Well hello, everyone (whomever that naming may entail)! I have today decided to, for the first time, utilize the blog function for which this website platform was initially designed. I cannot promise I will keep it up with any regularity. Just like when my mother asked if I would designate a certain time to call her every week, my (current) state of being-in-relation rebels at the clocktime consistency: I will call, I told her, but I cannot promise precisely when. Just so, to whatever particular everyone happens to be reading this: I will add to the blog posts, but I cannot promise precisely when.
In today’s initial announcement, I recently published a review of Suyi Davies Okungbowa‘s novella, Lost Ark Dreaming at the LA Review of Books:
LIKE THE PROTAGONIST of Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s new cli-fi novella Lost Ark Dreaming, I, too, have a recurring dream of being overtaken by rising waters. In Yekini’s dream, the biblical story of the ark and the flood mixes with the rising waters overtaking Lagos, Nigeria. Yekini clutches a basket with a baby in it, refusing to surrender it or flee. By the time she realizes what she has chosen, the waves have come, and she cannot escape them. But the basket in her hands is now empty.
In my dream, I make the opposite choice. At first, I try to outrun the rising waters, fleeing to higher ground. But running is futile. Gathering courage, I hold tightly to whatever structure happens to be around me and turn to face the advancing wave. Right before the waters engulf me, realization hits: the wave is a transformative force that will eventually overtake me. The process will be less painful if I accept it. I hold my breath as the wave washes over me.
There is something both Yekini and I are learning about water in our dreams. There is something that water is trying to teach us: sometimes the wave bringing destruction cannot be escaped; sometimes accepting transformation is the means to mitigate damage.
For more, continue reading here.
I’ve been thinking recently about fluidity and flows, about the responsibilities of taking relationality and reciprocity seriously (and humorously, at that…more on that later perhaps), and I offer these thoughts on Suyi’s powerful novella within that context. What does it mean to consider the ocean and the monsters within it as kin? How does that kinship reframe the ways we relate to them–and to each other?
I hope you find as much to ponder in the novella as I did.
In imagination,
Jenna
Jenna Hanchey 