LOLA OLUFEMI
Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and CREAM/Stuart Hall Foundation researcher from London. Her first book, Feminism Interrupted, was published by Pluto Press in 2020 and her second, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, by Hajar Press in 2021. Experiments is an expansive and generous mixed-genre book, consisting of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and pieces that fall somewhere between, each an attempt to describe a different political future. Lola spoke to TANK about the book’s imaginative project, language as opportunity and limit, and feminism “as revolution in service of every living thing”.
Interview by Nell WhittakerPortrait by Robin Silas
Nell Whittaker How did the book’s switching between different genres play out during the writing process?
Lola Olufemi Putting together a book that felt fragmentary or bitty was intuitive. In my theoretical work, which is about imagination and cultural production, I’m really interested in what fragmentation can offer us. So often we’re sold a total story by the grand narrative of history – that time signals linear movement from A to B, and this is how progress occurs. I take the notion of experimenting and playing with genre from radical histories, whether that be prison memoirs or poetry collections, revolutionary journals, collective forms of writing, where people have really made a political choice not to think of the relationship between reader and singular author as this sacred thing that goes untouched and to muddy temporality by allowing past, present and future to rub up against each other. I was really trying with the genre to indicate to my readers that this book is about the tactics we’re going to need to enact the futures that we so desperately desire, the futures that would enable us to live in ways that weren’t so miserable. And so in trying to create some kind of affective shift in readers that might allow them to think about the political horizon as something material and well within our grasp, I was also trying to encourage people not to be married to the idea that a book should look a certain way. Creating that feeling of disorientation when reading was incredibly important to me because we’re also in a moment of political disorientation. We’ve always been in a moment of political disorientation. In this moment as in every moment in the drawn-out present, there’s a space that opens up for receptiveness or the ability to be tactile with each other or to be genuinely collaborative. I’m asking – what new modes can we enact together? What can we rehearse? What can we bring into being in or through our desire and more importantly, our action?
NW You position your imaginative project against the ideas that stories in and of themselves are a force for human good and that history is linear and progressive.
LO The thing about the imagination that I find most useful is that as a political concept, it refuses to be taxonomised. You can’t give a full account of what the imagination is. My imaginative capacity and capability are different to yours by virtue of our different experiences in the world, our positioning within a class and racialised structure. The argument that I’m trying to make is that there is some connection between our imaginative capacity, and how that’s brought into being by language, and our impetus to resist, our capacity to think materially and strategically about what we are going to have to do to keep each other alive, to end forms of state violence and enact forms of direct action and community care via mutual aid. I’m really against the kind of bourgeois, literary idea that stories are all that matter; what I’m trying to do here is to show, through language, that our imaginations can be capacious, like Diane di Prima reminds us: “remember, / you can have everything you ask for, ask for / everything.” We need to behave as if it were possible for us to have the things we demand, rather than relegating them solely to the realm of the linguistic or the “not-possible”. So much of utopian fiction is that: utopia tells us this is what we desire but is not possible. My book stands firmly in the middle between a materialist critique and a utopian one to say, actually, the imagination is materially useful. It’s not useful to drift solely into a place of desire that becomes unmoored from what we have to do, the actions that we have to take, the structural critique that must underpin everything.
NW At what point did you find language itself limiting through the writing? And were those useful pressure points?
LO The limitations in language came from my own limitations as a writer. At the end of the book, I did a control search of specific words. I was there with a thesaurus: what’s another word for liberation? On a very practical level, that was how language became a kind of barrier. But it’s interesting to think about that kind of barrier in the context of the idea that in the worlds we seek to build, so much about what tethers us here, so much about the ways that we relate and understand each other, will not exist. Language as we know it will have to shift and change and move and become kind of malleable, better to fit a world in which capitalist exploitation and expropriation doesn’t order every mode of social life and organisation. I was also keenly aware that with everything I’m doing, I’m trying to grasp, but never actually fully holding onto, that thing that I’m trying to get. That is the process of trying to imagine under hegemonic conditions, which tell you constantly that the things that you wish for, desire, imagine, seek to build are not possible, will not happen. All things to be relegated to a future in which you are not present. When we talk about what we want, it’s like, “well, will this happen in our lifetime?” That’s the limitation of language, or “is this an accurate policy demand; how do we make a mass appeal for XYZ?” All limitations of language. My understanding of the purpose of a political ethic is much more expansive, to say, we can shatter these linguistic structures that we’ve built in order to understand each other. Limitation needn’t stifle us.
NW I’m just thinking about the proliferation of the word “electability” in the past five years, which is the reduction of a whole lot of different things into a singular term that we can argue about. This is a kind of compression, whereas in your work there’s a kind of inflation, of reutilising language, or returning to different forms of language.
LO Or dispensing with it entirely. I think of those writers who have been able to do that, people like Gail Lewis, June Jordan, George Jackson, poets! Jackie Wang says that poets are the timekeepers of revolution. What does it mean to break open the realm of the possible and the many dimensions that can exist? Poets do that all the time. They break and shift and move language in ways that make us feel like it is possible to open up ourselves to each other, to a text, to a linguistic experience, not dissimilar from those people who stage prison protests or those people who engage in direct confrontation with the police, as we’ve seen over the last year. Those people who end up imprisoned because of that – someone like Ryan Roberts, or other people who have been detained by police, are also enactments of a breaking-open of what is possible. When people put their bodies on the line, they manufacture the feeling that it is possible to resist. To say no. Lots of the pieces in this book are kind of thought experiments: when we think about history, when we think about those people who have sacrificed, all those people who have gone to prison, we don’t think about what it would mean also to lose everything and be sent to prison for political action. And we don’t ask the questions, “Would I? Would I do that? Would I give up my home to house people ‘illegally’? What are the lines and the limits of my resistance? Would I be arrested? Would I be charged? Would I do something that would make me a real threat to state power?” And that’s a question, obviously, that has different answers for everyone. But I think for those seriously engaged in the possibility of living differently, that’s the question you have to ask yourself every week. I don’t want to become the kind of writer or the kind of person who only writes about revolution or who is preoccupied with a utopian idea and then when a critical juncture occurs, I’m at the desk writing instead of doing what should be done. And if you look at the black feminist tradition, those two things always went hand in hand. How do we support mothers? How do we educate children? How do we organise against state violence? And then afterwards, how do we create some kind of political education that exists in the archives and documents what we were doing so that someone else might pick up the work and continue.
NW Romantic love specifically comes up a lot in the book. You write, “I want to spend my life in service to others. This is not a human instinct. This is a choice.” I’m interested in the confines of and the possibilities of the love relation.
LO What I’m trying to point out is that all of these grand stories that we tell about romantic love – in particular, that love is transformative, deeply personal, able to change our lives – are not necessarily untrue, but that within the confines of the structures we live in, we have yet to approach even a tenth of our capacity to love. I’m always asking my friends, how would we love one another under transformed conditions? How would we know each other? What would it mean if the family didn’t exist? And obviously, this has been asked by so many people, but what would new forms of kinship look like? What would “queer being” mean in that space? Queerness as opposed to a taxonomised sexuality requires a kind of rejection of the nuclear family unit, not only as the main source of emotional care but also as a unit of production. That’s one way in which we rehearse what love could be or what love could truly mean, all those people that let people in, all those people whose houses are revolving doors, who don’t charge their friends rent to live in a home, who open up their space as much as possible, who redesign what the house could look like so that it’s not a master bedroom and two children’s rooms. I’m asking what love would mean outside of a class structure, if there were no necessity to marry upwards, whether that be class or caste. What would it mean to escape the requirements of heteronormativity and the rigidity in which love is based? Love needn’t mean domination or possession only; there is freedom and flexibility and playfulness that would come into that love ethic as well. Gail Lewis calls black feminism a project of ethical relation, love should be that fuel.
NW The idea of contingency is so invigorating in love.
LO Neoliberalism, indeed every exploitative structure, tells us to reject an interdependence that is crucial to enacting the things that we would like to enact, but also will be crucial if we are to reach our true capacity for the ways that we could love other people, so that love doesn’t mean just you and me against the world. I’m saying that until those conditions arise, I can’t pretend that what passes for love is pure magic; I won’t be sentimental. Anne Boyer talks about this phenomenon of romantic love under capitalism becoming a “communism of two”. I take seriously that that is not what love is and should be. Love is not me and you; it’s broad; it’s expansive. It’s everyone. ◉