Hello again,
I am very excited to be speaking to Jason Okundaye about his exceptional debut, Revolutionary Acts, next Thursday (14th March). Here is a link to buy tickets if you would like to come.
I was so impressed by this book when I first read it. I checked my emails and realised that was back in November 2022. Before a book is published it then goes through a process of editing and choosing the cover and other elements of marketing and publicity. So, here we are, almost a year and a half later, with Revolutionary Acts due out this Thursday (7th March). I highly recommend it, if you haven’t preordered you still can before Thursday and it will arrive by then.
I found it strange to discover how long ago I had read Revolutionary Acts. It does not feel like that at all. I still remember most of the book pretty vividly, which speaks to the quality of both the stories and the writing. I have a good memory and I tend to remember the rough outline of everything I read (I know this sounds like a lie but it is true), even from years back. I remember conversations in real life in a lot of detail too, which is useful and also sort of awful. If you have the same thing you will know what I mean.
I also find I tend to remember specific lines of writing because I either particularly enjoy them, or because I think they are exceptionally bad, for a long time. There is this really cheesy line from a terrible “essay” which I read more than ten years ago which I still think of probably twice a week. I will not reproduce it here, but maybe a substack some other time about cheesy writing, perhaps one in which I talk in vague terms.
Anway, there are specific lines I remember from Revolutionary Acts, which is very much because it sits in the first camp. I even remember where I was when I read certain sections, which speaks to how emotive I found them too.
As a rough outline, Revolutionary Acts is an oral history detailing the lives and activism of a group of black gay men living through the HIV and AIDs epidemic, in and around Brixton, in the 70s and 80s up until the present day. The book takes the form of chapters relaying stories gleaned through extensive interviews Jason conducted with 7 men.
I find this description could make this book sound like it might be a little dry. I personally do not like to read, for example, some of the recently published pop politics books detailing the history of left wing activism because a lot of the writing is just not good. You know the kind of books which are full of clunky, derivative imagery; references to us being butterflies with our wings tied behind our backs, trapped by the system, and the like. And clumsy sentences full of nested clauses which all circle back on each other, each contradicting the logic of the one which went before. Or in which the writer will use that voice which is either defiant, shrill and hectoring or trying to be “matey”. Chapters might open with dictionary definitions of words which are widely used, Foucault will likely be quoted at length to relay generic, common sense points.
I am sure the world of pop right wing politics explainer books is as bad if not worse, but I am not the target market for these so it is not that I do not read them because the writing is bad, I simply don’t read them because I was never going to.
My issue with this writing when I see it on the left too, is that I don’t think it is simply a case of the writer being incompetent. (Or not only that). Instead it seems to me that they do not respect the reader at all. I see this as not merely the absence of style but a relentless anti-style, a defiant and pompous refusal to spend time and effort making something good. When I read something like this I feel I am confronted with ostentatious laziness and derivativeness (dictionary definition of a word, appeals to authority for generic information, I mean come on) reframed unconvincingly as an intellectual project. It strikes me that the kind of person who would try to get away with this has an exceptionally high opinion of themselves and a worryingly low opinion of other people. I expect this from the right, I hate to see it on the left.
If this person was a carpenter making you a chest of drawers they would turn up with it and one of the drawers wouldn’t fit in its shaft and there would be nails and splinters sticking up everywhere and they would expect you to not notice how shoddy it all was. I have no time for it.
Revolutionary Acts is the opposite of this. It is written like a novel, in a gossipy but literary style. You can tell this is because Okundaye thought a lot about how to best impart not only the raw information but also the sense of the community and time he is describing. He has taken great care to choose quotes which capture a sense of the voice and character of each man in the book and the result is that, while reading, you spend time with 7 vibrant and fascinating personalities. (Actually 8 I suppose, counting Okundaye). So much thought and care has gone into Revolutionary Acts, you can tell while reading that it is the total opposite of someone just thinking “bang that down sure and that will do” for their book.
A lot of the material which sits slightly in the background has stayed with me for a long time too. You get their stories of love and heartbreak, some of which are devastating. Because much of what happens in the book predates the internet, and because these men were living often incredibly precarious lives, people can just vanish without a trace or without even leaving a photograph. This is something I think a lot of young people now will find hard to conceptualise. The sense of genuine community too, which existed when people had to find a community in person, at pubs and clubs, as opposed to the atomised world of social media, is very striking too. I found Revolutionary Acts to be one of those books which sprouts lots of other paths of thought.
I really felt taken seriously as a reader, which is about the best thing I can say about any book. I’m excited to have a chance to read it again for our event.
Till next time xxxx
You can buy my novel, Lazy City here.