Tolu Daniel
@toludaniel.bsky.social
essayist. club dancer.
writer person.
PhDing.
writing the next big boring book on your shelf.
Debut Essay Collection: "Exodus" 2027 (@CavanKerryPress.bsky.social)
Dispatches from St Louis.
writer person.
PhDing.
writing the next big boring book on your shelf.
Debut Essay Collection: "Exodus" 2027 (@CavanKerryPress.bsky.social)
Dispatches from St Louis.
I wrote about the hunger that follows you—when food becomes a language you fear forgetting. A thread on exile, imperfect egusi, and the meals that refuse to be translated. "What the Tongue Remembers" open.substack.com/pub/fromthei...
What the Tongue Remembers
On Food, Homesickness, and the Labors of Making Ourselves Whole
open.substack.com
May 27, 2025 at 3:29 PM
I wrote about the hunger that follows you—when food becomes a language you fear forgetting. A thread on exile, imperfect egusi, and the meals that refuse to be translated. "What the Tongue Remembers" open.substack.com/pub/fromthei...
"African literature is a long argument between the living and the dead," wrote Gikandi. But what happens when the living fall silent? My latest essay traces: how digital platforms reproduce censorship. why critique now lives in encrypted DMs among others. open.substack.com/pub/fromthei...
The Silence We Made
On the roaring silence that has engulfed the African Literary Ecosystem
open.substack.com
May 20, 2025 at 9:30 PM
"African literature is a long argument between the living and the dead," wrote Gikandi. But what happens when the living fall silent? My latest essay traces: how digital platforms reproduce censorship. why critique now lives in encrypted DMs among others. open.substack.com/pub/fromthei...
Wrote about The Years of Blood, Adedayo Agarau’s new collection that turns violence into language not of spectacle, but of witness. A review about grief, complicity, and what it means to document what should never be forgotten. It is up on Substack now. open.substack.com/pub/fromthei...
THE NECESSARY VIOLENCE OF ADEDAYO AGARAU
On the Ethics of Elegy in "The Years of Blood"
open.substack.com
May 15, 2025 at 12:35 PM
Wrote about The Years of Blood, Adedayo Agarau’s new collection that turns violence into language not of spectacle, but of witness. A review about grief, complicity, and what it means to document what should never be forgotten. It is up on Substack now. open.substack.com/pub/fromthei...
New essay: on what happens to words when you leave home. On exile, emigration, and the ache of trying to name what displacement feels like.
open.substack.com/pub/fromthei...
open.substack.com/pub/fromthei...
On the Slipperiness of Words Far From Home
On Language Lost, Found and Misnamed
open.substack.com
May 13, 2025 at 6:34 PM
New essay: on what happens to words when you leave home. On exile, emigration, and the ache of trying to name what displacement feels like.
open.substack.com/pub/fromthei...
open.substack.com/pub/fromthei...
"The page is always blank before it isn't. That moment of beginning — pure potential, terrifying freedom — is where every essay is born, though few admit how little they know at the start." Essays, Unfinished
open.substack.com/pub/fromthei...
open.substack.com/pub/fromthei...
Essays, Unfinished
On writing into uncertainty, memory’s fragments, and the quiet faith of beginning anyway.
open.substack.com
May 8, 2025 at 12:51 PM
"The page is always blank before it isn't. That moment of beginning — pure potential, terrifying freedom — is where every essay is born, though few admit how little they know at the start." Essays, Unfinished
open.substack.com/pub/fromthei...
open.substack.com/pub/fromthei...
Setting up a weekly dispatch on substack from now till the first year anniversary of my soon to be published collection of essays. It will feature a lot of my thoughts on craft, pop culture and politics.
May 1, 2025 at 11:22 AM
Setting up a weekly dispatch on substack from now till the first year anniversary of my soon to be published collection of essays. It will feature a lot of my thoughts on craft, pop culture and politics.
"The leaves forgot how to be green."
April 30, 2025 at 1:28 PM
"The leaves forgot how to be green."
"Understanding Nigerian identity requires exploring the culture’s interaction with both documented and ephemeral media. Both Nigeria’s pre-colonial and post-colonial histories are steeped in rich oral traditions, complemented by written and broadcast narratives."
rpublc.com/april-may-20...
rpublc.com/april-may-20...
rpublc.com
April 14, 2025 at 11:57 PM
"Understanding Nigerian identity requires exploring the culture’s interaction with both documented and ephemeral media. Both Nigeria’s pre-colonial and post-colonial histories are steeped in rich oral traditions, complemented by written and broadcast narratives."
rpublc.com/april-may-20...
rpublc.com/april-may-20...
"There is a peculiar fate in literature: some books die and some books are killed, not because they weren’t read or weren’t loved, but because they were regarded as unbearable. And some simply refuse to vanish. They exist as whispers, as rumors in footnotes, as echoes in the margins of other..."
Thinking Erasure in African Literature - Olongo Africa
Download as PDFThere is a peculiar fate in literature: some books die and some books are killed, not because they weren’t read or weren’t loved, but because they were regarded as unbearable. And some ...
olongoafrica.com
April 5, 2025 at 3:10 AM
"There is a peculiar fate in literature: some books die and some books are killed, not because they weren’t read or weren’t loved, but because they were regarded as unbearable. And some simply refuse to vanish. They exist as whispers, as rumors in footnotes, as echoes in the margins of other..."
"...give me all the love in the world
to waste."
to waste."
March 21, 2025 at 5:51 PM
"...give me all the love in the world
to waste."
to waste."
"...the cardiogram you sent me,
is likewise the city, my love."
Lauris Velps
is likewise the city, my love."
Lauris Velps
March 21, 2025 at 5:48 PM
"...the cardiogram you sent me,
is likewise the city, my love."
Lauris Velps
is likewise the city, my love."
Lauris Velps
Why should my survival be dependent on the survival of my oppressors? – Fred Moten.
March 17, 2025 at 12:27 PM
Why should my survival be dependent on the survival of my oppressors? – Fred Moten.
"To change your race either becomes a kind of thought experiment, geared to make you empathize with another race or to punish you for being bigoted, or it becomes a brief, giddy act of exoticism or slumming, a way to transcend race and class divisions immediately but impermanently."
Namwali Serpell: "Race Off"
An essay by Namwali Serpell: "The immediacy, transience, and opportunism of race transformation encourages a self-congratulatory, self-fulfilling return…
yalereview.org
March 16, 2025 at 5:07 PM
"To change your race either becomes a kind of thought experiment, geared to make you empathize with another race or to punish you for being bigoted, or it becomes a brief, giddy act of exoticism or slumming, a way to transcend race and class divisions immediately but impermanently."
"Rather than aiming for the unique, which might pierce our haze of distraction, art has succumbed to marketable generalities: stock music on Spotify, soporific streams of Netflix content."
www.newyorker.com/culture/crit...
www.newyorker.com/culture/crit...
The New Literalism Plaguing Today’s Biggest Movies
Buzzy films from “Anora” to “The Substance” are undone by a relentless signposting of meaning and intent.
www.newyorker.com
March 9, 2025 at 11:28 PM
"Rather than aiming for the unique, which might pierce our haze of distraction, art has succumbed to marketable generalities: stock music on Spotify, soporific streams of Netflix content."
www.newyorker.com/culture/crit...
www.newyorker.com/culture/crit...
every year i feel like i discover the one Ballard that defines the rest of the year. didn't find one last year but i have found the one for this year for sure. 2023 was Laufey's Second Best, this year will be Rachel Chinouriri's Even with Cat Burns.
February 12, 2025 at 12:48 AM
every year i feel like i discover the one Ballard that defines the rest of the year. didn't find one last year but i have found the one for this year for sure. 2023 was Laufey's Second Best, this year will be Rachel Chinouriri's Even with Cat Burns.
i had the pleasure of reading from one of the most important things i have written in recent years during the issue 75 launch of @haydensferryreview.bsky.social yesterday. was both fun and emotional as I read the text. if you can, please grab yourself a copy. the essay is titled Exodus.
January 31, 2025 at 1:00 PM
i had the pleasure of reading from one of the most important things i have written in recent years during the issue 75 launch of @haydensferryreview.bsky.social yesterday. was both fun and emotional as I read the text. if you can, please grab yourself a copy. the essay is titled Exodus.
"While lost in my reverie, I heard a very loud knock. It was Sam. Sam knocks on the door the same way he is built, all muscles and no chill. He is a big, muscled man with an unrepentant love for booze and women."
lolwe.org/on-the-sunny...
lolwe.org/on-the-sunny...
On the Sunny Side of the Street - Tolu Daniel | Lolwe
An essay by Tolu Daniel
lolwe.org
January 26, 2025 at 5:26 PM
"While lost in my reverie, I heard a very loud knock. It was Sam. Sam knocks on the door the same way he is built, all muscles and no chill. He is a big, muscled man with an unrepentant love for booze and women."
lolwe.org/on-the-sunny...
lolwe.org/on-the-sunny...
"Africa has no shortage of celebrated writers – so why is it so hard for African readers to get hold of their books?"
www.theguardian.com/global-devel...
www.theguardian.com/global-devel...
Africa has no shortage of celebrated writers – so why is it so hard for African readers to get hold of their books?
Across the continent books can be expensive and libraries scarce. But growing numbers of tech innovators and independent publishers are working to make African literature available and affordable
www.theguardian.com
January 16, 2025 at 2:44 PM
"Africa has no shortage of celebrated writers – so why is it so hard for African readers to get hold of their books?"
www.theguardian.com/global-devel...
www.theguardian.com/global-devel...
so grateful that i finally get to learn & read the theories to back up so many of the claims i have been making about language and diasporic literature. finally i have found the hill to proverbially die on as it regards the availability of the several ways most colonial languages continue to evolve
January 16, 2025 at 2:24 PM
so grateful that i finally get to learn & read the theories to back up so many of the claims i have been making about language and diasporic literature. finally i have found the hill to proverbially die on as it regards the availability of the several ways most colonial languages continue to evolve
first day of class yesterday and i went to the wrong room, sat there for two hours before leaving which meant that i missed the original class i was scheduled to be in. the second semester of the phd is off to the best start.
January 15, 2025 at 3:45 PM
first day of class yesterday and i went to the wrong room, sat there for two hours before leaving which meant that i missed the original class i was scheduled to be in. the second semester of the phd is off to the best start.
“Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but if a novel can have an enemy, then the enemy of this novel is the idea of ‘One nation, one religion, one language.'”
lithub.com/what-is-the-...
lithub.com/what-is-the-...
What is the Morally Appropriate Language in Which to Think and Write?
The following is Arundhati Roy’s W. G. Sebald Lecture on Literary Translation, commissioned by the British Centre for Literary Translation and the National Centre for Writing. It was delivere…
lithub.com
January 15, 2025 at 3:42 PM
“Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but if a novel can have an enemy, then the enemy of this novel is the idea of ‘One nation, one religion, one language.'”
lithub.com/what-is-the-...
lithub.com/what-is-the-...
"The Iran I write about is intimate and intensely personal. Nothing in the world I inhabit today—geographically, culturally, emotionally, or linguistically—bears any resemblance to it."
lithub.com/feeling-in-f...
Feeling in Farsi, Writing in English: On Translating Your Life From One Language to Another
I remember the first time I learned an English word. It was in a classroom somewhere in downtown Tehran. The language school was a four-story building, grand but sad, set against the smog and noise…
lithub.com
January 14, 2025 at 8:30 PM
"The Iran I write about is intimate and intensely personal. Nothing in the world I inhabit today—geographically, culturally, emotionally, or linguistically—bears any resemblance to it."
lithub.com/feeling-in-f...
collection is finally a finalist with this publishers and i can finally start living with my heart in my chest and hoping that they pick it.
January 10, 2025 at 4:46 PM
collection is finally a finalist with this publishers and i can finally start living with my heart in my chest and hoping that they pick it.
"These photographs and videos won’t last. They won’t last for the same reason that there are no lasting images of recent hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes: even with high demand for such images, there is consistent oversupply."
www.newyorker.com/culture/anna...
www.newyorker.com/culture/anna...
A City on Fire Can’t Be Photographed
The images of a burning Los Angeles won’t last, simply because our ways of seeing are inadequate to our predicament.
www.newyorker.com
January 10, 2025 at 3:32 PM
"These photographs and videos won’t last. They won’t last for the same reason that there are no lasting images of recent hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes: even with high demand for such images, there is consistent oversupply."
www.newyorker.com/culture/anna...
www.newyorker.com/culture/anna...
really admire the dude sitting next to me on this plane who began snoring the moment the plane began taxi-ing. and has slept undisturbed through all the turbulence and movements of the plane. i wish i was him. in my next life perhaps.
January 8, 2025 at 8:48 PM
really admire the dude sitting next to me on this plane who began snoring the moment the plane began taxi-ing. and has slept undisturbed through all the turbulence and movements of the plane. i wish i was him. in my next life perhaps.