Elnathan John

On AI, Literature and the Myth of Human Exceptionalism I am seeing a particular kind of confidence everywhere now, and I recognize its scent because history has worn this perfume before.

On AI, Literature and the Myth of Human Exceptionalism
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🔥🔥🔥

Tomorrow There Will Be Clarity I tell myself I might not make it to Gozo this December.

Tomorrow There Will Be Clarity
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How to Raise Your Parents — The Hopkins Review “Tell them that, in the end, they are all they have. And that family means bearing the weight of each other’s flaws, forgiving without demand, and learning to forget, especially learning to forget.”

So, I have new fiction out in The Hopkins Review. It is titled, How To Raise Your Parents. Please read, share, let me know what you think about this story!

Link: hopkinsreview.com/features/eln...

THE SENTENCE A meditation on style, syntax and truth in sentence-making

My new essay on THE SENTENCE; on style, syntax and truth in sentence writing. open.substack.com/pub/elnathan...

Thank so much André!!!

"We feel first. Then we think. And only after that do we begin the search for words, for vessels sturdy enough to carry what we have sensed, shapes capable of holding breath without leaking it.

This order matters."

Writing as a Stance Toward Truth Tell all the truth but tell it slant

Writing as a Stance Toward Truth
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““Northern Nigeria” […] is often used as if it names a single moral climate, a unified religious temperament, a coherent attitude toward gender, sexuality, and difference. In reality, it is a shorthand that flattens a region marked by sharp internal variation—legal, economic, religious, and social.”

Masculinity, Secrecy, and Survival among ’Yan Daudu in Northern Nigeria Elnathan’s Corner is a reader-supported publication.

Masculinity, Secrecy, and Survival among ’Yan Daudu in Northern Nigeria
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Listening as Reading: On Audiobooks and the Life of Words Human beings do not encounter language in a single, uniform way.

Listening as Reading: On Audiobooks and the Life of Words
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On The Failures and Potential of Book Publishing One thing I have always known intuitively, and which writing longer pieces here has now confirmed, is that Nigerians (and other young…

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 Restraint, Honour, and Social Breath In Hausa Culture

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

Indian Nights and Hausa Mornings Cinema, Weddings, and Women’s Words in Northern Nigeria

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!

Posh Wanker, Kaduna Boy Accents, Shame, and the Strange Geography of Belonging

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 🥰

Ich danke dir André!

The Hidden Life of a Kiss Private Truths, Public Silence, and the Grammar of Desire in Hausa Culture

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

open.substack.com/pub/elnathan...

Posh Wanker, Kaduna Boy Accents, Shame, and the Strange Geography of Belonging

Posh Wanker, Kaduna Boy
open.substack.com/pub/elnathan...

The Hidden Life of a Kiss Private Truths, Public Silence, and the Grammar of Desire in Hausa Culture

"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.

Every enlightened person shows off their library. Yet the people who make the coffee that makes them shit in the morning can make a living wage whereas most writers cannot. Housekeepers (who provide a useful service and whose labor should be respected) earn more than writers on average.

We claim to be a civilisation that cherishes knowledge and books but the very people who create them are the ones least able to support themselves from this endeavour. Yet we accept this as normal. I think it is a damn shame and our problem is certainly not AI.

I find publishing one of the least business minded and least creative of all the business endeavours I have tried to study. I cannot count how many times publishers, agents, editors and people in the book business just respond to an idea with: that won’t work/sell. Too little innovation.

Too many people who have no idea how to run a business or make money are busy setting up mushroom publishing houses that contribute to the impoverishment of writers. Yes, we can blame much of this on the way capitalism operates. But this is the world we live in. Publishers must adapt. Writers too.

We need more serious business thinkers and innovators in publishing and fewer ideologues and hobbyists. If we respect books and writing then there is no reason a serious writer should not be able to earn as much as a barista in a city. We would not accept this for any other sector.