Brought to you by the team over at Restful by Studio Styles.
The Book
The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly - Sun-mi Hwang
(originally published in 2000 in South Korea, first published in English in 2013)
In 144 small pages, Sun-mi Hwang’s most popular book packs a lifetime of wisdom about life, love and death. The main character, Sprout, is a hen who—like all of us—once had a dream. The dream changes, spirits change bodies, life transmutes, and love remains the one force that sustains whatever it touches. For some readers, it will be a fable that calls to mind Animal Farm and Charlotte’s Web. One of the book’s many successes as a fable is that it calls a variety of experiences and realities to life. An egg is an egg but is also a seed, it is also the beginning of any journey on the reader’s mind. And in this fable, readers have found metaphors for national politics, miscarriage, man vs nature, on and on.
In an interview, the author said she began to write the book in 1998 when her father was dying of cancer and that she wanted to recount her father's unfortunate, rugged life full of sad experiences and poverty. The result is a rare novel about compassion, parenting, survival and freedom.
We recommend this especially if you’re looking for a simply-told, small but mighty treat that may change/shift something in your heart.
The Album
This is What I Mean - Stormzy
Don’t just take it from us.
“His best work for me… I think it’s beautiful cos every song on the album, from start to finish, focus on relationships we have as people. It’s very honest and vulnerable cos it talks about the conflicts that it comes with and also shows how beautiful they can be. Cos at the end of the day, the experiences we have with the people were with, ultimately make us the people we become. I lost someone very close around the time this album dropped and it helped me. Can’t explain it.” - @iam_jerrymoses on Twitter
“…he expressed himself entirely (not the storm we all know)… speaking out from the heart” - @deee_szn on Twitter
“This album is me holding a mirror up to myself” - Stormzy (We recommend reading this interview Stormzy had with Rick Rubin. Besides being about the album, it is an inspiring conversation about making art and living from the heart.)
“Fastest way to heal after a break up.” - @JDivine13 on Twitter
Listen to Calum Landau (a producer and engineer on the album) talk about the process of making the album including being holed up alongside other brilliant collaborators in a house on Osea Island for a month. “It is easily the thing I am most proud of in my musical career… I think it is really formative for the UK music scene to see an artist at the top of the game create something so free and unexpected. It will open doors for a lot of other UK artists to create more explorative art and take a few more risks.”
Ten Essays
On work and community
A Paystack Friendship - Fu’ad Lawal (Vistanium)
Over the past three years, Fu’ad Lawal has built ‘Vistanium’ to be a home for meaty, painstaking and finely edited stories about Nigerian life that connect the everyday to the extraordinary. ‘A Paystack Friendship’ is no exception. It takes us to 2015: a young Nigerian developer applies to a job in Oslo and gets it, but Norway rejects his work visa application. And so he walks in through the other door- an invitation to build Paystack with two friends.
In the 90s, British musician Brian Eno described a word to his friend: Scenius. He believed that significant changes in history resulted from large numbers of people and circumstances to create something new. Scenius is the communal concept of genius, a collective intelligence and intuition that resides in the scene where it’s happening beyond the genes of the people in it.
Quartey believes this is the point – to bring people together in good faith, work on a collective mission where people feel whole, and create pure vibes – to create scenius.
In this way, Paystack’s mission as a business is not just powering a new generation of enterprises across Africa. It’s also creating a culture that won’t revolve around a cult figure but around a cult of Paystack – where people could become their best selves while building a community of practice.
Oka ni Ogun: An Ode to Amala - Ayoola Oladipupo (The Republic)
Despite being an ode singer who says at the end of the song, “Amala doesn’t even taste nice […] and it looks even worse,” Ayoola Oladipupo has written an essay in honour of amala, amala makers and sellers (like Mama Adija), amala politicians (like Chief Adedibu), and amala lovers (like the city of Ibadan).
The Yorubas have a saying, ‘iyán ni óúnje, ọkà ni ògùn’, pounded yam is food, ọkà is medicine. Amala is typically called ọkà by more native speakers of the Yoruba language.
… a personal favourite is the story that claims amala brought about Ṣàngó’s ability to spit fire. I like to imagine Ṣàngó, a huge man with childish impatience, insisting on eating scorching hot amala against the advice of the servant who presented him with this new dish put together by combining the finest crops grown in the kingdom. I imagine Ṣàngó taking a huge morsel in his hand and swiftly swallowing it, too swift for the nerves on his fingertips to signal danger to his brain. Realizing the error of his ways a few seconds too late, he lets out a fiery wail that reverberates through the entire Oyo kingdom. And like that, the god of fire is born.
On history and the environment
Dreams of Green Hydrogen - Ndongo Sylla and Danielle Gabor (Boston Review)
The 20s are roaring again and this time, green hydrogen is a shiny new addition to (post-) colonial extractivism’s make-up routine. Hydrogen burns ‘clean’ and so Europe is gagging for it. The EU plans to source the hydrogen for its high-energy modernity primarily from African countries. Adding to the chorus of warning bells, development economists Ndongo Sylla and Danielle Gabor use this essay to argue that in place of public-private partnerships, we should revive the Pan-African ambitions of the green developmental state.
Without this strategic embedding of de-risking partnerships, the green hydrogen revolution threatens to trap Global South countries into the patterns of unequal ecological exchange that have historically characterized carbon capitalism. Carbon capitalism at the core always insisted that the periphery specializes—first by colonial force and, later, by free-trade imperialism—in the production and exports of industrial commodities. Among the world’s first global industrial commodities, sugar, for example, was an early pioneer of unequal ecological exchange: financiers were the real beneficiaries, while the competitive pressures of the global sugar market led plantation owners into a savage exploitation of enslaved people and environmental destruction in a drive to reduce costs. Since then, unequal ecological exchange has reconfigured the social, political, and economic organization of peripheral territories to suit the ecological requirements of core countries.
A Case for New African Internationalist Politics - Joshua Segun-Lean (The Republic)
In this essay, Joshua Segun-Lean discusses how Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine has unveiled and deepened ideological divides in debates about state power and the use of violence. At the heart of his discussion is the question: What does the occupation of Palestine have to do with Africa and the Global South at large?
Elaborating on his disappointments in the response to Biafra, Achebe said, ‘This independence about which we rejoiced in the early 1960s is really quite empty. And if only Africans would see it—see that what’s happening here—that the bell that’s tolling here is tolling for them.’ These collisions and entrapments between and among nation-states—the intensification and transference of penal statecraft and extractive architectures—are a feature of the global order or what is known as modernity. Scholars of modernity and decolonization understand this order to work as a ‘colonial matrix’ or through a ‘coloniality of power’.
…Thus, the recognition that national systems of oppression are mutually inclusive with and dependent on global systems of oppression might lead us to two critical formulations: histories of resistance are likewise intertwined, and neutrality is impossible.
On society and ideas
She Wants To Make Something - Lola Olufemi (in ‘Structurally F_cked’, a report by Industria)
Most of us are ‘she’. In characteristic sharpness of wit and language, Lola Olufemi pokes at the barriers to making something that most artists face due to the ideological underpinnings of the art/creative/cultural industry.
How does the artist come to be?’ is really a question about material conditions. Namely, what social, political and economic environment does art arise from and how does it develop in relation to unfolding historical processes?
‘How does the artist make their work?’ is really a question about resources. Who has the money to pay for mentorship, supplies, studio space? Who has the whole afternoon to ponder an idea, examine the ins and outs of it and decide its shape?
The only way that we can make art mean anything is to create the conditions where its production could truly be scattered, various, generative, spontaneous. Freely made, resourced and explored by all – imbued with revolutionary love – art that expresses that which language fails, or what a visual cannot communicate, or what sound leaves out.
The Story - Fowota Mortoo (Fumnabulist Magazine)
In Fowota Mortoo’s ‘The Story’, narrative and authority are explored via a series of starting points. The essay is an ever-beginning circle, its subject matter an ever-present cycle of conquest over mind and territory. (Worth reading alongside Parul Sehgal’s The Tyranny of the Tale.)
The Story begins with maps, transgressions of truth, and conviction in the superiority of one.
It begins again with centers of light and peripheries in darkness, with the Enlightened bestowing a new defining characteristic of what it means to be human. It begins with the forced evaporation of divine spirit from land and sea, with the valorized alienation of humans from all that surrounds, feeds, sustains us.
On intimacies and interiorities
The Fire in My Memory - Immaculata Abba (Winner of Abebi Non-fiction Award, published in Isele Magazine)
Since 2005, Immaculata Abba has lived with the grief of losing a sibling as an active matter, a force that acts upon her life and her community. In this essay, she describes how tangible that force has been in hopes of inspiring more accountability to responsibility and attention to duty.
I was at home in Aba on the evening of the crash. My mother had gone to the market to buy a carton of Indomie (KC’s favourite: plain onion flavour), plantains, coconuts and whatever else. She was making a feast for her best friend’s first day back from boarding school. The anticipation was light and steadfast, the promise as sure as the sky. I helped cut onions and pound peppers while CeCe Winnas and Don Moen songs played on my mother’s Nokia phone which she had placed on the window-sill in front of the sink. When my mother received the phone call, I was standing on a bench that allowed me reach the kitchen tap as I washed bowls and chopping boards. I handed the phone to her and her face registered not an emergency but an enquiry.
I Asked Four Former Friends Why We Stopped Speaking - Kui Mwai (Vogue)
“I loved my friend/He went away from me/There's nothing more to say,” so begins Langston Hughes’s Poem. But sometimes a lot is left unsaid and in this essay, Kui Mwai takes one for the team to ask four former friends what happened. We’re definitely not trying this at home but it was a courageous and thrilling experiment worth observing.
I can’t believe Dominique and I waited so many years to have this conversation. I’d harbored so much guilt, confusion, and pain over our friendship. It had haunted me, and played a big role in the way I saw myself as a friend. And all this time, Dominique had thought the same of herself.
I’m not walking away from these conversations with the conviction that I’m a good friend, or even a good person. However, talking with my ex-friends did remind me that loving people—even platonically—isn’t easy. Sometimes you hurt your friends, sometimes they hurt you, and sometimes there’s no hurt at all, but they still fade away like a memory. Life is short, but it’s long, too. If you’re lucky, people will come in and out of your life and, for however long they’re there, you’ll feel loved.
Notes on Affliction - Mofiyinfoluwa Okupe (Pleiadesmag Magazine)
Simple and short- our human bodies deserve respect. They deserve to be regarded seriously. In this essay, Mofiyinfoluwa takes a good look at her body’s suffering from the disease of endometriosis and shares with us her experience of living inside a healing body.
The only way to treat endometriosis is to stop menstruating. It is a disease that thrives on the blood of your monthly cycle. To starve the disease, you must stop the blood. To do this, I am administered artificial progesterone, thirty milligrams a day. A hormonal cocktail that shreds my sanity and self, leaving behind a weeping-willow woman. Everything is sour in my mouth. My vagina will not lubricate. My breasts hang heavier every passing day. My body is in a state of pseudo-pregnancy, Dr Olu tells me. I am carrying a phantom child. Although it is not there, I feel the weight of it every waking morning.
The Branches and the Wind and the Rain - Zenas Ubere (Isele Magazine)
We saved our favourite for last. Here, Zenas Ubere tells us—quite carefully and softly—about how his grandfather lost his way inside his body.
In addition to a loss of memory, dementia could also induce a loss of language and a decline in general cognitive functions that impair the daily performance of the affected. Often, after being diagnosed with it, the patient could have as little as three years to live. Nerve cells in the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for memory formation and cell production, suddenly begin to die. This damage spreads until the patient’s mind is entirely consumed. It sometimes affects the patient’s motor functions too, making the person a stranger to everything they learned growing up, such as accrued personality traits, the act of walking, riding a bicycle, and so on – as though the reel of one’s life was being rewound to the moment they were born, a clean, blank slate, empty of experience. It is to be lost in place, time, and self.
… He said to the nurse that he needed his mother, and then he cried louder. “I feel as if I’m losing all my leaves,” he told the nurse, “the branches and the wind and the rain,” he said, incoherent as a toddler still working through the rigours of language construction.