[Digital Poetics 4.13] Three Poems by Lola Olufemi
Image by Sopo Ramischwili-Schäfer
THE FUTURE CONDITIONAL
The future conditional is a conversation between and the hesitation that precedes it.
lacunae that reeks of promise. In the square of HISTORY, they cried: tomorrow has been sublimated to the
needs of today! We rejoiced. Now they call us fools because we believed them. Before it is anything, the
future conditional must be porous, capable of shape shifting, a pattern hovering just below the surface,
repeated at the level of enunciation: granted space for breathing / or else, continuous, like the best prose,
)
in anticipation of the end of the world, tomorrow devoured its own hands. today presents them, sullen.
Our tired eyes say hold us. The authorities remark, what muck. what mess. All we ask is that tomorrow give
over to visions that mark the ground of reterritorialisation. The future conditional is just,
a question of will and will not
No such thing as,
bad timing.
LITERARY FICTION DIED
Literary fiction died the same day images flooded the screen; red, white, green and black. This is not a
group of writers sitting around a table trying to find root cause. Making decisions about a slick turn of
phrase, polishing text into graven image, using language as corridor, cover, shield. This is a commitment,
so not literature and better for it.
I write because I’m compelled to and how unfortunate.
I write because, sometimes, like when I am falling asleep or working or sitting around the table with
friends, it is all I can think to do. I do my work to meet other people in something other than an obituary,
news forecast, talking points, field notes, citations. I write because I am tired of being told language is an
empty vessel for threat. What I write should make you scared to close your eyes at night. What you read
should stop you, cold, on the dance floor. You should be worried about martyrdom as you say goodbye to
your children at the school gates.
EVEN IF THE STATE MAKES IT SO
If not by bomb, then by starvation, or disease or immiseration (cultural AND), or then by displacement,
crumbling measure, infestation or death by winter, death by summary execution, friends, death by
changing season, by loss of the tongue, limb, by the performance of the loss of tongue or limb, by the
destruction of the grave stone, archaeological dig, the library, then if not by ambivalence, then joyful
participation in slaughter, death by rhetoric or put simply: point blank range by settlers turned soldiers,
death by confinement or obfuscation, pathology, or death by the page (the author was murdered),
surveillance drones named like fauna, or then the virus, death by the body of work that follows infanticide
– death by the word that won’t travel in the air, or by darkness, then stuttering rubble, death by sorrow,
death by vacant and vacated ‘viable solutions’, destiny reclaimed, by that continued sickness (diasporic
mysticism), dripping saccharine, limping inept, stupidly inchoate or, / rebind
revolutionary sentiment in response to they are circling my building,
refuse to admire
the levity of the steadfast
from
the ministry of imperial forgetting
repeat with blood,
death is no inevitability (repeat with blood)
*
Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and CREAM/Stuart Hall foundation researcher from London. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands and futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (2020, Pluto Press), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (2021, Hajar Press) and a member of 'bare minimum', an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.
