Still needs editing

An email correspondence

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-wrong-kind-of-black-poet

https://seun146179.substack.com/p/the-algorithm-will-not-save-you?triedRedirect=true

… I truly enjoyed reading ‘Seun’s review; he balanced the praises and criticisms he offers, but most importantly, shows the importance of the book for this current moment, while also critiquing the contradictions it establishes, contradictions that as ‘Seun mentions, pushes your argument forward to the point where it can then be engaged fruitfully by young-uns like me.

The review solidified in many ways the intersections between our works. It has also helped me realize how deeply I need to think about some of the arguments I weave around my discussion of bookfluencership and social media literary practices. It has also made me see my reflexive attempt to understand the personality from a place of anonymity – no Achebe, no Adichie, just good ol’ social media writers and influencers who are on similar playing fields when it comes to the of outrage economy. 

I also don’t agree with how ‘Seun places your book in conversation with Jesuyemi’s article. You both ain’t saying the same thing nor does Jesuyemi exercise the same critical 

From where I stand, Jesuyemi is not saying what everyone thinks he is saying. His melodramatic article goes on and on about how institutional gatekeepers of literature in the 21^st century does not extend grace to divergent worldviews. On surface level, the message sounds good and clear; but on a deeper level, one can’t help but notice how he is presenting it in such bad faith – a case of equivocational strawmanning, how his citation of Western literary workers is uncritical, and how his contestation about grace being in low supply is ahistorical.

For where I stand as a Christian who has also  the same biblical truths as he has been and has negotiated these truths in dealings with the literary world, I can clearly see that it’s not grace Jesuyemi is getting at, it is tolerance, the kind that is not dialectical, the kind that receives but does not give. Despite having words on pages, despite the fact that it has been subject to different interpretations and has been approached from different cultural, theological, and historical standpoints, despite the fact that it possesses all the qualities of a literary text, the Bible is hardly regarded as one by believing Christians; its words are absolute (Jesuyemi said so himself). The differences in beliefs by different Christians has never been because of the standardization of the notion of divergence in theology, but because we constantly have to absorb Christianity or biblical injunctions to fit the divergence of our existences. We constantly have to be crooked in our practice of Christianity and hold space for a reality that just always will be contradictory, chaotic, and rife with differences.

Jesuyemi’s CHOICE to blatantly turn his belief into fact and stand on a biblically-charged string of words without any show of dialectical flair becoming of a literary critic does not reflect the kind of grace that he is demanding of other literary works and workers. He is asking that he and his beliefs that have so far had tangible consequences on people’s lives be tolerated while the beliefs of other people that have so far had tangible consequences on people’s lives yield to graceful compromises. If we actually go by the subtexts of his message, what we will have is an anarchy of opinions, an apolitical literary domain where we all close our eyes to the reality of how personality shapes writing and reception to writing and where what shapes what influences what happens to who (a reality that your book acutely contends with).

Secondly, to actually preach the message of literary dialectics and the generative tensions it incurs is to see that the liberal institutions he brings to the light as examples of devious manipulation of literary autonomy are operating from the same playbook that non-liberal forms of censoring draw from. Institutions like NBCC are not counter-hegemonic, they are alt-hegemonic, just another iteration of a structure that is humanist in orientation, but driven by ideological correctness and binarized understandings of politics and its effects on people’s lives

This is where an understanding of intersectionality comes in; an institution can both be supportive of gay rights and still be hegemonic, racist, inhumane, and still treat Africans like shit because they can. One can say like my friend Kanyinsola Olorunnisola does that people’s sexual material conditions should not be caught up in ideological struggles, acknowledge that the Bible has said so and so about homosexuality, and still turn around to note how religions and their books operates, inevitably affects bias, and has inadvertently been weaponized in the battle over controlling people’s minds and actions.

In fact, following Marquis Bey’s radical and anarchist presentation of intersectionality, race, gender, and sexuality are non-normative, fluid entities that stand always in opposition to the rigid structures that institutions like NBCC in all their advocative grandness work within. NBCC ain’t acting for gay people, Black people, or whatever else, they are acting for NBCC as an institution. And Jesuyemi just happened to be caught up in the web of their undignified institutionalism the same way human lives and identities have been caught up in the web of institutional religions for a lot of centuries now.

Rather than hold NBCC and other literary gatekeepers in the West accountable for their institutional hegemony and acknowledge the hopeless contradictions of the structures upon which theirs and his belief are founded on, he chooses to signpost NBCC as upholding a banner of censoring that is a symptom of a much larger issue of 21st century literary un-grace-ful-ness or, in simple terms, wokeism. It is ironical that his essay, due to its uncritical sentimentality, has since unleashed a vitriole and un-excised show of bigotry on the very genres of people whose orientations he claims he can be against despite not being against them, the people. 

In short, as opposed to what ‘Seun infers, ERNEST JESUYEMI IS NOT A FOIL AGAINST THE OUTRAGE ECONOMY IN NIGERIAN LITERATURE, HE IS PART OF IT. HE FUELS IT, ALWAYS HAS. And this was how I was expecting ‘Seun to position your book in conversation with Jesuyemi’s essay. An outrager would not recognize the contradiction-less nature of their own demands that literature be a site for expressing and holding space for contradictions; an outrager would resort to melodrama, one-sided presentation of facts, and false causes (PostHocErgoPropterHoc) in rendering arguments rimmed with a request for permissiveness to be uncritical about the structures that hold us up as we seek absorption into other structures.

“…the Ernest situation makes the personal political in a specific way. It asks whether literary culture has room for people who hold views the institution finds uncomfortable, provided those views are not the instrument of their critical work. The answer, in the current moment, seems increasingly to be no. Yékú’s book argues implicitly, and his conclusion argues explicitly, that this is a loss, not a triumph. He is right. A literary culture that can only tolerate agreement is not a literary culture. It is a congregation.” 

This is all good except that this is not what the Ernest situation asks. What it asks, I contend, is how the institution is in itself an algorithm, where what is uncomfortable and comfortable is not deterministic (much like technology isn’t). The personality displayed via technological affordances only reflects the agelong technology of physicality, the algorithm of human affectations. The different kinds of institutions in existence have always never made room for the different views they consider uncomfortable, but the content of what it considers uncomfortable is what always changes. Today, it is “don’t say or not say the Earth is round; today, it is, “don’t say or not say homosexuality is a sin”; tomorrow, it might be, “don’t say or not say we can’t sleep with aliens.”

Once upon a time, Ernest’s truth, belief, view or whatever else would have earned him a seat on the table rather than ousted him from the presence of the Dalvas. If ‘Seun’s and Ernest’s “discovery” that institutions don’t allow space for what it regards as uncomfortable is already a foregone conclusion, then I think the historical positionings of your work, the fact that you demystify the notion of algorithm and extend it beyond digital spaces into past epochs should be taken more seriously and literally in understanding what it would mean to be “grace-full” about the peculiar algorithmic projections of the personalities that have erupted out of this current age.