ktravula – a travelogue!

A Digital Prophet Revisited

A number of years ago, shortly after I left high school, or maybe in my first year of uni, I came across this book called Being Digital, written by Nicholas Negroponte, then a columnist at Wired, in 1995. I lived then in Ìbàdàn, Southwest Nigeria, and was still undecided about what I wanted to do with myself. I don’t know whether I saw a copy of the book first, or came across the media frenzy about it. But being at the time already interested in digital technology, I took some interest. In any case, the book was everywhere. I didn’t get far with that first attempt at reading it, though I realized it held something fascinating about the future of technology.

I’d seen a desktop computer perhaps just once before, back then, in the house of a neighbour who ran the private nursery school I had attended. Cable TV was something we’d seen only in the house of another rich neighbour down the street, provided via the huge satellite dish parked in their garden. Mobile phones were not yet a thing in Nigeria, except in the hands of the very rich or the very fraudulent—big, clunky, bulky-looking things, but glamorous all the same. James Bond films showed fascinating new technologies, like self-driving cars and teleconferencing.

I got my first email address in 1998—this I remember. It was a Yahoo email, but in time I also got one on coolmail.com, and another from Hotmail, which seemed like a fancy thing to do. There were others, with names like Eudoramail and Pegasus. In Ìbàdàn in the late 1990s, the only place with public access to the internet was the “Business Centre,” later to be renamed “Cybercafe.” Email at the Business Center was a complicated affair. You wrote your “email” out by hand and handed it to the business center assistant, who typed it for you into the computer, and then sent it on for you via their email server. Almost like a telex system, connecting via “modems” that hooked up to the internet with a whirring tone that sounded like an intubated hospital patient trying to speak. You then went home and returned in a few days to check for a reply to your email. If it had arrived you’d pay for the message, the BC assistant printed it out, stapled it for privacy, and handed it to you.

Within the following year or so it became possible to register a personal email address and send one’s own private emails. But to use the “net,” you paid by the hour for access to one of several computers in the center, which was separated from the one beside you by a wooden bar. The same scene was playing out in Internet cafés from San Diego to Taipei to Mumbai.

For a child of 17, this was a really interesting time. Having access to the computer at all, even if I had to pay for it, was a delight, and it soon consumed all my free time. Eventually, after my admission to the university was delayed by a few months because of a general strike of the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities, I took a job in one of those business centres, as the assistant who typed out other people’s emails and printed their returned replies. I supervised the users who came to “browse” the internet and either renewed their time when it was up or kicked them out. With the job came unlimited access to the exploding new world of the internet. I registered my first website, learnt what cpanel, http, ftp, server, and other mysterious code words meant. I entered the university some months later and had an encounter with one of the earliest of the “Nigerian Prince” scams. But that’s another story.

The influence of Negroponte and his book followed me through my university days almost unconsciously, as I wrestled with linguistics and language technology, and eventually figured myself out as an adult fully invested in the digital life. What was it about the book that had made it such a flavour of the season on its publication?

For one thing, its novelty; Google would not be founded until September of 1998, three years after the publication of Being Digital. I remember the launch of Google as an upstart competitor to the dominant search engines, AskJeeves, Altavista, and Babelfish. If anyone had told me that I would eventually work at Google myself, or that it would become a company that would change the world of maps or the entire field of language technology, I would not have believed it. Even my work in the linguistics degree as an undergraduate touched only briefly on the possibility of “speech synthesis” and “artificial intelligence” and all the coming innovations that, in early 2000s Nigeria, sounded like the tech from the James Bond thrillers.

When the memory of those times came back to me a few weeks ago, I ordered the book, and today, these many years later, I finally finished reading it. I was curious to know how it would seem at this remove, but even more to compare it to the life I’ve lived in the digital technology space over the last three decades.

Being Digital did not disappoint. It made sense that a work of such keen and informed foresight was celebrated at the time, when many of the tools and frameworks we now take for granted, from fiber to deeply archived news sites, were only far-fetched ideas in the minds of the scientists and theorists then envisioning and working toward this new world.

The sense of awe I felt while reading it was matched by the wonder that so many more works of this nature are being written today—some of them, perhaps, equally prescient, and others destined to be wrongly ignored.

***

“Early in the next millennium… your telephone won’t ring indiscriminately; it will receive, sort, and perhaps respond to your incoming calls like a well-trained English butler. Mass media will be defined by systems for transmitting and receiving personalized information and entertainment. Schools will… become more like museums and playgrounds for children to assemble ideas and socialize with other children all over the world… We will socialize in digital neighborhoods in which physical space will be irrelevant and time will play a different role… When you watch an hour of television, it may have been delivered to your home in less than a second.” — Page 6.

“I am more convinced that by the year 2005, Americans will spend more hours on the internet (or whatever it’s called) than watching network television… Computer programs, not just people, will be reading material such as this book and making, for example, automatic summaries. Copyright law says that if you summarize material, that summary is your intellectual property. I doubt that lawmakers ever considered the idea of abstracting being done by an inanimate entry or robo-pirates” — page 58-60

“The information industry will become more of a boutique business. Its marketplace is the global information highway. The customers will be people and their computer agents. Is the digital marketplace real? Yes, but only if the interface between people and their computers improves to the point where talking to your computer is as easy as talking to another human being.” — 85

“The challenge for the next decade is not just to give people bigger screens, better sound quality, and easier-to-use graphical input devices. It is to make computers that know you, learn about your needs, and understand verbal and nonverbal languages. A computer should know the difference between your saying “Kissinger” and “kissing her”, not because it can find the small acoustic difference, but because it can understand the meaning.” — Page 92

“…Personal computers almost never have your finger meet the display, which is quite startling when you consider that the human finger is a pointing device you don’t have to pick up, and you have ten of them. You can move gracefully from typing to pointing, from horizontal plane to vertical. Yet it hasn’t caught on…” Page 132

“For most people, typing is not an ideal interface. If we could speak to our computers, even the most confirmed Luddite would use them more enthusiastically. Nonetheless, computers remain more and less deaf and mute. Why? The primary reason for so few advances in speech recognition is lack of perspective, not lack of technology… We don’t want to talk to a computer like a tourist addressing a foreign child, deliberately mouthing each word and pausing after it.” 137-141.

“A future agent is often seen as some centralized and omniscient machine of Orwellian character. A much more likely outcome is a collection of computer programs and personal appliances, each of which is pretty good at one thing and very good at communicating with the others. The image is fashioned after Minsky’s The Society of Mind (1987), in which he proposes that intelligence is not found in some central processor but in the collective behavior of a large group of more special-purpose, highly interconnected machines.” — 157

“In future digital media there will be more pay-per-view, not just on an all-or-nothing basis, but more like newspapers and magazines, where you share the cost with advertisers. In some cases, the consumer may have an option to receive material without advertising but at a higher cost. In other cases, the advertising will be so personalized that it is indistinguishable from news. It is news.” — page 170

“I don’t know about you, but I would throw away my VCR tomorrow for a better scheme… With all due respect to Blockbuster and its new owner, Viacom, I think videocassette-rental stores will go out of business in less than ten years.” — Page 173

“The next decade will see cases of intellectual property abuse and invasion of our privacy. We will experience digital vandalism, software piracy, and data thievery. Worst of all, we will witness the loss of many jobs to wholly automated systems, which will soon change the white-collar workplace to the same degree that it has already transformed the factory floor. The notion of lifetime employment at one job has already started to disappear…” — page 227

I’ll stop here, because I want you to read it, and wonder with me how much of this book may have influenced the countless visionaries, famous or obscure, whose innovations we now depend on for basic navigation of everyday life, from Netflix to Zoom, and how many more of his predictions—like a home service robot that barks like a dog when it senses an intruder—have yet to come to pass. The book, almost surprisingly, didn’t envisage crypto.

***

Personal computers, like the internet, have become commonplace in Nigeria. To my pre-teenage son living in America today, descriptions of the internet of my youth will sound like a fairytale. But many of the issues we grapple with today in Nigeria and on the African continent still have to do with whether our best technologies will ultimately succeed in improving society, or preventing underdevelopment.

My job, as it has evolved over the years, has been to find ways to make the new digital world recognise peculiar characteristics of that society, especially from the language angle. We have Google Maps now in Nigerian English—a project I led; I’ve also participated in many other projects to make language technologies function well in African languages. This includes the foundational work of digital lexicography, including building platforms like YorubaName.com and ttsyoruba.com, curating data for machine learning, and improving support for diacritics. None of this is happening as quickly as needed, but it is way better than what used to be. Digital globalisation, the dream of Negroponte’s generation, has in many ways come to pass, but it came with deep cracks that still prevent global equitable access.

I have since learnt that the Being Digital came from the the author’s regular columns in Wired magazine, and that it has now been translated into over forty languages. It must delight him to know that his words still comprise a relevant collection of data that can be bought online, as he imagined, through a digital shopping cart, and read on exactly the kinds of devices he dreamed of more than thirty years ago.

[First published on June 11, 2026 on FlamingHydra.]

Reading Forest Imaginaries

“In African fiction, the forests I encountered tended to be less about the trees and more about the lives and bodies of creatures, spirits, and plants. Forests in these narratives embody something liminal or inchoate, a site that resists mapping and boundaries, where beings meet and interact in ways that are unpredictable, chaotic, but also generative.”

— Ainehi Edoro

I’ve just finished reading Ainehi Edoro’s Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think published last month by Columbia University Press. Edoro, the publisher of Brittle Paper — an important platform for African literature conversations — takes a deep look at the role of forests in African literature, and the reader on a wild ride in this her debut scholarly work.

African novels have set whole revelatory scenes, important plot events and sometimes whole stories in the forest. But in Ainehi’s reading, the forest has played a still more fundamental role in African storytelling. Conventional criticism has reckoned the African forest “merely as setting, a stage where characters play out fantasies of magic and transformation,” fossilized and imagined “as a relic of a premodern, primordial, prelogical world, forever fixed in the past.” Edoro proposes instead a reading of the forests in these works as “spaces for the creative imagination” that “exert influence on the fictional worlds to the extent of being co-architects of the lives of the characters.”

And in about 284 pages, she makes this case quite convincingly.

Ṣóyínká’s 1967 poem Ìdanrè and his translation of Fágúnwà into Forest of a Thousand Daemons, Amos Tutuọlá’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Thomas Mafolo’s Chaka and Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon are all considered here. In each work, Edoro establishes associative connections between what is happening in the story and the role of the forest itself — as if a character of its own.

“Forest Imaginaries argues” the introduction says, “that the forest is a conceptual tool for rethinking the forms, histories, aesthetics, and critical methods of African literature… The book introduces the forest as a unit of spatial analysis in AFrican fiction based on the observation that the forest marks a distinct category of space in fiction. When characters enter forests in African fiction, something happens to their ability to imagine. There is something about the forest that suspends law, lets imagination run wild, transforms bodies, and collapeses time as well as distinction between the human and the nonhuman. The forest’s mythic and imaginative dimensions offer a different scale and context for analyzing a fictional world…”

In The Tragedy of the Forest, the book’s first section, Edoro explores the myth of Chaka, and Ṣóyínká’s mythification of Ògún in Ìdànrè; lso the role of the “evil forest” in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart — which I found quite compelling. In Things Fall Apart, the “evil forest” where rejects and the sick were buried and cast away from society was to eventually become the site of the first school in the village, when the systems of power changed hands from the local custom to the invading British army. Edoro teases out how the transition from that space of punishment and horror to one of communal progress impacted on many of the scenes in the book from Okonkwo’s relationship with his father and his society to other man-made tragedies that befell them, including his own eventual suicide.

“The failure of the evil forest to dispel the threat of the white man should have signaled that something much more sinister was afoot” she wrote in chapter two… Allocating land to the missionaries in the evil forest amounts to political death. By losing the evil forest and, by extension, the battle over death, teh clan loses the capacity to decide what is within or outside the law, what is threatening or nonthreatening violence, what is legitimate or illegitimate violence, who is a spirit of the wild and who is not, where the wild ends and where it begins.” — page 145.

In the latter section, The Love of the Forest, she explores Amos Tútùọ́lá’s joyful exploration in The Palm-Wine Drinkard as well as Nnedi Okorafor’s wild and futuristic storytelling through corals and aliens. I found this less compelling than the first part, but delightful anyway.

The bibliography is eleven pages long, while the end notes a little more than twice that, a testament to the depth of the author’s plumbing of these new meanings and significations

Edoro, a lecturer of African literature at the University of Wisconsin, founded BrittlePaper in August of 2010 as an African literary blog, an outlet for her postgraduate work at Duke University. It has since then established itself as a prime location for news and reviews of new writings. I myself have published reviews, interviews, and views on the platform, and found it a rich source of conversation in African literature. I find the subject of the book even more compelling since I’ve been working on a biographical nonfiction on Nobel Laureate Wọlé Ṣóyínka which uses the forest — and the writer’s relationship with it — as a springboard to understanding his work and his life. It is rewarding to find some congruence of one’s work in others’ delightful research explorations.

The rather predictable future of such an important book as Edoro’s, alas, is the likely prescriptive uses to which it will henceforth be put as a template of understanding all of the forests in African literature. I noted quite early in the book that its richest examples came from early African works in print, by authors who have now almost all ascended into ancestorhood. Does Edoro’s understanding of African forest roles in literature extend into modern works, written by writers who may never have inhabited the world of mystery, superstition, and regimented rules that characterized early pre-Western-contact African societies? This is, perhaps, where the mention of Okorafor would have been some consolation. The coral reefs that dominated the plot of Lagoon, Edoro argues, “invite us to reconsider the very nature of worldbuilding (as) an ongoing, collective process… not as a graveyard, but a living archive of creativity and survival.”

More derivative readings would layer Edoro’s work on new literatures like Akwaeke Emezi’s, Romeo Oríogun, Jide Salawu, Remi Ngamije, etc to see if the forest — even in the concrete jungles of modern living — continues to speak to us in much the same way as in these older cited works. My guess is that this will result in a radically-different book — maybe Edoro’s sequel — but would not be any less compelling.

Read an interview with the Ainehi Edoro here.

[This essay was first published on FlamingHydra on 24 February, 2026]

In the Shadow of Context — an essay

“Context: The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.”

– Oxford English Dictionary

In the early twenties, Professor Ivor A. Richards, in search of a new way to teach the assessment and appreciation of poetry, came up with an idea that seems commonplace now, but at the time was interesting enough to challenge existing conventions. What he did, an experiment he detailed in his book Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929), was to distribute to his students, poems written by a wide range of people from ancient masters to modern practitioners, from Shakespeare to a random poet in the reigning literary magazine, without the names of the authors printed on the pages of the poems.

This method, he realized, achieved a number of fascinating results. It brought the work to a level of familiarity, gave each poem a chance to be appraised on its individual merits or flaws, and removed the bias that the prominent or unknown name of the author brought to bear on the assessment of the work. The same yardstick that is used to judge Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” is used on Frost’s “Mending Wall”. And without the name of the author present—the experiment was based on the knowledge that these student critics had no prior exposure to these poems at all—the positive or negative assessments of the craft is obtained purely from contact and the learned rules of criticism. The result of this experiment was published in the 1929 book, with each chapter dedicated to one selected poem and the individual appraisal given by each of these students, affording the reader another chance to walk in the shoes of the student critics and the experience of their teacher.
Although an eye-opening experiment at the time, it was not without criticism. For one, poems, like fingerprints, are unique not just in their creation but also in form, style, content, and context, so any analysis based solely on their physical form always lacks something to make them relatable to an audience that has never been in a classroom. While it impressed educated critics and other professors, for whom such a system was already in place for the assessment of academic work for peer-reviewed journals, it failed to carry along a wide range of the writer’s’ audience. By excluding the extraneous circumstances not obtainable by primary contact, each work was assessed like the other, with little regard for what made them different, or what truly brought them alive. A certain assumption had to be made about the homogeneity of the writings in order to successfully treat something from people of different generations, class, gender, age, and influence in the same way for the purpose of criticism.

From 2014 to 2015, while I taught as a high school teacher in Lagos and edited a print anthology for students, I initiated a similar experiment, but this time for a writing competition for poetry, short fiction, and essay writing. All the entries received were stripped of identifying information, re-typed for uniformity of font, grouped into their different categories, and sent to judges. For poetry, a judge was selected who received the formatted package containing dozens of students’ writings without their names, age, or class. For fiction, the same was repeated, with the judge receiving dozens of short stories bearing nothing on the stories but the title of the work. The essay writings received similar treatment. Our instructions to the judges was that they return the scripts with an assessment of the overall quality of the work, and a rating of all the entries with a view to choosing the first, second, or third prize-winners in each category.

The result of the judging, similar to what I.A. Richards had expected and received from his student critics, was something close enough to an objective-subjective assessment: objectivity from knowing that nothing outside of the work gave away the authors’ “reputation”, except for their competence or otherwise in handling the plot and style, from knowing that all that the work received would have been ranked highly or lowly on their own merit; and subjectivity from our inevitable reliance on that one judge for our selection of the winning work for the year in that particular category. (For bigger competitions like the Booker, Orange, NLNG, Caine, etc, there are usually more than one judge, so that a comparison can be made of subjective opinions of judges before results are declared). Parents were happy with the results, and so were the students, particularly in the knowledge that the works had impressed without any personally identifying information.
For that competition focused on high school students, it might seem quite odd that any notable factor outside of the text was thought capable of influencing the judges in any direction of note. But a question from one of the judges during the process put this assumption to rest. He had written back to ask what the age range of the students under assessment was. This was for his own notes, some of which were to be used on the book’s blurb. Because the question dealt with all the works under consideration, the information was not “damaging” enough to have been withheld. But one imagines that if one particular work had impressed solely because of the author’s perceived youth, that information would have become prejudicial to the overall assessment of other parts of the work’s failure or success.

So obsessed was Professor Richards with his desire to preserve the sanctity of this method that he ensured that the names of the authors of the poems used in each of the book’s chapter were left not just at the tail end of the book, but written in reverse, to be decoded only by holding the book to a mirror. That seemed a little extreme, but the message was clear. With The Sail, the high school anthology to which I alluded earlier, all it took was a private spreadsheet in which the names of the original authors were properly matched with the title of their work, kept away not just from judges but also from fellow teachers to whom the student authors often went in pursuit of information about the status of their entries. One imagines that if modern prizes for writing pursued a similar course, the process would require a lot more time. To strip a novel, for instance, of identifying information might require more than just ripping off its cover or book spine but retyping it in total. Now how much effort would that need in order to choose a Booker Prize winner? The result, in any case, might not be any more subjective than they currently are, but might they be more objective? Will they make the prizes better insulated against charges of subconscious bias and arrive at what T.S. Eliot referred to as “a juster estimation of actual [work], good and bad”?

I brought this question up once on Twitter with the administrator of the Caine Prize, curious, at the time, about the perception that the return of previous winners into the shortlist that year might indicate that favouritism, intended or not, had begun to mar the selection process. That 2015 shortlist was called “probably the weakest line-up” that was intensified by a comment by E.C Osondu—a previous winner himself—who asked if the judges had thought of how their decision to shortlist past winners would “complicate things going forward”. My primary curiosity in raising the Twitter question was whether the judging process could offer some clarity in either direction. If the entries were judged blind, then it wouldn’t matter who showed up on the shortlist, or how many times they did. The rules for the prize hadn’t precluded anyone from entering their work, so if whatever was entered was good enough, it deserved to make into the shortlist, or win.

However, the Caine Prize had branded itself over time as a prize for upcoming and emerging voices in African literature. The prize was launched, according to its website, “to encourage and highlight the richness and diversity of African writing by bringing it to a wider audience internationally.” That could suggest that previous prize-winners, already exposed to the wider international audience, deserved to be excluded before the submissions are sent to the judges. Not doing this in 2015 meant that something was askew. Realizing that the entries were not even sent blind to the judges raised the question: what exactly were the judges assessing? Or, put another way, was there anything that they were prevented from using as means of assessment? And was the audience justified in its discomfort with the judges’ lack of insulation from positive or negative bias brought by the presence of (name, reputation, bio, worldview) context?

I realised in time that these questions aren’t met with smiles. To begin with, every prize is subjective, seeking a certain type of writing with which its name can be associated. The Caine, fairly or not, has over time been associated with what has been called “a riot of exhausted clichés”, rewarding writers who—according to Helon Habila—“perform Africa for the world…”, inundating their writings “with images and symbols and allusions that evoke… pity and fear… in a CNN, western-media-coverage-of-Africa, poverty-porn sense.” Were that the case, nothing in the suggestion that the names of the authors be removed before the judging process starts will bring about the expected change in overall direction of the Prize’s gaze, so it was also a waste of time. What should have been suggested is a clarification of what is the true object of that gaze. And that is an ongoing conversation.

I first read Practical Criticism eager to understand how English poetry worked, interested in learning how to identify a good poem or a bad one, and curious about the process underlying the critical assessment of that kind of literary output. I came away suddenly freed from the hefty burden of perfection that modern practitioners and valorised teachers exuded through abstruseness and “authority”. But what was lost in the demystification of poetry was gained in the stronger respect for the field of criticism and that particular method of interrogation. Poetry, it showed, is first a craft, much as it is also an extension of a writer’s worldview and influences; but the appreciation of this craft is primarily a subjective one too, even when passed through a seemingly objective filter of a blind assessment. Yet, that blind assessment, helpless as it might be, has had its moments.

In 2014, American writer Michael Derrick Hudson, having been denied entry into the prestigious Best American Poetry anthology forty times prior, invented “Yi-Fen Chou” as a pen name. Suddenly, his work seemed to acquire visibility and was promptly accepted, to his surprise and delight. When he later disclosed what he had done to suddenly “earn” this respect, an uproar ensued, and charges of fraud followed. The editor of the collection, Alexie Sherman, did himself no favours by then refusing to rescind the offer, remarking that “if I’d pulled the poem then I would have been denying that I was consciously and deliberately seeking to address past racial, cultural, social, and aesthetic injustices in the poetry world… But I believe I would have committed a larger injustice by dumping the poem… It would have implied that I chose poems based only on identity. But that’s not what happened. In the end, I chose each poem in the anthology because I love it. And to deny my love for any of them is to deny my love for all of them.”

Leaving aside the unconvincing nature of a “love” that didn’t show itself during the forty previous attempts, the simultaneous denial and acceptance of bias in one paragraph showed the complexity of the problem. Other factors not relevant to the work at hand are superimposed on it by the intrusive “goodness of heart” of the sensitive judge/editor/critic, and what emerges on the other side becomes less of a credible product of unbiased diligence than a labour of love. This, as have been argued, is not always a bad thing. Minority writers, typically left out of prominent selections, have been given exposure by this kind of affirmative action. But this only further illustrates the problem. Would an increased diversity of judges not improve the system better than what amounted to editorial tokenism? Would a V.S. Naipaul, who has judged women’s writing as primarily “sentimental, with a “narrow view of the world” be a valuable member of a prize panel in which the gender of the entrant is publicly known?

Now, to say that a process exists that will totally eliminate bias, or remove any way of making assumptions of the writer’s background, skill, interests, preoccupations, from the text of their creative work, is near impossible. Writers themselves make it very hard. In my June 2016 review of Tọ́pẹ́ Fọlárìn’s Caine Prize shortlisted story, written in practical interrogation of this question, I referred to the work as being “nakedly autobiographical”. It was a categorization helped along by the overwhelming shadow of context which the writer himself had unwittingly provided via publicly accessible interviews about his life, begging the question as to whether the work, entered for a fiction prize, could be so-categorized. It started off a feisty internet debate that lasted for weeks. What most of the negative responses to the review’s argument failed to resolve, however, was the purpose, usefulness, relevance, or limit of context itself. If the Caine Prize judges had access to all the same publicly available information the critic cited, and were most likely to use them in the assessment of the work under consideration, what precludes the reviewer from using them as well? Conversely, if all that mattered was the text and nothing more, would the concerned metacritics also be up in arms about the disclosure that entries were sent to the Caine Prize judges along with accompanying personal biographical information of the shortlisted writers?

Still, sending entries to judges, and critics, without identifying information—bios, names, previous prizes won, etc—will only offer a primary layer of protection against deliberate or unconscious bias. Won’t there need to be a conclave-like insulation (or a truly honour-based system) to prevent them from just googling keywords to bring out the work to them on the computer in its full publicly available form? I’ve tried to imagine, many times, how this would work out in real life and I keep coming short of a truly perfect system. The suggestion, by readers less intently obsessed with the question, always provided an exculpating alibi: “What do you mean by a perfect system anyway? They don’t exist. This is not an academic exercise. Some writers even have such a distinct style that will permeate through every layer of protective insulation. Best to trust the subjectivity of the current system than chase an impossible ideal. Opinions are subjective, and imperfect, and will always be.”

Professor Richards’ method is situated in formalism, “a style of inquiry that focuses, almost exclusively, on features of the literary text itself, to the exclusion of biographical, historical, or intellectual contexts” as Wikipedia puts it. The approach is called new criticism, which emphasizes “close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object.” Much of modern literary criticism has moved away from formalism, perhaps for the better, opening its arms to issues declared relevant with the subject matter of the author’s preoccupations: feminism, racism, sexism, ageism, ethnicism, nationalism, and many more. The 20th century, affording us so many issues against which to rebel or with which to identify, has either saved literature from the tedium of closed assessment, which had disproportionately benefited the high society of literary criticism, the elite prescriptivists and guardians of the form; or condemned literature to the gutters of plebeian society where each word, line or paragraph is smeared with an allegiance to or rebellion against a real or imagined social norm or ill in the writer’s supposed conscientious pouch.

How much is Wọlé Ṣóyínká’s “Telephone Conversation” (1962) enhanced by the knowledge of the writer’s background? One can argue that everything that needs to be known about it should already be obvious within its lines. Yet, it is also true that knowing it was written in the early 60s adds a new knowledge that will be lost when appraised in isolation. Why is the landlady concerned about the potential tenant’s skin tone if she wasn’t of a different race, and in a different country? Appraisal of other works follow similar concerns, from J.P. Clark’s “Casualties” (1970) to W.B. Yeats’s “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” (1919). There’s insufficient satisfaction in enjoying the latter’s iambic tetrameter than in knowing that the subject of the poem, a 36 year-old aviator friend to Yeats, was shot down over Italy, by mistake, in 1918. And though that context helps to better situate the work and understand the author’s obsession with the theme in later poems like “Memory of Major Robert Gregory, Shepherd and Goatherd, and Reprisals”, it does nothing to enhance the poems’ individual integrity as commentary on the nature of war.

The case of Elena Ferrante’s anonymity presents perhaps the most extreme case of rebellion against the scourge of context. But even that doesn’t much succeed. The experiment fails not because of the writer’s “outing” by a restless journalist, but by the shadow of the context that still naturally arises from the writer’s constructed biography. That “George Orwell” was not a distinguished gentleman from the British royal family but a cynical ex-policeman and journalist Eric Blair from Burma neither adds nor removes much from the enduring relevance of Animal Farm or 1984, yet the relevance of the existence of either information, constructed or otherwise, poses an interesting paradox. If the writer’s bio is important at all, why are pen names even a thing? And if it’s not, then why do we place any attention on it in our overall appraisal of the work? If, as Ferrante argues, “books, once they are written, have no need of their authors”, then why are authors’ names part of the package in the first place? The writer who became Elena Ferrante may be assumed to have separated the real human self from the constructed artistic one. But Elena Ferrante, even as a constructed person, has come to embody enough of a sufficient distraction herself — as a brilliant writer of heart-wrenching stories, to ever be truly ignorable. So, the cycle never ends.

What is left then, particularly of the stamp of approval that literature prizes confer—perhaps the most distracting context of all—is the settlement of the argument of what exactly is being assessed when works are entered. Aaron Bady, in our interview from 2013, wondered whether these prizes set up to reward the best writing or to allow certain regular (or upcoming) names thrive? The answer to this will be varied. I don’t assume that the Booker and the Caine have the same intentions, so their process should be equally as diverse. But if this is not the case, then what does that tell us? Tidbits from behind the scenes of forty years of the Booker Prize throws up fascinating discoveries, from guilt about having awarded an author the same prize over a decade earlier (see Coetzee’s Disgrace, 1999), to disagreement about whether the work was a “novel” in the strictest sense or a non-fiction documentary (see Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, 1979; Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, 1984), to disinterest because of the small size of a book (Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood, 1977) or resistance to a novel’s perceived “domesticity” (Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall, 1970). This description of the process by Jonathan Coe (a 1996 judge) makes the point more soberly:

“The process consists of nothing more rigorous than five people sitting in a room together for a few hours, swapping personal opinions. And as far as I remember, not a single judge (including me) ever changed his or her mind, or shifted his or her position, in response to an argument put forward by a colleague. In the midst of it all, the novel which I now remember as being the finest of all – Asylum, by Patrick McGrath – slipped through our net, and failed to make the shortlist by a whisker. If it had reached the shortlist, such is the randomness of the final selection process, it might easily have won the prize itself.”

And from James Wood (1994):

“I liked the winning book a great deal (James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late) – it was one of my choices – and would have been happy with either that book or Alan Hollinghurst’s The Folding Star. But I intensely disliked the way we reached that verdict, and felt that the arbitrary, utterly political process discredited the whole project.”

If cost is the biggest reason for the infeasibility of blind assessment, what is the excuse of the Nigeria LNG Literature Prize, with its $100,000 prize booty and much more in administration costs? What is the Booker’s or any of the bigger budget book prizes’? Smaller budget prizes like the Caine have hinted at that excuse as have others, but is it valid? The presence of mostly prominent contemporary names in the last shortlist of writers on the Miles Morland Writing Scholarship will certainly do little to assuage concerns that the effort is driven mostly by the entrants’ reputation.

Lizzy Attree once told me that prizes are only “as good as the writers who enter for them”. It is worth asking, as I.A Richards might have, whether they, instead, should be as good as the writings that the prizes uncover.

____

This essay was first published on 20th March 2017 at Enkare Review. It is reproduced here in its original form because Enkare.org is no longer live.

Of Brutish Museums and Modern Parallels

In September, I read Alan Boisragon’s The Benin Massacre (1898).

The author, a British army officer, was one of the two survivors of the ill-fated trip into Benin City of Nigeria in late December of 1896, which led to the death of seven British officers and dozens of other Africans. Three months later, in February of 1897, about 1200 armed men from the colonial navy descended on Benin and sacked the city, displacing the king, and bringing it under the British Empire.

The book focused mostly on the initial ill-fated trip that led to the original set of deaths, but also offered relevant insight into the “punitive expedition” that followed. According to Boisragon, and many other accounts since, there was no clear indication that the visit had been sanctioned by London or was there any indication that Benin was prepared to welcome them. The Ọba (king), according to local customs, had been forbidden to welcome any foreign visitors during the period, and said so in many messages sent ahead to the Acting Consul-General James R. Philips, whose grave remains today in Ugboneh, near Benin City. In ignoring that and all other signs of hostility, they encountered tragedy, and so did the city. Benin, in British lore, had been called “the city of blood” before, and since, then.

I found the book significant because all I’d known until then about the ill-fated British colonial adventure and the following “Punitive Expedition” had come from third-party sources. Reading the words of one of the members of the military party on the initial trip filled in a lot of history, not just from the British side, and their empire-coloured narrative, but also of the Benin side and their last-ditch attempt at national autonomy. To the British, Benin was filled with brutes who engaged in reckless human sacrifices (mostly true); and to Benin, the British were a greedy force not to be trusted with the resources of the state (also true). But in reading both sides of the conflict, one sees a clearer picture of an unavoidable tragedy. The 1897 expedition brought an end to the Benin monarchy, at least temporarily, and engineered the largest-scale looting of traditional artefacts in Nigeria. Many of those works are now exhibited around Europe with a large number locked behind walls at the British Museum.

There was one unintended consequence of the violent migration of these artworks to Europe, though. For the first time, Europeans got to see up close the amazing artistry in bronze of these once-thought-of brutes from the heart of Africa. Intricate works created over centuries to memorialize Benin history in plates, bronze heads, ivory carvings and other decorative items were studied to provide important insights into 12th-century African metal and bronze technology.

So intrigued had the story made me that I went on a buying spree, sharing copies with friends and searching for all other relevant reports from the time. Benin, The City of Blood was another one, written in 1897 by Sir Reginald Bacon, a soldier who accompanied the punitive expedition. It chronicles the first-hand account of the expedition including the looting of Benin’s treasures. For a propaganda piece of material from the perspective of the victor, it still provided a number of important historical details that showed the British in unkind lights. Later, City of Blood Revisited (1982) was published by Robert Home, to fill in other perspectives on British Colonialism.

The story of the massacre and expedition has come back to the fore of my mind a few days ago because of the news in the Nigerian and international media, that the new Museum of West African Arts (MOWAA) in Benin had its opening/preview scuttled by disruptive protests of citizens allegedly connected to the Ọba of Benin. Video reports from the unfortunate event, while pretty mild compared to what one imagines was real violence that met the uninvited British party in the winter of 1896 in the forests of Ughoton, still calls to mind the presence of an unresolved cycle of historical trauma. This time, thankfully, no one was killed, precipitating another disastrous invasion (which Trump and his Secretary of War would have relished under the excuse of “saving Christians”). The dignitaries from many foreign embassies, and the many local visitors who had flown in to see the magnificent edifice were reportedly scurried away to safety, and the edifice remains closed.

Three days ago, new reports came out that the Certificate of Occupancy of the museum has now been revoked by the state government, thus— at least for now — rendering the project effectively stopped. A project, reportedly supported by local and foreign funders to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.

The story of how we got here leads back to the Palace of the Ọba of Benin, the custodian of both the memory of the 1897 trauma and the modern returns that have trickled in over the years through pressures of restitution.

The original Benin Cultural District, as envisaged by the Obaseki administration — shared in a recent Facebook Live interview. #13 indicates what has now become MOWAA, while #2 is the designated site of the BRM

***

In 2020, British historian Dan Hicks published a book that “changed the conversation on contemporary museum.” Brutish Museums, as he called it, argues that museums are not neutral institutions but rather extensions of colonial violence and trauma and tools for perpetuating white supremacy. That museums should prioritize people over objects, and acknowledge the histories of violence behind their collections. The work fed, in a timely manner, into the push that had by then gained currency around the world to return all of the stolen objects back to their original spaces, or at least work with original custodians to establish ownership and parameters of restitution. In October of that year, the then Governor of Edo State Godwin Obaseki shared a tweet congratulating Sir David Adjaye, a famous Ghanaian-British architect, for an award he’d just won, and confirming his presence on what the governor referred to as “the Benin Royal Museum Project”. BRM, for short. That name will come in handy later.

[Watch Adjaye admit to the project by this BRM name in a CNN interview]

Long before this — in 2007 precisely — a group which called itself “the Benin Dialogue Group” was formed with the aim to “facilitate a permanent display for reuniting Benin works of art dispersed in collections around the world”. On its board were members of the Edo State Government, the Royal Court of Benin, the Nigerian National Commission of Museums and Monuments, a number of foreign museums including the British Museum, Pitt Rivers Museum, others from Germany, Netherlands and Sweden, and a number of Nigerian stakeholders in academia and civil society. Over the years, this group shepherded the conversation about the restitution of looted artefacts, and had representatives at public events where some of these artefacts were publicly returned. Their work, according to reports, was what led to the selection of David Adjaye as the proposed architect behind what would be the Benin Royal Museum to eventually house the returned artefacts, according to Governor Obaseki.

This is where the facts and passions get murky. Before the Edo State Government tenure of Godwin Obaseki ran out, the project had secured free government land across from the Ọba’s Royal Palace to house this future museum that had apparently secured the buy-in from a number of global museums and institutions, who promised funds. The land, reported to occupy a significant portion of the old palace grounds that was destroyed in 1897, was fitting if the returned artefacts were to live there as a testament to repair. But somewhere between the end of Obaseki’s government and last week’s proposed opening, the name of the project changed from “Benin Royal Museum” — whose name pays both homage to the community and the provenance of the items — to “Edo Museum of West Africa Arts” (EMOWAA) and later “MOWAA” with the Edo name dropped off without explaination. And instead of an ownership structure that embodied the initial plans, a new Legacy Restoration Trust (LRT) nonprofit was registered, with an Executive Director, Philip Ihenacho, who is reportedly an old business partner of the former governor.

A fundraising card from 2020 from LRT inviting people to discuss the proposed Royal Museum, with Adjaye and Obaseki as guests.

As at June 2020 when Governor Obaseki was disqualified from contesting for reelection under his former party, rumours had begun to circulate that it could cause a rupture in his work on the proposed museum. He eventually won under the PDP, and left office in 2024. The current governor was elected under the APC.

So, who owns MOWAA? The organisation’s website says it is “an independent, non-profit institution, of which the former governor has no interest, financial or otherwise.” On Wikipedia, it is described as a museum built “to show over 300 items on loan from European museums.” To the current state government, it is a project whose founding has been marred by some type of misrepresentation, particularly in funding. By using the “Benin Royal Museum” name and the restitution movement to secure funding for an ostensibly state project and then rerouting them into a private foundation where neither the state nor the palace has any say or stake, something had gone awry and accountability is needed.

The impressive structure that is MOWAA in Benin today sits on about fifteen acres of land, part of which used to be the Edo Specialist Hospital built by the British in 1905, just eight years after sacking the city — a work of rammed earth architecture by Adjaye. Much of what the land it sits on, however, includes royal burial sites, old palace yards, homes of important chiefs, and many more. In the last couple of years, excavations have happened there, reportedly without permission from the Ọba or any royal interests, but supervised/supported by the British Museum, adding to the ire of the community. If ancestral traumas that had befallen this land had a name, they always came with a “British” label and “the memories and trauma associated with the looted artifacts are still etched in the memory of the Benin royal family” according to Peju Layiwola, an art historian and cousin of the current Ọba.

Photos from the aftermath of the punitive expedition in 1897.

So when the rift threatened to spill open a few years ago, the Ọba’s palace got the federal government to declare that all returned artefacts belong to the Royal Palace, and not to any particular individual or group. And when representatives from MOWAA, according to the Ọba, sent documents to him requesting his relinquishing of his rights to them for the use of the museum, he declined. Last October, news came out that the Museum had decided to showcase clay replicas instead, and observers wondered what was going on. Conversations with people familiar with the conflict shed light on some of these subjects, and many retained hope that cool head will prevail to bring all the relevant interests to the table. Until then, the returned artefacts remained in the palace.

They remained there when MOWAA tried to open on November 7 and was prevented by the mob.

MOWAA said it has never have “claimed nor presented itself as the Benin Royal Museum in order to secure funding. We would suggest that the relevant authorities confirm directly with any and all of our donors that we have never misrepresented our status” a recent press release read. The panel set up by the federal and state governments seem focused on that central question, while the museum remains closed, and the old governor is in Oxford. Some of the foreign dignitaries whose countries are involved in this project continue to take sides in a conflict whose roots go deep.

***

In Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, a 1974 play by Ola Rotimi, which dramatized the 1897 tragedy for the stage using the Benin Ọba’s name as title, much focus was given to the internal divisions within Benin Kingdom that made it easy, and possible, for the community to be so-invaded and destroyed. A certain Agho Obaseki, a powerful chief and prime minister of the kingdom at the time, who reportedly signed the initial treaty with the British when Henry Gallwey first visited in 1892, has been historically blamed for much of the division that led the British in.

Photo from Bacon’s 1897 book.

The current Ọba of Benin, Ewuare II (CFR), is the great great-grandson of Ovonramwen Nogbaisi under which Benin first fell, while Godwin Obaseki descended from the famous prime minister Agho. Ancient rivalries continue to rhyme across the ages, along with it the shadows of external powers with the means, interest, and ability to cause further destruction. “The past is not past,” Dan Hicks wrote in Brutish Museums. “It is present, and it is violent. The past is a place of trauma, a place of violence, a place of dispossession. And it is a place that is still with us, still affecting us, still shaping our world.”

“The Benin Bronzes are not just objects,” Hicks continues, “they are instruments of continuing colonial violence.” Many of them remain around the world, in private hands and institutional museums. Many are now at risk of permanent disappearance if the events in Nigeria continue to create a pretext to not return them. The victims: art, heritage, and memory.

___

This piece was first published on FlamingHydra on November 14, 2025.

Crossing Borders: A Spotlight on Literary Translation

Talk given at Boston University’s annual conference on Forced Displacement. April 7, 2025

____

Good afternoon everyone.

Like you, I’ve been watching the news.

And when I got the invitation to participate in a conference on forced displacement, I was convinced that someone had planned with some invisible force to get me into government trouble. I went online to search, just to be sure that it was not an elaborate prank. Look and behold, it’s real. It’s a real place, on campus, and the conference does indeed seek input from a writer and linguist about how violent conflicts affect language. Or, at least as I see it, how language adapts or survives in spaces of armed conflict and forced displacement.

So thank you for inviting me.

I’m a writer, the co-editor of Best Literary Translations, now in its third year. There are copies of the book for sale if you’re interested in them. The 2025 edition will be out at the end of this month, guest-edited by Cristina Rivera Garza, but we have copies here.

I’m also a linguist, by training. In other lives, I’m a language activist in Nigeria with interest in the ways that technology hinders or enhances the use and vitality of languages across the country and across the continent. I’m also a creative writer, usually poetry. So, you see language is very important in my trade.

At Columbia University a few weeks ago, I spoke about a professor mentor of mine, Ron Schaefer who shared with me the language of his childhood in St. Cloud Minnesota. Like most people who grew up in the frontiers, his grandparents had come from Europe and brought their languages with them, so the lingua franca at the farm was German. I knew that most families at those times spoke their languages at home, but it was interesting to hear it again. Ron himself, now a professor of linguistics, had achieved success in his career by helping to revitalize and document a language of Nigeria called Emai, and had retired as the Director of International Programmes at Southern Illinois University.

We were having this conversation online during the time when the government was declaring English as the official language of the US. I used his story in that talk to illustrate a problem of amnesia but also of displacement. Something many of us can relate to in some way, since every immigrant to the US comes from somewhere and carries with them some of that culture and tradition and, of course, language. What do we lose? How do we carry these senses of displacement to each generation through our language competence and lack thereof.

Nigeria, my primary example, offers many more instances. Even when there are no obvious conflicts, a country of about 520 languages hoping to make a nation out of the many will eventually run into a number of issues. Many of these involve technology, which is my primary interest. But many are merely sociological. Some conditioned by politics, globalisation, educational or government policies. The official language of Nigeria too, is English, and this has affected the growth and capability of many Nigerian languages. There are still no schools in the country today where you can learn in any Nigerian language. Literature is still mostly in English. Governance is in English. And many Nigerian languages are dying as a result. Many languages in the country and on the continent are endangered because of this historical and ongoing event. What globalization has done on the African continent and elsewhere is present English as the only viable means of communication while making other languages irrelevant. And with the language loss, we lose different ways of looking at the world.

And then throw in conflict, conquest, forced and unforced displacement, and you have a different story. We had a Civil War between 1967 and 1970, but some fissures remain. Look around the continent today; heck look around the world: Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, the Congo, Korea, etc. Each of those conflict spaces present not just the tragedy of human displacement, but also of language.

During my grad school, I worked part-time at the International Institute of St. Louis. It was an institution set up to help displaced people from all around the world fit into the American society. We taught them not just English language but American culture. Many of them came from places where they had spoken no other language but their mother tongue. Due to war and displacement, they were now here in a place where English language was the only means of communication. Working with adults who had never heard the song “A for Apple, B for Ball” was a moment in humility. It was easy to imagine, in my own bubble in Nigeria where English dominated most of the public interactions that it was a language that everyone spoke or had some experience with.

This is where translation comes in, or multilingualism.

By providing a chance for cultures to travel from one language to another, we bring people into comfort with their surroundings. While we may not always be able to get into their heads and understand the depth of their predicaments, we can help them get a comfort with their new environment enough to give their lives a second chance.

My experience at the International Institute always filled me with that sense of profound awe at what it must take for someone to leave their old lives for a chance to start again, trusting that all they know and have left behind will be enough to get them through the new and challenging experience.

Where communication happens, and relevant messages transmit successfully from teacher to student, colleague to colleague, neighbour to neighbour, life goes on as it should, and community is healed. When it is not, or when translation breaks down enough to transmit ambiguity or other unwanted additions to conversations, the purpose is defeated.

I’d like to quote from the talk I gave at Columbia, regarding a YouTube video I saw earlier in the year, this time about an ongoing global conflict.

I had seen an interview, a few weeks ago, between President Zelensky and Lex Friedman which had — in the space of an hour or so that the interview lasted — the two speakers speaking English, Russian, and Ukrainian. But due to the help of technology, speech synthesis, voice cloning, translation, and artificial intelligence, I could watch the whole interview in English, without even knowing when the switch happened between languages. Someone else could view the same interview in Russian or Ukranian and have the same experience. Technology has been trained to understand which language is spoken, and adjust it to the listener as necessary. This wasn’t possible for any language in 2005 when I left the university, but now it’s almost commonplace. And yet, it still isn’t possible today in Yorùbá, a language that I speak, or any African language I know. If I had my way, it would. One day, our experience of the internet will be tailored to our language competence. But to make African languages like Yorùbá participate, we need a lot of clean Yorùbá data, and resources to train models that can make it happen. The continent of Africa has about 2000 languages. Where do we begin?

Technology has been helpful, in many ways, in helping us cross language barriers, even in times of war. But, as I said in that talk, some languages have been luckier than others. Because of a combination of factors: political, social, economic, some of the languages most efficient to use in technology, in translation, and now in AI are some of the same languages that have advanced features in the earlier internet age, and in the earlier print age. Some of those obstacles to the smaller languages have followed them into this new generation.

Imagine a situation in which someone being evacuated from Gaza or Sudan or Ukraine into the United States can just communicate immediately through the use of technology, with instantaneous translations?

Literature is one great way to bridge the gulf. The larger the corpora in the language, created by literature or just regular language use in technology, the more likely the language is to be aided by technology in the future, to be useful in modern speech tech. But like I also mentioned, literature has followed the rest of the hegemonic institutions in favouring only big languages with powerful tools and powerful cultures. A lot of systemic issues have mitigated against the production of literature publication in underserved languages. So English, Mandarin, German, Korean, French etc continue to lead in the tech age as they do in the artificial intelligence age.

Literature in a small African language doesn’t always stand a good chance to be read anywhere but in the village where the language is spoken, if it’s written at all. And when it’s written, the chance to publish is small. When it’s published, it might not get widely distributed. With the internet, the audience can grow a bit. So a speaker of that language who lives in a corner of Germany or Japan or Indiana can read that story in his language published on a widely read literary platform. This was the thinking behind our project at OlongoAfrica, where we got a select number of stories by African writers translated into ten different African languages, and then get native speakers to read and record them. We put these on a website for people to read and listen to and share.

What Best Literary Translations does is provide a place for many of the translations from these languages can gather and travel together across the world in English, in a book form. As editors, we collect, read, edit, and present some of the best translation entries we receive which have been translated into the English language. We thus engage readers in English who may not otherwise have access to these works, or these writers.

What we can do is to hope that the availability of these opportunities for creative exchange does something to mitigate the pain and suffering that necessitate translation in the first place, though we know innately that it can never be fully sufficient. The world is a complex place, with a variety of unpredictable events moving us to the other.

I’m a speaker of Yorùbá, a language I know that I speak with full native competence, but which I haven’t had to speak over the last couple of years as I’d have loved, because I’m surrounded by people who speak different languages. When I am in Lagos, Nigeria, where I lived for ten years, I’m surrounded by other Nigerians who speak Igbo, Hausa, Ibibio, Efik, Berom, etc. To communicate with each other in a modern metropolis, we speak English, or Pidgin. And as a result of this though important contingency, we put our own native languages to the back, and it recedes by itself over the years into places from where we sometimes need sharp tools and hours of labour to rescue them.

In 2021, I published my Yorùbá translation of a collection of English poems, written by a professor from the University of Pennsylvania. In retrieving words from my native language to render from English the creative endeavour of another person, I ran into a wall, many times, and I’m reminded of the saying that the best way to lose one gift is to refuse to use it. Words I once took for granted took many hours of thinking and trying to retrieve. It was no different when, in 2022, I translated a short story by Haruki Murakami into Yorùbá. Very exciting process in both cases, but no less tasking in reaching words I used to never have to look for, in my own language.

So perhaps, this is one of the benefits of translation: giving us a chance to reach into parts of ourselves that we may have forgotten exists, to find the part of ourselves that was always there, and in a language we speak in the depth of our soul. The difference is that in my own case, it is voluntary. The many people who have to go into exile, who are forcibly displaced from their homes, who have to live in places where their native languages do not serve them in any capacity, do not have the choice as to whether to forget. The new societies often force that condition on them, sometimes suddenly, sometimes gradually, but always eventually.

Translations, technology, and literature can only mitigate what is a fundamental alienation.

During the work for our 2024 edition of Best Literary Translation, we ran into a dilemma. Some of the Ukrainian translators selected for the edition wrote to us to request that they not be published beside Russian ones, because of the ongoing conflict. Not being able to resolve the conflict in a way that does not disenfranchise the work of translators we had diligently selected, the writer elected to withdraw her poem, highlighting some of the issues that translation in itself can’t always solve.

At a language conference at Brown University’s Translation Across Disciplines last year, I was on a panel on Translation and social justice. One of the speakers spoke about her work at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where US has a base, which holds hundreds of detainees considered too dangerous to put on the mainland or sent back to their countries. Some of the translators at the base come from Cuba — the base provides regular job for them — while some actually live on the base. One of the things I was so curious about, and I asked the speaker, was what did she notice was the change in the Spanish of those who are condemned to live on the Island not because they’re detainees, but because they are employees of the government. They can’t go back to Cuba, they work for the US government, and they don’t have a chance to interact daily with people who come from the US mainland. But their language is Spanish. I was really curious whether the Spanish they spoke evolved over the years to a point where it is so different from that on the mainland. I don’t remember what the answer is now, but I find things like this quite curious — the ways in which our language competence evolves over the years, either because of our deliberate actions, or because of forces beyond our control.

I’m rounding off now. Let me quote from the introduction to our first issue BLT2024:

“Best Literary Translations strives to be a curative to parochial thinking. We present voices from around the world, paying special attention to lesser-known literatures and languages. The guiding vision of Best Literary Translations is to offer a counterpoint to the xenophobia and racism that have marked the last decade— and, truly, the entire history — of this country.”

And from BLT 2025, rightly dedicated to Refaat Alareer (a Palestinian writer, poet, and victim of the Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip in December 2023) and Jerome Rothenberg, an American poet, translator and anthropologist, we have the following:

“Despite the many difficulties that can hinder their translation, twenty-three languages are represented here in Best Literary Translations 2025. Featured in these pages are not only works from languages that have been underrepresented in U.S. publishing, but some that have been actively persecuted, such as the Uyghur of Adil Tunaz (translated by Munawwar Abdulla), the Faroese of Kim Simonsen and Lív Maria Róadóttir Jæger (translated by Randi Ward and Bradley Harmon), the Tu’un Savi of Florentino Solano (translated from Spanish by Arthur Malcolm Dixon), and the Ukrainian of three different authors, among others. That some of these works made it to publication at all—much less into our nominations and eventually into the pages of this anthology is a testament to steadfastness of the authors continuing to write in those languages, the dedication of the translators working urgently to amplify their voices, and the solidarity of the editors who published this work. Best Literary Translations celebrates their successes and honors their ongoing struggles.”

In conclusion, language loss can be as much a marker of displacement as incarceration or loss of land. But I’m a linguist so my work is about the language, and not the politics. Occasionally, they intersect, sometimes so personally. And occasionally, literature is there to provide some succor in those liminal spaces.

Thank you for listening

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