Chairs, Laundry, and Homophobia

Why are you gay?

In a JAMB literature class I tutored earlier this year, a conversation was had concerning Elizabeth Kamara’s poem, “New Tongue,” and a growing ideological and identity crisis—the deep confusion of what is authentically African, and not simply imported—the younger Nigerian generation is faced with. That is, if by writing this, there was ever an “ideology.” We discussed African identity and how, in a globalised context, there is a paradigm shift in what the African mind assimilates, accepts, or rejects as culturally unique. In one of her lines, Kamara writes of the new generation glorifying “the newness of a borrowed tongue and culture.” I asked the students what the terms a new tongue and borrowed tongue and culture meant to them. Some said “language”; others mentioned “religion.” While no one explicitly mentioned “identity,” “gender” or “sexuality,” the conversation revealed gaps in how, even in accepting or rejecting these realities, certain areas are often overlooked.

Quite sadly, following the tragic, violent incidents at the Ozoro festival in March, an acquaintance jokingly admitted he “would rather spare the life of a rapist than that of a homosexual.” As others laughed, I let the air hold my disgust. “It was a mere joke,” he’d tell me later. But was it? It left me irritated, because the joke is not an isolated thought. It is what is justified when the video of assault on a gay person appears on social media: “Beat am make him head correct,” “Another lost brother,” “You leave woman say na man you wan follow,” “Make una kill them,” “God forbid.” And so, the loss of human life becomes merely a justified joke in a society that fails its young.

When Ernest Jesuyemi’s essay “The Wrong Kind of Black Poet” and Evidence Egwuono Adjarho’s videos on “Reclaiming the Rainbow For God” found their way to me, the link was undeniable. Their arguments are anchored in the very same undercurrent of disgust that I had just witnessed in that “mere joke,” no matter how intellectually subtle or disconnected they try to make them. It is as though a spectre haunts the intellectuals and critics of this generation, a spectre of human autonomy. So they utilise all tools to reinforce their exorcism, whether framed as martyrdom, moral cleansing, or plainly as the defence of art. While writers like Abasi-maenyin and Chiemeziem Everest Udochukwu have written on this development, there is still a lack of clear, historical and ideological solidity that connects these social realities and reactions as they form, even beyond the individual in a global literary market. And all of this re-echoes a kind of postcolonial chimera laden with ideological crisis and Westernised validations. In the face of a retreat, it is soaked in the water of a dogmatic, neo-colonial homophobia. They fail to realise that culture is a product of material, historical conditions.

In his seminal 1983 work Literary Theory: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton pointed out that literature is not an immutable, objective category of pure aesthetic value, but a construct deeply entangled with the ideological illusions of a specific social class. It will be a fundamental mistake to regard art as an autonomous playground detached from the materiality of its production and consumption. To view art from such a lens, one commits a delusion of bourgeois liberal humanism—one where, like democracy, it is devoid of its class character. In the African literary space, this fundamental error re-emerges. Now, it is expressed in two seemingly opposite but structurally similar rhythms: the critic who bemoans his exclusion from Western fellowships on the basis of “intellectual liberty,” and the intellectual who weaponises illogical analogies and moral panic to police the borders of human identity.

Jesuyemi details his expulsion from the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) over a theological tweet from 2023; he frames the event as an Orwellian tragedy of an “enlightened subjectivity” besieged by a modern, progressive “Stasi.” Yet, on the contrary, it reveals a far more complex web of systemic failures. It is the plague that comes as a “postcolonial” writer seeking refuge in a metropole. This again goes to say that a writer is first a social being. By attempting to participate in the NBCC when its windows open upward to diversity, economic, and social fluidity, while simultaneously demanding that the same apparatus ignore his stringent conservative dogma, Jesuyemi falls victim to his own critical oversight: “He did not separate the art from the artist; that is impossible. He took the art as it is, because good art does not become any less valuable because it contains (what are to us) troubling sentiments.” While I will attempt to tackle this later, as I read these words by him, I found it paradoxical. By insisting that separating the art from the artist is impossible, on what ground does Jesuyemi demand that the NBCC separate his literary criticism from his public political identity? But more importantly, this translates into a broader cultural stasis where the insularity of the individual feels less shared. Maybe not. In the digital space, the charades gain more reverberating echoes as globalisation blooms. There is a reaction here and another there: everyone chooses what to accept or reject and becomes, by extension, the police, the judge, and the executioner.

In 2023, I argued that defining our cultural boundaries by socioeconomic rot and, now, reasserting traditional dogmas, are only myopic ways to view the world. It fails to see that themes migrate; that their illation lacks the merit of any chauvinistic campaigns. Art changes as society changes. Let me reiterate my views here:

It is important to redefine what culture is and how it evolves side-by-side with societal organisation—both on political, economic, and social grounds—and how they reflect on the consciousness of the poet and the critic. Culture is the total accumulation of how humans acquire and conquer nature, and as this seems, what we hold so unique is just a productive reflection of society itself. That is, our science and technology: techniques of surviving each epoch of society within class relations, interests, repulsion, and need. Art becomes a reflection of that dialectic interrelationship between a class and its artists, which in turn defines the culture and ideology that continually thrive.

It is within the above framework that the artist is a product of his social existence. That art, to a large extent, is not created out of a vacuum. There are sides that must be taken. These sides are first purely ideological and political even before the form in which they are written. So, if we agree that art cannot be separated from the artist, to what extent do our critics believe this boundary stretches? Does that impossibility not justify the NBCC’s decisions? If it doesn’t—let’s say we assume the impossibility never existed—from what can art be detached from the artist? Does the artist cease to become a social being? If not, how then should a work be read? Are the readers themselves not social beings? And to what extent can “good art” not become any less valuable because it contains (what are to us) troubling sentiments? What does good art mean? To whom is it valuable? If the “troubling sentiments” relate to sexism, homophobia, or class oppression, doesn’t it maintain a value that serves to protect the status quo? It is within these questions that Chiemeziem and Jesuyemi’s postulations fall short or fail to answer. One I can best summarise as lacking materialistic, socio-historical depth. Take Chiemeziem Everest Udochukwu’s rejoinder in Afrocritik, for instance:

What Jesuyemi genuinely wants is a literary culture capacious enough to hold divergent, even troubling, subjectivities without reflexive excommunication. He is right to want it and right that the narrowing of American literary culture, its transformation from an arena of difficult thinking into an enforcement mechanism for approved positions, is bad for literature and bad for democracy. He is right that a poem ruined by cant is only a bad poem. He is right that the eccentricity of a phrase, the ring of one word against another, should not be subject to political veto. He is right about all these.” (Bold text placed by me).

Interestingly, language or words have always been political acts. And their mastery comes from a place of privilege and power. I mean, it is only beautiful to let words ring against another, but who decides which ring is “eccentric” and “troubling”? Who decides the power to set the musicality of the poem? Language is an ideological tool. Words in themselves, either by an artist’s independent choice or not, are not devoid of social constructs. No words are neutral on the basis of their musicality. So even when Jesuyemi doesn’t see anything wrong with the word “whore” (either by being self-referential) as opposed to “sex worker,” he fails to see the historical baggage. And by such failure, he misses the social shifts in the meaning of words and in reality. That reality, as subtly pointed out by his American poet friend, is also the underbelly of what the market economy of modern publishing gate-keeps.

In Datta Ketan’s Linguistic Anthropology: Language Ideologies and their Implications, it only becomes clearer that language is beyond mere symbols or sounds. It is the “social and cultural phenomenon deeply embedded within specific contexts and shaped by historical, political and economic factors.” While in certain colloquial Nigerian spaces, friends can jokingly, and in a more jovial setting, use terms like “ashawo”or “prostitute,” its translation into “whore” in other (international) contexts can be misread as verbal assault, misogynistic, or rooted in patriarchal violence. (Other words exist to prove this point. Nicolas Cage’s documentary series, History of Swear Words,should be enough for anyone willing to see these contexts, however subtle they are.) Most critically, I cannot but ask to what extent Chiemeziem thinks Jesuyemi is “right about all these,” or on what logic he makes his deductions about what an individual artist “wants” or the “right to want it.”

When Jesuyemi catalogues the shifts in the US literary space since 2020 and observes at a distance—from Poetry Foundation to his dismissal from the NBCC—his arguments rely on the assumption that these institutions are neutral entities concerned with pure aesthetic form. But in his own distance until 2025, there were ongoing sociopolitical ruptures in the West that continues to reshape the cultural superstructure. Admitting that he profited from the free submission periods for Black writers is only a testament to these radical shifts and concessions. Even when he laments that choosing a word for its musicality has suddenly “become a political act,” it is because it has always been a political act. The NBCC’s decision was political. Its survival, funding, and even alignment are entirely dependent on these supposed liberal, progressive ideas.

The market drive of the Western literary space, particularly what it publishes or conventionally agrees to accept, cannot be against its own cultural survival and political logic. It has an economic calculus. Even when Jesuyemi admittedly praises queer literature, “literature being literature and not religion,” it immediately collapses under his own rhetoric that art cannot be separate from the artist, a logic that justifies the NBCC’s decision to not separate his critical “art” from his tweeted identity. But on a larger scale, this is the dichotomy where global capital defines the trajectory of the postcolonial writer, either by erasure or by a reality defined by their domestic market stability. Even locally, the ruling ideology of a society reinforces the illusions of individual liberty or martyrdom. It is in this context that Jesuyemi misreads both historical materialism, and Orwell, whom he selectively invokes to promote a detached, formalist aesthetic to argue his case. And, therefore, misses Orwell’s vital warning: to say an art is “non-political” in an age of violent state-sanctioned panics is not an act of intellectual liberty; it is a direct concession to the ruling ideology. Permit me to cite a long passage from Orwell’s essay:

Whenever one attempts to defend intellectual liberty against the claims of totalitarianism, one meets with these arguments in one form or another. They are based on a complete misunderstanding of what literature is, and how—one should perhaps say why—it comes into being. They assume that a writer is either a mere entertainer or else a venal hack who can switch from one line of propaganda to another as easily as an organ grinder changing tunes. But after all, how is it that books ever come to be written? Above a quite low level, literature is an attempt to influence the viewpoint of one’s contemporaries by recording experience. And so far as freedom of expression is concerned, there is not much difference between a mere journalist and the most “unpolitical” imaginative writer. The journalist is unfree, and is conscious of unfreedom, when he is forced to write lies or suppress what seems to him important news; the imaginative writer is unfree when he has to falsify his subjective feelings, which from his point of view are facts. He may distort and caricature reality in order to make his meaning clearer, but he cannot misrepresent the scenery of his own mind; he cannot say with any conviction that he likes what he dislikes, or believes what he disbelieves. If he is forced to do so, the only result is that his creative faculties will dry up. Nor can he solve the problem by keeping away from controversial topics. There is no such thing as a genuinely non-political literature, and least of all in an age like our own, when fears, hatreds, and loyalties of a directly political kind are near to the surface of everyone’s consciousness.

When George Orwell wrote his 1946 essay, “The Prevention of Literature,” what he meant by enemies of literature was nothing more than the totalitarian states such as the Stalinism and Fascism of that time, backed by the violent monopoly of state power. For anyone who loves history, the 1895 Trials of Oscar Wilde, the prosecution and ban of Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 collection Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), and Allen Ginsberg’s obscenity trial in 1957 after writing Howl,are not far-fetched. These are examples of where state power is wielded. The US poets, fellows, and editors whom Jesuyemi criticises do not hold such power. They do not have the apparatus of the “Stasi.” They cannot, on the basis of their literary authority, assassinate or arrest or exile dissenters, as states have done to Ken Saro-Wiwa, Wole Soyinka, Giordano Bruno, Hugo Bettauer, Federico García Lorca, Isaac Babel, Farag Foda, Martin O’Hagan, Anna Politkovskaya, Gauri Lankesh, and Salman Rushdie. The NBCC exists merely within the precarious claws of global capitalism, which, if it ever genuinely conflicts with actual state power, will be accordingly crushed and erased. This is not the same political landscape Orwell diagnosed—and to be invoked by Jesuyemi is a contextual distortion.

To understand why the NBCC reacts the way it does, one must look beyond mere “cancel culture” to the material history of the metropole itself. The very values of liberty, diversity, and equality from which critics like Jesuyemi wish to benefit are not abstract gifts dropped from heaven. They were won through centuries of bitter class struggle in the West, struggles tied directly to the evolution of productive forces that pushed society past primitive, feudal, and religious dogmas. These cultural victories, quite unfortunately, are what capital accommodates and institutionalises as frameworks for diversity to maintain the systemic stability of modern Western organisations. Yet, all is not well in the house of Capital. We are again witnessing a global crisis fuelled by its own systemic decay. It is what drives the vehicle for the global far-right, as the return of Trumpism has shown. With a general lack of clear-cut material solutions for the economically plundered populace, the modern right-wing machinery relies on a calculated strategy: mobilise the most backward, reactionary layers of society by weaponising moral panics around religion and sexuality. Deny it as they might, our postcolonial poets and critics who scream about “orthodox rights” are merely the ideological troops of Trump operating within the neocolonial enclave. When they rail against progressive shifts in the name of “tradition” or “theology,” they are singing from the exact same hymnbook as Western far-right reactionaries. They stand on the side of a system that replaces class solidarity with cultural warfare.

This reactionary victory is made possible by a profound vacuum: the absence of a distinct, independent Left philosophy capable of bringing working-class identity to the fore as a counterweight to capitalism. When alternative movements fold themselves into the very bastions of capital, they abandon the field, leaving the disenfranchised masses to be swept up by demagogues. In the absence of this structural resistance, we suffer a terrifying reversal of civilisational gains on the cultural front. It is within this backdrop that one must question the material cost of “enlightened subjectivity” that Jesuyemi defends, or the “sophisticated prejudices” of T.S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism, or the “irritating” points of Ezra Pound’s fascism—as if these ghosts don’t haunt the value of art. Terry Eagleton made this clearer when he said “literature does not exist in the sense that insects do, and that the value-judgements by which it is constituted are historically variable, but these value-judgements themselves have a close relation to social ideologies.”

So while Jesuyemi doesn’t see that these ghosts have flesh, a friend in a room somewhere in Lagos chooses to spare a rapist over a person with a different sexual orientation. Neither does this friend perform any “eccentric” phrasing in the direction of literary subjectivity. If anything, he is executing moral cleansing in the very “troubling sentiments” Jesuyemi asks us to accommodate, the kind where he boldly asserts, “how are we to live if we cannot risk offense in a poem?” Is this the same “rights” that Chiemeziem confers by the “ring” of words as music or “pure” art in a world in whose mouth and hands gavels a death sentence, as it has with Hillary Ikechukwu Emereole, Hamza Idris-Tofawa, Umar Yusuf-Dungurawa, Abuja Area Mama, Mohammed, and countless humans whose lives are at risk for their sexual choices or identity? By holding on to these orthodoxies and subjectivities like “core” native armour, the ultimate irony of our current stasis is clearly mirrored. Upon this trajectory are Evidence Egwuono Adjarho’s “Reclaiming the Rainbow for God” videos stacked.

In this particular video, Evidence opens with a chair analogy. She argues that society is being desensitised into normalising “anomalies.” Of course, this comes after Jesuyemi’s essay. As I watched, I couldn’t contain my critique of its fallacies, which, again, weaponises a moral panic. The first flaw in the logic is equating a chair to human complexity. A chair is nothing but a static, predetermined object designed to serve a singular, mechanical purpose. To her, placing laundry on it means it has been misused and, by such, is an anomaly. But she fails to recognise that a chair lacks consciousness. Even if we consider this panpsychically, we can agree that a chair in itself is not aware. It cannot think, feel, or experience being sat on. If it does, which is unlikely, that is within a reality of itself to define what is “misused” or an “anomaly.” Yet, it is this singular analogy that oversimplifies the intricacies of human consciousness on which Evidence’s convictions rest.

Humans are infinitely complex. Like the universe, no matter how infinitesimal we appear, our psychology, biology, desires, and even our ecosystems cannot be reduced to the simplicism of a chair. If the same logic is placed on humans, the contradictions are clearer. Take the mouth as an example. It is “designed” for us to eat. But it is still on this design that we speak, sing, and express affection and logic, as Evidence could do with her videos. So, do we define these other uses of our mouth as anomalies, following Evidence’s analogy?

In fact, and scientifically speaking, what is normal does not equal good, nor does the rarity of something make it inherently bad. Red hair is an apposite case. While it is a rare genetic anomaly, it is completely natural. So even when Evidence claims “people”—which I think is such a vague generalisation, if the argument is about a specific group—are desensitised to normalise “sin,” the opposite is true from a socio-historical lens. There are no new agendas. The fact that humans react to disgust or raise alarm toward the unfamiliar is not because it is exactly a natural reflex but rather a reflection of social conditioning and taboos at a specific time and place, built on the existing, ruling ideologies of such a society. I have taken time to deconstruct this analogy so my arguments are only clearer.

While moral panics are commodifiable, these reactions, however they come, such as policing, protection, or advice, do not see that themes migrate in a globalised world. And again, too, they erroneously fail to accept their indigeneity, even from an African perspective. It is on this premise that both Evidence and Jesuyemi operate, though their methods differ. Evidence’s overt rhetoric is a campaign to “reclaim” African sexuality, while Jesuyemi’s brief theological dismissal function as a quiet offshoot of the very same logic. Both unthinkingly assume that homosexuality is unnatural, an imported, modern Western anomaly that corrupts the African identity or subdues it, were we to pick a dogmatic side. This is an inversion of history. It is the kind of shock Okot p’Bitek had at Oxford University in 1960; one I have come to summarise in what I call the “tetrad of self-logical questioning”: Do you think homosexuality is (1) abnormal, (2) unnatural, (3) against God, or (4) outside of humans or never existed in prehistoric, precolonial Africa? Most attempts to dissect this tetrad only put one face-à-face with either personal dogma or unequivocal facts. I prefer the latter. When people make arguments to justify homophobia, it is primarily on these orthodox logics. Yet, they barely touch on the fulcrum of the matter.

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) removed homosexuality from its dossier of mental disorders. Seventeen years later, the World Health Organisation did same. But more importantly, it was Bruce Bagemihl’s book, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, published in 1999, that once again confirmed my position that nature is indeed queer: more than 1,500 species exhibit same-sex behaviours. Reading Bagemihl’s book, these words have remained with me:

Any book on homosexuality and transgender in animals is necessarily unfinished, a work in progress. The subject is so vast, the types of behaviors so varied, and the number of species involved so large, as to defy any attempt at comprehensiveness . . . And the scientific research in this area is only in its infancy: new developments and discoveries are continually being made, and the extent of uncharted and as yet unknowable terrain is so great as to render any attempt at completeness hopelessly premature.

Hereon, arguments that being queer is an anomaly, or unnatural, or against God (Divine nature) lose tangibility. Nature doesn’t conform to human constructs or superimpositions of a heteronormative world that is rigidly along a male-female binary. This reminds of an Albert Einstein’s comment on how the mysterious is the most beautiful thing one can experience in this world, such that anyone who can’t pause and wonder is “as good as dead.”

In Evidence’s rhetoric, she weaponises the term “sodomy” to push her narrative, blindly adopting a punitive legal category first codified under King Henry VIII through the Buggery Act of 1533, which marked the moment the English state violently seized control over the private, sexual lives of citizens. Quite unfortunately, it is upon the bedrock of these medieval colonial imports, exported globally as the British Empire swallowed new lands, that modern African legal systems were nurtured. Almost 500 years later, a reactionary mob feels justified, by divine logic, in cleansing people of their right to sexual choices. When I hear “homosexuality is a foreign idea or un-African” or, more appropriately, the “device of the enemy,” I am struck by the sheer historical cognitive dissonance. Bisi Alimi famously unpacks this “un-Africanness” as a colonial lie in how we have suddenly agreed homophobia is a European import, the logic Evidence mirrors.

However, the debate on homosexuality in Africa can best find ground once we either try to strip language of its social contexts, like in the animal world, or root it in African reality. That, I presume, is unattainable. But Michael Lyons is correct to say that “the social meaning and rules behind them are completely different.” It again presents us with the linguistic challenges on which we construct these realities or facts. The same can be said, too, for animal sexuality and behaviours, which are not devoid of human connotations: for instance, do male lions think they are gay when they bond and, sometimes, mount one another?

So even when Nsibidi writings or symbols show two women sleeping together, as Mikael Chukwuma Owunna presented in his lecture, Precolonial African Sexuality, Contemporary Homophobia, and Limitless Africa, is our modern interpretation of being queer the same as what is evident in prehistoric or precolonial Africa? Has queerness looked the same throughout history? Would the Aparanga of the Zande people who had “boy wives” consider themselves gay? Would Queen Nzinga Mbande of Angola or King Mwanga II of Uganda see himself as bisexual? Would the Orishas accept they are “queer” due to their androgynous nature? Or do the yan daudu in northern Nigeria or the Chibados of Angola agree that they act or dress like women? While Olivia Opara did a good job in articulating these facts, Ifi Amadiume and Michael Lyons make us question the social context of our modern interpretations or linguistic labels.

However, we can learn from the position of Stephen Murray and Will Roscoe in Boy-Wives and Female Husbands. They remind us that simply because people in the past engaged in same-sex relationships, it “doesn’t mean they were gay in the way we understand it today.” Yet, even when we respect this historical nuance, the ultimate conclusion remains undeniable: on the absolute basis of our shared ancestral history, homosexuality is fundamentally not un-African. Arguing a case against it doesn’t rule out the fact either. It only promotes the sociolinguistic and cultural contexts they have existed in. So where does Evidence base her rhetoric on reclaiming the rainbow? Does “reclaim” mean a return to African identity or the complete tear-down of it? Part of this is answered and tested on the doorstep of history.

The vocabulary of our “new tongue,” along with its heteronormative bricks and colonial roofing, under the guise of an Abrahamic endorsement and illusive Africaneity, is the foundation upon which ideological custodians and the mobs have built their altar to seek, sanitise, and erase indigenous African realities. Decolonisation, truly, is “incomplete and exclusionary” if it fails to “decolonise the colonial and racist structures that have influenced current African perceptions of gender and sexuality,” as Minority Africa puts it. 

The contemporary African critic can only return to the frameworks provided by his materiality. We cannot anchor our literary or cultural identity on the inflexible pillars of Victorian moralism, cultural chauvinism, and religious dogma. We must realise that we cannot return to a past, especially one that doesn’t fit our human progress or ignores the right to choices, consent, and life. Even when Jesuyemi attempts to escape the ideological crisis of global capital by chanting the mantra for a pure, formalist aesthetic, the world proves too sophisticatedly political for his taste. For Evidence Egwuono Adjarho, it is a matter of building an altar out of shallow neocolonial dogmas. For the student, he is a living testament to such colonial distortions under the guise of cleansing. All of this falls into the trap of cultural chauvinism. The kind where Terry Eagleton argued that liking a banana is not merely a private matter but a questionable fact:

A thorough analysis of my tastes in food would probably reveal how deeply relevant they are to certain formative experiences in early childhood, to my relations with my parents and siblings and to a good many other cultural factors which are quite as social and “nonsubjective” as railway stations . . . that fundamental structure of beliefs and interests which I am born into as a member of a particular society, such as the belief that I should try to keep in good health, that differences of sexual role are rooted in human biology or that human beings are more important than crocodiles . . . are bound up with our social life and could not be changed without transforming that life.

This reinforces the idea argued by Leon Trotsky, that while art has its internal laws of form, the artist, critic, and reader are not empty machines; they are living products of their social conditions. We cannot romanticise the socio-political rot of our present milieu, nor is it logical to tear down the historical effort fought and rewritten by people whose right to sexual choices and existence is as valid as anyone else’s. To this too, the critic must pick a side and face the politics. “Class exists and so do our ideals or consciousness, either in crisis or in revolution. It is the mode of society, understanding the class relations therein, that shapes the life, death, and limits of our literature,” I once concluded in my essay on the Fourth Generation debate. It is on this same Mount Sinai that literature may or may not suffer. When the writer refuses to see these material relations, they do not achieve aesthetic purity; they merely capitulate to the ruling bigotry of their time.

In this era of shifting tides, where the global working class has not yet fully claimed its independent political voice, the burden falls heavily on our cultural workers. Writers and critics cannot afford to be neutral observers or defenders of ancient bigotries masked as “artistic freedom.” They must be the watchdogs on the prowl. They must defend the sanctity of human life and identity against the encroachment of backwardness. Even within the theological frameworks these conservative critics claim to revere, they misread their own texts. They forget that when Christ defended the woman caught in adultery against the reactionary conservatives of his day, he was recognising her fundamental humanity as an exploited proletariat within a brutal system. Let me end with Louis Macneice poem, “Snow”:

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was

Spawning snow and pink roses against it

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world

Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes—

On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands—

There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.♦

Edited by

Edited by Carl Terver

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Michael Bestman Osemudiamen is a cybersecurity analyst and technical writer based in Lagos. He writes corporate security documentation, runs M.B Cybersecurity Notes, and writes cultural essays. His work has been published in the 1919 Review, Vanguard, The Republic and elsewhere. 𝕏