Literature and art in a distracted world
Conversation (III) with the articulate and entertaining Abasi-maenyin Esebre
Creativity is an aspect of human existence that sets us apart from other life forms. We all have the talent for it, even though the world and our economies do their best to ensure we ignore and suppress this ability. Regardless, some people disregard this insistence on being mindless cogs and choose the risk of making art. I am obsessed with them.
Abasi-maenyin Esebre is one such person. I had him on Connecting over a year ago, where we discussed Cockroaches, Politics, and Dropping Out. It is one of my most fun entries. Maenyin is one of my favorite Nigerian writers. His essay “Call Me By My Name” has been published in AFREADA, and he has won two SEVHAGE literary prizes. You should check out his work on Substack, especially this one on Nigerian English (Ninglish).
For Conversation (III), I briefly spoke to him about creativity, commodification, and what it means to engage deeply with literature in an increasingly distracted world. I hope you enjoy it.
1) Can you tell us about yourself?
This question puzzles me the older I get. I don’t like to introduce myself as my profession or aspirations anymore because these are things I do or hope to master. And I am not necessarily what I do. Neither do I like to introduce myself as my hobbies because these are things I wish to stay a secret, private, if you will.
I’m Abasi-maenyin, and I don’t know who I am.
I like music, although I haven’t listened to it enough for years now. I love movies, but I haven’t watched enough either. I’m a connoisseur and a dilettante in one. I keep many sunsets in my memory—they somehow seem to keep me going.
2) You mentioned movies and music but left out literature, which I believe you spend most of your time on. Do you think watching movies can substitute for reading, especially as video content is gaining popularity over text?
I’m starting to enjoy literature again; that’s why I omitted it. I seem to have been reading books that weren’t stimulating enough, safe books, books that were doing things that I could do in my sleep. I like the impossible in prose. A sentence that befuddles me with its poetry or a story that stuns me with its narration. I’m currently reading Underworld by Don DeLillo and River Spirit by Leila Aboulela: both of them exquisite: the former for its shimmering prose, the latter for its breathtaking narration.
And, to answer the question, no. I don’t think movies can ever substitute for reading, as long as the imagination exists. Studies have shown that reading activates more parts of the brain than watching movies, but beyond that, beyond scientific validation, reading is such a pleasure: you can’t doomread: even if you do, that’ll be a thousand times more useful—educating and entertaining—than doomscrolling, which the rise of video content has brought as a curse upon us. But I digress.
3) I completely agree with your sentiments of videos not being able to replace text because you lose the element of mental visualization that reading requires, but movies do not, and with video content, things get more vapid. Do you think this “vapidness” of our digital era, where people are pushed to produce produce produce, is infecting the literary landscape?
In a way, it is. And meme culture deserves part of the blame. The whole “the curtains are blue” and “let people enjoy things” and “it’s just not that deep” combo combined with videos made to be consumed at twice the normal speed with no proper recollection of what’s been experienced or its real-life implications has seeped into the literary realm in troubling ways: a) people wanting to insert themselves in fictional books, experiencing themselves as the MC in the book, and b) skipping lines of description/narration in favor of dialogue. Two terrible reading habits I speculate, come from the video content world where things are algorithmically tailored for you or where you have to power to scroll past what doesn’t instantly entertain.
4) Hahaha. First of all, what do you mean by “the curtains are blue”? Also, I’ve been skipping descriptions since I was a child—before smartphones and the ubiquitous internet. Sometimes, I feel they are too much and do not help the plot. I see it a lot in African literature, an emphasis on imagery, but don’t you think there’s some validity in skipping it sometimes?
“The curtains are blue” is a statement that represents a dismissive attitude towards symbolism in literature. It posits that things are just literal with no double meaning. That the green light at the end of Gatsby’s dock is just a green light and nothing more. And symbolism is a big part of literature.
For the second question, I feel we overestimate plot too much. I don’t see a need to skip the descriptions, and I say this as someone who’s read Nabokov and Joyce, But perhaps this is a harsh judgment. However, that’s why genre books and literary books exist (I hate these categorisations, but they’re useful here, so)—the former focuses more on the plot, the latter on language and voice. In all, I’d rather not read a book than skim it.
5) I tried reading Ulysses last year, 10 years after my first attempt, and I couldn’t get into it. But that’s a topic for another day. I wonder why you do not like categorizing books. Honestly, it’s only been last month that I knew fiction was categorized into literary and genre. I always gravitated toward literary fiction and just thought I liked “books about life.”
I tried Ulysses before but didn’t finish it, but I will again, and I’ll get the hard one this time. I did love the beginning. I love difficult books because they’re so rewarding once you finally unravel them. But I digress. I like categorizing, not just that particular binary, because it can be unwittingly exclusory, especially to books in the fantasy and sci-fi genre, which could make people overlook other brilliant writers like Octavia Butler, for example.
6) I hear the name, but I have never read anything by her. But before you go, recommend a novel from Butler or three other pieces of media my readers should try.
In these fascist times, I think everyone should read “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler and watch “AlphaGo - The Movie” on YouTube, a documentary about how the South Korean Go champion Lee Sedol battles it out with Google’s AI, Alpha Go, trained to be and beat the best of the best: I want everyone to be familiar with Move 78. And everyone should listen to “In Utero” by Nirvana.
I hope this conversation nudges you back to the books that dazzle, the sentences that demand your full attention, and the questions that don’t have easy answers. In between usual programming, I am going to do more of these interview-style entries because they seem like a great way diversify what you get from Connecting and I get to collaborate with writers and artists.
What do you think about this one, and would you love me to continue? Please leave a comment and also a heart and also a share. Till next time.
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