There’s a peculiar thing that happens when you express a view on the internet, particularly on Elon’s blue app. First comes the disagreement, which is healthy and expected. Then comes the discourse, which can be illuminating. And then, once in a while, if you’re lucky enough to have struck a nerve, comes the chorus of voices insisting you should simply stop talking altogether.
In 2024, when we suggested that pirating books might actually harm the writers you claim to love, we were elitist. And now, having expressed a view about the nature of reading and attention, we’ve collected a new label: ‘ableist’.
For context, this is in regard to a tweet we put out yesterday, attached below.
We can’t and we won’t respond to the plethora of diverse insults that arose from it because we understand that it’s in the nature of certain persons, which may often include acclaimed names, on X, to think through the limited fringes of their bias.
But what strikes us is the assumption that having an opinion about reading practices somehow constitutes an attack on disabled people. The leap from “focused reading offers something different from listening while washing dishes” to “people with disabilities shouldn’t engage with books” requires a level of gymnastic interpretation that would impress Olympic judges. But we live in an era where every aesthetic preference must be translated into a moral referendum and every discussion about craft or practice must be scanned for its potential to exclude. In the words of Adichie, it’s obscene!
For posterity sake, we want to be clear about what we actually said.
We suggested that different modes of engagement produce different kinds of understanding.
We proposed that reading, in the traditional sense, requires a particular quality of attention that multitasking naturally dilutes.
This isn’t remotely novel. It’s been proven by dozens of academics in the reading and psychology scholarship. It’s not even particularly controversial outside of Twitter. It’s an observation about cognition that anyone who has tried to absorb complex material while washing dishes can probably confirm.
But somewhere along the way, literary discourse acquired an allergy to judgment. The suggestion that one approach might yield deeper comprehension than another became tantamount to constructing barriers. The notion that some works might demand your full attention to reveal themselves has been reframed as gatekeeping.
When did the literary community become so fragile that it cannot withstand a conversation about attention spans?
When on God’s Earth has the notion that Ulysses might reward focused attention more than distracted skimming become elitist and ableist? At this rate, the belief that sentences should contain verbs will soon be given that label.
The term has become a convenient cudgel used to shut down conversations without engaging with the substance of the argument. Besides, isn’t it simpler to find an “ist” or an “ism” than to articulate why you disagree?
Never mind that many of these isms collapse under the lightest scrutiny. That the same people weaponizing these terms often have no actual connection to the communities they claim to be defending. The label itself is enough. Once applied, it spreads through quote tweets and threads and the substance of the original point dissolves entirely.
This is what passes for literary criticism now. The increasingly baroque process of finding offence.
Audiobooks are indeed a valuable way to experience stories, and we encourage anyone who wants to use them to use them, especially people with visual impairments or reading disabilities. But couldn’t it also be true that listening to an audiobook at 1.5x speed while cooking dinner produces a different, less immersive experience than sitting with a physical text and giving it your full attention?
The vocabulary of social justice has been so thoroughly weaponized that it no longer distinguishes between actual harm and simple disagreement.
What these critics want is for us to become another bland platform that celebrates everything equally and stands for nothing in particular. As one writer said, we ought to be “polite”.
But a literary magazine that’s afraid to have opinions about literature is useless. If we can’t say that some approaches to reading offer more than others, then what exactly are we doing?
Akpata Magazine exists because African literature deserves a platform that respects it enough to have opinions about it. That cares enough to argue.
And when people tell us we’re being elitist or gatekeeping or ableist or banger boys or unadulterated idiots (in the words of a supposed poet who writes about voice and silencing) or whatever the accusation of the week turns out to be, we will evaluate the criticism honestly. If it has merit, we’ll consider it. If it’s simply an attempt to silence opinions someone dislikes, we’ll ignore it.
Because there are already too many spaces online where everyone agrees with everyone else about everything. Literature needs at least one space that’s willing to hold nuanced conversations. Akpata Magazine will continue to be that space.
The Editorial Team of Akpata Magazine
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