I am so excited to share an interview I conducted Last Summer before heading back to University!!!!!!!!! (You can tell my excitement through the amount of exclamation points I have used).
I have been waiting and planning to interview POSTSCRIPT LONDON Co-Founder Elvira Vedelago since she launched the first issue of her paper earlier this Summer. POSTSCRIPT LONDON is an intellectual anthology and biannual newspaper exploring the dynamics and lifestyles of women of culture living in the modern world. It includes a variety of content written by creatives and academics, which are accompanied by strong images. I first discovered Elvira through an Instagram story post I saw on Ruth Awogbade profile. From then, I fell in love with her and the work she had been doing…
So, I decided to email her and ask her if she would be interested in partaking in a feature on my blog, it would involve asking her a couple of questions concerning her paper ‘POSTSCRIPT.’ NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS DID I THINK SHE WOULD RESPOND!
Elvira Vedelago answered 4 Questions I wrote to do with the vision, creation, and meaning of POSTSCRIPT LONDON. It was amazing to read her responses and it really opened my eyes to the great works women are doing today, as I have said many times before ‘It is the YEAR of the WOMAN’ and this is one example illustrating this fact.
Get ready to read from an extraordinary QUEEN, Elvira Vedelago!
How did your vision for Postscript come about? – What triggered the starting of this paper?
“POSTSCRIPT started as a conversation. About a year ago, I met a now close friend, Chinasa Chukwu of the contemporary fashion brand Weruzo, (you may want more details as to what Weruzo is so I have provided a link to her website, please go and check it out! It is an amazing, beautiful brand)
As women of the Nigerian diaspora, born in foreign cities and living in London, we bonded quickly over lunch one afternoon and realized that we shared the same interests in culture and the same frustrations at the lack of adequate representation for women in the media. Very soon after that first meeting, we decided to create something that would encapsulate the nuances of being a woman of a certain culture – women like us – living in a modern city.”
I believe it is very important in this day and age to recognize a need and this is exactly what Elvira Vedelago and Chinasa Chukwu did. They realized there was a lack of representation of African women and decided to change this, they believe that every woman no matter what race or cultural background they come from deserves a voice, especially in today’s society where we can perhaps feel alienated.
I love how POSTSCRIPT simply started from a conversation, it is amazing to see how POSTSCRIPT manifested from here! What a GREAT journey! I think a key message to take from this is that you should never doubt your dreams, you may even laugh at the ideas you come up with thinking that it could never happen in a million years but until you start how can you be so sure your dreams won’t come true?
I definitely did doubt myself before starting my new blog ‘Estheessentials’ because I was scared nobody would care about it or people wouldn’t be interested enough to read it. However, once I actually started it I began to get more and more confident and started to believe God was going to use this blog for great things. It was no longer about me, it was the people I was going to help, which are the QUEENS of this generation. So, my advice to all the QUEENS out there today is to STOP doubting and START believing, just like Elvira and Chinasa did!
2. You describe Postscript as a cultural anthology– What do you mean by this?
“We wanted to create a publication for women that discussed more than fashion. As much as I appreciate fashion, I worry that it is one of the few (and very limited) ways in which the media feels it can communicate with women, other than discussions around our body or our relationship to men. There hasn’t always been a strong press narrative that celebrates our minds and voices, and so creating POSTSCRIPT was a chance to encourage yet more meaningful conversations amongst women. By focusing on culture, it connects women to ideas, customs and forms of expressions about our differing perspectives of the world we share through varied content e.g. articles, essays, interviews, sketches and works of art – hence an anthology.”
When I looked up the word ‘anthology’ on Google, it came up with the definition: ‘a published collection of poems or other pieces of writing.’ I remember studying an anthology of poems in GCSEs and their themes were different, it was exciting reading different perspectives and voices, which is exactly what POSTSCRIPT is trying to do, give their audience variety and highlight other amazing features to the female, which doesn’t purely rely on the outside. POSTSCRIPT is stepping outside the box and is being unique by deciding to emphasize on culture as opposed to following what is ‘popular.’
Today’s society needs more individuals willing to be different, having the courage to provide a unique, one of a kind perspective in such a fixed society. women like Elvira Vedelago and Chinasa Chukwu are changing society by not conforming to the standards already seen, instead, they are creating new ones. We females are not powerless, we have the strength and grace to create a place for us to be heard.
‘Be the change you want to see in the world.’ (Mahatma Gandhi)
3. What made you decide to create a paper that would explore the complexities and lifestyles of women of culture in the modern world– What drove you to think differently than the other female-centered magazines?
“Chinasa and I share similar experiences of being third culture kids (children raised in a culture other than their parents’ or the culture of the country named on their passport for a significant part of their developmental years), and there are so many with similar stories living in London. These wonderful complexities are exactly what we want to explore – nuances which incorporate a history of differing backgrounds and experiences. Whether South Asian, Eastern European or West African, we want to understand what life is like as contemporary women in these varied spaces.”
“The rise of the Internet has opened up a worldwide dialogue, so POSTSCRIPT asks what we can learn from the perspectives of different women across the globe. The difference for us is in the presentation of that content. By drawing inspiration from newspaper formatting and incorporating elements of academic anthologies, we hoped to create a platform where the voices of independent thinking women could be shared and digested in a meaningful and conscious manner.”
What we have to realize is that we females have so much to offer the world and things like our culture, race, and background can be our assets. Sometimes we allow who we are, where we come from or what we look like become our insecurity and that way we may have closed a door. In the age of social media, we should never feel like our voices don’t matter… we should not give society the power to patronize us into being quiet.
Imagine if the founders of POSTSCRIPT bowed down to the fixed demands of society, we would have been denied the creation of this distinctive and special paper.
4. Finally, Where do you see Postscript in the future?
“World domination”!
I know I am so glad we have a paper like POSTSCRIPT existing in today’s society and I cannot wait to see what else they do in the future.
This interview was taken from my personal blog ESTHESSENTIALS and was published on my site on September 1st, 2018.
