‘Write Something Familiar in a Way That Readers Encounter It as Something New’

First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.

Our questions are italicized.

My mom was intentional about raising a child who reads. I was, I think, seven when I got this little book filled with short English stories. She also got me the classical Nigerian texts—The Bottled Leopard, Things Fall Apart, etc. By the time I was ten, I got Richard Wright’s Black Boy as a birthday present, and it rocked my world. Along the way, I read A Woman in Her Prime, The Joys of Motherhood, the Adichie classics (several times I must add), and a hundred or so illicit Harlequin romances lol. I also really loved reading Lola Shoneyin’s The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives, Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon and Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come. I was in awe of Sefi Atta after reading that book.

As soon as my command of language was able to grasp more critical thoughts, I began reading a lot of Molara Ogundipe, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, Crenshaw, bell hooks, and Brittany Cooper (Eloquent Rage is probably my favourite book currently). I would say I currently read more non-fiction than fiction these days. If my life was a book, it would be the ‘Orchestrated Fury’ chapter in Cooper’s Eloquent Rage. In a moment in time, where women must learn to orchestrate their fury in ways that do not tear them apart, in a world that wants us cowering, in pain and burn out, that chapter resonates with my soul, and even more because the way Brittany Cooper described her mom reminded me so much of mine—talk about rooting for the underdogs!

A lot! Like I said, I am reading a lot of academic texts these days, and there is an inherent problem with an academia that has for long been run on the politics of using Black/African bodies as talking points even when these same bodies are considered illegitimate in the academy. Asides from that, I am a big fan of reparative reading, so I lately disagreed with critiques of intersectionality that focus more on the way it’s been co-opted/used as a buzzword and less on the fact that intersectionality is deeply rooted in the experiences of Black women. I also recently disagreed with a critique of Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s The Invention of Women that didn’t acknowledge the specific time-space that Oyěwùmí was writing within when she made the claim ‘Yorùbás don’t do gender’. Her work, being a pointed challenge to Western universalizing gender binaries, inherently showed multiple possibilities of self-presentation and unveiled Yorùbá worldviews that have been ignored/erased. I do not believe she was in any way presenting Oyo as a gender utopia or establishing a rigid North/South binary. And I believe she was fed up as I am, having worked in both NGO and academic spaces, about the ways the Global North presents ideas and practices people had been doing through generations as new inventions that we must all follow on their own terms.

I recently read Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, and what I got from that book was a moment of reflection where I realized that the way we construct a lot of liberal-progressive thoughts and politics is within a very specific frame of racial capitalism and consumerism, especially for trans bodies. Transness inherently disrupts normativity. It disturbs what we know and have internalized about norms. So, to see transness read in the framework of Big Med and unattainable beauty standards, the limitless elasticity of passing and piecing, where trans bodies are compelled to surgically alter themselves to fit cisgender norms driven by capitalist and consumerist pressures, is disturbing. We see this in real time with the piecing of Black trans bodies, where they are compelled to pass into a norm, and a very problematic norm at that, where for Black/Afro Trans bodies, becoming a passing normative woman, means you are situated within a culture of Eurocentric standards of beauty—the whiter the skin, the straighter the nose, the ‘good hair’ ideal…. Yes, passing can indeed be a survival manoeuvre for bodies in transphobic contexts, passing is nonetheless shaped by classed and racialized standards of acceptability and assimilationist politics, and I think there should be more conversations about that.