The depth of attention
This interview is a result of notes sent via Google Docs between Kisumu and St Louis.
Akal:Tolu, I have always read and loved your essays. Your recommendations are on my bookshelf. I remember desperately looking for Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth after reading your Substack post titled after his essay “Concerning Violence.” I bring this up to get your thoughts on a thing I have been thinking about after reading this essay by Elena Gosalvez Blanco. Elena writes about her experience working as an assistant to the talented writer, Patricia Highsmith. There is evidence of Patricia’s meanness from that essay. Similar accusations have been made against a couple of great writers, most infamous being Sir Vidia Naipaul. On X, there have been talks of how problematic the great James Baldwin was. These accusations, whether true or not, frighten me. I fear meeting writers I adore for this reason. A big part of me expects great writers to be as humane and beautiful in person, just as they are in their works. “You can’t have worked on your craft this hard, yet your character is shitty,” a writer friend recently told me. What I mean to ask is something about the veneration of writers. What if the writers we ‘worship’ are failing at grace and love and kindness? What if they are wretched, wicked, and more? Does it even matter who they are beyond their works? Let’s start from here.
Tolu: Thank you for always reading. It feels good to know that the work does not exist in a vacuum, that it meets readers who are finding uses for it. With regards to your question, I think one of the dangers of reading deeply is that intimacy begins to masquerade as knowledge. A writer may narrate loneliness, grief, tenderness, exile, and desire so convincingly that we begin to feel like we know everything about them. But often, what we really know is their sensibility, not their character. And those two things are not always the same thing.
I think many readers want moral reassurances from the people whose work has moved them. We want the sentences that held our attention to have come from someone equally capable of grace in ordinary life. But literature has never guaranteed virtue. Sometimes a writer’s work doesn’t reflect the person they consistently are, but the person they are capable of becoming for a page or even a paragraph.
This does not mean that character is irrelevant. It is. Particularly where matters of cruelty, abuse, or the use of power to harm others are involved. But I also think readers get in trouble whenever admiration hardens into veneration. A writer can enlarge your inner life and yet fail, in private, at kindness, humility, or even love. Perhaps, the real task, difficult as that may be, is to admire the work without turning the writer into a saint.
Akal:I started smoking cigarettes because of Binyavanga, because of Baldwin, because of Bessie Head. I smoked more after reading Murakami’s memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, where he writes that he would smoke sixty-two ‘sticks’ a day. Smoking might have been their muse-seeking ritual, but so did I want to make it mine. I have tried the streets and drinking like Marechera. I stopped, though. To be clear, drinking and smoking are not depictions of a failure to character; rather, the point I am making is what you have phrased above as the hardening of admiration into veneration. Tolu, I guess my follow-up would be: besides writing, reading, observing, and imagining, is there a lifestyle that makes great writers great?
Tolu: I think many young writers inherit the aesthetics of writers before they inherit their discipline. We imitate the visible rituals first because rituals are easier to reproduce than consciousness. The cigarette, the bar, the loneliness, the insomnia, the chaotic room. These things begin to look like entrances into genius because they are attached to people whose work altered us. But I do not think there is a lifestyle that makes great writers great. There are only conditions that help particular writers access concentration, attentiveness, and endurance. For some writers, that once included cigarettes and alcohol. For others, it was long walks, routine, celibacy, prayer, running, conversation, or solitude. The mythology survives because the dramatic habits are more visible than the invisible labour of revision. Nobody romanticises sitting with a sentence for six hours. I suspect what makes great writers great is less the performance of suffering than the depth of attention they bring to living. The danger of veneration is that we begin to imitate the smoke instead of the fire.
Akal: To talk about your work. I know you foremost as an essayist. This is the point at which I tell you that I increasingly prefer the essay form to any other form. Last year, you wrote an interesting essay, The False Crisis of African Literary Estrangement, and with your argument in mind, I went back to read Teju Cole’s Open City. (You draw from Teju’s Tremor, but I do not have a copy yet.) Before I ask about the fundamental argument in that particular essay, allow me to ask about the virtue of the essay form. JM Coetzee, in his novel Elizabeth Costello, writes, ‘From the beginning the novel has made a virtue of not depending on being performed.’ I have been thinking of this statement and how it could be recast to what the essay’s virtue is. What has the essay made a virtue of?
Tolu: I cannot speak with enough authority on what Coetzee fully means there, but I think the essay has made a virtue of movement. Of thinking across things. One of the reasons I love the form is that it permits a kind of intellectual wandering that still remains rigorous. An essay can move from a novel to a memory, from political critique to aesthetic form, from Lagos to Massachusetts to a Renaissance painting, without feeling formally dishonest. In some sense, the essay trusts association. It trusts that thought itself is relational, that one idea illuminates another. And perhaps that is what attracts me to it. The essay allows you to think in public without pretending that thought arrives fully formed. You can trace uncertainty, contradiction, revision, even obsession. I think that is partly what I was trying to do in “The False Crisis of African Literary Estrangement.” I wasn’t simply trying to make a polemical argument; I also wanted to move between texts and critical anxieties and ask what kinds of assumptions about Africa, cosmopolitanism, and literary belonging keep repeating themselves beneath the conversation.
Akal:Before posting this, I have had to go back to your essay. The way you use the word ‘complicity’ gives it a particular impression. The last word that produced a similar impression on me was ‘acquiescence’ as used by Ibrahim William in his essay, Co-opting African Literature. Both words involve yielding to another person’s will. More deeply, they also suggest a presence of (intellectual) violence/contestation. Now that you write while in the USA, are you ever concerned that these are words that could possibly be used in describing you and/or your work?
Tolu: I think any African writer or any writer from any of the post-colonies, working within global literary infrastructures, has to confront that question honestly. To write from or within any of the Western countries, or to publish through Western institutions, to have your work circulate through prizes, residencies, universities, and festivals, is already to exist inside networks shaped by uneven histories of power. So, I would be suspicious of any writer who imagines themselves completely outside that notion of complicity, as you have rightly noticed. But I think complicity becomes intellectually useful only when it deepens self-interrogation rather than collapsing into paralysis. One of the things I admired in Teju Cole’s Tremor, for instance, is precisely its refusal of innocence. The novel understands that modern subjects inherit compromised worlds. I would unpack what I mean by modern subjects there, but it would take forever to complete the response. I can use myself or Ibrahim William, whose essay you refer to as an avatar of the modern subject. We are implicated by our current positionalities – we are both scholars at Western institutions with interests in understanding African Literary positionalities within this new world order. The question is not whether we are untouched by power, but whether we remain critically attentive to the structures we move through and benefit from. I also think there is a difference between entanglement and acquiescence. Entanglement may be historically unavoidable, since that is one of the traits of the postcolony as Achille Mbembe has rightly pointed out. Acquiescence, however, suggests surrender, a refusal to question the terms under which one is being received, rewarded, or circulated. For me, the responsibility is to remain vigilant about those terms and to resist becoming so seduced by institutional approval that one loses the ability to critique the structures granting it.
Akal:There is a unique defiance that is required of the African writer. Your essay, ‘Thinking Erasure in African Literature’, in a couple of ways explains this defiance while using Mbougar Sarr’s novel, ‘The Most Secret Memory of Men’ as a backdrop. Perhaps you writing, “and the uneasy realisation that to be an African writer is to always be on the verge of haunting, to always risk becoming a spectre in the margins of the canon,” at the end kind of sums up your examination of the defiance required. What do you think is the consequence of an African writer not realising their place in the global literature infrastructure?
You have mentioned Achille Mbembe, and now I am thinking of his work, ‘On the Postcolony’. “Speaking naturally about Africa,” he says, “is not something that has ever come naturally.” Is African literature the place to speak about Africa naturally?
Tolu: I think one consequence of not understanding one’s position within the global literary infrastructure is that a writer may begin to mistake visibility for freedom. I have seen this before, but visibility is never innocent. The global circulation of African literature has always been mediated by institutions, prizes, publishers, universities, translation networks, and critical expectations that shape what becomes legible as “important” African writing. This does not mean African writers are merely passive victims of the system. Far from it. But without an awareness of those structures, a writer risks unconsciously reproducing the very narratives or performances that the literary marketplace rewards. Sometimes this appears as self-exoticization. Sometimes as the pressure to become representative. Sometimes as the soft censorship of complexity in favour of readability. What interested me in Mbougar Sarr’s novel was precisely this precariousness: the sense that African writers are often celebrated conditionally. They are welcomed into the canon and simultaneously kept at its edges. Recognition and erasure begin to exist side by side, almost like twins sharing a womb.
Mbembe’s point, I think, is that Africa has historically been overdetermined by external vocabularies: colonial anthropology, humanitarian discourse, developmental language, and even certain nationalist narratives. So “speaking naturally” about Africa becomes difficult because Africa is rarely allowed to arrive outside mediation or performance. I do not think African literature completely escapes this problem. No literature escapes history. But I do think African literature remains one of the few spaces where Africa can exceed the flattening logics imposed on it while articulating a sense of self for its own people. At its best, African literature can restore texture, contradiction, interiority, and ambiguity. Perhaps the goal is not to speak “naturally” about Africa, as though there exists some pure, untouched language waiting for us. Perhaps the task is to speak honestly from within the fractures history has left behind and to speak with and to our people while at it.
Akal: I am holding Achebe's, ‘The Education of a British- Protected Child', reading the titular essay in which he writes: "The middle ground is neither the origin of things nor the last things; it is aware of a future to head into and a past to fall back on; it is the home of doubt and indecision, of suspension, of disbelief, of make-believe, of playfulness, of the unpredictable, of irony." Whereas this passage is in a totally different context, I can’t help but think of what you are saying about recognition and erasure; visibility and freedom. So, assume the African writer settles for the edge and makes a base there, what blessing can she make from it? Is there any outcome other than being ‘finished’ like Yambo Ouologuem, Rene Maran, or Delphine Zanga?
As a scholar, would you rather be doing the task of speaking your honesty through scholarly essays or impressionistic stories?
Tolu: I am cautious about turning Achebe's "middle ground" into a full-fledged theory because I think, in that essay, he is describing a disposition more than a system. He is writing about a space between certainties, a place where one remains open to contradiction, doubt, and multiple inheritances. But I do find the phrase useful for thinking about African literature, even if that was not Achebe's primary concern. The history of African writing has often unfolded in these intermediate spaces. Between languages. Between audiences. Between local obligations and global circulation. Between visibility and erasure. In that sense, many African writers already inhabit a kind of middle ground, whether they choose to or not. And I think one consequence of recognizing this is that we stop imagining the literary center as the final destination. The edge is not merely a place of exclusion. For many African writers, it has been the condition of writing itself. A few names attain extraordinary visibility, but the vast majority remain at the margins of circulation, translation, and critical memory. The fact that we can readily recall certain writers while others disappear into archives, footnotes, and specialist scholarship is evidence of this reality. Yet I am not convinced that the edge is only a site of diminishment. The center often demands legibility and rewards coherence, recognizability, and sometimes even performance. The edge permits a different kind of freedom. It allows one to look inward and outward simultaneously. It allows one to belong and question belonging at the same time. It allows one to remain attentive to multiple histories without fully surrendering to any single one.
When I think about figures such as Yambo Ouologuem, René Maran, or Delphine Zanga Tsogo, I do not only think about their exclusions. I think about the fact that they continue to trouble literary history long after the institutions that marginalized them. One of the lessons I took from Mohamed Mbougar Sarr's The Most Secret Memory of Men is that erasure is never total. Ghosts persist. They return in archives, in scholarship, in new generations of readers, and in the work of other writers. Sometimes survival takes the form of canonical recognition. Sometimes it takes the form of becoming a question that history cannot quite resolve. As for whether I would rather speak through scholarship or through stories, I suspect I am incapable of choosing. The scholar in me is interested in explanation, genealogy, context, and argument. The storyteller is interested in ambiguity, atmosphere, memory, and feeling. What attracts me to the essay is that it occupies a middle ground between those impulses. It allows me to think rigorously while remaining attentive to uncertainty. But there are truths that criticism can only approach and that fiction can inhabit. A scholarly essay can explain erasure. A novel can make a reader feel haunted by it. A critical argument can describe exile. A story can render its texture. I do not think of these forms as competitors. They are different ways of pursuing the same questions, different instruments trying to hear the same music.
Akal:I recently put someone on to your essays, and one feedback she gave after reading and doing a little ‘stalking’ was that your writing has migrated, just like you have.(Her words). ‘From Abeokuta to the US, the contours of his writings have changed,’ she said. I see it, too, especially with your personal essays. There is the death of your father, which you have written about- sorry for your loss. Then there is your writing of Nigeria. Of home. It is like Nigeria is keeping you up at night. It is like you are writing about her to burn up all the silences that distance from her has cast on you.
As we wrap this up, you once wrote that home for you is the road. Meaning is unfixed, Carl Phillips says. So I won't be surprised if this has changed. Say something about migration, home, and distance.
Tolu: I think your friend is right in noticing a shift, but I am not sure I would describe it as my writing migrating. What has changed, I think, is my field of vision. Nigeria remains central to my imagination. If anything, distance has made me think about it more, not less. But living elsewhere has forced me to confront histories, structures, and conversations that were not always visible to me in the same way before. My worldview now accommodates spaces I had not previously considered with the same intensity.
So when I write about Nigeria today, I am often writing about it in relation to other things: migration, race, empire, archives, global literary culture, the university, the movement of people and ideas across borders. The subject has not disappeared. The frame has widened. Perhaps that is what migration does. It does not necessarily replace one home with another. It reveals that places are never as self-contained as we imagine them to be. You begin to see the threads connecting Lagos to Philadelphia, Abeokuta to Massachusetts, African literature to European museums, personal memory to larger historical processes. For that reason, I do not think distance has made me less Nigerian on the page. It has simply made me more attentive to the conversations Nigeria has always been having with the rest of the world.
As for home, I am increasingly reluctant to speak about it as a fixed destination. Home feels less like a location than a set of ongoing negotiations between memory and presence, departure and return. I am not sure one ever resolves those negotiations. Perhaps writing is simply the record of trying.
Akal:One particular line on writing that I have been thinking about lately is what VS Naipaul tells Paul Theroux at some point in their friendship. “The only consolation of the writing profession is that it is fair. That in spite of everything, literary excellence will always be rewarded.” What advice would you give us who are writing while surviving the continent? You for sure know something about the literary hustle. From your days in Abeokuta to now, there must be things about the journey you understand. What is your literary watchword, Tolu?
Tolu: I am not entirely convinced by Naipaul’s statement. I would like it to be true. I would like to believe that literary excellence is always rewarded. But literary history is crowded with writers whose brilliance was recognized late, partially, or not at all. I think immediately of Herman Melville and the fact of how his genius was only discovered retrospectively. What I do believe is that excellence matters, whether or not it is immediately rewarded. And perhaps that distinction is important. For those of us writing from the continent, or writing in conversation with it, the temptation is often to measure success through recognition alone: the prize, the fellowship, the publication, the festival invite, the podcast interviews, etc. These things matter. I would be dishonest if I said otherwise. But they cannot be the only reason to write because they are not entirely within our control.
What remains within our control is the work itself. The sentence. The paragraph. The rigor we bring to our reading. The seriousness we bring to our craft. The willingness to keep going when very little seems to be happening. I think my literary watchword, if I have one, is simply this: keep insisting on excellence. Not because excellence guarantees reward, but because it is one of the few things the writer can actually govern. And beyond the individual writer, there is another responsibility that feels equally important to me. We must continue telling our stories to our own people. We must continue imagining literary cultures that do not derive their value solely from recognition elsewhere. There is nothing wrong with reading outwardly. African literature has always been in conversation with the world. But we must also continue building traditions of reading, criticism, memory, and artistic exchange that can sustain themselves from within.
Sometimes I think we speak too easily about surviving the continent. Survival is certainly part of the story. Many of us know the practical difficulties well. But I hope we are also imagining something beyond survival. I hope we are imagining conditions under which African writers can thrive, where literary culture is not an exception but an expectation, not a miracle but an ordinary part of civic life. That future, if it comes at all, will not arrive all at once. It will be built book by book, poem by poem, story by story, essay by essay, magazine by magazine, reader by reader.
And so my advice, however inadequate, is to keep at it. Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep paying attention. Keep insisting on the highest standards you can imagine. The conditions may not always be fair. It has never been, and history for all we know about it, hasn’t either. But our stories remain necessary, and the work of telling them remains necessary too.
Akal:It has been a pleasure! Thank you for agreeing to this.
Tolu: I am grateful for the opportunity. Thank you too.
AKAL is a Kenyan writer and editor whose works have appeared in a number of publications that include The Elephant, Brittle Paper, Doek, JAYLit, Saraba, The Weganda Review, and others. He is also a 2023 Idembeka Creative Writing fellow and an attendee of the Ibua Novel Manuscript workshop. In 2022, he was a recipient of two digital residencies organised by the University of East Anglia, one of which resulted in a short-story anthology he contributed to. His essay, Where Reasons End, was listed by Afrocritik as one of 50 notable essays from Africa in 2024.
TOLU DANIEL is a Nigerian writer and scholar whose essays and short fiction have appeared in print and online publications. He holds master’s degrees from Kansas State University and Washington University in St Louis. He is the recipient of the 2025 Isele Nonfiction Prize and one of the 2025 Heartland Journalism Fellowship. His work has been supported by the Monson Arts Residency, Writivism, and the Goethe Institut Nigeria.
