Photo Collage from Original Book Covers by Peace Onafuye / THE REPUBLIC.
the REPUBLIC INTERVIEWS / FIRST DRAFT
The Books Writers Read and Disagreed With
Photo Collage from Original Book Covers by Peace Onafuye / THE REPUBLIC
the REPUBLIC INTERVIEWS / FIRST DRAFT
The Books Writers Read and Disagreed With
I remember reading You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi sometime in 2022 and rolling my eyes multiple times. While Emezi’s writing was brilliant as usual, I had not come across such a bunch of unlikeable characters in a work of fiction. I disagreed with their actions and decisions as the plot progressed. I almost did not finish the book, but I stayed for the writing. Clearly, that’s a book I disagreed with.
There are many reasons why one may disagree with a piece of writing. It could be the character development, the character arc, how the writer responds to occurrences and events as the book progresses, or the arguments that the author decides to highlight and champion. All of these show that reading is an exercise. While you can learn something new, or escape from the world, you can also choose to disagree with whatever text you are engaging with. Hence, I find it interesting to read the responses in our First Draft interview column to this question: ‘What’s the last thing you read and disagreed with?’
In the past few months, we have received some interesting responses to this question. From South African historian, Thula Simpson, to Nigerian writer, Helon Habila, here are seven writers and the books they read and disagreed with.
HELON HABILA
One can disagree with a text for many reasons, for style, for theme, for content, for its argument, and still find something in it to like. I am a more tolerant reader than I used to be, I guess. I read books sometimes because I was commissioned to review them, and in that case, I make my position clear—I did that recently in my review of Dear Senturan by Akweke Emezie for the UK Guardian. I love the writing style, Emezi is a brilliant stylist, but I was turned off by the narcissism.
MUMBI KANYOGO
It would have to be How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue. The story is about a fictional village in West Africa, Kosawa, struggling to protect itself from an extractivist corporation. This corporation is drilling oil, destroying the surrounding land, and killing Kosawa’s children, culture and the way its people relate with one another. It is a heartbreaking and deeply moving story of slow death facilitated by capitalist accumulation and told through the perspectives of various community members who witness and experience the effects of this destruction. I learned and felt a lot as I read this book.
However, I winced at the idea that the protagonist’s coming of age as an organizer and activist was only made possible by her emigration to the US and her encounter with what the writer situated as ‘real democracy’. Additionally, while Mbue highlighted that in part, it was a series of failures in the US that led to the African community’s dispossession, she did not make it clear that it was systems of imperialism, racial capitalism, and extraction—systems that are central to the US’s brand of liberal democracy and global dominance—that made it possible for that community to be decimated in the way that it was. This omission—not naming the harm this caused as a product of imperialism and capitalism is what allowed the author to situate the US as a model democracy and even a beacon of hope—when in this and many other stories it is the source of destruction.
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ZAINAB KUKU
I don’t often disagree with the premise or subject matter of a text, especially if it is fiction or poetry. If I disagree with a text, it is most likely because of the writing style, structure or tone of the writer. On this basis, the last thing I read and disagreed with was Ariel by Sylvia Plath. Plath’s decision to use a racial slur in the poem was unsettling, as it automatically isolated me from her work as a Black reader.
AYOOLA OLADIPUPO
I read everything with some skepticism, even my own work, so it’s often not memorable when I disagree with a text. What comes to mind is Dialogue, a book based on a conversation between James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni, and this is perhaps memorable because I’m not yet sure that I disagree with it.
During the dialogue, Baldwin attempts to explain how the racism Black American men face influences their ability to express love to their families at home. To this, Giovanni responds, ‘I love you so I get the least of you…if you love me, you must lie to me.’ While Giovanni’s point is interesting—contrary to what we tell ourselves, telling the truth is almost always self-serving—I’m uncomfortable with the idea because it seems like a very slippery slope.
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DESOLA OLALEYE
It was something I read in Daniel A. Bell and Avner de-Shalit’s book, The Spirit of Cities. It was in a chapter they wrote on Oxford as the city of learning. To aid their argument that the University of Oxford is an institution that produces scholars as opposed to researchers, they present what I feel is a dubious dichotomy between researchers and scholars. They claim a researcher is someone who seeks to ‘explore’ and ‘unearth the unknown and show it to the not-knowing’. On the other hand, a scholar is one who aims only to accumulate knowledge; such an individual is not concerned with learning anything new but is rather focused on training themselves to teach students about established frames of knowledge. They describe natural scientists as researchers and intellectual historians as scholars.
While I don’t disagree that researchers and scholars do the things Bell and de-Shalit say they do, I don’t agree that there is a fine distinction between ‘researchers’ and ‘scholars’ and their ways of working. I think there are researchers who do all that scholars do, and scholars who do all that researchers do as described by Bell and de-Shalit. My view is that it is an unnecessary distinction to make.
THULA SIMPSON
I recently read Adam Sisman’s biography of A. J. P. Taylor, having read Kathleen Burke’s biography of the subject many years ago. In discussing Taylor’s significance as a historian, they tend to accept without questioning the critique advanced by his contemporaries that his use of new media in his case television—as a platform through which to disseminate his views, undermined his seriousness as a historian. But I kept thinking that Taylor surely deserves to be credited as one of the first of the modern historians in that regard, and that as the discipline probes ways of extending its ‘impact’ in an ever-changing technological environment, he could well still be a prophetic figure.
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WOLE TALABI
I mostly read fiction so it’s hard to disagree with anything in that since, well, it’s fiction. You either like it or dislike it but it is hard to agree or disagree with. However, last summer I read a non-fiction book. A biography titled Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance. While I don’t disagree with any specific facts in the book, I fundamentally disagreed with the author’s positioning and manner of reporting the facts which constantly claimed to be objective and unbiased but clearly came across as thinly veiled idolatry of Musk. It reminded me why I generally prefer fiction to non-fiction. At least with fiction, I know someone is trying to sell me on a story⎈
