‘Writers Have the Obligation of Imagining the Future That Must Be Achieved’

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

Our questions are italicized.

James Hardly Chase novels, because there was always a classmate with a new one to lend. Why You Act the Way You Do by Tim LaHaye, because I found it in my mother’s divider. Nani Boi titles, those were ₦150 apiece when I was in secondary school. The Rosicrucian Digest, because my father owned a collection for a reason I still don’t know. I also read poems and novel excerpts in English comprehension textbooks. My parents barely had enough to pay for all our required schoolbooks and so had little to spare on extra-curricular ones. So, anything I could find, I read.

I struggle to think of any book, fiction or non-fiction, that fits my life at this moment. I am not lost but I am not sure where I am, only of the direction in which I am headed. Until a few years ago, I thought I would be a biomedical scientist. I moved states to pursue that career path. And now, I am such a different person with very different priorities. Even my familial relationships are in a state of flux, some getting stronger, some ceasing to exist. I am becoming surer of who I am, the sort of life I want to live, what society I want to see. I am sure there are books that attempt to capture this experience, but none come to mind in a way that feel representative.

That would be an article in Discovery Magazine titled ‘Dire Wolf De-Extinction Breeds Both Hope and Uncertainty’. In it, Matt James, the chief officer of colossal biosciences speaks to the company’s so called de-extinction of the dire wolf, claiming that the technology presents ‘opportunities to help recover populations at scale in places where they should be reintroduced responsibly in a way that can be focused on coexistence.’ At the heart of that argument is an intentional delusion about what is causing our loss of biodiversity. Till today, there is a refusal by natural scientists to reckon with the legacies of colonization and the present realities of capitalist production. As we speak, CO2 levels are still on the rise. The capitalist system has pushed our world into a sixth mass extinction event and is wreaking havoc across the globe, particularly in the global south. Indigenous communities are being displaced and made into climate refugees and more than 42,000 species are currently at risk of extinction due to human activity. Yet there is money—millions of dollars—to de-extinct species that disappeared thousands of years ago. To incubate the illusion that one day we can repair our biodiversity by ‘reintroducing responsibly’, when we have not even stopped the current onslaught corporations have unleashed on our ecosystem. At the heart of ‘de-extinction’ science is the hubris of western colonization which thinks it can destroy the natural world for profit and then repair it in a lab.

In the same vein, they are still trying to find a technological solution to climate change, even though the science clearly states we are on borrowed time. They will try to tame the sun with an obscenely expensive reactor before they concede the destructive, unsustainable nature of the capitalist system.