For the Yoruba, the phrase orunile captures the notion of home that one carries with oneself from birth. The idea is that we leave heaven, our home, to embark on a journey into the world, a marketplace. The marketplace referred to here is a West African marketplace where almost any kind of transaction may occur. It is a public space full of possibilities, danger, and wonder. In the Yoruba oja, the key component is the negotiation of the value of something through verbal barter. It is a sphere of performance where there are winners and losers. Individuals are encouraged to use forceful rhetoric, mastering the art of persuasion and profiting from it. Following this metaphor, then, the world is a place where we try our luck, hone our potential as individuals, and eventually leave at the end of the day. What we take back home with us from the marketplace is the dilemma we are all faced with in our human existence. Along these lines, then, the moment we are born illustrates our dispersal into the diaspora of the world. I usually write about how this ontological position creates a uniquely African and Caribbean mode of understanding the human being's place in the world in the genres of memoir and novels based on Yoruba mythological narratives.