Masculinity, Secrecy, and Survival among ’Yan Daudu in Northern Nigeria
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Listening as Reading: On Audiobooks and the Life of Words
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On the failures and potential of book publishing in Nigeria and beyond. #publishing #literature #writing

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On Academic writing and the Intellectual. #academia #writing #literature #intellectual

Kunya is not simply what you feel. It is how you position yourself before feeling becomes necessary. Fear is what you feel in the wild. Kunya is what you feel at home—where people will remember.

Kunya: Restraint, Honor and Social Breath in #Hausa Culture
elnathanjohn.substack.com/p/kunya

Please read my new essay: "Indian Nights, Hausa Mornings: Cinema, Weddings and Women's Words in Northern Nigeria."

#Bollywood #Kannywood #India #Nigeria #Film

elnathanjohn.substack.com/p/indian-nig...

On #Dhamendra, Bollywood and northern Nigeria.

#Dharmendra is gone, but I remember Unguwar Rimi (Kaduna, northern Nigeria) boys shouting “Dramendra,” running wild after Sholay, raising dust, hands shaped like guns. For many in northern Nigeria, #Bollywood wasn’t escape—it was our first emotional education.

I have an essay about this next week!

In this essay, I reflect on code-switching as both a skill and a scar, on symbolic capital in language, on the quiet violence of “sounding right,” and on what it costs to keep passing through different rooms with the same body but different voices.

elnathanjohn.substack.com/p/posh-wanke...

Leseempfehlung!!! 😊 (englisch) Ich lese die Texte von @elnathanjohn.bsky.social so gerne 🥰

The first tenderness anyone ever teaches you is not language but proximity. Before you learn to call anything by its name, someone’s breath grazes the soft place above your eyebrow; someone’s lips hover near your cheek; someone steadies your head with a palm

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Posh Wanker, Kaduna Boy
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"The problem was never that people in Hausa culture did not kiss. The problem was that no one respectable admitted it."

The Hidden Life of a Kiss
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I was raised to fear the term ɗan iska—literally, son of the wind (plural: ‘yan iska). It meant trouble: vagabond, deviant, an immoral, undisciplined child of the air. To be ‘yar iska was to be a woman who did not know her place, who laughed too loudly…
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#Berlin at night.