You think language is set in stone? Listen to a Nigerian talk a person to the fringes of their own English using pidgin-a genius composition. All these unalike branches, growing out of the same tree. Find all five remixes to Rema’s “Dumebi”. Read The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa and register what feels familiar about the premise where have you seen that before? It’s strange, isn’t it, to know that what we remember is also a collaboration. Watch the Greek film Dogtooth and remember how you were taught to see see how every manipulation has its genesis in language, how language reshapes the cornea and whatever stands before it. Or watch Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer and notice the world you hold too tight become subsumed in an alternate reality, another now. Listen to the Red Hot + Riot album made in honor of Fela’s music and enter the rooms that appear when Meshell Ndegeocello, Manu Dibango, Sade Adu, Kelis, Common, Tony Allen, and D’Angelo are invited to the same house party. You don’t know how to turn Something into Something Else? Listen to what a remix does to a song: how in African Lady, an ADM remix, TMXO lays Masego’s music over a Lagbaja sample, rubbing two worlds against each other until they spark a three-minute-fifty-seconds long fire. We have always made it up.Īrt making is my strongest argument for redefinition, because nothing shows you the lie of impossibility and the multiplicity of worlds better than a body of work standing where once there was nothing. What is society, anyway? It’s an anthology of someones. Whatever was written by a person for a people, can be edited by a person or a people. But is that true? Seeing as many of us are alive on the outskirts of definitions, seeing as that’s the address that saved some of our lives, the place where we watch our safeties spring out of the ground, it’s clear that whatever was defined can be redefined. You’re just one person and this is how it works: society decides, you obey. You’re told this from when you’re little, that your questions will put you in trouble, that you are and will always be too small to challenge a meaning. You don’t want to be lonely either, do you, so you believe the rule: there’s nothing but nothing for you outside the defined lines. And you want to be safe in this scary place, don’t you? So you do what you’re supposed to do, and you avoid what leads to suffering. The more you belong, the farther away you are from punishment. Who is normal? What is beauty? Who is a criminal? What is a woman? What is a man? What is good love? What is sex? What is fair? Who is holy? What is evil? The more you agree with the definitions you’ve been given, the more you belong. Society as we know it is simply a collection of shared definitions. If you really think about it, we were all raised inside a giant dictionary. Eloghosa Osunde, At the Beach in Your Dream, 2020, mixed media.

Growing things and other stories