‘Write Something Familiar in a Way That Readers Encounter It as Something New’ Ololade Faniyi’s First Draft

African feminist-scholar and author of  ‘An African Feminist Manifesto’, Ololade Faniyi, is drawn to writings about the digital and the African imaginary: ‘We must resist the universalizing mission disguised as bridging the technological divide. We have lost so much as a people; we don’t have any more to lose.’

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

Our questions are italicized.

What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?

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

If your life at this moment was the chapter of a book, which book would that be?

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

What’s the last thing you read and disagreed with?

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

There is an inherent problem with an academia that has for long been run on the politics of using Black/African bodies as talking points even when these same bodies are considered illegitimate in the academy.

What’s the last thing you read that changed your mind about something?

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

What makes a text powerful: the subject or how it’s written?

What makes a text powerful is the person who is writing it, how they write it, and more importantly who/what is being placed in the margins or the centre. My friend, Innocent Chizaram Ilo, recently wrote this incredible piece about ‘the audacity of writing from the margins’ for people of former British colonies. I think this is even more important in the very moment in time, with the recent ‘delve-AI wars’, that we, in this matter-of-fact postcolonial condition, must make English our own, and not only that, but the way we write about our lives in this language cannot only be written towards the hegemonic centre, but we must create a counter-centre.

Which writer or piece of writing has been your biggest influence?

I would say my biggest influence is probably Molara Ogundipe. She was writing against the grains in an extremely hostile and patriarchal Nigerian academy in the seventies and she didn’t let it silence her. She is my biggest inspiration, and I am so sad I didn’t get to meet her before she passed.

What is your writing process: edit as you write or draft first, then edit?

I draft first and then edit. My first drafts are typically run-on-lines with lots of spelling errors, because I type as I dictate to myself. I have a sort of out-of-body experience where one self is dictating to the other. It is like I am transcribing a stream of consciousness, and I am both generator and receiver of the words. It can take me as much as two to four simultaneous top-to-bottom edits to have a draft I am confident enough to allow others to see!

What was your process for writing your essay ‘Lionhearts: The Artistic Novelty of Nigerian Women Directors’?

Oh my, this was a long time ago. I barely remember. I only know I watched Genevieve Nnaji’s Lionhearts and Kemi Adetiba’s King of Boys, and I just thought about how differently nuanced women characters are when they are directed by women directors. I had also just learnt about the Bechdel test, so I put my thoughts into words, submitted it to The Republic and it got accepted. My editors were very helpful.

It is like I am transcribing a stream of consciousness, and I am both generator and receiver of the words.

How did your approach change in writing your essay, ‘An African Feminist Manifesto’?

I am a much more critical theorist than I was in 2019, and I have adopted a politics that is all at once radical, decolonial, intersectional and African feminist-centered.  My PhD research is at the intersection of digital humanities, digital cultures, African studies, and gender studies. I am also currently a graduate fellow for the Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI network, which is an intra-institutional network of Atlanta-based AI researchers, so it just seemed about time to put all my budding thoughts into an essay. After I got the email about the feminist issue, which ended up being named after my essay, ‘An African Feminist Manifesto’, I did not type a single word for about two to three days. I only made notes in my jotter about what I wanted this to sound like. I carry that jotter everywhere, so by the end of day two, I had a substantial amount of scribbling. I sat down, and typed it in my usual draft first, edit later. My mom and my partner are my usual first readers, but this time, I roped my friend, Moyomade Aladesuyi, into reading it and they thought it was good, so I sent it to my editor.

What inspired this essay?

First, this essay was inspired by the recent pushback against ‘decolonization’, especially with Elon Musk’s comments equating decolonization with extreme violence and hate speech. Decolonization means so much as a possibility for colonized people within the African continent as much as it does Palestine. The weaponization of anti-Palestinian self-determination politics in a way that dismisses a complex and diverse struggle as monolithically bad is not just wrong but also dangerous. Second, my work across grassroots organizing and academia has me witnessing the ongoing legacy of coloniality in so many dimensions that continue to shape the lives and experiences of African women, from the imposition of Eurocentric norms to the exploitation of African labor and resources by global corporations. I was inspired by the works of Black, Indigenous and African feminist scholars and practitioners, such as Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, Sylvia Wynter, Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, and Abeba Birhane, who have developed critical frameworks for understanding and resisting the intersections of gender, race, and (digital) coloniality. Even more so, I was inspired by an urgency for alternative, decolonial modes of world-making that centre the knowledge, agency, and self-determination of African women.

What’s the most interesting reaction/feedback you’ve had about your writing?

It is probably a tweet interaction that I came across by chance where someone linked and referenced my essay, ‘An African Feminist Manifesto’, as an example of how, like Platonism was a movement in antiquity, feminism offers a model to move between established frameworks and rework/critique them in relation to one another. I have also seen Spanish-speaking diasporic users engage in my work on Twitter and I am so excited because it is in globally translatable critical thoughts spanning across diasporic lands and seas that true liberation lies!

What is the most meaningful piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?

It was to not assume that I have a monolithic audience, and to write even something that might be familiar in a way that readers encounter it as something new.

What’s the last book you started reading and didn’t finish?

I can’t recall any.

The weaponization of anti-Palestinian self-determination politics in a way that dismisses a complex and diverse struggle as monolithically bad is not just wrong but also dangerous.

What book(s) have you always wanted to read but haven’t gotten around to yet?

My friend, Ann Holland, made me a reading list that I have to catch up on. I will share some of the titles on there: The Sex Lives of African Women by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, Nearly All Men in Lagos Are Mad by Damilare Kuku and more.

Imagine you’re starting a book club. Which three writers would you invite?

It would be a posthumous club. Imagine sitting in the midst of Audre Lorde, bell hooks and Molara Ogundipe and just basking in the beauty and brilliance of their words.

What’s the last book you recommended to a friend or loved one?

I recommended Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back by Ulises Mejias and Nick Couldry to my partner.

What’s the last great book someone recommended to you?

That would be either Courtney Desiree Morris’ To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua or Black Aliveness, Or A Poetics of Being by Kevin Quashie.

You’re a feminist activist-scholar. What’s your Holy Trinity of feminist literature?

I would defer to what Hélène Cixous said in her famed essay, ‘The Laugh of Medusa’, ‘Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing’.

What is your favourite topic to write or read about these days?

I am pretty drawn these days to the digital and the African imaginary, especially because we are in such a critical moment in time that people are distracted by the problems of their daily lives to realize that authoritarian governments and big corporations are clamping down on people’s right to own their lives, bodies, data, dreams, way of seeing the world, etc. We must resist the universalizing mission disguised as bridging the technological divide. We have lost so much as a people; we don’t have any more to lose.

What are you currently working on?

Currently, I am working on a paper about how the current hype around artificial intelligence, and the governance structures of digital platforms affects African feminist digital communing (the online practices and experiences of African feminist communities). I am particularly interested in exploring user-resistance practices—survival and visibility manoeuvres—that African feminists adopt within these digital spaces. I am also interested in how African feminists embody alternative modes of engaging with the digital—modes that are rooted in decolonial, intersectional politics—especially as evolving policies and market logic of platform governance are reproducing colonial hierarchies and enacting new forms of racialized, gendered violence. It’s an equally heavy, challenging and yet energizing work, and I am excited about it.

Question from Oyindamola Depo-Oyedokun: What book or story do you wish you had beaten its writer to writing because you resonated so deeply with it?

That would be Tiffany Willoughby-Herard’s I Meant for You to Be Free’: Winnie Mandela’s Love Letter to and Pedagogies for Young South Africans, the Post-1994 Generation. It has not been published yet and I only got a chance to pre-read it because my professor at Emory invited her as a guest speaker. That book is everything I need as a guide for activist-parenting, life-writing, and more. I can’t wait for the book to come out!

Bonus: Please suggest a question for a future author’s First Draft  

What was that piece of writing you created that made you realize you wanted to pursue a career in writing (in any capacity)?

Who do you think we should interview next?

I believe everyone on our issue has been interviewed already⎈

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