Sometime a Clear Light

A Photographer's Journey Through Alaska, Nigeria, and Life

By: Aylette Jenness

Narrated by: Ellen Anthony

In Sometime a Clear Light: A Photographer's Journey Through Alaska, Nigeria, and Life, Aylette Jenness reflects on living with her husband and two small children in a tiny Yu'pik village in Alaska in the early 1960s, as well as the time they spent in Africa from 1966 to 1969, three of the most terrible years of the Nigerian Civil War (the Nigerian-Biafran War). It was a tumultuous time for Aylette as well, as she split from her husband, an anthropologist, who had been sent to Nigeria to study the resettlement driven by the construction of the Kainji Dam.

The memoir follows her evolution as a single mother, an author of 11 children's books on diverse cultural groups, and a self-taught photographer. Her photographs of the Fulani, Sarkawa, Kamberi, and Hausa people of Yelwa, Kainji, and Ibadan, which capture a lost way of life, are now are housed in the Aylette Jenness Collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art.

In Sometime a Clear Light, Jenness, now 87, looks back at her own life to find insight into the past as she is losing her physical sight due to macular degeneration.

©2021 Aylette Jenness (P)2023 Aylette Jenness