“Straight white author’s career finally takes off after he tells woke publishers he’s gender queer Nigerian”, reports the Daily Mail.
The artist formerly and now once again known as Aaron Barry is truly a bard for our times:
From 2023 to 2024, Barry had managed to fool 30 respected literary journals around the globe and got about 50 of his ‘nonsensical’ poems published.
He published dozens of pieces as Adele Nwankwo, a ‘gender-fluid member of the Nigerian diaspora,’ including one titled After Coming Out: A Wrestling Promo.’
‘The CisBoys thought they could gang up on me and put an end to my championship pursuit?’ the poem published in 2023 reads. ‘Hah! I’ve got Toni Morrison books that hit harder than those bozos.
‘Oh, and this would set the crowd ablaze, cause them to whisk in rattle homemade signs (“The Nigerian Nightmare,” “Nwankwo 11:16,” Step on My Balls, Kween Adele!)’
‘The first poem to ever get picked up was the “yah jah gah hah” one,’ Barry told The Free Press in an article published on Wednesday.
He was referring to one of Nwankwo’s poems that was published in the Tofu Ink Arts Press, which has a mission of ‘amplifying the voices of the under-represented.’
The poem kicks off with a Toni Morrison quote about ‘navigating a white male world’ and features lines such as ‘voodoo prak tik casta oyal drip drip.’
‘It was very obviously nonsense. Just fake bad Creole,’ Barry explained to the outlet as he chuckled, baffled that the poem was accepted to begin with.
Another one of Barry’s characters, b.h. fein, whose pronouns are ‘its/complicated,’ was actually nominated for a 2025 Best of the Net Award.
The intro of the award-worthy piece, titled Shakespeare’s C*msl*t, reads: ‘To ?️ or not to ?️ William Shakespeare’s ??? little c*msl*t ??? : that is the question.
A 2024 interview with b.h. fein appears in a magazine called “The Cry Lounge” here:
hi there, reader! i’m b. h. fein (they/them or it’s/complicated)~~! i write lots of stuff (mostly in lowercase), but my gluten-free bread and vegan butter is free verse poetry. i haven’t been sending my stuff out for too too long, but i feel like i recently cracked the code as to what i can offer the poetry world
They wasn’t wrong there.
-*-
I was going to add a “Related Post” link to my Samizdata post about Rahila Khan, whose short stories about the lives of Asian girls and women in a depressed English town were much admired in the literary world of the late 1980s until she turned out to be the Rev. Toby Forward, an Anglican vicar. Virago, the publisher, had all its unsold copies of Down the Road, Worlds Away pulped. The post I thought I remembered writing seems to have metaphorically shared their fate.
Alligator Anmè
Nan dlo a, yon alligator,
Kote solèy la klere, li toujou kontan,
Li danse ak kè kontan, san pè,
Nan zèb vèt, li jwenn yon zanmi, yon nonm.
Li pa kache, li pa wont,
Nan lanmou li, li pa gen limit,
Kè li gwo, li renmen tout,
Dlo a ap fè bal, tout moun ap ri.
Bati yon rèv anba solèy la,
De zanmi ki pataje tout sa,
Yon alligator ki renmen ak fòs,
Nan lanmou, li se yon gwo bòs.
It’s in creole and it’s a about a gay alligator. Poe wrote it for me in a scouple of seconds.
Let’s try James Joyce…
Fried Chicken and Baboons
In the sizzle, oh sweet crunch,
Golden skin, taste bud’s punch,
Life’s a feast, each bite a quest,
In every morsel, we find our rest.
Baboons, they swing, they leap, they play,
Under the sun, they find their way,
In the wild, their truth unfolds,
In every howl, a story told.
Transcendence in feathers, in skin so fine,
Fried chicken whispers, “You’re divine,”
Existence dances on a plate,
In every chew, we contemplate.
From jungle to kitchen, a journey vast,
In every flavor, shadows cast,
Baboons and chicken, a curious blend,
Life’s a banquet, where we transcend.
One of the people infuriated by Ceylon’s ‘true’ identity was Chris Talbot, who uses they/them pronouns, a freelance editor and DEI consultant.
Talbot is the editor of B’K Magazine, which published one of Nwankwo’s poems last year.
‘There’s a white cis man, Jasper Ceylon, pretending to be a host of marginalized individuals in order to get published as them,’ B’K Magazine shared on Instagram.
‘He thinks it makes him clever and is trying to prove that publications will print anything as long as it comes from a marginalized person.’
Not trying, succeeding. Bigly.
It is horribly clear that the study of the humanities (such as English and History) has collapsed into leftist nonsense at most universities – that the culture has been corrupted.
But it will not “just” stop at the humanities – the study of all subjects, including the physical sciences, will collapse if the intellectual decay is not reversed.
All subjects, including mathematics and physics, depend on basic principles of philosophy (yes – philosophy) – such as truth being objective and universal. And these principles of philosophy are denied by “Woke” Critical Theory Marxism – which sees everything as “power relations”, to be seen via its racial and sexual obsessions.
Being “apolitical” will NOT work – “Woke” Critical Theory Marxism must be defeated, driven out, or it will destroy education – and, by destroying education, destroy the culture.
As John O’Sullivan has pointed out for many years – any organisation or group that does not fight the left, ends up being taken over by the left.
It does not matter if it is flower arranging, or a board game society, or anything – if you do not fight the left, they will take you over and destroy you.
The price of liberty is indeed eternal vigilance.
Freedom that has lasted for centuries can be lost very quickly – very quickly indeed.
I just noticed “Nwankwo” is an an anagram of “Now Wank”
You only just noticed the wank in Nwankwo, Nick? I felt a bit guilty about making fun of what is a moderately common name in Nigeria, but did not have the strength to resist. It was not the only one of Mr Barry’s pseudonyms that felt as if it might have been chosen to amuse, if only himself at first. As featured in my title, the fake name “fein” sounds similar to “feign”. The Mail said that
“Neveah Mei” sounds like “never me”. I’m not sure whether there should have been a comma between “Dirt Hogg” and “Sauvage Respectfully”, but whether it was one name or two, those are pretty funny pairings of words.
The gullibility of these people is (still) astounding. Unfortunately some are in charge of more important things than literary journals; I once started getting benefits correspondence for a “Mr D Fako” (I think it was) at my address. Pointed out to the official at the provided phone number that the clue was in the name and I didn’t like having my tax money passed out to false claimants; she replied to the effect that a foreign name should not be a bar to receiving benefits.
NickM.
This is indeed the future of physics.
And mathematics will be redefined to be about the evil of “white supremacy” and “hetero normativity” of “toxic masculinity”.
All to be solved by getting rid of “capitalism”.
Barbarus – it is not gullibility, it is much worse than that.
The establishment elite just do not care – they do not care about literature, or any other subject. They care only about POWER – not astonishing, for they are people who say that everything is about “Power Relations”.
The days of Joseph Wright, an ordinary workman who walked all the way to Heidelberg (apart from the sea crossing) and supported himself by hard manual labour as he become of the leading scholars of Germanic languages (such as Anglo Saxon) of his age, are long gong.
Today Joseph Wright (a real “proletarian scholar” – not the son of rich people pretending to be a “proletarian”) is dismissed as a “racist-sexist-homophobe” – which, by modern definitions, he was.
He was also the person who saved a young J.R.R. Tolkien from the Classics (which Tolkien had no passion for) and brought him to the formal study of Germanic languages – such as Anglo Saxon (old English).
Recall The Education of Little Tree, award-winning autobiography of a Cherokee boy in 1920s Appalachia. Published in 1976, republished by University of New Mexico Press, a NY Times best-seller, and 1991 American Booksellers Association Book of the Year.
Actually written by a notorious white supremacist (Ku Klux Klansman and former speechwriter for George Wallace) – who died in 1979.
Paul,
I recall once here stating that the citadel of hard science can never fall to woke. You disagreed with me. You were right.
I remember when Scientific American was worth reading. Now we get this. Proof that tragedy and farce are two cheeks of the same arse.
I shall not even attempt to defend maths on the basis of things like the use of the Indo-Arabic numeral system, the complicated history of the concept of zero, the etymology of terms like “algebra” and “algorithm” or any of that* because any defense would be futile. Why? Because I could never win because for a certain mindset all I’d prove to them is “cultural appropriation”. It’s a complete Kobayashi Maru.
The “elites” hate Tolkien because his work is popular and their turgid ramblings aren’t. There are many more reasons but that is the nub of it.
*And there is a lot more. Buddhism’s “Lotus Sutra”‘s use of very large numbers bears interesting similarity to “The Sand Reckoner” by Archimedes. Link? Alexander? Those Bamyan Buddhas definitely showed Greek influence. This is something I plan on researching.