Dr. Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and Stuart Hall foundation researcher who completed her doctorate based in the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media at the University of Westminster. Her work focuses on the utility of the political imagination in the textual and visual cultures of radical social movements, examining the role cultural production plays in processes of materialist resistance and collective conceptualisations of futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (2021), the forthcoming Against Literature (2026) and a member of 'bare minimum', an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.
Find Lola on Instagram (@lowlamichelle).
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EPISODE REFERENCES
Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love; T.W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’; Stuart Hall; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling; Jackie Wang, ‘The Coral Tree’; the OWAD Manifesto; June Jordan; Wendy Trevino; Anthony Joseph, ‘The Ark’; Vanessa Onwuemezi, Dark Neighbourhood;
Lola’s recommendations: June Jordan, ‘Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan’; Amiri Baraka, ‘Beauty and Truth’; Nisha Ramayya, Fantasia; Maya Binyam, Hangman; Charting the Journey.
TRANSCRIPT
Chris Lloyd: Welcome to Books Up Close, the podcast. I'm Chris Lloyd and I'm a writer and academic. On this show I talk to other writers about their work and practice. We also collaborate on a close reading of their writing, look at particular passage or a whole poem and talk about its meanings, resonances and technicalities of language. This is a show for book nerds, aspiring and established authors or anyone interested in how texts get made. In this episode, I talk to Lola Olufemi about the opening of her book, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise. Lola is a Black feminist writer and researcher from London. She is the author of Feminism Interrupted and Experiments in Imagining Otherwise. Hi, Lola. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Lola Olufemi: Thank you so much for having me.
CL: I'm very excited. mean, you know, I'm a fan of your work anyway, and excited to talk about this book. I've got it here. This book has been very helpful to my brain. The quote, ‘ambivalence is not another word for freedom’, is on a post-it note on my wall, just so you know.
LO: Oh thank you. that's That's a huge compliment. Yeah, I'm really i'm really excited. I haven't done anything like this with this book, so I'm really excited to close read it with you.
CL: Okay, great. Well, yeah, the opening question I ask everyone is like, what are your thoughts on close reading? How do you feel about it as like a practice? And also, how do you feel about post reading your own work with other people?
LO: That's yeah, a really excellent question. I'm thinking I did an English literature undergrad degree. And I guess I come from that kind of like IA Richard school of like practical criticism, close reading. And so I have a really I think that I like close reading without context because I think it sharpens my analytical tools, but maybe just because that's the way I was trained, I just like have this affinity for it. And I think it makes me really slow down and think about the words on the page, it removes guesswork in a sense. It reestablishes a more kind of intimate connection with a text by a reader. And I feel like the practice of close reading provides me with a bit more autonomy, even if I'm wrong, even if the close reading is like insufficient or not correct analytically. I think it just, I do a lot of close readings in workshops that I do with other people, especially people who are not so confident about literature or or the practice. And I find that when we can unlock and investigate a text together, when we can be curious and argue and disagree and when we're not afraid to make mistakes or be wrong in terms of what we think the text means. Like when we remove that imperative to like know the text absolutely, I think that like close reading becomes this real expression of curiosity and fun and playfulness. And yes, yeah. So the the relationship is complicated. I think i I like it for the tools that it's giving it's given me. But I think, yeah, it also makes me sometimes like a little bit of a snob. I don't know. I'm also trying to like shed that that like very highbrow training that I had about like, what to do with the text, how you close read it what close reading means. Sometimes it's just all about, you want it to just be about like feeling or the experience of like reading a text or you know, hearing it aloud rather than all of these things you're supposed to know about it.
CL: And are you excited to read your own work or are you ore comfortable doing it with other people's work?
LO: I mean, obviously way more comfortable with other people’s. I'm excited to bounce off of you. I think something that I find quite interesting and something that's happened quite a lot with this book, especially with younger people who read it, is that they'll come up to me and they'll say, oh yeah, I love this and it meant this and I thought it meant this and I was like, I'm kind of like, no, no, it doesn't. But I really like that you're so confident in your reading of it. And so I think there's something about close reading your own text as an author that takes away the mystery of how you created it for reader. But I'm, yeah, I'm interested to get into it and hopefully to, I'm gonna let you lead and then we'll see where where yeah where we go from there. Because I think as a writer, I know that i'm all of my work finds itself in the editing process. So when I'm writing that like initial draft or initial paragraph, I'm never thinking... There ah there is a way that like obviously my own style is inherent, but I'm never thinking about like device or technique. That all comes in after. I'm just like maybe thinking about a feeling or an idea I'm trying to flesh out, and then I go back and give it give it a structure. so In that way, i can't I often can't say like, yes, I was very deliberate in the moment of writing it about this phraseology or this like blah, blah, blah. And yeah, it all comes after.
CL: That's exciting. I mean, we'll talk more about your writing practice later because that that's really nice to pick up on. So we're going to look at and very early passage in Experiments in Living Otherwise. Did you want to say anything about the book generally before we hear the passage or do we should we just jump straight in? How do you feel?
LO: So this is an excerpt from the beginning of the book, the very, this is like the very first two paragraphs of the book. And I guess in this beginning part, which I very ironically wrote last, I wanted to give this book a poetic framing and I wanted to kind of flesh out the ideas and concepts in it and talk about how it it was related to this method of feeling. So how I was trying to use language and the texture of language to evoke feelings in readers that were connected to impetus the impetus to resist or connected to a structure of feeling or ah desire for the world to be organised in a different way. So I didn't want the book to just be a kind of free-floating experiments. I wanted there to be a semi-clear framework that that helped position me politically, helped position my attempts at writing inside of this like broader political frame.
CL: Amazing. Great. Well, if you're okay to read the passage for us, that'd be fantastic.
LO:
I hold, like those before me, that experiments can and do fail. I am trying to make an argument for the otherwise. Not otherwise as in>>>>>over here!!!!>>>>>come find me, or a small black dot that recedes as I approach. Not that thing that is obscured and needs to be unobscured.
Not a smudge, or an absence, or an entity to be owned or conquered. The future is no one's property; no need to shackle it. Not otherwise as in, the political horizon awaits; otherwise as in, a firm embrace of the unknowable; the unknowable as in, a well of infinity I want us to fall down together.
Otherwise: the future is now and all those political promises we make to one another, all the wishing and hoping in earnest (say it three times like a spell: wishing and hoping, wishing and hoping, wishing and hoping), all the leaps from the edges of bridges and mountaintops, all the reaching for and around, all the drug-taking and sex everywhere-we-should-not, all the serious study and strategy, theorising and making anew, all the breakages that slice historical space-time-all those movements that clear space and mark our struggle to live free, live better, love more, to knit abundance, all that is the work of another realm that is not-here.
CL: Amazing. Thank you so much. I'm really fascinated in the styles and modes of writing in this book, right? To call it just nonfiction seems limiting to me somehow, right? It's doing so many things as poetry. There's all kinds of stuff in here. And I think in these opening paragraphs, you give us a real sense of like voice, whether it's your voice, whether it's the speaker's voice, like however we you know distinguish those kinds of things. And yeah, I really want to kind of get into some of those like specific things that I think you're doing, or at least that I feel like you're doing. And that first sentence, ‘I hold like those before me that experiments can and do fail’.
There's like loads in here. I say this with everyone about almost like sentence structure, right? I feel like I would probably write like those before me, comma, I hold the experiments. Instead you do I hold, comma, like those before, like this little pause, right? Where you begin with the you doing, right? Like I hold - then there's this other thought about like, like other people have done, that experiments kind do fail. And as you're saying, like when you're writing, you're writing instinctively for feeling, right? Not for kind sentence structure. But at what level do you think you're, are ah you thinking about that in the edit stage? Where those pauses come, how those pauses happen?
LO: I think instinctively I'm also thinking about what a text sounds like when read aloud. So I think for me, the sentence structure of that that first sentence was about injecting a kind of like colloquial sensibility to the sentence. I wanted it to feel like I was actually talking to someone rather than following the grammatical rules where a clause should be right, and I think that evolved like when you're when you're trying to write as if you speak then you take far more pauses. There is a sense that you want to like emphasize specific you know clauses or ideas, but I think with that first sentence I really wanted to start with failure wanted start with like trying to position myself as like the voice or the narrative voice of this text in a long legacy of like failed attempts at experimenting.
When I was writing the book I wanted there to be a kind of playful tongue-in-cheek element where I was kind of like winking at the audience and being like I know that this you know might be a frame that loses its sparkle in like two or three years, like experimentation, like collaboration, forms of critical fabulation, poetics, the imagination. They're all ideas that over time kind of sag and can become limp because of how ah in the repeated use of them, there is a kind of hollowing out of like what it means. And so I wanted that. I wanted that sense of like, oh, you know, other people have tried this and I'm doing my own version and maybe I'm doing it rubbish and maybe I'm getting good. Like I wanted that to also be present there. That's some of the ideas around the sentence. But yeah, I really, ah connect to what you're saying about the sentence structure. And I've never personally been good at knowing as a former literature student, grammar was not the thing that I was good at.
CL: No, but I think is that it it almost doesn't matter, right? It's more like how the grammar works on a person, right? And it's the the kind of invert, like maybe not what are you expecting or what I would do, but I kind of like that back, you know, that that we would go through different things and that I hold, um ah and like hold has so much kind of resonance anyway, like holding, but like the holding open, the holding of an idea, holding is care, right?
LO: Also holding together, yeah, holding together, which is which is yeah really crucial, I think, in this sentence. And then you know yeah there's an intimacy there that i'm I'm trying to build. I think this whole text is about trying to build a connection with the reader and saying, I want you to think through this set of ideas with me. And within that thinking together, there's space to disagree, there's space to to contradict each other. There's space for us both to hold contradiction together. And how do we do that?
CL: One of my favorite quotes from this is , 'there is as not as much space in I know as I don't know’. The idea of holding open, which I think is something that people get scared of, right? In terms of ideas or politics or, you know, the idea that within kind of abolition thinking as well, it's like, we could think otherwise and people like, yeah, but I want an answer now. Like, what would that mean? What would that look like? Tell me what it would be. It's like, no, which just you know, how about just thinking about holding open as a first step?
LO: Yeah, I think I'm always drawn to thinkers and writers, feminist thinkers in particular, that have a specific generosity in the way that they're thinking and also aren't afraid to be wrong. I hope that that's also a a thread that runs through the book. And I guess we with that particular phrase, like, there is as much space in I know as in I don't know. I think I was trying to exercise this annoyance I had about always being told that my reading practices or my analytical practices when I was doing English literature were too didactic. That was a word that came up often. It's like you're too sure about how the world should be. You're too invested in this idea that you know there needs to be a revolution in how we how we live, we need to transform material conditions. And I think that when you have an experience of like an elite education, as I did, you're constantly being… There's a constant attempt to like inculcate you into this like highbrow ambivalence. They don't want you to care about the world as it's produced through language, through actions, through you know the flow of capital, right? like there There is a kind of aestheticizing of those processes. So you're supposed to hold the violence of those processes, historical or otherwise, at arm's length. And you're supposed to only hint at them in the writing. I never found that appealing. Not only did I find it cowardly, I found it to be a dereliction of like ethical responsibility to other people. I found it to be profoundly like, it angered me a lot.
And so like, that's what I was trying to do. I was trying to say that the the argument is often that there's no nuance in surety. And it's like, there absolutely is. There's always space, like you said, to be open to hold contradiction, to be generous, to change one's mind, but to be sure about a certain set of principles in the world, writers shouldn't be scared of that, you know? And that means that ah there writers with sets of principles that I will vehemently disagree with. That's also fine. But that kind of subtle stripping and the kind of implanting of ambivalence as somehow like more beautiful, more fruitful, more expansive is rubbish to me.
CL: And I think you do a lot of that kind of intellectual clearing in this first paragraph. I'm trying to make an argument. I love that as well. It's not like I'm making an argument, like I'm trying to make an argument. Really, emphasis on attempt, right? Rather than, and that's like not to be pretentious, but the early French translation of essay, right? Like essayeur is to try out. It's always an attempt, the original idea of an essay was never conclusive but rather let me think something through. And what you don't then do is say, this is what I mean by the otherwise. You have not, not, no one's, not, - you give us all the the definitions what it isn't. And I think that's a really interesting kind of position to begin with. Not otherwise, as in over here. I want to talk about those little Chevron-y things in a minute. Come find me or this. Not that thing. The future is no one's property. Not otherwise, as in. And I really think to me that does something to the the kind of experience of reading the text. That we want really definitively a definition of this, the you know the the main concept that the author is giving us, right? Like, this is what we're going to talk today, the otherwise.
And you're like, wait, let me tell you what it isn't, though, first, right? Because as soon as I tell you what it is, you're going to come up with your rebuttals, maybe, right? Is how it feels. It almost feels like you're kind of you're staging other people's querying already.
LO: Yeah, it's a an attempt to preempt I think… I come, again, you come from that school of like, yes having a a critique of capitalism or having a feminist framework, you're always preempting… Or even being in the academy, you're always preempting a counter argument. And in this sense, I was pre-empting the counter argument that feeling in materialist politics doesn't matter or shouldn't be given like primacy or isn't as important as - dry economism. Or you know you know a critique of the like the political economy or whatever. And if I rewrote it now I wouldn't do that because in a way it just it felt like a it does still feel like ah a little like a very gendered preempting. And I realize now it's like I don't care about those people who make those arguments so I didn't have to I didn't have to cede to them so much. But I I do I really pick up on what you're saying about I think the negation. Like starting from from the place of what is the method that I'm trying to use to figure out what it is but because nobody… Like I said, the future doesn't belong to anyone so as a narrative voice I can't make claims about what it is. I can only collaboratively get us to think about all the things that it isn't as a way of like arriving at a collective social vision or as a way of arriving at some sense of like what the horizon might feel like, what it might feel like effectively, for example.
And I really liked what you said about the essay because I'm returning to that school of thinking about the essay as a weighing up of ideas, as a way to like gander and as a way, I think the best essayists really do that. They like circle round the idea and you're not actually quite sure where they land sometimes. And the process of like reading in that way is really edifying in terms of your ability to hold contradiction. Which is like a basic Marxist principle and yeah your ability to engage with any kind of like dialectic so so that's what I was maybe yeah trying to do in in not presenting ironically. A sure fire definition of like this is what the otherwise is, I didn't want to like produce another linguistic enclosure and wanted it and maybe that's like also why I'm using these like I don't know what they're called, like brackets or like whatever, because I wanted to try and break the words are apart. I wanted there still be some sense that like anything at any moment could change in the text, even though you were reading it in a book that had been printed, revised, et cetera.
CL: Yeah, I want to come to the word otherwise in a minute when we get to that second paragraph about how you landed on that word. But yeah, in that second line, like ‘not otherwise as in’, and then you have these like six little like triangle brackets that are kind of like directional, right? Like as in over here, exclamation mark, like four of those. It feels immediately like you're telling us something as readers of like, ah you know, as you said, earlier I'm not conforming to a particular mode of writing or a particular kind of stylistic mode. Like it feels like texts, almost you know when you kind of use different kinds of like punctuation in like messaging between friends right. It feels informal quote unquote whatever that is but also it's like playful, it's it's like so many things I think you're telling the reader that while you're doing very high thinking in a way right like you're experimentation you're talking about thought. And then already you're kind of playing at the level of the line. And that to me automatically makes me go like, hmm, this isn't what I'm expecting to read. And I kind of love that as ah as a style and as an aesthetic choice.
LO: I think there's also like something about multiple exclamation marks, just like visually, that's a bit naive. like was very like It feels quite childlike. Or there's a switch between like but that that little those two words like over here might be, as you're reading it, they might be said in a different voice. The punctuation that indicates that like they're separated from the rest of the sentence because they're expressed in a different tone. I think I wanted to, there there are so many elements of the imagination as a process of bringing that which does not previously exist into being that are yes, subjective, but also childlike. they They require a real, a belief system that children have that adults often lose. And so, yeah, I wanted to also put the the hints of that, of like returning to like constituting that ah of the otherwise or using our imaginations in the in this capacious manner might require us to like access some some childlike qualities in our belief that, you know, things could be different, that the world needn't be organised around, you know, misery or pain or violence, you know?
CL: Yeah. And the different kinds of I don't know, registers that you're using throughout the text, right? There's no, the voice doesn't sit in one singular mode, which I kind of really appreciate. Like it it doesn't, it doesn't standardize itself in a way that we might expect from other kind of traditional quote unquote essays, right? And I think that's part of this play, this type type of experimentation.
The line, the future is no one's property, no need to shackle it, which I didn't think, I don't if I thought about it in the first time I read it. But the words property and shackle to me immediately conjure up, I don't know, discourses of slavery, right? Like they feel like words linked to enslavement. And I wonder, i don't know, you don't have to say yes or no to this, but the idea of the future being something that, you know, is within that capitalist empire colonial worldview, right? That these other lines have been much broader, right, in terms of thinking. But here, like property and shackle, I'm like, ooh, we are now grounded in that materialist world that you're thinking through. I don't know.
LO: Yeah, I think I agree with that. I was i was thinking about how worlds are defined by the flow of of capital or like just capitalism as a social, political, you know moral, ethical system often place parameters on what the future yes They narrow the horizon constantly. The future is AI. The future is your labor being replaced by XYZ.
And I wanted to use the words private profit property because it's like one of the core and central values in Marxist thought that must be abolished in order for communism and other modes of like free being to actually be established. Like thinking about Marx and Engels saying that communism is a movement to abolish the present state of things. And what defines the present state of things, ownership and private property. And so I wanted to say our conceptualizations of the future, there also needs to be a radical embrace of contingency, which is not at odds with a materialist social vision, like to to embrace the unknowable, to embrace what, like the the kind of vectors of like what is not known, what is not predictable, what cannot be foreseen. What doesn't necessarily contradict with the party program or like, you know, attempts at establishing political vision or a political grounds through collective organization.
Because I often found that those two things were positioned as at odds with each other. So when i'm when I'm saying no need to shackle it, is that this invented future that we're we're talking about needn't also then conform to the conventions of what you know, capitalism dictates in our collective imaginaries that the future look like. It doesn't have to bend. It can be, for want of a better word, completely free, completely unrestrained.
CL: Then the end of that paragraph... you know, when you then say otherwise as in, which again is not like fully otherwise is, right otherwise as in, that in makes you go like, okay, maybe not fully then, a firm embrace. As in, a well of infinity, I want us to fall down together, which again is like a move within the book of like, this is a this is a me and you reader endeavor, right? Like this is a collective approach. This is not the singular I voice of the book. claiming things but rather like we have to do this collectively and that could be a kind of Marxist collectivity, but it to me at the level of language it's that the reader isn't let off the hook, kind of right? The reader has to do something in this process
LO: Yeah, I do also think the the movement from I to to us is extremely deliberate in that sense. It's like the embrace of the unknowable must be collective in order for to be workable. And so, yeah, I agree with that reading. And there are many ways that I do this in the book in terms of leaving space for the reader to to write back, asking questions that don't necessarily have answers. But I didn't want to position - I didn't want to in imbue the narrative voice with any authority, which is why everything is extra qualified in some sense, which like, it maybe is good maybe is annoying and in another way. But yeah that extra qualification is because I want to signal towards the relationality involved in thinking together and the necessary interdependence that it requires for us to answer the question. Like what is to be done, like very broadly and and I think that that's where language for me becomes a tool to create specific effective environments. Like the the repeated use of not the kind of longed out sentences. I'm trying to like establish a feeling in the reader where they're like lulled not into a place of security but into a place of like curiosity and thinking and wishing and dreaming so that like there's something that flows textually between me and them, which constitutes a desire. Like I'm thinking about desire in in the way that Balan defines it as like this cloud of possibility, thinking about like the the subject and object relationship, you know, and I'm trying to to shape the character of that desire using language.
CL: Yeah, as i was reading the book I was like, I feel like Lola has read some Lauren Berlant. You can feel their presence in the background, also someone like Sara Ahmed, right? Like the way that both of those writers think on the page, think through language. Yeah. And they're playful as well. Yes, exactly. Both of them are like, they're clearly having fun even while they're saying deadly serious things. And I always appreciate that ah in their work. And that yeah, I was like, I wonder how much they're hanging behind this.
And then you get paragraph two, otherwise, colon. And it's something, you know, you're expecting like a dictionary definition or something, right? You know, that you'd have there. Otherwise, brackets. And instead you get in in the copy, in the physical copy, like a 12 line run on sentence, right? Just joined together with commas, as you say, which becomes... super expansive but also kind of breathless right in the way that these ideas are tumbling over each other that actually otherwise can't be defined. And while we can talk through some of the words that come up I did want to ask, did you land on otherwise really early in the process was otherwise the word that helped you. because you know there are lots of other ones that people have used right for this thinking the imagine that this kind of different imaginary?
LO: Yeah, that's a good question. I think so. I think it was a word that just kept repeating because it was initially a filler for that orientation or pointing in the direction of the future. And a lot of these same words like come up in a lot of the thinking that I was doing, a lot of the writing that I was doing, like futurity, temporality, its relationship to radical cultural production. And so, in a way, otherwise to me feels like an empty, empty word, and one like prime to be filled. And so so yeah, I guess it did. It just at very beginning of the book, I say that the otherwise is kind of like, ah it's a gesture. It's not, it's not itself in and of itself, like fully contained. And that's really important for keeping the ability to like clarify and qualify and think together. But it's also really important in rejecting which this book tries to do totality, it eat it even formally, right? Like it's trying to like write in facts fragments, thinking in bits. It's not presenting a firm and solid idea. And so, yeah, I think when I was writing, I was going back to a lot of the things that I was like forced to read when I was an undergrad. And I remember there was this essay that Adorno wrote about the essay as form or something, I think might be called that. And in it, he says something about like, you know, that the essay doesn't conform to the principles of like good science Like it refuses to behave and and to act as if, you know, philosophical ideas or things that aren't ideas that aren't total, aren't worthy of of investigation. And like that's what i wanted to kind of get across i wanted to be like yeah actually i can all these things that feel fragmentary ephemeral can be given a temporary solidity in my attempt to like think them through and connect them in this way and like galvanize. I think - maybe the feelings of the reaction against being called didactic finds its way into the style. Because the material actualization of a lot of my work the process of writing is always about, like I do want the reader to come away with something? Like whether it's a pure hatred or like a real love of the text. Like I want to do something, I want there to be a change in state.
CL: Yeah, I mean, if it makes you feel any better, my PhD supervisor constantly told me I was being too argumentative. Then when I had my viva, both examiners like, this is really argumentative. And then when I submitted it as a book and it got published, the peer reviewer was like, this is really argumentative. And I was like, yeah, because I feel really strongly about these things. Why are you not understanding that?
LO: I really made my exit from literary studies as I couldn't stand the ambivalence. Like i could not stand it so i had to actually go in search of like gender studies, sociology, whatever like some kind of other frame. And now i find myself kind of in cultural studies, and actually the literary. I miss it like it does give me a way, which is partly why i wrote this book as well because i wanted to actually do justice to the fact that, yes, I feel like I am a writer. I do that that's the way that I naturally express myself.
CL: Yeah for sure and also that language is inherently generative and playful right? Like the bit where you say all the wishing and hoping earnest brackets say it three times like a spell wishing and hoping wishing… It's like funny right like it's fun and I don't know: that language is the route to, or is one route to, like making things possible. Like as you said earlier, language shaped the world in which we live. And I think maybe that's, don't know, I feel like people forget that, right? That we understand each other through often like the linguistic frames that allow us to think certain things. And by you messing with language at the level, ah like on the page, helps some of that happen, right? That it doesn't just become The future is now and all those political promises. You know, you can feel a reader being like, okay, this is going to be serious. And then you're like, let me give you a little bracketed bit that's fun. And then you get all the leaps from the edges and bridges and mountaintops all reaching for and around. Just a rich sentence, like all that sibilance that runs through it. All the serious study and strategy theorizing. Like so much sibilance in this little bit. Like it sounds like rich and moving. Like the sentences move.
LO: Yeah, I guess I wanted to capture like that Stuart Hall thing of like ah Marxism without guarantees and like the promise in the sense of like Cedric Robinson's idea of like promise, you know, like this idea that like we can't know, nothing nothing is will be just handed to us, nothing the future won't just appear. And so like it is made up, what what all of these different clauses are trying to do is to show the many dimensions that this like political horizon or or future or whatever you want to call it might be made up of. And I and i wanted in there to include nods to pleasure and play. And I get that from like being queer and and engaging in queer theory, that the future is not just, you know, a site of the fruition of a specific set of political ideas, it's also embodied. It is also about like sex everywhere we should not it is also about all of those practices.
And I guess if we're thinking about like political promise and I was thinking a lot about ideas of like fugitivity and all of the present day rehearsals that especially oppressed groups engage in, in order to glimpse the future, either aesthetically or in an embodied way, those are still also important. And so that's what I wanted, that's what I meant by you know theorizing and making a new all of those breakages that slice historical space time. All of those practices open junctures they help us they help us to understand the current conjuncture that we're in a new way all in that sense of like you said. They give us a way of understanding like texture as a repeated pattern. So like that's what i'm always i'm always thinking why in times of crisis do i return to art and art practices. Like especially language and like poetry for example as as a means of trying to understand the moment and I think it's because it provides a texture to my everyday life it makes me feel differently and like that's what you know the those clauses. Like the live free live better love more I wanted to like stack those desires on top of one another so that they like build in momentum and then kind of like gesture away as the sentence ended if that makes sense.
CL: Yeah, fully that, but that rhythm like really speeds up for me, right? I think that was, that I was reading aloud, the sibilance runs into live free, live better, love more, to knit abundance. Like the speed is picking up as we're kind of- We're gallivanting towards some kind of end that hopefully isn't final. Yeah, all that is the work of another realm that is not here. and it, like it was making me think of Jose Esteban Muñoz as well, like his work and thinking about futurity, but just the not here. Which I think is so hard to think, right? Like it's much harder to think that like the thing that's not present or the thing that is, but what you're doing, like in the languages, even if we don't yet know what that looks like, the language or how you're playing with language is helping us move at least right on the page. And think that's quite exciting.
LO: Yeah, that that's a very generous reading. And yeah, I appreciate it. it's nice to It's nice to hear. I feel like in the reading, there is some sense that you kind of have locked on to what my intention was. And actually, It's been a long time since I've returned to this book. So like reading it now, I'm like, oh yeah, maybe I was trying to do that. I don't know whether I thought about it that deeply when I was actually doing it. But it's nice to look at your own work as if there was some complexity there that's important.
CL: Oh, there definitely is. But I mean, even if, you know, intention, like whatever, right? But like unconsciously or consciously, you were doing something, you were trying to work something out in the words. One of my, one of my aims in this podcast is to, to share that message with people that might not be in like the spaces that we're always in or in classrooms or in, you know what i mean? and Language does have effects and those effects are worth attending to.
LO: Yeah, like definitely it's like a, it's a force. I can't remember, i was in a workshop and we were talking about somebody's writing. I can't remember who it is, but I was saying that maybe their poetics were so commanding that it's like, you better get up and do something, you know? And I guess a lot of the intention behind that, this book is trying to create that same mood regardless of whether the the person does or not, like it's like that, that stand up straight, like, yeah, and it's sometimes it's, some people do it very well and it comes from this deep place of authority that next to the reader. And I guess I'm trying to do it through an invitation to collaborate.
CL: Yeah, which is a great maybe segue to thinking about your writing practice. You said earlier, like you do more of the work in the editing or, you know, the editing is. But do you have a do you have a general writing practice? Do you have like rituals? you have a setup? Are you doing it on your phone, on computers, by hand?
LO: I would say that my writing practice, when I am on a deadline or I need to do something, i can't write at home because I'll just eat, and smoke cigarettes and like scroll. I'll just distract myself. So honestly, i would say the most consistent writing practice I have is going to science floor two in the British Library. I'm just like sitting there. That's where I wrote my PhD. I wrote Feminism Interrupted in SOAS Library. I like to write in libraries. Something about having other people around you alerts you to a specific kind of performance of writing that you should be doing, even if you're not. So like I rarely, unless I'm like, I guess doing freelance work or a different kind of writing, I'll be by myself, but I love to go to the library. It also gives me a structure of the day and I like going to the same room and kind of like trying to sit in the same place. I get a lot done when I'm in the library. But that's that's the only, and I always write on a laptop. I'm kind of scared of writing by hand. I probably should, but I haven't done that thus far. Yeah, I'm mostly writing on a laptop. and constantly backing things up because I'm scared that they'll like my laptop will crash or like turn off or disappear or something.
Yeah, that's mainly what I'm doing. And I'm always trying to read poetry whilst I'm writing something. I'm not sure if I'm writing nonfiction, i can't i can't read other nonfiction because I'll just start writing in the style of that person. So I don't do that. But um I always have like a poetry book on hand. I often feel like when I feel stuck, just reading someone else, like reading a good essay or reading a good poem and you're you're reminded of like how like sumptuous language can be or how much like longing or yearning can be like locked into a paragraph. Or just the sometimes the straightforward commands that writers give you about what the role of the writer is or what the role of the artist is or like poems that from like revolutionaries to one another. Those are those are all windows in, and ways in to like reanimate the writing process for me when it feels dull. But it is often dull
CL: I love that. I mean we're so different I could I can never work in a library if I go into library I will just sit there and nothing will happen. Like I'll go to get books or look up books but I cannot do the mechanics of writing sentences the library.
Do you do you have early writing memories? do you know like when when did you start writing thinking, like hey I can do this or were you like a reader first?
LO: I was a big reader when I was a kid and I was an early writer as well. I think I remember when I was in school, I wrote a short story about a prison, ironically, from the perspective of the prison. So I was like writing as if I were the prison walls and there was like someone in there. I was always experimenting at a young age. And I think obviously the the prison element of it is is really alerting us to to the fact that I was alive to some form of containment that was organizing my life and others, um which is where the kind of political vein through my writing comes out.
But I did that. And then i also used to, I still have this book that I made which was like a book of, I did some collaging of like quotes from my favourite books. But this was when I was really young and I was reading like, yeah, … I won't say what I was reading, but I was reading books that weren't very good. But I was like, you know, i was I felt very deeply about these books and I would cut out sentences and then I would write poems. So I had i have this collection of poems, the first one I wrote when I was 11. And if you can believe it, it's like dreams, imagine of it. So i was yeah I've been writing about the same thing for like two decades. But it it is actually really sweet because I identify then what my like lineage is in in language, what my ideas are, what i'm what I've always been trying to to use language to do, which is the expand the constituency I was located in, whether that's like a class system, a racial hierarchy, ah you know, the gender division of labour. I've always been trying to pull those apart and envisage myself and others in different modes of relation. And that's what i i see when I look back and I read those like 13 year old poems about dreams.
CL: That's really exciting. But also thinking about the architecture and the technologies of prisons at that age, your brain was like, yeah I need to dismantle institutions.
LO: Like, prisons seem really bad. We should really get rid of them. But I do have to shout out, like I had a really great English teacher and sociology teacher at my school. I went to Enfield County. Which is a comprehensive all-girls school in Enfield. And my teachers were just they really nurtured my my reading and my writing habit habits and and made me think like politics and literature together always. And never made me feel like I was too much for what my like literary or political concerns were they they would were just brilliant and yeah. Shout out to Mr. Ryan and Miss Foster.
CL: Shout out to the teachers. We love teachers. Without my English and media teachers, like, I don't know. Yeah, I'd be a different person. And I know you do workshops and stuff, but I don't, do you do like creative writing workshops? Do you run those?
LO: Yeah, I do. I do creative writing workshops. Currently, I'm doing an online writing course for a group of writers who are working on a long-term project and feeling stuck. And so we're doing a lot of but having kind of mini lectures on like style and experimentation and what those things mean were and we're writing together using writing prompts. But I do creative writing workshops for young people mainly which is my favorite because they all kind of come in and they say, I don't really get this like why is this important. And then by the end they're like, yeah I can use poetry to explore you know the deepest parts of my self and being. And they're all gay and they're all very interested in revolution and so it's nice.
CL: Are there any of those like exercises you'd like want to share here? are the things you get them to do either the kids or the or the you know the adults?
LO: So often I get people, I have these like five words that I use, or like some words that I use that are like care, strike, bright, free world, words that like reappear in my own writing. And I get people to do a free writing exercise after we've done some close readings of texts, we've kind of thought about what style and experiment experimentation are. I get them to do a free writing exercise where they use any or all of those words in the exercise. And I think it gives people ah direction, especially when we're doing like political writing, gives people ah frame and direction for what I mean by our like shared and collective understanding of like what politics is.
I also get people to close read each other's work. Often I read an excerpt from Jackie Wang's poem called ‘The Coral Tree’, which is a staple. People love that poem. And I read it against like the OAD manifesto or June Jordan's work or Wendy Trevino's work. Or in the in the course we read this poem or listen to this poem by Anthony Joseph called ‘The Ark’ which I recently heard him perform at a conference at the British Library on like a black literature. So I've been I've been trying to to mix it up. We sometimes read Vanessa Onuwemezi's Dark Neighbourhood, stories from that.
But in terms of the free writing, I try and keep it very loose and open and the aim is to actually more so than to achieve anything in the writing process it's to get people to not be afraid of sharing and kind of failing publicly. Or not being very good publicly because it's like it's trying to get back to the the kind of, not, I don't want to say primal, but there's something instinctual about what you want to write rather than the craft. And I always try and separate that instinct from from craft.
CL: That's exciting. Again, experiments can and do fail. Like, let's lean in, right? okay last question. I mean, you've given us thousands of book recommendations today, so that's already really exciting. But there are there any others that you want to shout out? Like new books, old books, things coming out?
LO: So for this book that I'm trying to write, I've been thinking a lot and reading a lot of essays about like literary culture, list like literary values. And there's this essay in Some of Us Did Not Die, which is an essay collection by June Jordan, called ‘Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of of Willie Jordan’, which is a really good essay that i I hadn't read before where June Jordan talks about the experience of um getting a class of hers to define the grammatical rules of Black English and how that's related to basically the state sanctioned murder of a Black boy.
And in the essay, she talks about how the class comes up with this decision to write an open letter to the police department in Black English and like what that kind of means for the expression of their grief and pain and how they know actually that that's no substitute for the kinds of political organizing or the impossibility of doing ah justice to this person who has been murdered.
But I think it's a really beautiful essay and one that made me think a lot. And then I've also i also read ‘Beauty and Truth’ by Amiri Baraka, which is poem where he's basically like, if you're a poet, get used to being poor and ... Your job is to try and identify like beauty and truth and your life is going to be fucking difficult because money, [poets] don't have any prestige, nobody likes them. It's a really fun poem, but I think it really like returned me to like the ethical responsibility that writing held and holds for lots of people.
And the last one I'll say, actually, I've got loads. I just finished reading Fantasia by Nisha Ramayya. And I really loved that book for, there's there's a poem in that book called ‘Three for Alice', which I thought was beautiful. And the way that she plays with like sound and language, the way that she makes words do things that I couldn't otherwise, that they wouldn't maybe otherwise do. I don't know. I felt like I was reading it and it was one of those texts where I was like, if I don't pay attention I'm going to be very lost in about four sentences because I'm not going to know what's going on and that that is that is a very like exciting proposition.
Another book that I read, not not very recently but one that stuck around as a contemporary novel that I think yeah is is one of the best I've read is Maya Binyam’s Hangman. It's a beautiful novel about somebody who is like, who was exiled and kind of like returns home. But it's it's it's the reason why it's beautiful is that there is this unreliable narrator. It's not even that the the narrator is unreliable, he's just absent from the facts of his own life. There is a real exploration of what it means to be removed and distant and and what it means to like take apart that like immigrant story as it happens in both directions. So you know the Western, the Imperial core is this place of the fruition of one's personal dream and home as a site of belonging. And lastly, so I'll say I also revisited, in order to um do some research for this book, Charting the Journey, which is a classic Black feminist UK text by a whole bunch of authors, including Gail Lewis. And in there, there's like essays about political organizing, but there's also a lot of poetry. And there is this conversation between Alice Walker and someone else, I can't remember. They're talking about Joan Riley's book, like one of the first books published by a um black woman in Britain. And they're kind of talking about the politics of that book and writing processes.
And I think it really captures the energy of the literary culture in the 80s. The sense of there being like a Black feminist sensibility that was crossing borders and people were beginning to use the novel form as like a site of political consciousness raising. Or at least an expression of the the violence of race and gender. And yeah that really struck me as well but charting the journey is is a beautiful book which I highly recommend. It's kind of hard to get one's hands on but I’m sure you can find a copy online.
CL: Amazing, I will link to all of these suggestions in the notes. You've given us so much to think about, or if no one else, you've given me a lot to think about Lola. So I really appreciate it and appreciate your time today means a lot.
LO: thank you for having me.