me into a catholic school along with my brother. Here, both my brother and I played basketball. I only stayed in that school for a year for academics but I still continued to play basketball there. Being a part of this sport for those years resulted in me falling in love with the sport. Fast-forward a couple of years, my first year of collegiate basketball was at Dowling College in Oakdale, Long Island. This was a Division II school that unfortunately my first year there shut down due to going bankrupt. At Dowling I majored in Business Law. Skip a couple of more years and now I am a senior on the Women’s Basketball team here at Cortland. As a kid, I always thought I wanted to be a professional basketball player, I aspired to play Division I basketball and eventually overseas. As you can see, that didn’t happen.
After I eventually grew out of my hoop dreams, I realized that something I loved other than basketball was kids and my culture. My Nigerian culture and my African American culture. This resulted in me changing my major to English when I got to SUNY Cortland to pursue a teaching career, later on I picked up a minor in Africana Studies. Although this class is a requirement, I wanted to take this class because I would love to learn more about the history of Africa.
Joka Oyefeso 