Every person with albinism has a plethora of stories to tell and, on September 20th, Standing Voice met with Demilade Adeyemi to hear hers. Demi doesn’t just tell the story of her own life: in her new book, No Country for Cold Men (out Dec. 15th through Troubadour), she infuses her own experiences into a fictional novel about a young boy with albinism, set in a dystopian African future.
Fortunately for Demi, her family were accepting. Growing up in Lagos (Nigeria), Demi explains that, unlike many, her family’s acceptance meant she could enjoy a normal childhood. “We just got on with life,” she says. Her parents took her to additional eye tests, knowing her vision was likely to be impaired. Other than that, she was just like her siblings.
Demi’s life hasn’t been without challenges, though. On her first day of school Demi was made to sit in the corner and eat salt for the whole day. She, and her family, felt the incident deeply. Demi had enjoyed a privileged upbringing but, on that first day of school, it became clear that her family couldn’t shield her from the bitter sting of exclusion.
"it was very important to just learn how to adapt to different situations.”
Her parents thought about sending her to school in the UK. They could see that she was becoming a target. Some of her teachers were hard on her, they didn’t understand that her eyesight made it for hard for her to read. For her part, Demi preserved. Looking back, she told Standing Voice that she doesn’t “always see it as a bad thing, because it was very important to just learn how to adapt to different situations.”
“I wasn’t ‘black’, but then I wasn’t ‘white’ either”
For her secondary education, Demi moved to the UK, finding herself once again adapting to very different situations. While her primary school classmates paid little regard to the colour of her skin, integrating in the UK was more difficult. She felt like she didn’t fit in anywhere: “I wasn’t ‘black’, but then I wasn’t ‘white’ either”, she remembers. Demi is now studying Law and Anthropology at the London School of Economics. At university, she joined the Afro-Caribbean society. Some students were unsure: they didn’t know or understand her. They didn’t “think that I was black”, she told Standing Voice.
It was in her first year at LSE that Demi began writing her novel in earnest. She had toyed with the idea of drawing on her own life with albinism to write for some time, but she lacked the impetus to finish it. It was a sense of duty towards others with albinism that spurred her to write. She doesn’t take her privileged upbringing for granted. Demi has two cousins with albinism. Her family is large, so she doesn’t know them well, but when she does see them, she almost feels embarrassed. “I feel sorry for them,” she says. She knows they don’t enjoy the same privilege she does.
“To become my own self, I need to recognise who I am.”
For Demi, the first step in writing No Country for Old Men was deeply personal. Her relationship with albinism has always been uneasy. She says she hates to associate herself with it: she doesn’t talk to her friends about it. Her family, she says, don’t like to discuss albinism. But her attitude is starting to change. “To become my own self, I need to recognise who I am,” she explains. She’s learning to feel comfortable talking about albinism, for herself and for those less fortunate.
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