For Nigerian theatre practitioner, writer and filmmaker Joel Cicero, the experience of diaspora is not defined solely by movement between countries. It can also be understood through the relationships families attempt to preserve when geographical distance separates people whose lives remain deeply connected. This intersection of family, distance and cultural identity provides the foundation for Abraka, Cicero’s short play examining how sudden tragedy can transform ordinary communication between relatives living across different continents.

The work centres on a diasporic family confronted by a drowning incident in Nigeria. Rather than reconstructing the tragedy after its consequences are already understood, Cicero employs a real-time dramatic structure in which the emotional dimensions of the event emerge through fragmented transnational telephone conversations. The approach places communication itself at the centre of the theatrical experience and allows the audience to encounter uncertainty alongside the characters.

This structural choice distinguishes Abraka from a conventional treatment of bereavement. The telephone simultaneously represents connection and separation. Family members can hear one another almost immediately despite being thousands of miles apart, yet communication cannot remove the physical distance between them. Cicero therefore turns a familiar feature of contemporary diasporic life into a dramatic mechanism for exploring grief, helplessness and belonging.

For families whose members live across countries, major events rarely remain confined to the place where they occur. News travels across borders, and an incident affecting one person can immediately disrupt relatives elsewhere. Abraka draws its dramatic tension from this reality. The characters are connected to the same crisis but encounter it from different locations, receiving information through conversations that may be incomplete, interrupted or emotionally overwhelming.

The approach reflects Cicero’s wider interest in storytelling concerned with African experiences, families, communities and cultural exchange. His creative background encompasses theatre and film, giving him experience with storytelling both as a performer and as part of the production process. His professional biography describes a practice focused on compelling African narratives and socially significant issues affecting families and communities.

One important foundation for that development was Ifeloju, a narrative short film in which Cicero portrayed Charles, one of the principal characters. Directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Yinusa Akorede and produced by Josh Olaoluwa and Joshua Oyewumi, the project was developed through the EbonyLife Creative Academy, an initiative designed to provide emerging Nigerian filmmakers with professional, industry-standard filmmaking experience.

Ifeloju was among six short films produced through the Academy programme and was subsequently included among the final projects showcased at EbonyLife Cinemas in Lagos. The screening brought the work before film-industry professionals, creative executives and representatives of the Lagos State Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, providing the participating filmmakers and performers with exposure within a professional creative environment.

Cicero’s portrayal of Charles also contributed to his understanding of character development and the collaborative processes underlying screen storytelling. Working with directors, producers, performers and other production personnel provided practical experience of how individual creative contributions combine within a completed narrative.

His experience subsequently extended beyond performance when he worked as a Production Assistant on the feature film Glamour Girls, produced by Play Network Africa. In that capacity, Cicero supported production logistics, on-set coordination and daily filming operations. The role represented a different dimension of filmmaking from acting, requiring engagement with the organisational and collaborative work necessary to move a large production from scheduled scenes to completed footage.

These experiences provide useful context for understanding Abraka. Cicero’s creative development was not confined to a single function. Performance required him to interpret character and narrative from within a role, while production exposed him to the coordination underlying professional filmmaking. Dramatic writing, by contrast, placed responsibility for constructing the characters, relationships, conflict and narrative structure directly in his hands.

It is in that context that Abraka becomes particularly revealing. Rather than attempting to tell an expansive story about migration, Cicero narrows his attention to a single destabilising event and the family relationships surrounding it. This concentration allows the consequences of geographical separation to emerge through individual reactions rather than through abstract commentary about diaspora.

The Nigerian setting is also significant. It gives the play a specific cultural and geographical foundation while allowing its central concerns to remain accessible beyond that setting. Families separated by migration frequently negotiate responsibilities across borders, maintaining emotional relationships despite physical distance. When emergencies occur, the technologies that ordinarily make separation manageable can suddenly reveal their limitations.

Cicero uses those limitations as part of the theatrical language of Abraka. Fragmentation in communication reflects fragmentation in experience. Real-time progression reduces the distance between discovery and emotional reaction. The telephone becomes both a bridge between family members and evidence of what technology cannot provide: physical presence.

This combination of dramatic form and subject demonstrates an emerging authorial approach grounded in the particularities of African and diasporic experience. It also distinguishes Cicero’s writing from a simple retelling of tragedy. The drowning incident initiates the narrative, but the deeper concern is what happens to relationships when family members must experience a shared crisis from different places.

Through Abraka, Cicero consequently presents diaspora as more than geographical relocation. It becomes an emotional condition shaped by connection, absence, responsibility and belonging. His experiences across Ifeloju, Glamour Girls and original theatre provide different perspectives on how stories are performed, produced and constructed.

Within that progression, Abraka demonstrates Cicero’s capacity to transform a culturally grounded family experience into theatrical material with broader human resonance. By making distance an active component of the drama rather than merely part of its setting, he creates a work in which two continents can be connected by a telephone call while remaining painfully separated by circumstance.