If you expect that the first thing anyone “visiting” an arts and book festival requires is a brain, you expect wrong, very wrong. All you need a brain for is to stay alive and when comment/question time comes, to maybe add –ness in front of an everyday word, to give your meandering submission/question a sheen of erudition (e.g versusness = opposition). The jokes are pretty easy to catch, social media has normalized shit like “shit” and “Bleep” so much that they are like Che Guevara shirts, and if poetry not about pounding ngalame drums is read, you can simply let it out the other ear till you encounter it on the page, where contemplation may require much more than trying to catch what the Bleep the reader is saying in the first place.

In the run-up to the Ake Festival, someone tweeted that the most important requirement at such a festival was the condom (the tweeter is obviously male), as writers can be very “expressive” people. I dismissed it at the time as an idiot aiming for humour. Boy, was I wrong. And given that literary festivals conglomerate literary groupies (easy prey, in the grand scheme of things), I wonder why I dismissed in the first place.

Read the rest of the article here on http://nantygreens.com/ake-festival-will-not-hear/