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| Sunmisola Odusola, Co-Founder, Kòkòrò Mag |
Across essays and stories that move fluidly across the real, the surreal, and the speculative, Sunmisola Odusola return to a set of questions: What does it mean to be housed in flesh? What happens when the boundaries of the self begin to loosen? And what might it mean to become something other than what we are?
Sunmisola’s imagination draws freely from biology, literature, and the quotidian strangeness of being alive. Beneath the surrealism of their art is a persistent fascination with connection: with the impossibility of fully knowing another person, the inadequacy of language, and the strange possibility of a form of intimacy that might exist beyond words and symbols.
This conversation engages those threads through Odusola’s works: The Body Paradox, Origami, Mitosis, as well as their recent preoccupation with literary curation. We talk about the creative instincts behind their experimental forms, the difficult question of knowing when a resistant piece needs revision and when it’s asking to become something else, and the danger of experimentation becoming an end in itself. The conversation also moves beyond the body and into Odusola’s editorial work with Kòkòrò, their thoughts on strangeness and the new artistic terrain they are beginning to approach. Ultimately, this is a chat about becoming: about the selves we shed, the selves we carry with us, and the strange things art allows us to become.
Sunmisola Odusola writes on existence, love, and death, and daydreams about making surrealist art someday. They were shortlisted for DKA Poetry Prize (2024), and have had their works published in Backwards Trajectory, Brittle Paper, Fiery Scribe Review, Witcraft, Journal of Compressed Literary Arts, Lolwe, and Eunoia Review. Find them on X @femmeborg
ELISHA
It’s an absolute pleasure to speak with you, Sunmisola. Having interacted with your writing, I’ve found this beautiful thread connecting many of your works. The Body Paradox, Origami, and Mitosis take different forms, but when you look at them side by side, there seems to be a sustained inquiry into embodiment and an opening onto larger metaphysical questions about identity, transformation, and what it means to inhabit the ‘self'. Is that a connection you recognise in your own work, or is it something that only becomes visible in retrospect?
SUNMISOLA
I would not say it becomes visible in retrospect, but I also do not start writing a story, thinking about whether or not I am going to focus on embodiment. It is this way because it is a conversation that is always ongoing in my head, and somehow finds its way into my works. Of course, after writing a couple works with the embodiment thread linking all of them, and listening to my friends make jokes about how obsessed I am with bodies, I have become more aware of it. With my pieces on embodiment, one line from The Body Paradox comes to mind, “You have a body, so what are you going to do about it?” I have a body, so I write about it. More than writing about the body because I have one, each of the works answer a different question.
I noticed how often your work resists the idea of a singular self. There's frequently another presence: a sister, a double, another consciousness. Does this reflect how you think about identity?
SUNMISOLA
Yes, it does. I always find individuality a bit limiting. It is a human thing. That's why we are always after transcendence. I like to mull over the idea of breaking the boundaries of individuality, and becoming part of someone. Is it good in the long run? Probably not. When I talk to people, I cannot move past the idea that I am not quite getting the full spectrum of everything—who they are, what they are thinking in real time. However isolating we are, we have language to somehow bridge that. But even language itself has limitations. I have also been mulling over the kind of transcendence that is post-language and post-symbols, where the connection between two people is so deep that language falls short. It becomes useless. “Like and ‘like’ and ‘like’ — but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?” Virginia Woolf asks in The Waves. In a post-language world, a thing exists in itself, pure. It is ludicrous to argue that the purest form of language is the absence or non-existence of it, I know. Anyway, that is a different subject.
About “twin consciousness,” I believe that the road to the fixed form is lined up with all the selves we have shed over the years. The beautiful thing about this kind of ‘shedding’ is that the new self still retains memories of the old self. I am reminded of a research by Dr Martha Weiss on whether moths could retain memories from other stages, and it was discovered that they could. In The Body Paradox, the protagonist finds embodiment horrifying, Mitosis, on the other hand, leans towards the push-pull dynamics as well as fragmentation during metamorphosis. I just remembered tagging the relationship as almost incestuous!
In your essay, The Body Paradox, you describe Yeong-hye's transformation in ‘The Vegetarian’ as “enviable." What is it about characters who long to become something other than themselves that fascinates you?
SUNMISOLA
Ah, Yeong-hye! I am more fascinated with the transformation than the end result. I tried to explain this in The Body Paradox. I found Yeong-hye's character enviable because the transformation was apparent. It was quick, too. I find human development a bit boring. One could argue that the transformation is perhaps more apparent and chaotic in the womb, from blood to fish-like blob to small human, but it gets a bit boring after that. I want to grow wings on my twenty-fifth birthday, and emerge from my cocoon on my thirtieth. A lot of mammals experience isometric growth, where they birth a smaller version of themselves, so it is just not humans. Regardless, I would like my transformation to be more apparent either way. I find these transformations interesting because of the restlessness I often feel. Maybe if I woke up the next day with a pair of wings growing from my back, I might be more inclined to live life a little more.
You mentioned revising Mitosis and how it refused to “bend into submission." How do you know when a piece is resisting revision because it isn't working, and when it's resisting because it's asking to become something different?
SUNMISOLA
This was one of my fears with Mitosis. I have so many versions of it sitting in my drafts. I decided it was asking to become something different because every revision felt like it was losing something. It became less of itself. That is one thing I look for when editing. You want to know if the piece is doing what you want it to if a particular part of it is taken away, and you want to know if any line or sentence is central to the idea or relevant to the story. For Mitosis, removing those lines felt like a disservice to the work, just a little more tweaking, and it probably would have been a different work altogether. I am not really an advocate for ‘if it is working, don't fix it,’ but if a piece is resisting revision, and you have sat down with enough to find out what is working and what is relevant, it might just be asking to become something different.
Do you think there's a risk that ‘experimental’ becomes a shield, like, a word that protects a piece from being asked to do more? How do you interrogate your own work against that possibility?
SUNMISOLA
It can be used as a shield, yes. It happens when experimental art is done just for the sake of experimentation. I am not saying there is anything particularly wrong with this, but it is very important to ask why. Why am I trying to do something different? For me, it is not about wanting to be experimental. I have the ideas first, and if the best way to write it down or create it is through experimenting, then I let it happen.
The body in your work is never just a body. It's sometimes a church, or a coffin, a seam, or a symbol of duality. Where did that way of imagining the body begin? Has it always been central to your writing, or did it emerge gradually as you found your voice?
SUNMISOLA
My way of imagining the body began from trying to understand it. . When we place something side by side, we are forced to look at what exists at its core, and what the thing is in itself. It definitely emerged gradually in my writing. Nothing is ever really just that thing. By that I mean, I mean that nothing is ever so isolated that it exists without being connected to another thing. Well there is the thing about every Wikipedia article leading to one on Philosophy, but apart from that, I cannot think of anything.
Paper as a symbol keeps resurfacing in different forms in your stories: paper cranes, paper vomit, a scrunched-up paper bird, paper fingers. What is it about that material that has become such a persistent symbol in your imaginative world?
SUNMISOLA
I had something I tagged the “Paper Phase.” Origami is one of the works from that phase. During the phase, I played with the idea of the paper as a symbol of fragility and ephemerality. I have since left the Paper Phase, and I have a couple of works gathering dust in my drafts as evidence, but I still find the idea interesting. I tried not to explain the symbol, so I just left it for anyone who finds it interesting enough to piece it together. I really miss the phase, but I am done with it for now.
What are you working on now? Does your writing still seem to orbit the questions of the body, doubling, and dissolution, or do you feel yourself being drawn toward new terrain?
SUNMISOLA
I feel myself drawn to a new terrain. I have a newfound obsession with photography, so I might look into Ekphrasis in the future. Right now, I am working on a personal essay about an old house. I have been writing about it for years, but it still does not feel completed. I have written so many versions of the essay that every version is a different essay altogether. I feel the need to say this: if I go crazy, it will probably be because of the essay.
I cannot say for sure if I am done with the questions of the body, as I have a forthcoming essay that is still somewhat related to questions of the body. It is not as body-focused as the other works, but it still revolves around transformation.
You’ve recently co-launched Kòkòrò, a journal of strange kini. What does the name ‘Kòkòrò’ carry for you? And how did you and your co-founder settle on what ‘strange’ means for the journal, together?
SUNMISOLA
I can't think of anything that speaks to my current hyperfixation on entomology than the name of our journal. If there is anything my co-editor and I have in common, it is how similar our interests are. She is as fascinated with insects as I am, so when she suggested the name, I immediately agreed. More than our mutual fascination with insects and how cool bugs are, both of which are good enough reasons to name our journal Kòkòrò, we chose the name because it captured what we wanted to do. Bugs are very misunderstood and overlooked, the same way people overlook the relevance of the weird and unconventional. The unconventional and the avantgarde help shape culture, and hold a mirror to it. For a long time, we talked about the rigidity and business-like approach to journals, and how it could be improved. We talked about it so much that we decided to get off our butts and do something about it. We wanted to make a space where people could read the crazy and the experimental, and where creatives and artists can create experimental art without being asked to tone it down. We understand how rigid structures can affect experimentation, so we founded Kòkòrò. About settling on what ‘strange’ means for us, we have settled with works that makes you think, “What the fuck?” Works that are anarcho-something, insurrectionist—not in output, but in form. Surrealist, slipstream, and genre-bending.
Musing after Orire in Origami, I wanted to ask you the same question: what is art to you?
(whispers) “Colours in a drab world.” (laughs) But I’d love to hear your answer.
SUNMISOLA
I would like to steal Orire's line. Art is colours in a drab world. There is a misconception about how humans are the only animals who create art, but we have birds like the Bowerbird who just collect blue, shiny things for the sake of it. To mate, really. But we never question an artist about whether their art was made to attract a mate, so they should be allowed the same liberty. We create art because we can. I can almost imagine a higher animal looking at our art, and saying, ‘It just seems to enjoy dragging a brush around a piece of wood’ or ‘the human animal just seems to enjoy scribbling down on a piece of paper.’ While I agree with Orire, art is also our response to this life, it is us shaking our stick at meaningless good and meaningful bad.
Elisha Oluyemi is a Yoruba writer whose psychological works tow the planes of memory, rituals, and the disintegration of the self. Winner of the Ikenga Short Story Prize (2023) and joint-winner of the Brigitte Poirson Literature Prize, Short Story (2023) & winner of the Ikenga Short Story Prize (2023), he was shortlisted for the Isele Short Story Prize (2024). He is a contributing author for the Love Grows Stronger in Death anthology (Witsprouts, 2024) & Unbound: An Anthology of New Nigerian Poets Under 40 (Griots Lounge, 2024). He serves as a mentor in the SprinNG Writing Fellowship. Elisha's writing has been reviewed or published in Locus Magazine (No. 41), Lampblack, Strange Horizons, Lolwe, Mystery Tribune, Broken Antler, Isele Magazine, Lunar Journal, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Brittle Paper, and elsewhere.
