So, I hosted Studio Styles’s first social event last Saturday and the next one is in a few days. If you’re in Abuja, RSVP here. (It’s Book Swap Social and there will be fiction, memoirs, health, history, poetry, academic, art books and more.)
At some point, Mo, Mam and I were at the fiction pile and Mo said he wanted a book with emotional heft and the simpler the better. I gave him The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly.
I typically feel disinterested in stories where non-human animals are doing human things like packing human-style lunch boxes and forming human-style governments. And thankfully this was not such a book. All the non-human animals were doing their animal things. There were humans too and they did human things. Some call the book a fable. The publishers say the book is “an anthem for freedom, individuality and motherhood” and it is.
At the same time, for me, it was a realistic book I read literally which brought up themes of endings and beginnings, life and death, life cycles, existing in the circle of life, being animated by a life force, and being an animal. I still kill cockroaches and I am afraid of many living things, fungi especially, but connecting in mind with the living world around me is one of my ever-growing desires.
Julie G, a reviewer on Goodreads, wrote: “This is a book that is written in simple language, with a simple message: life is tough, the enemy is ever-present, but you have courage and joy inside you. Seek what you want and need and stand tall. The final paragraph is almost paralyzing in its strength and beauty.”
Completely finished me but also reset me. If you’re looking for that, here I am passing on the recommendation to you.
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You may have come across ‘The Deep Sea’ Neal Agarwal’s digital rendition of an expedition to our deepest-known part of the waters below. On my list of illuminating moments of 2023, right next to reading that hen book is going through ‘The Deep Sea’.
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Speaking of 2023 highlights, I deeply enjoyed Elif Batuman’s novel Either/Or. It was all I looked forward to during my job in October—coming back home from the office, and pressing play on the audiobook while I baffed, had dinner and laid down on my bed googling random shit and listening to Selin just talk about what she thought about in her day. Selin is full of questions and no question is rhetorical to her.
Some parts of the book and the conversations around it were boring for me and that boringness was a significant appeal. Many of the issues in/around the book felt far from my jagged-edge pressing concerns. Examples include Batuman’s feminist re-awakening while editing her first novel and the prequel to Either/Or, The Idiot, her insistence that the book is political because the personal is political and the book’s theoretical enquiry into the false dichotomy between an aesthetic and ethical life.
On one hand, Batuman and her novels are, to me, an example of how one’s social and political environments can shape one’s politics and influence the awareness one has about different issues. You don’t know what you don’t know. Plus: Reading the books, attending the seminars and participating in the conversations do not mean that everyone is thinking about them with the same lens as you. And this is a cause for humility and curiosity because it makes me think of all the issues and depths of understanding I am yet to meet and all the many different separate realisations everyone takes out of the very same things, moments and ideas we encounter.
On the other hand, Batuman’s reflection on her novels echoes the one big thing I’ve learnt this year: that there could always be new levels of understanding and experiential/embodied knowledge of already familiar things. Sometimes the new knowledge is not of the thing’s existence but of the extent of the thing. And man… the nature/extent of things are probably inexhaustible. There will be landmarks, layers, -spheres. But the fullness of anything? Infinite.
A nice squeeze for me in the novel was the novel’s reflection on male-female heterosexual romantic relationships and how common it is to engage in romantic relationships in such a way neither person is seeing or engaging with the other as a person, largely also because the individuals don’t see themselves as people either.
One of Batuman’s interviews, the one in Another Magazine, was particularly delicious because I too recently came to a realisation of some of the ways I have been living out a zombie compulsion in my romantic life.
Batuman was asked “You’ve mentioned your having a lot of troubling romances. What snapped you out of that stupor?”
I don’t know, because I remember thinking at the time that I knew I should end it, but it just seemed impossible. I just remember feeling that he was this island of humanity, and that the whole rest of the world was dead and uninteresting – like I was only really alive when I was with him. It’s just such a sinister way of thinking and it blocks you off from the rest of the world.
In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse talks about how Eros [sensual and passionate love] could be distributed over your whole body. It could be in your conversations, and in different relationships with different people. But because of capitalism, it’s been concentrated to the genitalia, so everyone’s just obsessed with who they’re having genital contact with. We have the work time and leisure time, and the work time is so depleting that in the leisure time you just have to drug yourself into this brainless state to rest up for your work. I did feel like the rest of my life was dead and this was the only channel on which I was alive. I felt like if I gave it up, I would just be surrounded by zombie people all the time.
DS: When actually maybe you were the zombie person.
EB: Yeah, I was the zombie person. It does take rewiring, though.
I have been Selin in many regards: as a Literature major, as a ruminant thinker whose many thoughts start somewhere and lead back to the same current relational obsessions (mostly failed relationships), and as the reader who “is exposed to an idea or a text, connects it to something in her life, thinks through how the text can extend or revise her prior perceptions about a person or situation, and then, often, returns to the text to evaluate it on the basis of how it has furthered her insights. [A reader who] tends to draw almost automatic one-to-one correspondences between people in her life and characters in books.”
Okay, instead of three beautiful things, I leave you with
One quirky thing:
This Daily Trust interview with Dr Patrick Wilmot, a Jamaican man who taught Sociology at Ahmadu Bello University for eighteen years before Babangida & co. kidnapped him from his house. They could only deport him through the UK and when they called Margaret Thatcher about the matter, she said “Do whatever [Dr. Wilmot] wants.”
I share the interview because it is really quirky, and because there’s a history mouthful in it. I learnt about Dr Wilmot while working on a research project (that didn’t get funding so didn’t go far) on radical thinkers (esp in Nigerian universities) who were grappling with khaki-capitalism in Nigeria in the 1960s-1990s. I was able to finally get one of his novels at an affordable price point here in Nigeria when I volunteered with the Iva Valley bookstore in Labour House.
Q: So, you are not the kind of committed intellectual that uses his intellect to change the society; you are a theoretician who analyses things and leaves it at that?
PW: If people understand the nature of the society and understand what is wrong with it, then they want to change it. The problem with Nigeria today is poverty. The way you deal with poverty is that you have an industrial strategy and work out how to deal with the oil industry, create factories and produce cement.
Till next time,
It’s still #CeasefireNow.
Restful is seeking contributors to the ‘Notes on Living’ column.
If you have a thread of thought (or two) that’s moving around in your head connecting a bunch of the things you’ve been reading, looking at and engaging with, we’d love to hear from you. The post you’ve just read is an example of what that could look like. Contributors get paid $20.
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