Ainehi Edoro, "Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think" (Columbia UP, 2026)

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Welcome to the new books network.

Hello, everyone.

Welcome to another episode of new books network.

My name is Morteza Haji Zadeh, your host from new books network.

And today I'm here to talk about a fascinating book that has recently published

by, been published by Columbia University Press.

The book we're going to discuss is called Forest Imaginations.

Oops, sorry, Forest Imagineries.

How African novels think.

Returned by Aine here, Doro.

Dr. Aine here, Doro is a system professor of English at African and African cultural studies

at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

She is the founding editor of Brito Paper, a leading platform for African literary culture.

And as I said this book was just recently published by Columbia University Press

in 2025, from Namstakein.

Aine here, welcome to new books network.

Thank you.

Before we start talking about the book, I just would like to remind our listeners,

if they're interested in literature, they'd better have a piece of paper and a pen handy.

There are lots of novels we'll talk about.

All myself when I was reading the book, I made a list of some of the novels I'd never heard of

before and I need to read.

So I'm sure this will happen too if you're a lover of literature, let's say.

But before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself

and tell us about your expertise and your background?

Thank you very much for having me on the podcast.

I am a Nigerian academic based in the US and I teach and research on African

fiction and social media as well.

There's two things that have typically sort of been separate in my academic interests,

but that have been connecting more and more over the years and reading forest imaginaries.

You might notice the ways in which how I think about storytelling, my value for fragmentation,

kind of is probably reminiscent of aspects of social media.

And at some point I'm going to kind of talk about places where those two things meet.

This book was inspired by my wanting to tell a different story of African fiction,

to situate the origins of African fiction within African indigenous traditions and forms,

to sort of maybe bracket the foundation of the European novel and its relationship to African

fiction. And I don't know if I succeeded, but I think that what I love about the project is

the freedom it gave me to kind of show how indigenous African forms have left a really strong

imprint in modern African fiction.

I think you have. And it makes quite a lot of sense. As I said to you before we started

recording the interview, I was really attracted to the topic of the book, forest imaginaries,

how African novels think. And as you mentioned, it's an integral part of this kind of indigenous

called tradition, let's say. And in your book, it's not only I didn't really read it as

as a literary interpretation of different African novels. Actually, it's not a fiction,

of course, but I read it like a story. There's beautiful narrative. And by research background

was also an ecocradical study, so I was really, really interested in many different parts of this book,

especially when you frame forest. And I would be great if we could talk about the title as well,

forest imaginaries. You envisage this forest to be an intelligent space. It's like a co-author

was you put in the book of African fiction. And this idea, I'm sure it's not just a background,

which is more or less been the case in a lot of British or American novels that I know about.

But can I tell us, how would you describe what it means? What does it mean? It's an intelligent

space. What do you mean by forest imaginaries? And how should we read a think of space within the

story, in the fictions that you discuss in the book? So the idea of a forest that thinks or intelligent

space is an attempt to give spaces more agency in storytelling. Typically, we tend to think of spaces

as setting, spaces as context, just spaces as this kind of dumb layer in storytelling where

characters who matter live out their fascinating and eventful lives. So space as a kind of

container that holds the lives of characters. I wanted to do something different to name the ways

that spaces are actually parts of storytelling. And that spaces are also telling the story.

And that space is also have stories to tell. And that kind of centering of the context

where stories take place gives us access to the world of fiction differently.

And so a good example will be Chinoa at Chibis, things fall apart, where you have this space called

the evil forest. So scholars have typically read that space as a kind of anthropological marker.

You know, some kind of local color elements that tells us that oh, we are in a pre-modern

Igbo world. But when you look closely, you realize that the evil forest is actually a space that

almost has a mind of its own in the sense that it sticks to particular kinds of characters.

And any time you associate a character with the evil forest, it is because the character

has something to tell us about the infrastructure used to decide who lives or dies.

So it is a kind of space that takes us to the very foundation of that world, which has to do with

the question of mortality. You know, should this person die or should this person leave?

Those types of large questions that are foundational to a fictional world, we can access them

when we look at how the evil forest as a space connects to particular kinds of character.

And creates this really fascinating web of influences among different types of characters.

That's all. Thinking of space as something that is alive, as something that can think is simply

to say that look space in fiction can also be themselves goal oriented, that they can drive the

narrative, that they can define a character, and that they themselves also have their own stories

that we should be able to listen to in order to get a fuller sense of how a fictional world

really works. In other words, that we cannot depend on just characters to tell us about a

fictional world. We have to be able to also tell the story of those spaces in the narrative.

That's to get a fuller richer picture of how a particular fictional world is complex and layered.

And again, I'm glad you mentioned this. You're absolutely right that in most other

maybe European traditions, the bars in general, the setting is just a dead inert background,

but it's quite different in having read a lot of African novels, but of course,

HIV is a famous one that a lot of literature have read. But you do see that it has this character

with its own, it's animate, it's agent, it has agency. In your introduction, you also,

this is what I really enjoyed about your book. That's where you re-imagine, let's

African literary history, through the forest, which is a very, very interesting concept to me,

rather than that linear chronological timeline, which is more or less a colonial legacy.

What does it mean when re-imagine, when we re-imagine, when we have this change,

we shift our attention to, let's say, to look at literary history through a vibrant space,

which is forest here, how does it help, but how does it change the way we read classic works,

classic African literature? Actually, I would say that if you trace the genealogy of

a literary form through the forest, it changes the way you look at fiction. It's actually not

even something that applies just to African fiction. The reason in part is because we tend to think

of the novel as the form of the urban. If you think about the way that we tell the story,

even of the emergence of the novel in Europe, the way that we kind of centralize 19th century

Victorian novels as this moment of coming of age for the novel form, we tend to overestimate

the urban space, as this space where the novel as a form really comes of age, or rather that

is the space of the novel that wins out from all the other possible ways that the novel could have

developed. And you see this carry over into the way that we talk about African fiction as well,

in a sense that when we tell the story, we privilege urban spaces. And this is also tied to the

way that we situate colonialism as the founding moment of African fiction, right? That so, yes,

the novel was invented in Europe, but it came to Africa via colonialism. And we trace the

development of the African novel by looking at how it shows up or it represents urban relationships.

And then that then develops into anti-colonial narratives that then develops into post-independence

narrative and so on and so forth. So it allows us to tell this very clean story, right? A story

that is so clean that it excludes indigenous African narratives. Which we talk about, but we say,

you know what? What came before is oral literature, you know? Yeah, it's important, but you know,

what's really important for us in defining the evolution of the African novel is how the novel

engages with the colonial question, right? How it represents anti-colonial discourse. And so,

what that means is that first, we automatically exclude African fiction written in the early

20th century because lots of those novels were not overtly anti-colonial. And then we say,

we're going to start the story from the mid-20th century when you're having people like

Wallet show income, Achebe, Angugawa, Tiongohu, they are writing very overtly anti-colonial

narratives. And the story is that African fiction comes of age at that moment, right? And then we move

on to continue to trace the development of the novel after. What I do differently is to say,

you know, if we start with the forest, if we if we try to kind of of trace the forest and the

evolution of this form through African novels, it allows us to begin somewhere else. One, it's

allows us to begin squarely within indigenous African narratives. So now we can see the ways in which

pre-modern African narratives contributed to the development of the African novel because we

can literally see how African writers are adapting indigenous forms as they are trying to make

sense of the novel as an imported form. And it also allows us to be able to treat to focus more

on aesthetic and formal development because we are tracing a very specific literary form which

is the forest, right? And maybe this is the moment where I shall say that what I study is not

actual forests. I study representations of forest in fiction. So because I'm looking at forests,

I'm actually asking questions about aesthetics and forms. I'm trying to think about why

characters act differently, why they look differently, why spaces look differently. And that type of

deep aesthetic formal questions allow me to argue that, okay, this is what African fiction contributes

to the novel as a global form from the in the form of aesthetics and form as opposed to simply

local color. And that, you know, when you trace the forest, it still allows you to ask all the

big questions that we like to ask about colonialism, about cities, about urban spaces. What is just

that it lets us ask it through a focus on aesthetics and form as opposed to focusing only on how

African fiction is representing anti-colonial discourse. So to be a tourist, come home to Disney

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It's quite interesting when you mention that it's, it's also applicable to,

it's not only applicable, let's say to to to African novels, but you can take this framework

that you have to audit traditions as well. And it opens up new possibilities of interpretation,

new avenues. Again, when I, my research wasn't as extensive as yours, but I,

when I was doing my research was on ecological humanities and I think I mentioned to you that

first part of my thesis was mainly on about about forest and open spaces and then it suddenly

moved to an urban area. And I wasn't really conscious of that until the end of the thesis when

I was looking at the whole project. It, it, it, it, it just manifests that the completely

different phenomena for me to look at the space as that, as that agent, you know, that could

completely read, imagine the meaning of the text. Another part of the book that I'm interested

in all concepts, let's say in the book that you did refer to at the beginning is the idea of

fragmentation, which we tend to view negatively, it's, it's incomplete, it's, it's, um,

obstructive, let's say it closes the new possibilities of horizons. But you don't look at it that way

and you think about fragmentation as something that is generative rather than destructive or stifling.

Um, how would you explain, um, why so many African stories embrace this traditional fragmentation,

there is repetition, discontinuity, brokenness, but it's something generative rather than negative

there. It would be good if it could give examples as well. Right. Um, so, um, I would say that

fragmentation is can actually be a way of creating something. Right. Um, and so, I'll give, you know,

I think the, I'll give an example of a Yeruba folklore. Um, have you ever heard about, um,

can, so just imagine in your, you know, um, in your mind and exploding deity or god, okay.

So the story goes that the archetyvinity in the Yeruba cosmology had a slave called Atunda and

it elived, um, together pretty piece fully for a very long time. Until Atunda became sort of

should I say jealous of the akadvinity? And so, one day he takes a big boulder and rolls the

boulder down the hill and shatters the god, the akadvinity. And when he does that, the akadvinity

splinters into over hundreds of splinters and each of those splinters become the many deities in

the Yeruba pantheon. Right. That's, this is, this is an example that, um, that, um,

Waleeshirenka gives of what one way to understand how fragmentation can be generative. Right.

That fragmentation is a power that is against anything that appears as a kind of, um, solidified

immovable form. So think about concepts, right. You know, big concepts like, um, like power,

man versus woman, you know, this, this, this very massive concept of conventions and traditions

that we used to give form to the world. fragmentation is something that helps us to break those

seemingly immovable aspects of our world so that we can reassemble them in new ways.

That's what the idea of one akadvinity who is shattered into splinters and the splinters from

his shattered body becomes, you know, the basis for assembling a, an ever-growing pantheon of gods

to me captures the sense in which fragmentation can be both destructive and creative at the same time.

And again, somebody like, um, um, shoenka, and the book to read is his book titled,

Mid-Litricho and the African World. He's thinking specifically from a Yeruba Indigenous

tradition. And his idea is that any kind of revolutionary practice, any attempt to gain radically

new knowledge has to come from dismantling, fragmenting, breaking apart, and unwieldy existing

structure, right? Because in the process, you deactivate its meaning and it allows you to kind of

recon bind and create something entirely new. That's what this idea that we can imagine

fictional worlds that even though they present as fragmented, they're actually very generative.

It's something that you find in pre-modern African storytelling and that enters into African

fiction as well. So if you think about a novel like, um, Ben Okri's The Famished Road that people

have typically read as magical realists, right? It's a novel about a kid who is a spirit being

and he finds himself in the human world. But he's also a very old, old spirit being. That's

so in the body of a child, he has this mind that has lived in many different centuries, many

different times. And as he makes his way through the human world, he keeps getting fragments and

flashes of images from all the many past lives that he has experienced. And the novel becomes a

kind of catalogue of all these different fragments of experience he has had in his many, many,

many hundreds of lives. And when we read the novel today, it seems extremely chaotic. It seems like

it doesn't really make a lot of sense. But then when you look closely at the ways that the characters

move through the world, when you kind of, when you pair that with the indigenous archive that

the story is built on, you realize that the story actually does make a lot of sense. But that how

we read it has to be different from the ways that we typically read a novel with a character that

has an arc that goes from the beginning, the middle, and an end, right? And that once we

or rather, that our challenge becomes how, what modes of reading can we invent to read a novel

like Beno Cries that allows it to generate meaning even in its seemingly chaotic form, right?

As opposed to the modes of reading that we are used to when we read novels that have stereotypically

traditional forms, that for me was the challenge. What's different modes of reading?

Can I invent? How can I think of character differently? How can I think of

of collectivities differently? How can I think of space and time differently in fiction that would

allow me to see the form that exists in these narratives that appear to be formless and fragmented?

Vincent, I think this idea of fragmentation, I'm a regional from Iran myself, and Iran does not

have a really rich novel tradition, let's say novel writing tradition, it's more as

copied from Europe, that tradition has been imported very recently, I would say,

less than a century, but that narrative, the idea of fragmentation has permeated into

some other artistic forms in cinema, and I see that how the way you describe it also,

beautiful to put it, that it opens up these all new interpretive possibilities.

Let me ask you another question, you talk about a number of different novelists there,

Shoyinka, for example, Oakree, and you put them side by side, and the argument is that

they think like a forest, thinking like a forest, this concept, how let's say this concept of

thinking like a forest, allow African literature, let's say, what does it allow African literature to do

that other narrative frameworks can't? And Sam, we have kind of touched upon this question,

but in terms of the narrative itself, what does it allow, how does it enable African literature

to say things that other forms can't?

That's a very good question, and I think maybe where to start will be to see what is a forest,

right? Many of us have read forest narratives, everything from fairy tales to Gothic novels,

you know, to fantasy, right, or have forests in them. And what we can all agree on is that

in stories when you enter into forests, the world becomes less stable than what you are familiar with

in kind of the, in what we might think of as the space of life, right? That's in forests,

anything can happen, right? Animals can talk, you know, characters can be transformed,

they could change their sex, they could, you know, you could find, what do you call them, creatures,

time could stop, time could be speeded up, right? Is this world where the rules, according to which

we organize political life, suddenly is suspended, and then anything can happen, right? And so,

you know, forests are also sort of like thresholds, right? They are like portals, they mark a limit,

they tell us, oh my goodness, I'm no longer at home, right? And I'm no longer on the road.

These are markers that help us to organize the space of life. In the forest, you know that, okay,

I have crossed some type of limit into a world that is not chaotic, right? But it just has

completely different rules that I, as a human, is not familiar with. And that in the forests,

you see yourself as a human, you see yourself as an outsider, right? This is the world of the animal,

right? The forest is the world of plants. If you are thinking with African cosmology,

the forest is the world of spirits and of all kinds of, um, um, that's so what it then means to

think like a forest, right? Is to be able to imagine what it means to exist in a world where

the familiar rules that organize life has been suspended, right? So is a space that can handle chaos,

right? Is it, is a space where chaos and fragmentation is okay? That's how it runs, you know?

And is a world where you don't need your typical human identities for you to be, um,

legible, right? In the forests, nobody recognizes you as, as you, you know, as you,

um, Ainehi, who is a mother and academic, right? In many of these stories, once you enter into the,

um, um, forest, you kind of realize that your identity as you know it has shifted. And so

it gives you a chance to kind of reimagine, rethink what you are, what the world is, right?

You're able to kind of, of, um, of remake yourself. That's so again, to say that a novel is

thinking like a forest, is to say that a novel is kind of built on this radical openness

to rethinking the norms of the political, the norms of society, right? That built into this

novel is an attempt to show us the, to kind of expose the rules that govern our world to break

those rules and then to reconstitute a different way of imagining life. That's why I think of

the forest as a kind of a laboratory that many of these writers who return to the forest as a way

of, you know, um, building fictional worlds. It's because the forest allows them to literally

piece worlds apart and reassemble them and that any novel that is kind of that, that signaling to

us that look, whether it is patriarchy, whether it is colonialism, whether it is human exceptionalism,

any of these kind of big concepts that, that our societies, our worlds have kind of taken

for granted as natural, writers will often use the forest as a device to undo those concepts

and then rethink them or re-imagine a world that is built differently. So for me, that's what it

means for a novel to think like a forest. It's a fascinating description of this.

Um, let us talk about the specific novel here. Uh, when I could be mispronouncing the name,

so I apologize in advance. Yeah, there's a novel you're discussing in your book, uh, the novel is called

Chaka. If I'm not mistaken, it's written by Mofolo and um, in that novel, to me it was interesting

because the forest isn't, uh, it's just, it's not just the setting, it completely transforms

the character there and it also exposes the logic of modern power itself.

And you consider, uh, Chaka, this novel to be, but it would be good of course to introduce

very briefly, oh, then the novel itself and then tell us why you think, um, in your reading,

this novel is a kind of an early theorist of imperial violence, which is manifested through

forest. Yes. Okay. So, um, Chaka is by Tomos Mofolo who wrote this novel originally in

Sesoto language. He drafted it in 19 or eights between 1908 and 1910, but it was eventually

published in 1925 and translated a little later. Um, so what? This novel is about the Zulu King,

Chaka, who is a historical figure. So in many ways, it's a historical novel. Um, Chaka is, is

celebrated in a kind of, um, African political history as a military strategist.

And, um, he's known to have been a powerful king who takes the Zulu's a very small

Waktag community and expands it into a massive empire. And the novel is that account, you know,

how he became a king. And it starts from when he was, um, he was a little boy who is an outcast

and whose struggles to be recognized in his community, who everybody sees as essentially a dog in

flat. He's, he's, he's described as, um, as, as, um, as Chaka, the dog of his mother. And Chaka's

exclusion is actually very extreme. In the sense that he saw excluded that it is said that

anybody can kill Chaka and nobody will care. So this story is how do you go from being this

total outcast to becoming this revered king? And one of the am things that you find as you

kind of read the novel closely is that Chaka's power expands over time. And the shifts in his

power takes place in relationship to his changing relationship to the forest. But the sad thing,

and this is a spoiler. Sorry for people who haven't read the book, but he's worth it.

The problem is that Chaka becomes a very successful king, but then there is a reversal to his power.

He begins to kind of, his power begins to, begins to expand and becomes all consuming. So the

point where he begins to kill his own people and begins to destroy his kingdom and towards the end,

you know, Chaka goes mad. That's sort of Morpholo's account of the story. And I think that what I

saw in that story was that we tend to think of imperialism as this power that is about expanding

political influence over space, right? So violence is tied to order. Imperialism is the ability

to organize violence and use it to create order over an extensive period of, you know, an extended

space. This is like classic 101 political theory, right? So people like most hubs, people like

I'm Carl Schmidt, people like Joe Joe, Agamben, even Walter Benjamin would tell you this,

that look, order is not the end of violence. Order is simply the ability to manage violence.

And then imperialism is the ability to replicate this across an expansive, you know,

sphere of space. But what I find in this novel is how it shows us that actually imperialism is

yes order, but imperialism is actually, honestly, just the capacity to kill at a very large scale,

right? That what it means to be the emperor, the most powerful person in an ever-expanding

space simply means that you are capable to instrumentalize violence at a very large scale.

And for people who are interested in this idea, they can read Ashil and Bambe's essay titled

Necro Politics, right? And what I saw is that Chaka actually just modelled this way in which

modern power, right, at least in the very specific way that it manifested in African worlds,

in the early 20th century, where colonial powers were just enacting all kinds of violence,

you know, so subjecting vast communities to forced labor, displacing vast communities,

right? We know about the story of King Leopold and his, you know, just the mass killing

and mutilation of people's bodies, that these types of just really dark violence that happened

at the beginning of the inception of colonialism in Africa in the late 19th century,

early 20th century is an order of violence that is hard to wrap around your head. And you want to

ask, like, why, how, right? But it's its questions like that that Moffalo is trying to ask

at a time when he is literally in worlds that are experiencing these kinds of displacements.

And so Chaka's story becomes a way for him to diagnose the way that imperialism operates

by exercising kind of capacity to perform large-scale violence. So to me,

Chaka and Moffalo's novel is a brilliant, you know, engaging novel everybody, you know,

should read it. But it's also this really powerful diagnostic of modern power. And I think it should

be read alongside, you know, classic theories on, on, on imperial power.

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And to me it was quite fascinating, that's why there are a lot of novels in the book,

but the reason I specifically asked about this one was

was that you beautifully snobber managers to show that kind of in pair one is to explain through

setting as well. Well, of course, I guess the most famous author you discuss in the book is at

Chebe, and again at the beginning of the interview when I asked you about the importance of forest,

you did mention the famous evil forest in his novel. And it's one of the most misunderstood

I guess spaces in African literature. If you're not familiar with that tradition and pick up the

book and just read it, if you're not familiar with that post-colonial theory, for example,

it could easily be misunderstood. Why do you think in your view? Why do you think readers often

miss the, how do they misunderstand it? And why do you think they miss the political significance?

And also the juridical significance of forest in our Chebe's novel.

I think it's important because we read a Chebe's novel for how it represents a precolonial African

community, right? So we kind of emphasize its representational significance. And the novel does that,

right? It sort of takes you into this world and you feel like you are there. And that's why

a Chebe's novel is such a powerful response to Joseph Conrad's representation of the Congo,

right? Because Conrad then, you know, Congo has this culture less space. And a Chebe replies him,

right? With this beautiful novel that just kind of gives us a front seat on the day-to-day

of this Igbo world, you know? And you just, you get lost in all the, you know, the political

deliberation in all the moon-like dances, in all the masquerades and the conversations and the

proverbs. It's just so culturally rich and beautiful. And the novel does that. But the thing is,

though, is that we can't stop there because a Chebe's novel is also, is also an interesting,

is also an attempt to not just represent an African world in terms of its culture, but it's also

to show us the logics behind how this world works, right? So if we see a Chebe's novel as a sort of

writing back as an attempt to correct the false colonial misrepresentation of African worlds as being

without culture, right? Or formless, right? A Chebe is very careful to show us a world that works,

and to show us how the world works, right? And then to show us how the kind of the and the

the machinery through which the world works is interrupted with the advent of colonialism.

That's so to me, there is the cultural aspect of the novel, right? And then there is this kind of

structural, infrastructural aspect of the novel. And I feel like we miss that part a lot,

and that's why the evil forest is either completely erased in the West scholars have studied

this novel or it is represented as some kind of spiritual emblem, it's represented as a kind of

anthropological element, but either way it's represented as this tangential theme that is just

seen sort of like a tiny little local color theme, but which when you read that novel, right?

And this is what I tell people, almost all the characters that matter are connected to the evil

forest, right? Okonko was dead, Okonko was thrown into the evil forest, right? Okonko was

best friend, Obirika, he gave that he had twins, the twins they were discarded in the evil forest.

Okonko's daughter is Anobanji, which means that she's a kind of spirit being, right?

She is in some way connected to the forest. Okonko himself who is completely different from

his father and this for me is the sort of defining example of how the evil forest is this mechanism

working underneath the visible world of the novel. Okonko and his dad, they are completely different

and the narrator is so eager to make this distinction very clear to us. Okonko when he dies,

his body ends up in the evil forest just like his father, right? The, in fact, the British,

right? And this is for me what clinches the argument. The British, they also tied to the evil

forest because when they approach one of the clans asking for land to build a church, guess what?

The land gives them, sorry, the clan gives them land in the evil forest. So it's this space

that is doing so much work but is also very invisible and so it's very easy to miss. So it takes

a certain type of reading and I call this type of reading literary archaeology. It's a kind of

very patient way of reading a novel where you are reading for things that are that seem tangential,

things that seem like they don't matter. But when you use them to begin to trace and connect

characters and connect spaces and connect time and connect worlds because it turns out when you look

at the cosmological design of the evil world, the evil forest is a threshold that separates

the world of the ancestors on the ground and the world of the living on the ground, right?

So it's this space that is doing so much structural work that is so easy to miss

whether if we can name it, it really allows us to kind of dig through sedimentations of power

that is holding up the world of the novel and power as something that is neither just colonial

and evil but power as something that is that actually connects the British and the clan worlds,

you know, in a way that gives us a deeper understanding of what the novel is doing and that takes us

beyond a kind of oh, things for the part is a clash of cultural narratives which it is so much

more than that. And unfortunately, it's always only right at that level that you just mentioned,

you're right, yeah. One another part of the book that I was interested in was the idea of aquatic

forest, it has a lot of ecological significance as well which is also an era that I've always been

interested in and so in your reading and again, I hope I'm not mispronouncing the name,

who offers novels so there's this idea of aquatic forest, the idea, this idea that the future,

you know, might be coral, like corals, mean, reticulated, multi-species, can you describe what

you mean by an aquatic forest, because there are a lot of people who might be an oxymoron in a way,

but then again, you have, you know, a kind of an anti-colonial, let's say, and most of these novels,

you have this angle in reading these novels to talk about, for example, colonial violence as well,

but then in this one, you were drawn into this ecological imagery which ties in well with the

title of the book as well. As a way of talking about the African future, what do you mean by that?

What is an aquatic forest? What do you mean by African future and how do you think this idea helps us

to better understand African fiction? I would say that it was important to me to demonstrate

the uses of thinking with and through the forests in contemporary African fiction and I specifically

went for science fiction, right? In part to dispel this idea that the forest is a kind of figure of

primitiveness, right? So people could say, well, you know, why are you reading African

fiction through the lens of the forest? Have the forest not been used to misrepresent Africa

as a space, as a wild space? And of course, I completely disagree with that type of claim because

for me, the forest is actually a figure of the future. One of the ways, as I said at the

opening of my book to miss, understand the forest in fiction is to think that forests are only

connected to pre-modern, pre-logical, you know, pre-civilized worlds or imaginaries.

For me, the forests is very futuristic, right? And it's not hard to understand that, right?

That the forest are always here with us, right? And you know, it doesn't matter how civilized we

think we are, right? Forest are always there, right? And they're always a part of our world.

And so even from that perspective to me, the forest is a figure of the future.

But what I also noticed is that in many contemporary African science fiction fantasy,

the forest appears as a space that is actually used to host questions about what the future could

look like. And earlier, I spoke about how the forest is a space where writers tend to experiment

with world-making, right? World-breaking, I should say, and world-making as well. And so this particular

novel by Enedio-Kurafo is about aliens who come to the city of Lagos, Lagos is a city in Nigeria.

And when they arrive, they completely introduce chaos into the world.

The story is about how the story is about how Lagos sort of figures itself out, but it's about

how life in Lagos is reoriented from land to the ocean because Lagos is a coastal city on the Atlantic.

And when these aliens arrive, they actually set up shop in the ocean and they create this massive

corollane world that is constantly expanding and growing, and they unite ocean life, the

empower ocean life, and they refer to the under-water world as an aquatic forest. And so to me,

that novel gave me the chance to think about the forest in a really experimental way, right?

The forest is a figure that we associate with land, right? And in many of the novels I had looked

through the book, it's very much centralizes land. And land, as we know it, is sort of the world of

the human, is the world where the human, as a species, feels more at home. So what does it mean to

then shift the forest into the ocean? What does that do to human exceptionalism? And especially the

way that human exceptionalism is driving the ecological crisis that we are facing. So there were

humans feel like the world, the earth owes everything to humans, and the earth is just there for us

to use and plunder however we like. And this novel is asking, it's saying that, look, can we imagine a

world in which humans are existing in a kind of equal, multi-species relationship with other life

forms? What would that type of world look like, right? And my argument is that look,

an idiot-curaphous world is a, is that the future that we see in that novel is a world in which

other species have a sea in the world, but in order for this kind of radical shift to happen,

the world literally has to move and has to be reoriented in relationship to water. A space where

humans feel very out of their depth where humans have to kind of rethink what it means to be a

human and how to survive. And you know, that's kind of explore all of that, the idea of an aquatic

forest in the novel was very helpful to create this really radical shift in space that

lets us pose it a future in which human beings are kind of compelled and forced to exist differently

with other creatures and hold it as some sort of possibility for the ecological survival of the

future. I have one final question, it's going to be a difficult question I know. There are a lot

of novels in the book you discuss, but if our listeners would want to read one novel from the ones

you discussed in the book, well apart from things fall apart, that's most famous about, I guess.

Let's say a lesser known novel that you as a scholar of African literature would want other people

to know about and read, which one would it be and why? That's a very, you're all great books.

That is a tough one. Just a recommendation maybe? Yeah, let's put it as a recommendation for people

to read. A good one to read would be, oh you know what I'll do. Let's do the classic

Europa fiction, because Europa fiction has a rich tradition of forest narratives, oh my goodness,

just rich tradition and it's tied to hunter narratives as well. So these characters are hunters,

they go into the forest and then they meet all kinds of creatures and all kinds of experiences.

So I'm going to suggest that they read Dio Fagunwa's Forest of a Thousand Demons.

Oh, Forest of a Thousand Demons. Yes, and I can, I don't know if I could, should I spell it or?

Yeah, we could do that. Yeah, yeah. So I'm Dio Fagunwa as in D, as in David, O, as in opera. That's his first name

to initials D-O and his last name is Fagunwa F-A-G-U-N-W-A and the title is Forest of a Thousand Demons.

So Demons is as in D-A-E-M-O-N, not Demons as in D-E-M-O-N. So Forest of a Thousand Demons.

It is a very just super readable novel that was originally written in Europa in the 19th

that is and translated by Wallisseringpa while he was in prison in the 1960s.

Thank you, that's great suggestion. Thank you very, very much. I do like to thank you,

Professor Aenei Adoro for talking to us about your book. The book we just discussed was

Forest. The imaginary is how African novels think published by Columbia University Press.

Thank you very much and hope to be able to talk to you soon again about your future works on

new books network. Thank you. Thank you so much, Morteza. Thank you so much for taking the time.

I really enjoyed our conversation.

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