Finding The Third Space

Why the Most Powerful Stories Come From In Between

I have a confession: two months ago, I had never heard of Homi K. Bhabha. Then I read a single paragraph on a website a new acquaintance introduced me to, and it put into words something I’ve been building my whole life.

Finding the Third Space

To backtrack a bit: I’m building a trading card game based on the legends of the Benin Kingdom, and in May I took a prototype to the Games Expo at the NEC in Birmingham. While playtesting, I got talking with a few new people, and with one of them, Stefan, the conversation turned to the game, the folklore behind it, and Oguega, the Benin system of divination (similar to the Yoruba Ifa). had originally built Oguega into the game as a mystical code for players to collect, but cut it for the first version. It started to feel like a game within a game. Stefan, it turned out, knew a thing or two about Ifa, and he pointed me toward the work of If Time’s Limited, a multidisciplinary artistic research and performance collective based in Hong Kong.

It was on their website that I read the following:

“Anchored in Hong Kong, our projects explore the diverse dimensions of understanding a place and its untold/forgotten stories. ‘Hybridity,’ a concept coined by cultural theorist Homi Bhabha, focuses on the in-between space of more than two cultures.”

That paragraph summed up everything I’ve been building, better than I could have. I read it a few times over, then went looking for who this Homi Bhabha was.

My search pulled up two Homi Bhabhas:

Homi J. Bhabha, considered the father of India’s nuclear program,

and

Homi K. Bhabha, the scholar behind third space theory and author of The Location of Culture. It’s the latter the website was referring to, though both men are worth reading about.

Two Forms, One Idea

I have only just ordered *The Location of Culture*, so I am working from a surface read of his ideas so far. But what little I have absorbed already feels like something I have carried for years without having the words for it. It reminds me of something my friend Bamba, a filmmaker, once said about his hero, the poet Thierno Seydou Sall:

“In film, I create what he longs to do; in poetry, he writes what I yearn to say.”

Two different forms, two people, each completing something in the other that neither could reach alone. It’s its own small version of the third space.

The idea itself seems so obvious, but it’s rarely talked about. Growing up in the UK to Nigerian parents, people expect you to choose a side. Most people aren’t even generous enough to give you the choice. They make it for you. But hybridity, the place where two cultures fuse, what Bhabha called the third space, is where many second and third generation immigrants find ourselves. We are a nuclear fusion of cultures.

Two Calendars on the Wall

I grew up in London with two calendars on the wall: a Benin four-day calendar on one side, a Western seven-day calendar on the other. Every morning we bought a newspaper. I don’t think anyone does that anymore. In the corner of the house sat bronze castings telling the stories of Edo legends, which my parents narrated to us not at bedtime but during the day, over a meal or a cup of Yorkshire tea. Bedtime was for Charles Perrault’s Classic Fairy Tales, illustrated by Harry Clarke, in that old-fashioned, formal English of a much earlier translation. The reason being, my father believed that we would get a better grasp of English if we learnt an older version of the language.

The Benin Calendar 2025

For the daytime stories, I learned about the great Queen Idia, who led her son, Esigie’s, army in a civil war against his brother Arhuanran and Arhuanran’s mother, the formidable Queen Ohonmi. I learned about wicked dark magicians like Ebomisi, whose deadly challenges cost people their heads, which sounds horrific, but oral stories have no age ratings. And there was the legendary husband-and-wife team of Agboghi and Emokpolo, who fought side by side: he a mystical warrior who could summon pythons from his nose as body armour, she a sorceress who used a musical instrument to work magic.

Then, once we were done with Edo folklore, we watched Star Wars, Marvel, Disney: arguably a myriad of Western and other folklore in its own right. And to crown it all off, we watched the ultimate epic, the Mahabharata. I remember the day my little brother and I found it purely by accident, flicking through TV channels and landing on a yogi meditating under a tree. As kids it was new to us, so we sat and watched the thirty-minute episode with subtitles, not taking our eyes off the screen. Every weekend after that, we woke up at 6:30am to catch the next one. It took the best part of a year to reach the end, and it was so good we bought the full DVD set as teenagers and watched it again, twice.

The web of stories resonated with me instantly. The family disputes that spiralled into civil war were a familiar story to the Benin story of Esigie and Arhuanran’s fight for the throne. I was also drawn to how morality worked in that saga: Krishna, a god powerful enough to end the war outright, doesn’t. He offers help to both sides, even though he knows exactly where he stands.

Building My Own Third Space

This isn’t just two cultures meeting. It’s a whole constellation of them, absorbed over a lifetime. That’s the gift of growing up somewhere like London: a spectrum of cultures at your door, all of them inviting you further in. And the way we’ve chosen to pass on our own stories is a card game.

I’ve always tried to understand the world through the lens of the past, and games are the best way I know to do that. I vividly remember playing a video game built around Greek myths and legends as a kid, and how it made me more curious about the Greek gods, sending me off afterwards to actually read up on who Medusa or Athena were. A game invites you in and lets you shape the world as you learn it. You lose yourself in something you would have never have found without the internet doing the introducing. A world that feels like Horrible Histories and Marvel had a love child on the African continent, with cosmological stakes closer to the Mahabharata.

That, for me, is the third space. It’s why that paragraph on the If Time’s Limited website has stuck with me. Bhabha’s insight wasn’t just academic. It was a description of creative power.

Beyond the Game

I know I’m not the only one operating in this space. There’s a generation of young people in the diaspora who feel what I feel, who are British and Nigerian, or American and Ghanaian, or French and Congolese, and who’ve been told, implicitly or explicitly, that their in-between-ness is a problem to resolve rather than a position to build from.

Bhabha’s argument, and my own experience of building the Realm Of Obas project, suggests the opposite. The third space is not a waiting room between two homes. It is a home of its own. And the things built there are, in my humble opinion, pretty damn awesome.

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Realm of Obas is a trading card game rooted in the oral histories of the Benin Kingdom. Join the waitlist at realmofobas.com or follow us on Instagram.

Sources

• Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
• If Time’s Limited, Hong Kong-based artistic research and performance collective.
• Quote from Bamba Diop, on his hero Thierno Seydou Sall, from “Do Your Research & Come Back When You’re Ready”, Next Gen Bronzes, Medium.
• Perrault, Charles. Charles Perrault’s Classic Fairy Tales. Illustrated by Harry Clarke, introduction by Thomas Bodkin. Chancellor Press, 1986.